The Principles of Psychology.............................................................................................................................1

William James ..........................................................................................................................................1

Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions. The phenomena are

such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like; and, superficially

considered, their variety and complexity is such as to leave a chaotic impression on the observer. The most

natural and consequently the earliest way of unifying the material was, first, to classify it as well as might be,

and, secondly, to affiliate the diverse mental modes thus found, upon a simple entity, the personal Soul, of

which they are taken to be so many facultative manifestations. Now, for instance, the Soul manifests its

faculty of Memory, now of Reasoning, now of Volition, or again its Imagination or its Appetite. This is the

orthodox 'spiritualistic' theory of scholasticism and of commonsense. Another and a less obvious way of

unifying the chaos is to seek common elements in the divers mental facts rather than a common agent behind

them, and to explain them constructively by the various forms of arrangement of these elements, as one

explains houses by stones and bricks. The 'associationist' schools of Herbart in Germany, and of Hume, the

Mills and Bain in Britain, have thus constructed a psychology without a soul by taking discrete 'ideas,' faint

or vivid, and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions, and forms of succession, such things as

reminiscences, perceptions, emotions, volitions, passions, theories, and all the other furnishings of an

individual's mind may be engendered. The very Self or ego of the individual comes in this way to be viewed

no longer as the preexisting source of the representations, but rather as their last and most complicated fruit.

Now, if we strive rigorously to simplify the phenomena in either of these ways, we soon become aware of

inadequacies in our method. Any particular cognition, for example, or recollection, is accounted for on the

soultheory by being referred to the spiritual faculties of Cognition or of Memory. These faculties themselves

are thought of as absolute properties of the soul; that is, to take the case of memory, no reason is given why

we should remember a fact as it happened, except that so to remember it constitutes the essence of our

Recollective Power. We may, as spiritualists, try to explain our memory's failures and blunders by secondary

causes. But its successes can invoke no factors save the existence of certain objective things to be

remembered on the one hand, and of our faculty of memory on the other. When, for instance, I recall my

graduationday, and drag all its incidents and emotions up from death's dateless night, no mechanical cause

can explain this process, nor can any analysis reduce it to lower terms or make its nature seem other than an

ultimate datum, which, whether we rebel or not at its mysteriousness, must simply be taken for granted if we

are to psychologize at all. However the associationist may represent the present ideas as thronging and

arranging themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end to admit that something, be it brain, be it

'ideas,' be it 'association,' knows past time as past, and fills it out with this or that event. And when the

spiritualist calls memory an 'irreducible faculty,' he says no more than this admission of the associationist

And yet the admission is far from being a satisfactory simplification of the concrete facts. For why should

this absolute godgiven Faculty retain so much better the events of yesterday than those of last year, and, best

of all, those of an hour ago? Why, again, in old age should its grasp of childhood's events seem firmest? Why

should illness and exhaustion enfeeble it? Why should repeating an experience strengthen our recollection of

it? Why should drugs, fevers, asphyxia, and excitement resuscitate things long since forgotten? If we content

ourselves with merely affirming that the faculty of memory is so peculiarly constituted by nature as to exhibit

just these oddities, we seem little the better for having invoked it, for our explanation becomes as complicated

as that of the crude facts with which we started. Moreover there is something grotesque and irrational in the

supposition that the soul is equipped with elementary powers of such an ingeniously intricate sort. Why

should our memory cling more easily to the near than the remote? Why should it lose its grasp of proper

sooner than of abstract names? Such peculiarities seem quite fantastic; and might, for aught we can see a

priori, be the precise opposites of what they are. Evidently, then, the faculty does not exist absolutely, but

works under conditions; and the quest of the conditions becomes the psychologist's most interesting task.

However firmly he may hold to the soul and her remembering faculty, he must acknowledge that she never

exerts the latter without a cue, and that something must always precede and remind us of whatever we are to

recollect. "An idea!" says the associationist, "an idea associated with the remembered thing; and this explains

also why things repeatedly met with are more easily recollected, for their associates on the various occasions

furnish so many distinct avenues of recall." But this does not explain the effects of fever, exhaustion,

hypnotism, old age, and the like. And in general, the pure associationist's account of our mental life is almost

as bewildering as that of the pure spiritualist. This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, yet clinging

together, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, like dominoes in ceaseless change, or the bits of glass

in a kaleidoscope,whence do they get their fantastic laws of clinging, and why do they cling in just the

For this the associationist must introduce the order of experience in the outer world. The dance of the ideas is

a copy, somewhat mutilated and altered, of the order of phenomena. But the slightest reflection shows that

phenomena have absolutely no power to influence our ideas until they have first impressed our senses and our

brain. The bare existence of a past fact is no ground for our remembering it. Unless we have seen it, or

somehow undergone it, we shall never know of its having been. The experiences of the body are thus one of

the conditions of the faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small amount of reflection on facts

shows that one part of the body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are directly concerned. If the

nervous communication be cut off between the brain and other parts, the experiences of those other parts are

nonexistent for the mind. The eye is blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensible and motionless. And conversely,

if the brain be injured, consciousness is abolished or altered, even although every other organ in the body be

ready to play its normal part. A blow on the head, a sudden subtraction of blood, the pressure of an apoplectic

hemorrhage, may have the first effect; whilst a very few ounces of alcohol or grains of opium or hasheesh, or

a whiff of chloroform or nitrous oxide gas, are sure to have the second. The delirium of fever, the altered self

of insanity, are all due to foreign matters circulating through the brain, or to pathological changes in that

organ's substance. The fact that the brain is the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is

indeed so universally admitted nowadays that I need spend no more time in illustrating it, but will simply

postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the book will be more or less of a proof that the postulate

Bodily experiences, therefore, and more particularly brainexperiences, must take a place amongst those

conditions of the mental life of which Psychology need take account. The spiritualist and the associationist

must both be 'cerebralists,' to the extent at least of admitting that certain peculiarities in the way of working of

their own favorite principles are explicable only by the fact that the brain laws are a codeterminant of the

Our first conclusion, then, is that a certain amount of brainphysiology must be presupposed or included in

In still another way the psychologist is forced to be something of a nervephysiologist. Mental phenomena

are not only conditioned a parte ante by bodily processes; but they lead to them a parte post. That they lead to

acts is of course the most familiar of truths, but I do not merely mean acts in the sense of voluntary and

deliberate muscular performances. Mental states occasion also changes in the calibre of bloodvessels, or

alteration in the heartbeats, or processes more subtle still, in glands and viscera. If these are taken into

account, as well as acts which follow at some remote period because the mental state was once there, it will

be safe to lay down the general law that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or

followed by a bodily change. The ideas and feelings, e.g., which these present printed characters excite in the

reader's mind not only occasion movements of his eyes and nascent movements of articulation in him, but

will some day make him speak, or take sides in a discussion, or give advice, or choose a book to read,

differently from what would have been the case had they never impressed his retina. Our psychology must

therefore take account not only of the conditions antecedent to mental states, but of their resultant

But actions originally prompted by conscious intelligence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be

apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, pianoplaying, talking,

even saying one's prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things. The performances of

animal instinct seem semiautomatic, and the reflex acts of selfpreservation certainly are so. Yet they

resemble intelligent acts in bringing about the same ends at which the animals' consciousness, on other

occasions, deliberately aims. Shall the study of such machinelike yet purposive acts as these be included in

The boundaryline of the mental is certainly vague. It is better not to be pedantic, but to let the science be as

vague as its subject, and include such phenomena as these if by so doing we can throw any light on the main

business in hand. It will ere long be seen, I trust, that we can; and that we gain much more by a broad than by

a narrow conception of our subject. At a certain stage in the development of every science a degree of

vagueness is what best consists with fertility. On the whole, few recent formulas have done more real service

of a rough sort in psychology than the Spencerian one that the essence of mental life and of bodily life are

one, namely, 'the adjustment of inner to outer relations.' Such a formula is vagueness incarnate; but because it

takes into account the fact that minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn

react; because, in short, it takes mind in the midst of all its concrete relations, it is immensely more fertile

than the oldfashioned 'rational psychology,' which treated the soul as a detached existent, sufficient unto

itself, and assumed to consider only its nature and properties. I shall therefore feel free to make any sallies

into zoology or into pure nervephysiology which may seem instructive for our purposes, but otherwise shall

Can we state more distinctly still the manner in which the mental life seems to intervene between impressions

made from without upon the body, and reactions of the body upon the outer world again? Let us look at a few

If some iron filings be sprinkled on a table and a magnet brought near them, they will fly through the air for a

certain distance and stick to its surface. A savage seeing the phenomenon explains it as the result of an

attraction or love between the magnet and the filings. But let a card cover the poles of the magnet, and the

filings will press forever against its surface without its ever occurring to them to pass around its sides and

thus come into more direct contact with the object of their love. Blow bubbles through a tube into the bottom

of a pail of water, they will rise to the surface and mingle with the air. Their action may again be poetically

interpreted as due to a longing to recombine with the motheratmosphere above the surface. But if you invert

a jar full of water over the pail, they will rise and remain lodged beneath its bottom, shut in from the outer air,

although a slight deflection from their course at the outset, or a redescent towards the rim of the jar, when

If now we pass from such actions as these to those of living things, we notice a striking difference. Romeo

wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight

a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their

faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous

way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed;

whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be

Suppose a living frog in the position in which we placed our bubbles of air, namely, at the bottom of a jar of

water. The want of breath will soon make him also long to rejoin the motheratmosphere, and he will take

the shortest path to his end by swimming straight upwards. But if a jar full of water be inverted over him, he

will not, like the bubbles, perpetually press his nose against its unyielding roof, but will restlessly explore the

neighborhood until by redescending again he has discovered a path around its brim to the goal of his

Such contrasts between living and inanimate performances end by leading men to deny that in the physical

world final purposes exist at all. Loves and desires are today no longer imputed to particles of iron or of air.

No one supposes now that the end of any activity which they may display is an ideal purpose presiding over

the activity from its outset and soliciting or drawing it into being by a sort of vis a fronte. The end, on the

contrary, is deemed a mere passive result, pushed into being a tergo, having had, so to speak, no voice in its

own production. Alter, the preexisting conditions, and with inorganic materials you bring forth each time a

different apparent end. But with intelligent agents, altering the conditions changes the activity displayed, but

not the end reached; for here the idea of the yet unrealized end cooperates with the conditions to determine

The Pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment, are thus the mark and criterion of

the presence of mentality in a phenomenon. We all use this test to discriminate between an intelligent and a

mechanical performance. We impute no mentality to sticks and stones, because they never seem to move for

the sake of anything, but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no sign of choice. So we

Just so we form our decision upon the deepest of all philosophic problems: Is the Kosmos an expression of

intelligence rational in its inward nature, or a brute external fact pure and simple? If we find ourselves, in

contemplating it, unable to banish the impression that it is a realm of final purposes, that it exists for the sake

of something, we place intelligence at tile heart of it and have a religion. If, on the contrary, in surveying its

irremediable flux, we can think of the present only as so much mere mechanical sprouting from the past,

In the lengthy discussions which psychologists have carried on about the amount of intelligence displayed by

lower mammals, or the amount of consciousness involved in the functions of the nervecentres of reptiles,

the same test has always been applied: Is the character of the actions such that we must believe them to be

performed for the sake of their result? The result in question, as we shall hereafter abundantly see, is as a rule

a useful one,the animal is, on the whole, safer under the circumstances for bringing it forth. So far the action

has a teleological character; but such mere outward teleology as this might still be the blind result of vis a

tergo. The growth and movements of plants, the processes of development, digestion, secretion, etc., in

animals, supply innumerable instances of performances useful to the individual which may nevertheless be,

and by most of us are supposed to be, produced by automatic mechanism. The physiologist does not

confidently assert conscious intelligence in the frog's spinal cord until he has shown that the useful result

which the nervous machinery brings forth under a given irritation remains the same when the machinery is

altered. If, to take the stockinstance, the right knee of a headless frog be irritated with acid, the right foot

will wipe it off. When, however, this foot is amputated, the animal will often raise the left foot to the spot and

Pfluger and Lewes reason from such facts in the following way: If the first reaction were the result of mere

machinery, they say; if that irritated portion of the skin discharged the right leg as a trigger discharges its own

barrel of a shotgun; then amputating the right foot would indeed frustrate the wiping, but would not make the

left leg move. It would simply result in the right stump moving through the empty air (which is in fact the

phenomenon sometimes observed). The right trigger makes no effort to discharge the left barrel if the right

one be unloaded; nor does an electrical machine ever get restless because it can only emit sparks, and not

If, on the contrary, the right leg originally moved for the purpose of wiping the acid, then nothing is more

natural than that, when the easiest means of effecting that purpose prove fruitless, other means should be

tried. Every failure must keep the animal in a state of disappointment which will lead to all sorts of new trials

and devices; and tranquillity will not ensue till one of these, by a happy stroke, achieves the wishedfor end.

In a similar way Goltz ascribes intelligence to the frog's optic lobes and cerebellum. We alluded above to the

manner in which a sound frog imprisoned in water will discover an outlet to the atmosphere. Goltz found that

frogs deprived of their cerebral hemispheres would often exhibit a like ingenuity. Such a frog, after rising

from the bottom and finding his farther upward progress checked by the glass bell which has been inverted

over him, will not persist in butting his nose against the obstacle until dead of suffocation, but will often

redescend and emerge from under its rim as if, not a definite mechanical propulsion upwards, but rather a

conscious desire to reach the air by hook or crook were the mainspring of his activity. Goltz concluded from

this that the hemispheres are not the seat of intellectual power in frogs. He made the same inference from

observing that a brainless frog will turn over from his back to his belly when one of his legs is sewed up,

although the movements required are then very different from those excited under normal circumstances by

the same annoying position. They seem determined, consequently, not merely by the antecedent irritant, but

Another brilliant German author, Liebmann[2], argues against the brain's mechanism accounting for mental

action, by very similar considerations. A machine as such, he says, will bring forth right results when it is in

good order, and wrong results if out of repair. But both kinds of result flow with equally fatal necessity from

their conditions. We cannot suppose the clockwork whose structure fatally determines it to a certain rate of

speed, noticing that this speed is too slow or too fast and vainly trying to correct it. Its conscience, if it have

any, should be as good as that of the best chronometer, for both alike obey equally well the same eternal

mechanical lawslaws from behind. But if the brain be out of order and the man says "Twice four are two,"

instead of "Twice four are eight," or else "I must go to the coal to buy the wharf," instead of "I must go to the

wharf to buy the coal," instantly there arises a consciousness of error. The wrong performance, though it obey

the same mechanical law as the right, is nevertheless condemned,condemned as contradicting the inner

lawthe law from in front, the purpose or ideal for which the brain should act, whether it do so or not.

We need not discuss here whether these writers in drawing their conclusion have done justice to all the

premises involved in the cases they treat of. We quote their arguments only to show how they appeal to the

principle that no actions but such as are done for an end, and show a choice of means, can be called

I shall then adopt this as the criterion by which to circumscribe the subjectmatter of this work so far as

action enters into it. Many nervous performances will therefore be unmentioned, as being purely

physiological. Nor will the anatomy of the nervous system and organs of sense be described anew. The reader

will find in H.N. Martin's Human Body, in G.T. Ladd's Physiological Psychology, and in all the other

standard Anatomies and Physiologies, a mass of information which we must regard as preliminary and take

for granted in the present work[3]. Of the functions of the cerebral hemispheres, however, since they directly

Footnotes [1] Cf. George T.Ladd: Elements of Physiological Psychology (1887), pt. III, chap. III, 9, 12

[3] Nothing is easier than to familiarize one's self with the mammalian brain. Get a sheep's head, a small saw,

chisel, scalpel and forceps (all three can best be had from a surgicalinstrument maker), and unravel its parts

either by the aid of a human dissecting book, such as Holden's Manual of Anatomy, or by the specific

directions ad hoc given in such books as Foster and Langley's Practical Physiology (Macmillan) or Morrell's

If I begin chopping the foot of a tree, its branches are unmoved by my act, and its leaves murmur as

peacefully as ever in the wind. If, on the contrary, I do violence to the foot of a fellowman, the rest of his

body instantly responds to the aggression by movements of alarm or defence. The reason of this difference is

that the man has a nervous system whilst the tree has none; and the function of the nervous system is to bring

each part into harmonious cooperation with every other. The afferent nerves, when excited by some

physical irritant, be this as gross in its mode of operation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the waves of light,

conveys the excitement to the nervous centres. The commotion set up in the centres does not stop there, but

discharges itself, if at all strong, through the efferent nerves into muscles and glands, exciting movements of

the limbs and viscera, or acts of secretion, which vary with the animal, and with the irritant applied. These

acts of response have usually the common character of being of service. They ward off the noxious stimulus

and support the beneficial one; whilst if, in itself indifferent, the stimulus be a sign of some distant

circumstance of practical importance, the animal's acts are addressed to this circumstance so as to avoid its

perils or secure its benefits, as the case may be. To take a common example, if I hear the conductor calling '

All aboard!' as I enter the depot, my heart first stops, then palpitates, and my legs respond to the airwaves

falling on my tympanum by quickening their movements. If I stumble as I run, the sensation of falling

provokes a movement of the hands towards the direction of the fall, the effect of which is to shield the body

from too sudden a shock. If a cinder enter my eye, its lids close forcibly and a copious flow of tears tends to

These three responses to a sensational stimulus differ, however, in many respects. The closure of the eye and

the lachrymation are quite involuntary, and so is the disturbance of the heart. Such involuntary responses we

know as 'reflex' acts. The motion of the arms to break the shock of falling may also be called reflex, since it

occurs too quickly to be deliberately intended. Whether it be instinctive or whether it result from the

pedestrian education of childhood may be doubtful; it is, at any rate, less automatic than the previous acts, for

a man might by conscious effort learn to perform it more skilfully, or even to suppress it altogether. Actions

of this kind, into which instinct and volition enter upon equal terms, have been called 'semireflex.' The act

of running towards the train, on the other hand, has no instinctive element about it. It is purely the result of

education, and is preceded by a consciousness of the purpose to be attained and a distinct mandate of the will.

It is a 'voluntary act.' Thus the animal's reflex and voluntary performances shade into each other gradually,

being connected by acts which may often occur automatically, but may also be modified by conscious

An outside observer, unable to perceive the accompanying consciousness, might be wholly at a loss to

discriminate between the automatic acts and those which volition escorted. But if the criterion of mind's

existence be the choice of the proper means for the attainment of a supposed end, all the acts seem to be

inspired by intelligence, for appropriateness characterizes them all alike. This fact, now, has led to two quite

opposite theories about the relation to consciousness of the nervous functions. Some authors, finding that the

higher voluntary ones seem to require the guidance of feeling, conclude that over the lowest reflexes some

such feeling also presides, though it may be a feeling of which we remain unconscious. Others, finding that

reflex and semiautomatic acts may, notwithstanding their appropriateness, take place with an

unconsciousness apparently complete, fly to the opposite extreme and maintain that the appropriateness even

of voluntary actions owes nothing to the fact that consciousness attends them. They are, according to these

writers, results of physiological mechanism pure and simple. In a near chapter we shall return to this

controversy again. Let us now look a little more closely at the brain and at the ways in which its states may be

THE FROG'S NERVECENTRES. Both the minute anatomy and the detailed physiology of the brain are

achievements of the present generation, or rather we may say (beginning with Meynert) of the past twenty

years. Many points are still obscure and subject to controversy; but a general way of conceiving the organ has

been reached on all hands which in its main feature seems not unlikely to stand, and which even gives a most

plausible scheme of the way in which cerebral and mental operations go hand in hand.

The best way to enter the subject will be to take a lower creature, like a frog, and study by the vivisectional

method the functions of his different nervecentres. The frog's nervecentres are figured in the

accompanying diagram, which needs no further explanation. I will first proceed to state what happens when

various amounts of the anterior parts are removed, in different frogs, in the way in which an ordinary student

removes them; that is, with no extreme precautions as to the purity of the operation. We shall in this way

reach a very simple conception of the functions of the various centres, involving the strongest possible

contrast between the cerebral hemispheres and the lower lobes. This sharp conception will have didactic

advantages, for it is often very instructive to start with too simple a formula and correct it later on. Our first

formula, as we shall later see, will have to be softened down somewhat by the results of more careful

experimentation both on frogs and birds, and by those of the most recent observations on dogs, monkeys, and

man. But it will put us, from the outset, in clear possession of some fundamental notions and distinctions

which we could otherwise not gain so well, and none of which the later more completed view will overturn.

If, then, we reduce the frog's nervous system to the spinal cord alone, by making a section behind the base of

the skull, between the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata, thereby cutting off the brain from all connection

with the rest of the body, the frog will still continue to live, but with a very peculiarly modified activity. It

ceases to breathe or swallow; it lies flat on its belly, and does not, like a normal frog, sit up on its fore paws,

though its hind legs are kept, as usual, folded against its body and immediately resume this position if drawn

out. If thrown on its back, it lies there quietly, without turning over like a normal frog. Locomotion and voice

seem entirely abolished. If we suspend it by the nose, and irritate different portions of its skin by acid, it

performs a set of remarkable 'defensive' movements calculated to wipe away the irritant. Thus, if the breast

be touched, both fore paws will rub it vigorously; if we touch the outer side of the elbow, the hind foot of the

same side will rise directly to the spot and wipe it. The back of the foot will rub the knee if that be attacked,

whilst if the foot be cut away, the stump will make ineffectual movements, and then, in many frogs, a pause

will come, as if for deliberation, succeeded by a rapid passage of the opposite unmutilated foot to the

The most striking character of all these movements, after their teleological appropriateness, is their precision.

They vary, in sensitive frogs and with a proper amount of irritation, so little as almost to resemble in their

machinelike regularity the performances of a jumpingjack, whose legs must twitch whenever you pull the

string. The spinal cord of the frog thus contains arrangements of cells and fibres fitted to convert skin

irritations into movements of defence. We may call it the centre for defensive movements in this animal. We

may indeed go farther than this, and by cutting the spinal cord in various places find that its separate

segments are independent mechanisms, for appropriate activities of the head and of the arms and legs respec

tively. The segment governing the arms is especially active, in male frogs, in the breeding season; and these

members alone with the breast and back appertaining to them, everything else being cut away, will then

actively grasp a finger placed between them and remain hanging to it for a considerable time.

The spinal cord in other animals has analogous powers. Even in man it makes movements of defence.

Paraplegics draw up their legs when tickled; and Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after

decapitation, saw the arm and hand move towards the spot. Of the lower functions of the mammalian cord,

If, in a second animal, the cut be made just behind the optic lobes so that the cerebellum and medulla

oblongata remain attached to the cord, then swallowing, breathing, crawling, and a rather enfeebled jumping

and swimming are added to the movements previously observed.[1] There are other reflexes too. The animal,

thrown on his back, immediately turns over to his belly. Placed in a shallow bowl, which is floated on water

and made to rotate, he responds to the rotation by first turning his head and then waltzing around with his

entire body, in the opposite direction to the whirling of the bowl. If his support be tilted so that his head

points downwards, he points it up; he points it down if it be pointed upwards, to the right if it be pointed to

the left, etc. But his reactions do not go farther than these movements of the head.; He will not, like frogs

whose thalami are preserved, climb up a board if the latter be tilted, but will slide off it to the ground.

If the cut be made on another frog between the thalami and the optic lobes, the locomotion both on land and

water becomes quite normal, and, in addition to the reflexes already shown by the lower centres, he croaks

regularly whenever he is pinched under the arms. He compensates rotations, etc., by movements of the head,

and turns over from his back; but still drops off his tilted board. As his optic nerves are destroyed by the usual

operation, it is impossible to say whether he will avoid obstacles placed in his path.

When, finally, a frog's cerebral hemispheres alone are cut off by a section between them and the thalami

which preserves the latter, an unpractised observer would not at first suspect anything abnormal about the

animal. Not only is he capable, on proper instigation, of all the acts already described, but he guides himself

by sight, so that if an obstacle be set up between him and the light, and he be forced to move forward, he

either jumps over it or swerves to one side. He manifests sexual passion at the proper season, and, unlike an

altogether brainless frog, which embraces anything placed between his arms, postpones this reflex act until a

female of his own species is provided. Thus far, as aforesaid, a person unfamiliar with frogs might not

suspect a mutilation; but even such a person would soon remark the almost entire absence of spontaneous

motionthat is, motion unprovoked by any present incitation of sense. The continued movements of

swimming, performed by the creature in the water, seem to be the fatal result of the contact of that fluid with

its skin. They cease when a stick, for example, touches his hands. This is a sensible irritant towards which the

feet are automatically drawn by reflex action, and on which the animal remains sitting. He manifests no

hunger, and will suffer a fly to crawl over his nose unsnapped at. Fear, too, seems to have deserted him. In a

word, he is an extremely complex machine whose actions, so far as they go, tend to selfpreservation ; but

still a machine, in this sensethat it seems to contain no incalculable element. By applying the right sensory

stimulus to him we are almost as certain of getting a fixed response as an organist is of hearing a certain tone

But now if to the lower centres we add the cerebral hemispheres, or if, in other words, we make an intact

animal the subject of our observations, all this is changed. In addition to the previous responses to present

incitements of sense, our frog now goes through long and complex acts of locomotion spontaneously, or as if

moved by what in our selves we should call an idea. His reactions to outward stimuli vary their form, too.

Instead of making simple defensive movements with his hind legs like a headless frog if touched, or of giving

one or two leaps and then sitting still like a hemisphereless one, he makes persistent and varied efforts at

escape, as if, not the mere contact of the physiologist's hand, but the notion of danger suggested by it were

now his spur. Led by the feeling of hunger, too, he goes in search of insects, fish, or smaller frogs, and varies

his procedure with each species of victim. The physiologist cannot by manipulating him elicit croaking,

crawling up a board, swimming or stopping, at will. His conduct has become incalculable. We can no longer

foretell it exactly. Effort to escape is his dominant reaction, but he may do anything else, even swell up and

Such are the phenomena commonly observed, and such the impressions which one naturally receives. Certain

The acts of all the centres involve the use of the same muscles. When a headless frog's hind leg wipes the

acid, he calls into play all the legmuscles which a frog with his full medulla oblongata and cerebellum uses

when he turns from his back to his belly. Their contractions are, however, combined differently in the two

cases, so that the results vary widely. We must consequently conclude that specific arrangements of cells and

fibres exist in the cord for wiping, in the medulla for turning over, etc. Similarly they exist in the thalami for

jumping over seen obstacles and for balancing the moved body; in the optic lobes for creeping backwards, or

what not. But in the hemispheres, since the presence of these organs brings no new elementary form of

movement with it, but only determines differently the occasions on which the movements shall occur, making

the usual stimuli less fatal and machinelike; we need suppose no such machinery directly coordinative of

muscular contractions to exist. We may rather assume, when the mandate for a wipingmovement is sent

forth by the hemispheres, that a current goes straight to the wipingarrangement in the spinal cord, exciting

this arrangement as a whole. Similarly, if an intact frog wishes to jump over a stone which he sees, all he

need do is to excite from the hemispheres the jumpingcentre in the thalami or wherever it may be, and the

latter will provide for the details of the execution. It is like a general ordering a colonel to make a certain

The same muscle, then, repeatedly represented at different heights; and at each it enters into a different

combination with other muscles to cooperate in some special form of concerted movement. At each height

the movement is discharged by some particular form of sensorial stimulus. Thus in the cord, the skin alone

occasions movements; in the upper part of the optic lobes, the eyes are added; in the thalami, the

semicircular canals would seem to play a part; whilst the stimuli which discharge the hemispheres would

seem not so much to be elementary sorts of sensation, as groups of sensations forming determinate objects or

things. Prey is not pursued nor are enemies shunned by ordinary hemisphereless frogs. Those reactions upon

complex circumstances which we call instinctive rather than reflex, are already in this animal dependent on

the brain's highest lobes, and still more is this the case with animals higher in the zoological scale.

The results are just the same if, instead of a frog, we take a pigeon, and cut out his hemispheres as they are

ordinarily cut out for a lectureroom demonstration. There is not a movement natural to him which this

brainless bird cannot perform if expressly excited thereto; only the inner promptings seem deficient, and

when left to himself he spends most of his time crouched on the ground with his head sunk between his

All these facts lead us, when we think about them, to some such explanatory conception as this: The lower

centres act from present sensational stimuli alone; the hemispheres act from perceptions and considerations,

the sensations which they may receive, serving only as suggesters of these. But what are perceptions but

sensations grouped together? and what are considerations but expectations, in the fancy, of sensations which

will be felt one way or another according as action takes this course or that? If I step aside on seeing a

rattlesnake, from considering how dangerous an animal he is, the mental materials which constitute my

prudential reflection are images more or less vivid of the movement of his head, of a sudden pain in my leg,

of a state of terror, a swelling of the limb, a chill, delirium, unconsciousness, etc., etc., and the ruin of my

hopes. But all these images are constructed out of my past experiences. They are reproductions of what I have

felt or witnessed. They are, in short, remote sensations; and the difference between the hemisphereless animal

and the whole one may be concisely expressed by saying that the one obeys absent, the other only present,

The hemispheres would then seem to be the seat of memory. Vestiges of past experience must in some way

be stored up in them, and must, when aroused by present stimuli, first appear as representations of distant

goods and evils; and then must discharge into the appropriate motor channels for warding off the evil and

securing the benefits of the good. If we liken the nervous currents to electric currents, we can compare the

nervous system, C, below the hemispheres to a direct circuit from senseorgan to muscle along the line

S...C...M of Fig. 2 (p. 21). The hemisphere, H, adds the long circuit or loopline through which the current

Thus, a tired wayfarer on a hot day throws himself on the damp earth beneath a mapletree. The sensations of

delicious rest and coolness pouring themselves through the direct line would naturally discharge into the

muscles of complete extension: he would abandon himself to the dangerous repose. But the loopline being

open, part of the current is drafted along it, and awakens rheumatic or catarral reminiscences, which prevail

over the instigations of sense, and make the man arise and pursue his way to where he may enjoy his rest

more safely. Presently we shall examine the manner in which the hemispheric loopline may be supposed to

serve as a reservoir for such reminiscences as these. Meanwhile I will ask the reader to notice some

First, no animal without it can deliberate, pause, postpone, nicely weigh one motive against another, or

compare. Prudence, in a word, is for such a creature an impossible virtue. Accordingly we see that nature

removes those functions in the exercise of which prudence is a virtue from the lower centres and hands them

over to the cerebrum. Wherever a creature has to deal with complex features of the environment, prudence is

a virtue. The higher animals have so to deal; and the more complex the features, the higher we call the

animals. The fewer of his acts, then, can such an animal perform without the help of the organs in question.

In the frog many acts devolve wholly on the lower centres; in the bird fewer; in the rodent fewer still; in the

The advantages of this are obvious. Take the prehension of food as an example and suppose it to be a reflex

performance of the lower centres. The animal will be condemned fatally and irresistibly to snap at it

whenever presented, no matter what the circumstances may be; he can no more disobey this prompting than

water can refuse to boil when a fire is kindled under the pot. His life will again and again pay the forfeit of

Exposure to retaliation, to other enemies, to traps, to poisons, to the dangers of repletion, must be regular

parts of his existence. His lack of all thought by which to weigh the danger against the attractiveness of the

bait, and of all volition to remain hungry a little while longer, is the direct measure of his lowness in the

mental scale. And those fishes which, like our cunners and sculpins, are no sooner thrown back from the hook

into the water, than they automatically seize the hook again, would soon expiate the degradation of their

intelligence by the extinction of their type, did not their exaggerated fecundity atone for their imprudence.

Appetite and the acts it prompts have consequently become in all higher vertebrates functions of the

cerebrum. They disappear when the physiologist's knife has left the subordinate centres alone in place. The

Take again the sexual function. In birds this devolves exclusively upon the hemispheres. When these are

shorn away the pigeon pays no attention to the billings and cooings of its mate. And Goltz found that a bitch

in heat would excite no emotion in male dogs who had suffered large loss of cerebral tissue. Those who have

read Darwin's 'Descent of Man' know what immense importance in the amelioration of the breed in birds this

author ascribes to the mere fact of sexual selection. The sexual act is not performed until every condition of

circumstance and sentiment is fulfilled, until time, place, and partner all are fit. But in frogs and toads this

passion devolves on the lower centres. They show consequently a machinelike obedience to the present

incitement of sense, and an almost total exclusion of the power of choice. Copulation occurs per.fas aut nefas,

occasionally between males, often with dead females, in puddles exposed on the highway, and the male may

be cut in two without letting go his hold. Every spring an immense sacrifice of batrachian life takes place

No one need be told how dependent all human social elevation is upon the prevalence of chastity. Hardly any

factor measures more than this the difference between civili zation and barbarism. Physiologically

interpreted, chastity means nothing more than the fact that present solicitations of sense are overpowered by

suggestions of aesthetic and moral fitness which the circumstances awaken in the cerebrum ; and that upon

Within the psychic life due to the cerebrum itself the same general distinction obtains, between

considerations of the more immediate and considerations of the more remote. In all ages the man whose

determinations are swayed by reference to the most distant ends has been held to possess the highest

intelligence. The tramp who lives from hour to hour; the bohemian whose engagements are from day to day;

the bachelor who builds but for a single life; the father who acts for another generation ; the patriot who

thinks of a whole community and many generations; and finally, the philosopher and saint whose cares are

for humanity and for eternity,these range themselves in an unbroken hierarchy, wherein each successive

grade results from an increased manifestation of the special form of action by which the cerebral centres are

In the 'loopline' along which the memories and ideas of the distant are supposed to lie, the action, so far as it

is a physical process, must be interpreted after the type of the action in the lower centres. If regarded here as a

reflex process, it must be reflex there as well. The current in both places runs out into the muscles only after it

has first run in; but whilst the path by which it runs out is determined in the lower centres by reflections few

and fixed amongst the cellarrangements, in the hemispheres the reflections are many and instable. This, it

will be seen, is only a difference of degree and not of kind, and does not change the reflex type. The

conception of all action as conforming to this type is the fundamental conception of modern

nervephysiology. So much for our general preliminary conception of the nervecentres! Let us define it

more distinctly before we see how well physiological observation will bear it out in detail.

THE EDUCATION OF THE HEMISPHERES Nervecurrents run in through senseorgans, and whilst

provoking reflex acts in the lower centres, they arouse ideas in the hemispheres, which either permit the

reflexes in question, check them, or substitute others for them. All ideas being in the last resort

reminiscences, the question to answer is: How can processes become organized in the hemispheres which

Nothing is easier than to conceive a possible way in which this might be done, provided four assumptions be

1) The same cerebral process which, when aroused from without by a senseorgan, gives the perception of an

object, will give an idea of the same object when aroused by other cerebral processes from within.

2) If processes 1, 2, 3, 4 have once been aroused together or in immediate succession, any subsequent arousal

of any one of them (whether from without or within) will tend to arouse the others in the original order.[This

3) Every sensorial excitement propagated to a lower centre tends to spread upwards and arouse an idea.

4) Every idea tends ultimately either to produce a movement or to check one which otherwise would be

Suppose now (these assumptions being granted) that we have a baby before us who sees a candleflame for

the first time, and, by virtue of a reflex tendency common in babies of a certain age, extends his hand to grasp

it, so that his fingers get burned. So far we have two reflex currents in play: first, from the eye to the

extension movement, along the line 1111 of Fig. 3; and second, from the finger to the movement of

If this were the baby's whole nervous system, and if the reflexes were once for all organic, we should have no

alteration in his behavior, no matter how often the experience recurred. The retinal image of the flame would

always make the arm shoot forward, the burning of the finger would always send it back. But we know that

'the burnt child dreads the fire,' and that one experience usually protects the fingers forever. The point is to

We must complicate our diagram (see Fig. 4). Let the current 11, from the eye, discharge upward as well as

downward when it reaches the lower centre for vision, and arouse the perceptional process s1 in the

hemispheres; let the feeling of the arm's extension also send up a current which leaves a trace of itself, m1; let

the burnt finger leave an analogous trace, s2; and let the movement of retraction leave m2. These four

processes will now, by virtue of assumption 2), be associated together by the path s1m1s2m2 running

from the first to the last, so that if anything touches off s1, ideas of the extension, of the burnt finger, and of

the retraction will pass in rapid succession through the mind. The effect on the child's conduct when the

candleflame is next presented is easy to imagine. Of course the sight of it arouses the grasping reflex; but it

arouses simultaneously the idea thereof, together with that of the consequent pain, and of the final retraction

of the hand; and if these cerebral processes prevail in strength over the immediate sensation in the centres

below, the last idea will be the cue by which the final action is discharged. The grasping will be arrested in

In all this we assume that the hemispheres do not natively couple any particular senseimpression with any

special motor discharge. They only register, and preserve traces of, such couplings as are already organized in

the reflex centres below. But this brings it inevitably about that, when a chain of experiences has been already

registered and the first link is impressed once again from without, the last link will often be awakened in idea

long before it can exist in fact. And if this last link were previously coupled with a motion, that motion may

now come from the mere ideal suggestion without waiting for the actual impression to arise. Thus an animal

with hemispheres acts in anticipation of future things; or, to use our previous formula, he acts from

considerations of distant good and ill. If we give the name of partners to the original couplings of impressions

with motions in a reflex way, then we may say that the function of the hemispheres is simply to bring about

exchanges among the partners. Movement mn, which natively is sensation sn's partner, becomes through the

hemispheres the partner of sensation s1, s2 or s3. It is like the great commutating switchboard at a central

telephone station. No new elementary process is involved; no impression nor any motion peculiar to the

hemispheres; but any number of combinations impossible to the lower machinery taken alone, and an endless

All this, as a mere scheme,[4] is so clear and so concordant with the general look of the facts as almost to

impose itself on our belief; but it is anything but clear in detail. The brainphysiology of late years has with

great effort sought to work out the paths by which these couplings of sensations with movements take place,

So we must next test our scheme by the facts discovered in this direction. We shall conclude, I think, after

taking them all into account, that the scheme probably makes the lower centres too machinelike and the

hemispheres not quite machinelike enough, and must consequently be softened down a little. So much I may

say in advance. Meanwhile, before plunging into the details which await us, it will somewhat clear our ideas

if we contrast the modern way of looking at the matter with the phrenological conception which but lately

In a certain sense Gall was the first to seek to explain in detail how the brain could subserve our mental

operations. His way of proceeding was only too simple. He took the facultypsychology as his ultimatum on

the mental side, and he made no farther psychological analysis. Wherever he found an individual with some

stronglymarked trait of character he examined his head; and if he found the latter prominent in a certain

region, he said without more ado that that region was the 'organ' of the trait or faculty in question. The traits

were of very diverse constitution, some being simple sensibilities like 'weight' or 'color'; some being

instinctive tendencies like 'alimentiveness' or 'amativeness;' and others, again, being complex resultants like

'conscientiousness,' 'individuality.' Phrenology fell promptly into disrepute among scientific men because

observation seemed to show that large facul ties and large 'bumps' might fail to coexist; because the scheme

of Gall was so vast as hardly to admit of accurate determination at allwho of us can say even of his own

brothers whether their perceptions of weight and of time are well developed or not?because the followers of

Gall and Spurzheim were unable to reform these errors in any appreciable degree; and, finally, because the

whole analysis of faculties was vague and erroneous from a psychologic point of view. Popular professors of

the lore have nevertheless continued to command the admiration of popular audiences; and there seems no

doubt that Phrenology, however little it satisfy our scientific curiosity about the functions of different

portions of the brain, may still be, in the hands of intelligent practitioners, a useful help in the art of reading

character. A hooked nose and a firm jaw are usually signs of practical energy; soft, delicate hands are signs of

refined sensibility. Even so may a prominent eye be a sign of power over language, and a bullneck a sign of

sensuality. But the brain behind the eye and neck need no more be the organ of the signified faculty than the

jaw is the organ of the will or the hand the organ of refinement. These correlations between mind and body

are, however, so frequent that the 'characters' given by phrenologists are often remarkable for knowingness

Phrenology hardly does more than restate the problem. To answer the question, "Why do I like children?" by

saying, "Because you have a large organ of philoprogenitiveness," but renames the phenomenon to be

explained. What is my philoprogenitiveness? Of what mental elements does it consist? And how can a part of

the brain be its organ? A science of the mind must reduce such complex manifestations as

'philoprogenitiveness' to their elements. A science of the brain must point out the functions of its elements. A

science of the relations of mind and brain must show how the elementary ingredients of the former

correspond to the elementary functions of the latter. But phrenology, except by occasional coincidence, takes

no account of elements at all. Its 'faculties,' as a rule, are fully equipped persons in a particular mental

attitude. Take, for example, the 'faculty' of language. It involves in reality a host of distinct powers. We must

first have images of concrete things and ideas of abstract qualities and relations; we must next have the

memory of words and then the capacity so to associate each idea or image with a particular word that, when

the word is heard, the idea shall forthwith enter our mind. We must conversely, as soon as the idea arises in

our mind, associate with it a mental image of the word, and by means of this image we must innervate our

articulatory apparatus so as to reproduce the word as physical sound. To read or to write a language other

elements still must be introduced. But it is plain that the faculty of spoken language alone is so complicated

as to call into play almost all the elementary powers which the mind possesses, memory, imagination,

association, judgment, and volition. A portion of the brain competent to be the adequate seat of such a faculty

would needs be an entire brain in miniature,just as the faculty itself is really a specification of the entire

man, a sort of homunculus. Yet just such homunculi are for the most part the phrenological organs. As Lange

"We have a parliament of little men together, each of whom, as happens also in a real parliament, possesses

but a single idea which he ceaselessly strives to make prevail"benevolence, firmness, hope, and the rest.

"Instead of one soul, phrenology gives us forty, each alone as enigmatic as the full aggregate psychic life can

be. Instead of dividing the latter into effective elements, she divides it into personal beings of peculiar

character..'Herr Pastor, sure there be a horse inside,' called out the peasants to X after their spiritual shepherd

had spent hours in explaining to them the construction of the locomotive. With a horse inside truly everything

becomes clear, even though it be a queer enough sort of horsethe horse itself calls for no explanation!

Phrenology takes a start to get beyond the point of view of the ghostlike soul entity, but she ends by

Modern Science conceives of the matter in a very different way. Brain and mind alike consist of simple

elements, sensory and motor. "All nervous centres," says Dr. Hughlings Jackson,[6] "from the lowest to the

very highest (the substrata of consciousness), are made up of nothing else than nervous arrangements,

representing impressions and movements... I do not see of what other materials the brain can be made."

Meynert represents the matter similarly when he calls the cortex of the hemispheres the surface of projection

for every muscle and every sensitive point of the body. The muscles and the sensitive points are represented

each by a cortical point, and the brain is nothing but the sum of all these cortical points, to which, on the

mental side, as many ideas correspond. Ideas of sensation, ideas of motion are, on the other hand, the

elementary factors out of which the mind is built up by the associationists in psychology. There is a complete

parallelism between the two analyses, the same diagram of little dots, circles, or triangles joined by lines

symbolizes equally well the cerebral and mental processes : the dots stand for cells or ideas, the lines for

fibres or associations. We shall have later to criticise this analysis so far as it relates to the mind; but there is

no doubt that it is a most convenient, and has been a most useful, hypothesis, formulating the facts in an

If, then, we grant that motor and sensory ideas variously associated are the materials of the mind, all we need

do to get a complete diagram of the mind's and the brain's relations should be to ascertain which sensory idea

corresponds to which sensational surface of projection, and which motor idea to which muscular surface of

projection. The associations would then correspond to the fibrous connections between the various surfaces.

This distinct cerebral localization of the various elementary sorts of idea has been treated as a 'postulate' by

many physiologists (e.g. Munk); and the most stirring controversy in nervephysiology which the present

Up to 1870, the opinion which prevailed was that which the experiments of Flourens on pigeons' brains had

made plausible, namely, that the different functions of the hemi spheres were not locally separated, but

carried on each by the aid of the whole organ. Hitzig in 1870 showed, however, that in a dog's brain highly

specialized movements could be produced by electric irritation of determinate regions of the cortex; and

Ferrier and Munk, half a dozen years later, seemed to prove, either by irritations or excisions or both, that

there were equally determinate regions connected with the senses of sight, touch, hearing, and smell. Munk's

special sensorial localizations, however, disagreed with Ferrier's; and Goltz, from his

extirpationexperiments, came to a conclusion adverse to strict localization of any kind. The controversy is

not yet over. I will not pretend to say anything more of it historically, but give a brief account of the

The one thing which is perfectly well established is this, that the 'central' convolutions, on either side of the

fissure of Rolando, and (at least in the monkey) the callosomarginal convolution (which is continuous with

them on the mesial surface where one hemisphere is applied against the other), form the region by which all

the motor incitations which leave the cortex pass out, on their way to those executive centres in the region of

the pons, medulla, and spinal cord from which the muscular contractions are discharged in the last resort. The

existence of this socalled 'motor zone' is established by the lines of evidence successively given below:

(1) Cortical Irritations. Electrical currents of small intensity applied to the surface of the said convolutions in

dogs, monkeys, and other animals, produce welldefined movements in face, forelimb, hindlimb, tail, or

trunk, according as one point or another of the surface is irritated. These movements affect almost invariably

the side opposite to the brain irritations : If the left hemisphere be excited, the movement is of the right leg,

side of face, etc. All the objections at first raised against the validity of these experiments have been

overcome. The movements are certainly not due to irritations of the base of the brain by the downward spread

of the current, for: a) mechanical irritations will produce them, though less easily than electrical; b) shifting

the electrodes to a point close by on the surface changes the movement in ways quite inexplicable by changed

physical conduction of the current; c) if the cortical 'centre' for a certain movement be cut under with a sharp

knife but left in situ, although the electric conductivity is physically unaltered by the operation, the

physiological conductivity is gone and currents of the same strength no longer produce the movements which

they did; d) the timeinterval between the application of the electric stimulus to the cortex and the resultant

movement is what it would be if the cortex acted physiologically and not merely physically in transmitting

the irritation. It is namely a wellknown fact that when a nervecurrent has to pass through the spinal cord to

excite a muscle by reflex action, the time is longer than if it passes directly down the motor nerve: the cells of

the cord take a certain time to discharge. Similarly, when a stimulus is applied directly to the cortex the

muscle contracts two or three hundredths of a second later than it does when the place on the cortex is cut

(2) Cortical Ablations. When the cortical spot which is found to produce a movement of the foreleg, in a

dog, is excised (see spot 5 in Fig. 5), the leg in question becomes peculiarly affected. At first it seems

paralyzed. Soon, however, it is used with the other legs, but badly. The animal does not bear his weight on it,

allows it to rest on its dorsal surface, stands with it crossing the other leg, does not remove it if it hangs over

the edge of a table, can no longer 'give the paw' at word of command if able to do so before the operation,

does not use it for scratching the ground, or holding a bone as formerly, lets it slip out when running on a

smooth surface or when shaking himself, etc., etc. Sensibility of all kinds seems diminished as well as

motility, but of this I shall speak later on. Moreover the dog tends in voluntary movements to swerve towards

the side of the brainlesion instead of going straight forward. All these symptoms gradually decrease, so that

even with a very severe brainlesion the dog may be outwardly indistinguishable from a well dog after eight

or ten weeks. Still, a slight chloroformization will reproduce the disturbances, even then. There is a certain

appearance of ataxic inco�rdination in the movements the dog lifts his forefeet high and brings them

down with more strength than usual, and yet the trouble is not ordinary lack of coordination.

Neither is there paralysis. The strength of whatever movements are made is as great as everdogs with

extensive destruction of the motor zone can jump as high and bite as hard as ever they did, but they seem less

easily moved to do anything with the affected parts. Dr. Loeb, who has studied the motor disturbances of

dogs more carefully than any one, conceives of them en masse as effects of an increased inertia in all the

processes of innervation towards the side opposed to the lesion. All such movements require an unwonted

effort for their execution; and when only the normally usual effort is made they fall behind in

Even when the entire motor zone of a dog is removed, there is no permanent paralysis of any part, but only

this curious sort of relative inertia when the two sides of the body are compared; and this itself becomes

hardly noticeable after a number of weeks have elapsed. Prof Goltz has described a dog whose entire left

hemisphere was destroyed, and who retained only a slight motor inertia on the right half of the body. In

particular he could use his right paw for holding a bone whilst gnawing it, or for reaching after a piece of

Had he been taught to give his paw before the operations, it would have been curious to see whether that

faculty also came back. His tactile sensibility was permanently diminished on the right side.[9] In monkeys a

genuine paralysis follows upon ablations of the cortex in the motor region. This paralysis affects parts of the

body which vary with the brainparts removed. The monkey's opposite arm or leg hangs flaccid, or at most

takes a small part in associated movements. When the entire region is removed there is a genuine and

permanent hemiplegia in which the arm is more affected than the leg; and this is followed months later by

contracture of the muscles, as in man after inveterate hemiplegia.[10] According to Schaefer and Horsley, the

trunkmuscles also become paralyzed after destruction of the marginal convolution on both sides (see Fig. 7).

These differences between dogs and monkeys show the danger of drawing general conclusions from

experiments done on any one sort of animal. I subjoin the figures given by the lastnamed authors of the

In man we are necessarily reduced to the observation postmortem of cortical ablations produced by accident

or disease (tumor, hemorrhage, softening, etc.). What results during life from such conditions is either

localized spasm, or palsy of certain muscles of the opposite side. The cortical regions which invariably

produce these results are homologous with those which we have just been studying in the dog, cat, ape, etc.

Figs. 8 and 9 show the result of 169 cases carefully studied by Exner. The parts shaded are regions where

lesions produced no motor disturbance. Those left white were, on the contrary, never injured without motor

Where the injury to the cortical substance is profound in man, the paralysis is permanent and is succeeded by

(3) Descending degenerations show the intimate connection of the rolandic regions of the cortex with the

motor tracts of the cord. When, either in man or in the lower animals, these regions are destroyed, a peculiar

degenerative change known as secondary sclerosis is found to extend downwards through the white fibrous

substance of the brain in a perfectly definite manner, affecting certain distinct strands which pass through the

inner capsule, crura, and pons, into the anterior pyramids of the medulla oblongata, and from thence (partly

crossing to the other side) downwards into the anterior (direct) and lateral (crossed) columns of the spinal

(4) Anatomical proof of the continuity of the rolandic regions with these motor columns of the cord is also

clearly given. Flechsig's 'Pyramidenbahn' forms an uninterrupted strand (distinctly traceable in human

embryos, before its fibres have acquired their white 'medullary sheath') passing upwards from the pyramids of

the medulla, and traversing the internal capsule and corona radiata to the convolutions in question (Fig. 10).

None of the inferior gray matter of the brain seems to have any connection with this important fibrous strand.

It passes directly from the cortex to the motor arrangements in the cord, depending for its proper nutrition (as

the facts of degeneration show) on the influence of the cortical cells, just as motor nerves depend for their

nutrition on that of the cells of the spinal cord. Electrical stimulation of this motor strand in any accessible

part of its course has been shown in dogs to produce movements analogous to those which excitement of the

One of the most instructive proofs of motor localization in the cortex is that furnished by the disease now

called aphemia, or motor Aphasia. Motor aphasia is neither loss of voice nor paralysis of the tongue or lips.

The patient's voice is as strong as ever, and all the innervations of his hypoglossal and facial nerves, except

those necessary for speaking, may go on perfectly well. He can laugh and cry, and even sing; but he either is

unable to utter any words at all; or a few meaningless stock phrases form his only speech ; or else he speaks

incoherently and confusedly, mispronounc ing, misplacing, and misusing his words in various degrees.

Sometimes his speech is a mere broth of unintelligible syllables. In cases of pure motor aphasia the patient

Now whenever a patient dies in such a condition as this, and an examination of his brain is permitted, it is

found that the lowest frontal gyrus (see Fig. 11) is the seat of injury. Broca first noticed this fact in 1861, and

The injury in righthanded people is found on the left hemisphere, and in lefthanded people on the right

hemisphere. Most people, in fact, are leftbrained, that is, all their delicate and specialized movements are

handed over to the charge of the left hemisphere. The ordinary righthandedness for such movements is only

a consequence of that fact, a consequence which shows outwardly on account of that extensive decussation of

the fibres whereby most of those from the left hemisphere pass to the right half of the body only. But the

leftbrainedness might exist in equal measure and not show outwardly. This would happen wherever organs

on both sides of the body could be governed by the left hemisphere; and just such a case seems offered by the

vocal organs, in that highly delicate and special motor service which we call speech. Either hemisphere can

innervate them bilaterally, just as either seems able to innervate bilaterally the muscles of the trunk, ribs, and

diaphragm. Of the special movements of speech, how ever, it would appear (from the facts of aphasia) that

the left hemisphere in most persons habitually takes exclusive charge. With that hemisphere thrown out of

gear, speech is undone; even though the opposite hemisphere still be there for the performance of less

It will be noticed that Broca's region is homologous with the parts ascertained to produce movements of the

lips, tongue, and larynx when excited by electric currents in apes (cf. Fig. 6, p. 34). The evidence is therefore

as complete as it well can be that the motor incitations to these organs leave the brain by the lower frontal

Victims of motor aphasia generally have other disorders. One which interests us in this connection has been

called agraphia: they have lost the power to write. They can read writing and understand it; but either cannot

use the pen at all or make egregious mistakes with it. The seat of the lesion here is less well determined,

owing to an insufficient number of good cases to conclude from.[12] There is no doubt, however, that it is (in

righthanded people) on the left side, and little doubt that it consists of elements of the handandarm region

specialized for that service. The symptom may exist when there is little or no disability in the hand for other

uses. If it does not get well, the patient usually educates his right hemisphere, i.e. learns to write with his left

hand. In other cases of which we shall say more a few pages later on, the patient can write both

spontaneously and at dictation, but cannot read even what he has himself written! All these phenomena are

now quite clearly explained by separate braincentres for the various feelings and movements and tracts for

associating these together. But their minute discussion belongs to medicine rather than to general psychology,

and I can only use them here to illustrate the principles of motor localization.[13] Under the heads of sight

The different lines of proof which I have taken up establish conclusively the proposition that all the motor

impulses which leave the cortex pass out, in healthy animals, from the convolutions about the fissure of

When, however, it comes to defining precisely what is involved in a motor impulse leaving the cortex, things

grow more obscure. Does the impulse start independently from the convolutions in question, or does it start

elsewhere and merely flow through? And to what particular phase of psychic activity does the activity of

these centres correspond? Opinions and authorities here divide; but it will be better, before entering into these

deeper aspects of the problem, to cast a glance at the facts which have been made out concerning the relations

Ferrier was the first in the field here. He found, when the angular convolution (that lying between the 'intra

parietal' and 'external occipital' fissures, and bending round the top of the fissure of Sylvius, in Fig. 6) was

excited in the monkey, that movements of the eyes and head as if for vision occurred; and that when it was

extirpated, what he supposed to be total and permanent blindness of the opposite eye followed. Munk almost

immediately declared total and permanent blindness to follow from destruction of the occipital lobe in

monkeys as well as dogs, and said that the angular gyrus had nothing to do with sight, but was only the centre

for tactile sensibility of the eyeball. Munk's absolute tone about his observations and his theoretic arrogance

have led to his ruin as an authority. But he did two things of permanent value. He was the first to distinguish

in these vivisections between sensorial and psychic blindness, and to describe the phenomenon of restitution

of the visual function after its first impairment by an operation; and the first to notice the hemiopic character

of the visual disturbances which result when only one hemisphere is injured. Sensorial blindness is absolute

insensibility to light; psychic blindness is inability to recognize the meaning of the optical impressions, as

when we see a page of Chinese print but it suggests nothing to us. A hemiopic disturbance of vision is one in

which neither retina is affected in its totality, but in which, for example, the left portion of each retina is

blind, so that the animal sees nothing situated in space towards its right. Later observations have corroborated

this hemiopic character of all the disturbances of sight from injury to a single hemisphere in the higher

animals; and the question whether an animal's apparent blindness is sensorial or only psychic has, since

Munk's first publications, been the most urgent one to answer, in all observations relative to the function of

Goltz almost simultaneously with Ferrier and Munk reported experiments which led him to deny that the

visual function was essentially bound up with any one localized portion of the hemispheres. Other divergent

results soon came in from many quarters, so that, without going into the history of the matter any more, I may

In fishes, frogs, and lizards vision persists when the hemispheres are entirely removed. This is admitted for

All of Munk's birds seemed totally blind (blind sensorially) after removal of the hemispheres by his

operation. The following of a candle by the head and winking at a threatened blow, which are ordinarily held

to prove the retention of crude optical sensations by the lower centres in supposed hemisphereless pigeons,

are by Munk ascribed to vestiges of the visual sphere of the cortex left behind by the imperfection of the

operation. But Schrader, who operated after Munk and with every apparent guarantee of completeness, found

that all his pigeons saw after two or three weeks had elapsed, and the inhibitions resulting from the wound

had passed away. They invariably avoided even the slightest obstacles, flew very regularly towards certain

perches, etc., differing toto coelo in these respects with certain simply blinded pigeons who were kept with

them for comparison. They did not pick up food strewn on the ground, however. Schrader found that they

would do this if even a small part of the frontal region of the hemispheres was left, and ascribes their

nonselffeeding when deprived of their occipital cerebrum not to a visual, but to a motor, defect, a sort of

In presence of such discord as that between Munk and his opponents one must carefully note how differently

significant is loss, from preservation, of a function after an operation on the brain. The loss of the function

does not necessarily show that it is dependent on the part cut out; but its preservation does show that it is not

dependent: and this is true though the loss should be observed ninetynine times and the preservation only

once in a hundred similar excisions. That birds and mammals can be blinded by cortical ablation is

undoubted; the only question is, must they be so? Only then can the cortex be certainly called the 'seat of

sight.' The blindness may always be due to one of those remote effects of the wound on distant parts,

inhibitions, extensions of inflammation,interferences, in a word, upon which BrownS�quard and Goltz

have rightly insisted, and the importance of which becomes more manifest every day. Such effects are

transient; whereas the symptoms of deprivation (Ausfallserscheinungen, as Goltz calls them) which come

from the actual loss of the cutout region must from the nature of the case be permanent. Blindness in the

pigeons, so far as it passes away, cannot possibly be charged to their seat of vision being lost, but only to

some influence which temporarily depresses the activity of that seat. The same is true mutatis mutandis of all

the other effects of operations, and as we pass to mammals we shall see still more the importance of the

In rabbits loss of the entire cortex seems compatible with the preservation of enough sight to guide the poor

animals' movements, and enable them to avoid obstacles. Christiani's observations and discussions seem

conclusively to have established this, although Munk found that all his animals were made totally blind.[16]

In dogs also Munk found absolute stoneblindness after ablation of the occipital lobes. He went farther and

mapped out determinate portions of the cortex thereupon, which he considered correlated with definite

segments of the two retinae, so that destruction of given portions of the cortex produces blindness of the

retinal centre, top, bottom, or right or left side, of the same or opposite eye. There seems little doubt that this

definite correlation is mythological. Other observers, Hitzig, Goltz, Luciani, Loeb, Exner, etc., find, whatever

part of the cortex may be ablated on one side, that there usually results a hemiopic disturbance of both eyes,

slight and transient when the anterior lobes are the parts attacked, grave when an occipital lobe is the seat of

injury, and lasting in proportion to the latter's extent. According to Loeb, the defect is a dimness of vision

('hemiamblyopia') in which (however severe) the centres remain the best seeing portions of the retina, just as

they are in normal dogs. The lateral or temporal part of each retina seems to be in exclusive connection with

the cortex of its own side. The centre and nasal part of each seems, on the contrary, to be connected with the

cortex of the opposite hemispheres. Loeb, who takes broader views than any one, conceives the

hemiamblyopia as he conceives the motor disturbances, namely, as the expression of an increased inertia in

the whole optical machinery, of which the result is to make the animal respond with greater effort to

impressions coming from the half of space opposed to the side of the lesion. If a dog has right

hemiamblyopia, say, and two pieces of meat are hung before him at once, he invariably turns first to the one

on his left. But if the lesion be a slight one, shaking slightly the piece of meat on his right (this makes of it a

stronger stimulus) makes him seize upon it first. If only one piece of meat be offered, he takes it, on

When both occipital lobes are extensively destroyed total blindness may result. Munk maps out his 'Seh

sph�re' definitely, and says that blindness must result when the entire shaded part, marked A, A, in Figs. 12

and 13, is involved in the lesion. Discrepant reports of other observations he explains as due to incomplete

Luciani, Goltz, and Lannegrace, however, contend that they have made complete bilateral extirpations of

Munk's Sehsph�re more than once, and found a sort of crude indiscriminating sight of objects to return in a

few weeks.[17] The question whether a dog is blind or not is harder to solve than would at first appear; for

simply blinded dogs, in places to which they are accustomed, show little of their loss and avoid all obstacles;

whilst dogs whose occipital lobes are gone may run against things frequently and yet see notwithstanding.

The best proof that they may see is that which Goltz's dogs furnished: they carefully avoided, as it seemed,

strips of sunshine or paper on the floor, as if they were solid obstacles. This no really blind dog would do.

Luciani tested his dogs when hungry (a condition which sharpens their attention) by strewing pieces of meat

and pieces of cork before them. If they went straight at them, they saw; and if they chose the meat and left the

cork, they saw discriminatingly. The quarrel is very acrimonious; indeed the subject of localization of

functions in the brain seems to have a peculiar effect on the temper of those who cultivate it experimentally.

The amount of preserved vision which Goltz and Luciani report seems hardly to be worth considering, on the

one hand; and on the other, Munk admits in his penultimate paper that out of 85 dogs he only 'succeeded' 4

times in his operation of producing complete blindness by complete extirpation of his 'Sehsph�re'.[18] The

safe conclusion for us is that Luciani's diagram, Fig. 14, represents something like the truth.

The occipital lobes are far more important for vision than any other part of the cortex, so that their complete

destruction makes the animal almost blind. As for the crude sensibility to light which may then remain,

In the monkey, doctors also disagree. The truth seems, however, to be that the occipital lobes in this animal

also are the part connected most intimately with the visual function. The function would seem to go on when

very small portions of them are left, for Ferrier found no 'appreciable impairment' of it after almost complete

destruction of them on both sides. On the other hand, he found complete and permanent blindness to ensue

when they and the angular gyri in addition were destroyed on both sides. Munk, as well as Brown and

Schaefer, found no disturbance of sight from destroying the angular gyri alone, although Ferrier found

blindness to ensue. This blindness was probably due to inhibitions exerted in distans, or to cutting of the

white optical fibres passing under the angular gyri on their way to the occipital lobes. Brown and Schaefer

got complete and permanent blindness in one monkey from total destruction of both occipital lobes. Luciani

and Seppili, performing this operation on two monkeys, found that the animals were only mentally, not

sensorially, blind. After some weeks they saw their food, but could not distinguish by sight between figs and

pieces of cork. Luciani and Seppili seem, however, not to have extirpated the entire lobes. When one lobe

only is injured the affection of sight is hemiopic in monkeys: in this all observers agree. On the whole, then,

Munk's original location of vision in the occipital lobes is confirmed by the later evidence.[19]

In man we have more exact results, since we are not driven to interpret the vision from the outward conduct.

On the other hand, however, we cannot vivisect, but must wait for pathological lesions to turn up. The

pathologists who have discussed these (the literature is tedious ad libitum) conclude that the occipital lobes

are the indispensable part for vision in man. Hemiopic disturbance in both eyes comes from lesion of either

one of them, and total blindness, sensorial as well as psychic, from destruction of both.

Hemiopia may also result from lesion in other parts, especially the neighboring angular and supramarginal

gyri, and it may accompany extensive injury in the motor region of the cortex. In these cases it seems

probable that it is due to an actio in distans, probably to the interruption of fibres proceeding from the

occipital lobe. There seem to be a few cases on record where there was injury to the occipital lobes without

visual defect. Ferrier has collected as many as possible to prove his localization in the angular gyrus.[20] A

strict application of logical principles would make one of these cases outweigh one hundred contrary ones.

And yet, remembering how imperfect observations may be, and how individual brains may vary, it would

certainly be rash for their sake to throw away the enormous amount of positive evidence for the occipital

lobes. Individual variability is always a possible explanation of an anomalous case. There is no more

prominent anatomical fact than that of the 'decussation of the pyramids,' nor any more usual pathological fact

than its consequence, that lefthanded hemorrhages into the motor region produce righthanded paralyses.

And yet the decussation is variable in amount, and seems sometimes to be absent altogether.[21] If, in such a

case as this last, the left brain were to become the seat of apoplexy, the left and not the right half of the body

The schema on the opposite page, copied from Dr.Seguin, expresses, on the whole, the probable truth about

the regions concerned in vision. Not the entire occipital lobes, but the socalled cunei, and the first

convolutions, are the cortical parts most intimately concerned. Nothnagel agrees with Seguin in this

A most interesting effect of cortical disorder is mental blindness. This consists not so much in insensibility to

optical impressions, as in inability to understand them. Psychologically it is interpretable as loss of

associations between optical sensations and what they signify; and any interruption of the paths between the

optic centres and the centres for other ideas ought to bring it about. Thus, printed letters of the alphabet, or

words, signify certain sounds and certain articulatory movements. If the connection between the articulating

or auditory centres, on the one hand, and the visual centres on the other, be ruptured, we ought a priori to

expect that the sight of words would fail to awaken the idea of their sound, or the movement for pronouncing

We ought, in short, to have alexia, or inability to read: and this is just what we do have in many cases of

extensive injury about the frontotemporal regions, as a complication of aphasic disease. Nothnagel suggests

that whilst the cuneus is the seat of optical sensations, the other parts of the occipital lobe may be the field of

optical memories and ideas, from the loss of which mental blindness should ensue. In fact, all the medical

authors speak of mental blindness as if it must consist in the loss of visual images from the memory. It seems

to me, however, that this is a psychological misapprehension. A man whose power of visual imagination has

decayed (no unusual phenomenon in its lighter grades) is not mentally blind in the least, for he recognizes

perfectly all that he sees. On the other hand, he may be mentally blind, with his optical imagination well

preserved; as in the interesting case publislied by Wilbrand in 1887.[23] In the still more interesting case of

mental blindness recently published by Lissauer,[24] though the patient made the most ludicrous mistakes,

calling for instance a clothesbrush a pair of spectacles, an umbrella a plant with flowers, an apple a portrait

of a lady, etc. etc., he seemed, according to the reporter, to have his mental images fairly well preserved. It is

in fact the momentary loss of our nonoptical images which makes us mentally blind, just as it is that of our

nonauditory images which makes us mentally deaf. I am mentally deaf if, hearing a bell, I can't recall how it

looks; and mentally blind if, seeing it, I can't recall its sound or its name. As a matter of fact, I should have to

be not merely mentally blind, but stoneblind, if all my visual images were lost. For although I am blind to

the right half of the field of view if my left occipital region is injured, and to the left half if my right region is

injured, such hemianopsia does not deprive me of visual images, experience seeming to show that the

unaffected hemisphere is always sufficient for production of these. To abolish them entirely I should have to

be deprived of both occipital lobes, and that would deprive me not only of my inward images of sight, but of

my sight altogether.[25] Recent pathological annals seem to offer a few such cases.[26] Meanwhile there are

a number of cases of mental blindness, especially for written language, coupled with hemianopsia, usually of

the rightward field of view. These are all explicable by the breaking down, through disease, of the connecting

tracts between the occipital lobes and other parts of the brain, especially those which go to the centres for

speech in the frontal and temporal regions of the left hemisphere. They are to be classed among disturbances

of conduction or of association; and nowhere can I find any fact which should force us to believe that optical

images need[27] be lost in mental blindness, or that the cerebral centres for such images are locally distinct

Where an object fails to be recognized by sight, it often happens that the patient will recognize and name it as

soon as he touches it with his hand. This shows in an interes ting way how numerous the associative paths

are which all end by running out of the brain through the channel of speech. The handpath is open, though

the eyepath be closed. When mental blindness is most complete, neither sight, touch, nor sound avails to

steer the patient, and a sort of dementia which has been called asymbolia or apraxia is the result. The

commonest articles are not understood. The patient will put his breeches on one shoulder and his hat upon the

other, will bite into the soap and lay his shoes on the table, or take his food into his hand and throw it down

again, not knowing what to do with it, etc. Such disorder can only come from extensive braininjury.[29]

The method of degeneration corroborates the other evidence localizing the tracts of vision. In young animals

one gets secondary degeneration of the occipital regions from destroying an eyeball, and, vice versa,

degeneration of the optic nerves from destroying the occipital regions. The corpora geniculata, thalami, and

subcortical fibres leading to the occipital lobes are also found atrophied in these cases. The phenomena are

not uniform, but are indisputable;[30] so that, taking all lines of evidence together, the special connection of

vision with the occipital lobes is perfectly made out. It should be added that the occipital lobes have

Hearing is hardly as definitely localized as sight. In the dog, Luciani's diagram will show the regions which

directly or indirectly affect it for the worse when injured. As with sight, onesided lesions produce symptoms

on both sides. The mixture of black dots and gray dots in the diagram is meant to represent this mixture of

'crossed' and 'uncrossed' connections, though of course no topographical exactitude is aimed at. Of all the

region, the temporal lobe is the most important part; yet permanent absolute deafness did not result in a dog

of Luciani's, even from bilateral destruction of both temporal lobes in their entirety.[31]

In the monkey, Ferrier and Yeo once found permanent deafness to follow destruction of the upper temporal

convolution (the one just below the fissure of Sylvius in Fig.6) on both sides. Brown and Schaefer found, on

the contrary, that in several monkeys this operation failed to noticeably affect the hearing. In one animal,

indeed, both entire temporal lobes were destroyed. After a week or two of depression of the mental faculties

this beast recovered and became one of the brightest monkeys possible, domineering over all his mates, and

admitted by all who saw him to have all his senses, including hearing, 'perfectly acute.'[32] Terrible

recriminations have, as usual, ensued between the investigators, Ferrier denying that Brown and Schaefer's

ablations were complete,[33] Schaefer that Ferrier's monkey was really deaf.[34] In this unsatisfactory

condition the subject must be left, although there seems no reason to doubt that Brown and Schaefer's

In man the temporal lobe is unquestionably, the seat of the hearing function, and the superior convolution

adjacent to the sylvian fissure is its most important part. The phenomena of aphasia show this. We studied

Our knowledge of this disease has had three stages: we may talk of the period of Broca, the period of

Wernicke, and the period of Charcot. What Broca's discovery was we have seen. Wernicke was the first to

discriminate those cases in which the patient can not even understand speech from those in which he can

understand, only not talk; and to ascribe the former condition to lesion of the temporal lobe.[35] The

condition in question is worddeafness, and the disease is auditory aphasia. The latest statistical survey of the

subject is that by Dr. Allen Starr.[36] In the seven cases of pure worddeafness which he has collected, cases

in which the patient could read, talk, and write, but not understand what was said to him, the lesion was

limited to the first and second temporal convolutions in their posterior two thirds. The lesion (in

righthanded, i.e. leftbrained, persons) is always on the left side, like the lesion in motor aphasia. Crude

hearing would not be abolished, even were the left centre for it utterly destroyed ; the right centre would still

provide for that. But the linguistic use of hearing appears bound up with the integrity of the left centre more

or less exclusively. Here it must be that words heard enter into association with the things which they

represent, on the one hand, and with the movements necessary for pronouncing them, on the other. In a large

majority of Dr. Starr's fifty cases, the power either to name objects or to talk coherently was impaired. This

shows that in most of us (as Wernicke said) speech must go on from auditory cues; that is, it must be that our

ideas do not innervate our motor centres directly, but only after first arousing the mental sound of the words.

This is the immediate stimulus to articulation; and where the possibility of this is abolished by the destruction

of its usual channel in the left temporal lobe, the articulation must suffer. In the few cases in which the

channel is abolished with no bad effect on speech we must suppose an idiosyncrasy. The patient must

innervate his speechorgans either from the corresponding portion of the other hemisphere or directly from

the centres of ideation, those, namely, of vision, touch, etc., without leaning on the auditory region. It is the

minuter analysis of the facts in the light of such individual differences as these which constitutes Charcot's

Every namable thing, act, or relation has numerous properties, qualities, or aspects. In our minds the

properties of each thing, together with its name, form an associated group. If different parts of the brain are

severally concerned with the several properties, and a farther part with the hearing, and still another with the

uttering, of the name, there must inevitably be brought about (through the law of association which we shall

later study) such a dynamic connection amongst all these brainparts that the activity of anyone of them will

be likely to awaken the activity of all the rest. When we are talking as we think, the ultimate process is that of

utterance. If the brainpart for that be injured, speech is impossible or disorderly, even though all the other

brainparts be intact: and this is just the condition of things which, on page 37, we found to be brought about

by limited lesion of the left inferior frontal convolution. But back of that last act various orders of succession

are possible in the associations of a talking man's ideas. The more usual order seems to be from the tactile,

visual, or other properties of the things thoughtabout to the sound of their names, and then to the latter's

utterance. But if in a certain individual the thought of the look of an object or of the look of its printed name

be the process which habitually precedes articulation, then the loss of the hearing centre will pro tanto not

affect that individual's speech. He will be mentally deaf, i.e. his understanding of speech will suffer, but he

will not be aphasic. In this way it is possible to explain the seven cases of pure worddeafness which figure

If this order of association be ingrained and habitual in that individual, injury to his visual centres will make

him not only wordblind, but aphasic as well. His speech will become confused in consequence of an

occipital lesion. Naunyn, consequently, plotting out on a diagram of the hemisphere the 71 irreproachably

reported cases of aphasia which he was able to collect, finds that the lesions concentrate themselves in three

places: first, on Broca's, centre; second, on Wernicke's ; third, on the supramarginal and angular gyri under

which those fibres pass which connect the visual centres with the rest of the brain [37](see Fig. 17). With this

In a later chapter we shall again return to these differences in the effectiveness of the sensory spheres in

different individuals. Meanwhile few things show more beautifully than the history of our knowledge of

aphasia how the sagacity and patience of many banded workers are in time certain to analyze the darkest

confusion into an orderly display.[38] There is no 'centre of Speech' in the brain any more than there is a

faculty of Speech in the mind. The entire brain, more or less, is at work in a man who uses language. The

subjoined diagram, from Ross, shows the four parts most critically concerned, and, in the light of our text,

Everything conspires to point to the median descending part of the temporal lobes as being the organs of

smell. Even Ferrier and Munk agree on the hippocampal gyrus, though Ferrier restricts olfaction, as Munk

does not to the lobule or uncinate process of the convolution, reserving the rest of it for touch.

Anatomy and pathology also point to the hippocampal gyrus; but as the matter is less interesting from the

point of view of human psychology than were sight and hearing, I will say no more, but simply add Luciani

Of we know little that is definite.[sic] What little there is points to the lower temporal regions again. Consult

Interesting problems arise with regard to the seat of tactile and muscular sensibility. Hitzig, whose

experiments on dogs' brains fifteen years ago opened the entire subject which we are discussing, ascribed the

disorders of motility observed after ablations of the motor region to a loss of what he called muscular

The animals do not notice eccentric positions of their limbs, will stand with their legs crossed, with the

affected paw resting on its back or hanging over a table's edge, etc.; and do not resist our bending and

stretching of it as they resist with the unaffected paw. Goltz, Munk, Schiff, Herzen, and others promptly

ascertained an equal defect of cutaneous sensibility to pain, touch, and cold. The paw is not withdrawn when

pinched, remains standing in cold water, etc. Ferrier meanwhile denied that there was any true anaesthesia

produced by ablations in the motor zone, and explains the appearance of it as an effect of the sluggish motor

responses of the affected side.[40] Munk [41]and Schiff [42], on the contrary, conceive of the 'motor zone' as

essentially sensory, and in different ways explain the motor disorders as secondary results of the anaesthesia

which is always there. Munk calls the motor zone the F�hlsph�re of the animal's limbs, etc., and makes it

co�rdinate with the Sehsph�re, the H�rsph�re, etc., the entire cortex being, according to him, nothing but a

projectionsurface for sensations, with no exclusively or essentially motor part. Such a view would be

important if true, through its bearings on the psychology of volition. What is the truth? As regards the fact of

cutaneous anaesthesia from motorzone ablations, all other observers are against Ferrier, so that he is

probably wrong in denying it. On the other hand, Munk and Schiff are wrong in making the motor symptoms

depend on the anaesthesia, for in certain rare cases they have been observed to exist not only without

insensibility, but with actual hyperaesthesia of the parts.[43] The motor and sensory symptoms seem,

In monkeys the latest experiments are those of Horsley and Schaefer,[44] whose results Ferrier accepts. They

find that excision of the hippocampal convolution produces transient insensibility of the opposite side of the

body, and that permanent insensibility is produced by destruction of its continuation upwards above the

corpus callosum, the socalled gyrus fornicatus (the part just below the 'callosomarginal fissure' in Fig.7).

The insensibility is at its maximum when the entire tract comprising both convolutions is destroyed. Ferrier

says that the sensibility of monkeys is 'entirely unaffected' by ablations of the motor zone,[45] and Horsley

and Schaefer consider it by no means necessarily abolished.[46] Luciani found it diminished in his three

experiments on apes.[47] In man we have the fact that onesided paralysis from disease of the opposite motor

Luciani, who believes that the motor zone is also sensory, tries to minimize the value of this evidence by

pointing to the insufficiency with which patients are examined. He himself believes that in dogs the tactile

sphere extends backwards and forwards of the directly excitable region, into the frontal and parietal lobes

(see Fig. 20). Nothnagel considers that pathological evidence points in the same direction;[48] and Dr. Mills,

carefully reviewing the evidence, adds the gyri fornicatus and hippocampi to the cutaneomuscular region in

man.[49] If one compare Luciani's diagrams together (Figs. 14,16, 19, 20) one will see that the entire parietal

region of the dog's skull is common to the four senses of sight, hearing, smell, and touch, including muscular

feeling. The corresponding region in the human brain (upper parietal and supramarginal gyrisee Fig. 17,

p.56) seems to be a somewhat similar place of conflux. Optical aphasias and motor and tactile disturbances

all result from its injury, especially when that is on the left side.[50] The lower we go in the animal scale the

less differentiated the functions of the several brainparts seem to be.[51] It may be that the region in

question still represents in ourselves something like this primitive condition, and that the surrounding parts,

in adapting themselves more and more to specialized and narrow functions, have left it as a sort of carrefour

through which they send currents and converse. That it should be connected with musculocutaneous feeling

is, however, no reason why the motor zone proper should not be so connected too. And the cases of paralysis

from the motor zone with no accompanying anaesthesia may be explicable without denying all sensory

function to that region. For, as my colleague Dr.James Putnam informs me, sensibility is always harder to kill

than motility, even where we know for a certainty that the lesion affects tracts that are both sensory and

motor. Persons whose hand is paralyzed in its movements from compression of armnerves during sleep, still

feel with their fingers; and they may still feel in their feet when their legs are paralyzed by bruising of the

spinal cord. In a similar way, the motor cortex might be sensitive as well as motor, and yet by this greater

subtlety (or whatever the peculiarity may be) in the sensory currents, the sensibility might survive an amount

of injury there by which the motility was destroyed. Nothnagel considers that there are grounds for supposing

the muscular sense to be exclusively connected with the parietal lobe and not with the motor zone. "Disease

of this lobe gives pure ataxy without palsy, and of the motor zone pure palsy without loss of muscular

sense.[52]" He fails, however, to convince more competent critics than the present writer,[53] so I conclude

with them that as yet we have no decisive grounds for locating muscular and cutaneous feeling apart. Much

still remains to be learned about the relations between musculocutaneous sensibility and the cortex, but one

thing is certain: that neither the occipital, the forward frontal, nor the temporal lobes seem to have anything

essential to do with it in man. It is knit up with the performances of the motor zone and of the convolutions

backwards and midwards of them. The reader must remember this conclusion when we come to the chapter

I must add a word about the connection of aphasia with the tactile sense. On p.40 I spoke of those cases in

which the patient can write but not read his own writing. He cannot read by his eyes ; but he can read by the

feeling in his fingers, if he retrace the letters in the air. It is convenient for such a patient to have a pen in

hand whilst reading in this way, in order to make the usual feeling of writing more complete.[54] In such a

case we must suppose that the path between the optical and the graphic centres remains open, whilst that

between the optical and the auditory and articulatory centres is closed. Only thus can we understand how the

look of the writing should fail to suggest the sound of the words to the patient's mind, whilst it still suggests

the proper movements of graphic imitation. These movements in their turn must of course be felt, and the

feeling of them must be associated with the centres for hearing and pronouncing the words. The injury in

cases like this where very special combinations fail, whilst others go on as usual, must always be supposed to

be of the nature of increased resistance to the passage of certain currents of association. If any of the elements

of mental function were destroyed the incapacity would necessarily be much more formidable. A patient who

can both read and write with his fingers most likely uses an identical 'graphic' centre, at once sensory and

I have now given, as far as the nature of this book will allow, a complete account of the present state of the

localizationquestion. In its main outlines it stands firm, though much has still to be discovered. The anterior

frontal lobes, for example, so far as is yet known, have no definite functions. Goltz finds that dogs bereft of

them both are incessantly in motion, and excitable by every small stimulus. They are irascible and amative in

an extraordinary degree, and their sides grow bare with perpetual reflex scratching; but they show no local

troubles of either motion or sensibility. In monkeys not even this lack of inhibitory ability is shown, and

neither stimulation nor excision of the prefrontal lobes produces any symptoms whatever. One monkey of

Horsley and Schaefer's was as tame, and did certain tricks as well, after as before the operation.[55] It is

probable that we have about reached the limits of what can be learned about brainfunctions from vivisecting

inferior animals, and that we must hereafter look more exclusively to human pathology for light. The

existence of separate speech and writing centres in the left hemisphere in man; the fact that palsy from

cortical injury is so much more complete and enduring in man and the monkey than in dogs; and the farther

fact that it seems more difficult to get complete sensorial blindness from cortical ablations in the lower

animals than in man, all show that functions get more specially localized as evolution goes on. In birds

localization seems hardly to exist, and in rodents it is much less conspicuous than in carnivora. Even for man,

however, Munk's way of mapping out the cortex into absolute areas within which only one movement or

sensation is represented is surely false. The truth seems to be rather that, although there is a correspondence

of certain regions of the brain to certain regions of the body, yet the several parts within each bodily region

are represented throughout the whole of the corresponding brainregion like pepper and salt sprinkled from

the same caster. This, however, does not prevent each 'part' from having its focus at one spot within the

brainregion. The various brainregions merge into each other in the same mixed way. As Mr.Horsley says:

"There are border centres, and the area of representation of the face merges into that for the representation of

the upper limb. If there was a focal lesion at that point, you would have the movements of these two parts

starting together."[56] The accompanying figure from Paneth shows just how the matter stands in the

I am speaking now of localizations breadthwise over the brainsurface. It is conceivable that there might be

also localizations depthwise through the cortex. The more superficial cells are smaller, the deepest layer of

them is large; and it has been suggested that the superficial cells are sensorial, the deeper ones motor;[58] or

that the superficial ones in the motor region are correlated with the extremities of the organs to be

moved(fingers, etc.), the deeper ones with the more central segments (wrist, elbow, etc.).[59] It need hardly

We thus see that the postulate of Meynert and Jackson which we started with on p.30 is on the whole most

satisfactorily corroborated by subsequent objective research. The highest centres do probably contain nothing

but arrangements for representing impressions and movements, and other arrangements for coupling the

activity of these arrangements together.[60] Currents pouring in from the senseorgans first excite some

arrangements, which in turn excite others, until at last a motor discharge downwards of some sort occurs.

When this is once clearly grasped there remains little ground for keeping up that old controversy about the

motor zone, as to whether it is in reality motor or sensitive. The whole cortex, inasmuch as currents run

through it, is both. All the currents probably have feelings going with them, and sooner or later bring

movements about. In one aspect, then, every centre is afferent, in another efferent, even the motor cells of the

spinal cord having these two aspects inseparably conjoined. Marique,[61] and Exner and Paneth[62] have

shown that by cutting round a 'motor' centre and so separating it from the influence of the rest of the cortex,

the same disorders are produced as by cutting it out, so that really it is only the mouth of the funnel, as it

were, through which the stream of innervation, starting from elsewhere, pours;[63] consciousness

accompanying the stream, and being mainly of things seen if the stream is strongest occipitally, of things

heard if it is strongest temporally, of things felt, etc., if the stream occupies most intensely the 'motor zone.' It

seems to me that some broad and vague formulation like this is as much as we can safely venture on in the

present state of science; and in subsequent chapters I expect to give confirmatory reasons for my view.

But is the consciousness which accompanies the activity of the cortex the only consciousness that man has?

This is a difficult question to decide, how difficult one only learns when one discovers that the

cortexconsciousness itself of certain objects can be seemingly annihilated in any good hypnotic subject by a

bare wave of his opera tor's hand, and yet be proved by circumstantial evidence to exist all the while in a

splitoff condition, quite as 'ejective'[64] to the rest of the subject's mind as that mind is to the mind of the

bystanders.[65] The lower centres themselves may conceivably all the while have a splitoff consciousness

of their own, similarly ejective to the cortexconsciousness; but whether they have it or not can never be

known from merely introspective evidence. Meanwhile the fact that occipital destruction in man may cause a

blindness which is apparently absolute (no feeling remaining either of light or dark over one half of the field

of view), would lead us to suppose that if our lower optical centres, the corpora quadrigemina, and thalami,

do have any consciousness, it is at all events a consciousness which does not mix with that which

accompanies the cortical activities, and which has nothing to do with our personal Self. In lower animals this

may not be so much the case. The traces of sight found (supra, p. 46) in dogs and monkeys whose occipital

lobes were entirely destroyed, may possibly have been due to the fact that the lower centres of these animals

saw, and that what they saw was not ejective but objective to the remaining cortex, i.e. it formed part of one

and the same inner world with the things which that cortex perceived. It may be, however, that the

phenomena were due to the fact that in these animals the cortical 'centres' for vision reach outside of the

occipital zone, and that destruction of the latter fails to remove them as completely as in man. This, as we

know, is the opinion of the experimenters themselves. For practical purposes, nevertheless, and limiting the

meaning of the word consciousness to the personal self of the individual, we can pretty confidently answer

the question prefixed to this paragraph by saying that the cortex is the sole organ of consciousness in

man.[66] If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self

Another problem, not so metaphysical, remains. The most general and striking fact connected with cortical

injury is that of the restoration of function. Functions lost at first are after a few days or weeks restored. How

1) Restitution is due to the vicarious action either of the rest of the cortex or of centres lower down, acquiring

2) It is due to the remaining centres (whether cortical or 'lower') resuming functions which they had always

had, but of which the wound had temporarily inhibited the exercise. This is the view of which Goltz and

Inhibition is a vera causa, of that there can be no doubt. The pneumogastric nerve inhibits the heart, the

splanchnic inhibits the intestinal movements, and the superior laryngeal those of inspiration. The

nerveirritations which may inhibit the contraction of arterioles are innumerable, and reflex actions are often

repressed by the simultaneous excitement of other sensory nerves. For all such facts the reader must consult

the treatises on physiology. What concerns us here is the inhibition exerted by different parts of the

nervecentres, when irritated, on the activity of distant parts. The flaccidity of a frog from 'shock,' for a

minute or so after his medulla oblongata is cut, is an inhibition from the seat of injury which quickly passes

What is known as 'surgical shock' (unconsciousness, pallor, dilatation of splanchnic bloodvessels, and

general syncope and collapse) in the human subject is an inhibition which lasts a longer time. Goltz,

Freusberg, and others, cutting the spinal cord in dogs, proved that there were functions inhibited still longer

by the wound, but which reestablished themselves ultimately if the animal was kept alive. The lumbar region

of the cord was thus found to contain independent vasomotor centres, centres for erec tion, for control of

the sphincters, etc., which could be excited to activity by tactile stimuli and as readily reinhibited by others

simultaneously applied.[67] We may therefore plausibly suppose that the rapid reappearance of motility,

vision, etc., after their first disappearance in consequence of a cortical mutilation, is due to the passing off of

inhibitions exerted by the irritated surface of the wound. The only question is whether all restorations of

function must be explained in this one simple way, or whether some part of them may not be owing to the

formation of entirely new paths in the remaining centres, by which they become 'educated' to duties which

they did not originally possess. In favor of an indefinite extension of the inhibition theory facts may be cited

such as the following: In dogs whose disturbances due to cortical lesion have disappeared, they may in

consequence of some inner or outer accident reappear in all their intensity for 24 hours or so and then

disappear again.[68] In a dog made half blind by an operation, and then shut up in the dark, vision comes

back just as quickly as in other similar dogs whose sight is exercised systematically every day.[69] A dog

which has learned to beg before the operation recommences this practice quite spontaneously a week after a

doublesided ablation of the motor zone.[70] Occasionally, in a pigeon (or even, it is said, in a dog) we see

the disturbances less marked immediately after the operation than they are half an hour later.[71] This would

be impossible were they due to the subtraction of the organs which normally carried them on. Moreover the

entire drift of recent physiological and pathological speculation is towards enthroning inhibition as an

everpresent and indispensable condition of orderly activity. We shall see how great is its importance, in the

chapter on the Will. Mr. Charles Mercier considers that no muscular contraction, once begun, would ever

stop without it, short of exhaustion of the system;[72] and BrownS�quard has for years been accumulating

examples to show how far its influence extends.[73] Under these circumstances it seems as if error might

more probably lie in cutailing its sphere too much than in stretching it too far as an explanation of the

On the other hand, if we admit no reeducation of centres, we not only fly in the face of an a priori

probability, but we find ourselves compelled by facts to suppose an almost incredible number of functions

natively lodged in the centres below the thalami or even in those below the corpora quadrigemina. I will

consider the a priori objection after first taking a look at the facts which I have in mind. They confront us the

moment we ask ourselves just which are the parts which perform the functions abolished by an operation

The first observers thought that they must be the corresponding parts of the opposite or intact hemisphere.

But as long ago as 1875 Carville and Duret tested this by cutting out the forelegcentre on one side, in a

dog, and then, after waiting till restitution had occurred, cutting it out on the opposite side as well. Goltz and

others have done the same thing.[75] If the opposite side were really the seat of the restored function, the

original palsy should have appeared again and been permanent. But it did not appear at all; there appeared

only a palsy of the hitherto unaffected side. The next supposition is that the parts surrounding the cutout

region learn vicariously to perform its duties. But here, again, experiment seems to upset the hypothesis, so

far as the motor zone goes at least; for we may wait till motility has returned in the affected limb, and then

both irritate the cortex surrounding the wound without exciting the limb to movement, and ablate it, without

bringing back the vanished palsy.[76] It would accordingly seem that the cerebral centres below the cortex

must be the seat of the regained activities. But Goltz destroyed a dog's entire left hemisphere, together with

the corpus striatum and the thalamus on that side, and kept him alive until a surprisingly small amount of

motor and tactile disturbance remained.[77] These centres cannot here have accounted for the restitution. He

has even, as it would appear,[78] ablated both the hemispheres of a dog, and kept him alive 51 days, able to

walk and stand. The corpora striata and thalami in this dog were also practically gone. In view of such results

we seem driven, with M.FrancoisFranck,[79] to fall back on the ganglia lower still, or even on the spinal

cord as the 'vicarious' organ of which we are in quest. If the abeyance of function between the operation and

the restoration was due exclusively to inhiibition, then we must suppose these lowest centres to be in reality

extremely accomplished organs. They must always have done what we now find them doing after function is

restored, even when the hemispheres were intact. Of course this is conceivably the case; yet it does not seem

very plausible. And the a priori considerations which a moment since I said I should urge, make it less

For, in the first place, the brain is essentially a place of currents, which run in organized paths. Loss of

function can only mean one of two things, either that a current can no longer run in, or that if it runs in, it can

no longer run out, by its old path. Either of these inabilities may come from a local ablation; and 'restitution'

can then only mean that, in spite of a temporary block, an inrunning current has at last become enabled to

flow out by its old path againe.g., the sound of 'give your paw' discharges after some weeks into the same

canine muscles into which it used to discharge before the operation. As far as the cortex itself goes, since one

of the purposes for which it actually exists is the production of new paths,[80] the only question before us is:

Is the formation of these particular 'vicarious' paths too much to expect of its plastic powers? It would

certainly be too much to expect that a hemisphere should receive currents from optic fibres whose

arrivingplace within it is destroyed, or that it should discharge into fibres of the pyramidal strand if their

place of exit is broken down. Such lesions as these must be irreparable within that hemisphere. Yet even then,

through the other hemisphere, the corpus callosum, and the bilateral connections in the spinal cord, one can

imagine some road by which the old muscles might eventually be innervated by the same incoming currents

which innervated them before the block. And for all minor interruptions, not involving the arrivingplace of

the 'corticopetal' or the place of exit of the 'corticofugal' fibres, roundabout paths of some sort through the

affected hemisphere itself must exist, for every point of it is, remotely at least, in potential communication

with every other point. The normal paths are only paths of least resistance. If they get blocked or cut, paths

formerly more resistant become the least resistant paths under the changed conditions. It must never be

forgotten that a current that runs in has got to run out somewhere; and if it only once succeeds by accident in

striking into its old place of exit again, the thrill of satisfaction which the consciousness connected with the

whole residual brain then receives will reinforce and fix the paths of that moment and make them more likely

to be struck into again. The resultant feeling that the old habitual act is at last successfully back again,

becomes itself a new stimulus which stamps all the existing currents in. It is matter of experience that such

feelings of successful achievement do tend to fix in our memory whatever processes have led to them; and we

shall have a good deal more to say upon the subject when we come to the Chapter on the Will.

My conclusion then is this: that some of the restitution of function (especially where the cortical lesion is not

too great) is probably due to genuinely vicarious function on the part of the centres that remain; whilst some

of it is due to the passing off of inhibitions. In other words, both the vicarious theory and the inhibition theory

are true in their measure. But as for determining that measure, or saying which centres are vicarious, and to

And now, after learning all these facts, what are we to think of the child and the candleflame, and of that

scheme which provisionally imposed itself on our acceptance after surveying the actions of the frog? (Cf. pp.

256, supra.) It will be remembered that we then considered the lower centres en masse as machines for

responding to present senseimpressions exclusively, and the hemispheres as equally exclusive organs of

action from inward considerations or ideas; and that, following Meynert, we supposed the hemispheres to

have no native tendencies to determinate activity, but to be merely superadded organs for breaking up the

various reflexes performed by the lower centres, and combining their motor and sensory elements in novel

ways. It will also be remembered that I prophesied that we should be obliged to soften down the sharpness of

this distinction after we had completed our survey of the farther facts. The time has now come for that

Wider and completer observations show us both that the lower centres are more spontaneous, and that the

hemispheres are more automatic, than the Meynert scheme allows. Schrader's observations in Goltz's

Laboratory on hemisphereless frogs[81] and pigeons[82] give an idea quite different from the picture of these

creatures which is classically current. Steiner's[83] observations on frogs already went a good way in the

same direction, showing, for example, that locomotion is a welldeveloped function of the medulla

oblongata. But Schrader, by great care in the operation, and by keeping the frogs a long time alive, found that

at least in some of them the spinal cord would produce movements of locomotion when the frog was smartly

roused by a poke, and that swimming and croaking could sometimes be performed when nothing above the

medulla oblongata remained.[84] Schrader's hemisphereless frogs moved spontaneously, ate flies, buried

themselves in the ground, and in short did many things which before his observations were supposed to be

impossible unless the hemispheres remained. Steinert[85] and Vulpian have remarked an even greater

vivacity in fishes deprived of their hemispheres. Vulpian says of his brainless carps[86] that three days after

the operation one of them darted at food and at a knot tied on the end of a string, holding the latter so tight

between his jaws that his head was drawn out of water. Later, "they see morsels of white of egg; the moment

these sink through the water in front of them, they follow and seize them, sometimes after they are on the

bottom, sometimes before they have reached it. In capturing and swallowing this food they execute just the

same movements as the intact carps which are in the same aquarium. The only difference is that they seem to

see them at less distance, seek them with less impetuosity and less perseverance in all the points of the

bottom of the aquarium, but they struggle (so to speak) sometimes with the sound carps to grasp the morsels.

It is certain that they do not confound these bits of white of egg with other white bodies, small pebbles for

example, which are at the bottom of the water. The same carp which, three days after operation, seized the

knot on a piece of string, no longer snaps at it now, but if one brings it near her, she draws away from it by

swimming backwards before it comes into contact with her mouth."[87] Already on pp.910,as the reader

may remember, we instanced those adaptations of conduct to new conditions, on the part of the frog's spinal

cord and thalami, which led Pf�ger and Lewes on the one hand and Goltz on the other to locate in these

When it comes to birds deprived of their hemispheres, the evidence that some of their acts have conscious

purpose behind them is quite as persuasive. In pigeons Schrader found that the state of somnolence lasted

only three or four days, after which time the birds began indefatigably to walk about the room. They climbed

out of boxes in which they were put, jumped over or flew up upon obstacles, and their sight was so perfect

that neither in walking nor flying did they ever strike any object in the room. They had also definite ends or

purposes, flying straight for more convenient perching places when made uncomfortable by movements

imparted to those on which they stood; and of several possible perches they always chose the most

convenient. "If we give the dove the choice of a horizontal bar (Reck) or an equally distant table to fly to, she

always gives decided preference to the table. Indeed she chooses the table even if it is several meters farther

off than the bar or the chair." Placed on the back of a chair, she flies first to the seat and then to the floor, and

in general ,"will forsake a high position, although it give her sufficiently firm support, and in order to reach

the ground will make use of the environing objects as intermediate goals of flight, showing a perfectly correct

judgment of their distance. Although able to fly directly to the ground, she prefers to make the journey in

successive stages.... Once on the ground, she hardly ever rises spontaneously into the air."[88]

Young rabbits deprived of their hemispheres will stand, run, start at noises, avoid obstacles in their path, and

give responsive cries of suffering when hurt. Rats will do the same, and throw themselves moreover into an

attitude of defence. Dogs never survive such an operation if performed at once. But Goltz's latest dog,

mentioned on p. 70, which is said to have been kept alive for fiftyone days after both hemispheres had been

removed by a series of ablations and the corpora striata and thalami had softened away, shows how much the

midbrain centres and the cord can do even in the canine species. Taken together, the number of reactions

shown to exist in the lower centres by these observations make out a pretty good case for the Meynert

scheme, as applied to these lower animals. That scheme demands hemispheres which shall be mere

supplements or organs of repetition, and in the light of these observations they obviously are so to a great

extent. But the Meynert scheme also demands that the reactions of the lower centres shall all be native, and

we are not absolutely sure that some of those which we have been considering may not have been acquired

after the injury; and it furthermore demands that they should be machinelike, whereas the expression of

some of them makes us doubt whether they may not be guided by an intelligence of low degree.

Even in the lower animals, then, there is reason to soften down that opposition between the hemispheres and

the lower centres which the scheme demands. The hemispheres may, it is true, only supplement the lower

centres, but the latter resemble the former in nature and have some small amount at least of 'spontaneity' and

But when we come to monkeys and man the scheme wellnigh breaks down altogether; for we find that the

hemispheres do not simply repeat voluntarily actions which the lower centres perform as machines. There are

many functions which the lower centres cannot by themselves perform at all. When the motor cortex is

injured in a man or a monkey genuine paralysis ensues, which in man is incurable, and almost or quite

equally so in the ape. Dr. Seguin knew a man with hemiblindness, from cortical injury, which had persisted

unaltered for twentythree years. 'Traumatic inhibition' cannot possibly account for this. The blindness must

have been an 'Ausfallserscheinung,' due to the loss of vision's essential organ. It would seem, then, that in

these higher creatures the lower centres must be less adequate than they are farther down in the zoological

scale; and that even for certain elementary combinations of movement and impression the cooperation of

the hemispheres is necessary from the start. Even in birds and dogs the power of eating properly is lost when

The plain truth is that neither in man nor beast are the hemispheres the virgin organs which our scheme called

them. So far from being unorganized at birth, they must have native tendencies to reaction of a determinate

sort.[90] These are the tendencies which we know as emotions and instincts, and which we must study with

some detail in later chapters of this book. Both instincts and emotions are reactions upon special sorts of

objects of perception; they depend on the hemispheres; and they are in the first instance reflex, that is, they

take place the first time the exciting object is met, are accompanied by no forethought or deliberation, and are

irresistible. But they are modifiable to a certain extent by experience, and on later occasions of meeting the

exciting object, the instincts expecially have less of the blind impulsive character which they had at first. All

this will be explained at some length in Chapter XXIV. Meanwhile we can say that the multiplicity of

emotional and instincitive reactions in man, together with his extensive associative power, permit of

extensive recouplings of the original sensory and motor partners. The consequences of one instinctive

reaction often prove to be the inciters of an opposite reaction, and being suggested on later occasions by the

original object, may then suppress the first reaction altogether, just as in the case of the child and the flame.

For this education the hemispheres do not need to be tabuloe rasoe at first, as the Meynert scheme would

have them; and so far from their being educated by the lower centres exclusively, they educate

We have already noticed the absence of reactions from fear and hunger in the ordinary brainless frog.

Schrader gives a striking account of the instinctless condition of his brainless pigeons, active as they were in

the way of locomotion and voice. "The hemisphereless animal moves in a world of bodies which... are all of

equal value for him.... He is, to use Goltz's apt expression, impersonal.... Every object is for him only a

spaceoccupying mass, he turns out of his path for an ordinary pigeon no otherwise than for a stone. He may

try to climb over both. All authors agree that they never found any difference, whether it was an inanimate

body, a cat, a dog, or a bird of prey which came in their pigeon's way. The creature knows neither friends nor

enemies, in the thickest company it lives like a hermit. The languishing cooing of the male awakens no more

impression than the rattling of the peas, or the callwhistle which in the days before the injury used to make

the birds hasten to be fed. Quite as little as the earlier observers have I seen hemisphereless shebirds answer

the courting of the male. A hemisphereless male will coo all day long and show distinct signs of sexual

excitement, but his activity is without any object, it is entirely indifferent to him whether the shebird be

there or not. If one is placed near him, he leaves her unnoticed.... As the male pays no attention to the female,

so she pays none to her young. The brood may follow the mother ceaselessly calling for food, but they might

as well ask it from a stone.... The hemi sphereless pigeon is in the highest degree tame, and fears man as little

Putting together now all the facts and reflections which we have been through, it seems to me that we can no

longer hold strictly to the Meynert scheme. If anywhere, it will apply to the lowest animals; but in them

especially the lower centres seem to have a degree of spontaneity and choice. On the whole, I think that we

are driven to substitute for it some such general conception as the following, which allows for zoological

differences as we know them, and is vague and elastic enough to receive any number of future discoveries of

All the centres, in all animals, whilst they are in one aspect mechanisms, probably are, or at least once were,

organs of consciousness in another, although the consciousness is doubtless much more developed in the

hemispheres than it is anywhere else. The consciousness must everywhere prefer some of the sensations

which it gets to others; and if it can remember these in their absence, however dimly, they must be its ends of

desire. If, moreover, it can identify in memory any motor discharges which may have led to such ends, and

associate the latter with them, then these motor discharges themselves may in turn become desired as means.

This is the development of will; and its realization must of course be proportional to the possible

complication of the consciousness. Even the spinal cord may possibly have some little power of will in this

sense, and of effort towards modified behavior in consequence of new experiences of sensibility.[93]

All nervous centres have then in the first instance one essential function, that of 'intelligent' action. They feel,

prefer one thing to another, and have 'ends.' Like all other organs, however, they evolve from ancestor to

descendant, and their evolution takes two directions the lower centres passing downwards into more

unhesitating automatism, and the higher ones upwards into larger intellectuality.[94] Thus it may happen that

those functions which can safely grow uniform and fatal become least accompanied by mind, and that their

organ, the spinal cord, becomes a more and more soulless machine; whilst on the contrary those functions

which it benefits the animal to have adapted to delicate environing variations pass more and more to the

hemispheres, whose anatomical structure and attendant consciousness grow more and more elaborate as

zoological evolution proceeds. In this way it might come about that in man and the monkeys the basal ganglia

should do fewer things by themselves than they can do in dogs, fewer in dogs than in rabbits, fewer in rabbits

than in hawks,[95] fewer in hawks than in pigeons, fewer in pigeons than in frogs, fewer in frogs than in

fishes, and that the hemispheres should correspondingly do more. This passage of functions forward to the

everenlarging hemispheres would be itself one of the evolutive changes, to be explained like the

development of the hemispheres themselves, either by fortunate variation or by inherited effects of use. The

reflexes, on this view, upon which the education of our human hemispheres depends, would not be due to the

basal ganglia alone. They would be tendencies in the hemispheres themselves, modifiable by education,

unlike the reflexes of the medulla oblongata, pons, optic lobes and spinal cord. Such cerebral reflexes, if they

exist, form a basis quite as good as that which the Meynert scheme offers, for the acquisition of memories

and associations which may later result in all sorts of 'changes of partners' in the psychic world. The diagram

of the baby and the candle (see page 25) can be reedited, if need be, as an entirely cortical transaction. The

original tendency to touch will be a cortical instinct; the burn will leave an image in another part of the

cortex, which, being recalled by association, will inhibit the touching tendency the next time the candle is

perceived, and excite the tendency to withdrawso that the retinal picture will, upon that next time, be

coupled with the original motor partner of the pain. We thus get whatever psychological truth the Meynert

scheme possesses without entangling ourselves on a dubious anatomy and physiology.

Some such shadowy view of the evolution of the centres, of the relation of consciousness to them, and of the

hemispheres to the, other lobes, is, it seems to me, that in which it is safest to indulge. If it has no other

advantage, it at any rate makes us realize how enormous are the gaps in our knowledge, the moment we try to

Footnotes [1] It should be said that this particular cut commonly proves fatal. The text refers to the rare cases

[2] I confine myself to the frog for simplicity's sake. In higher animals, especially the ape and man, it would

seem as if not only determinate combinations of muscles, but limited groups or even single muscles could be

[3] I hope that the reader will take no umbrage at my so mixing the physical and mental, and talking of reflex

acts and hemispheres and reminiscences in the same breath, as if they were homogeneous quantities and

factors of one causal chain. I have done so deliberately; for although I admit that from the radically physical

point of view it is easy to conceive of the chain of events amongst the cells and fibres as complete in itself,

and that whilst so conceiving it one need make no mention of ideas,' I yet suspect that point of view of being

an unreal abstraction. Reflexes in centres may take place even where accompanying feelings or ideas guide

them. In another chapter I shall try to show reasons for not abandoning this commonsense position;

meanwhile language lends itself so much more easily to the mixed way of describing , that I will continue to

employ the latter. The more radicalminded reader can alway read 'ideational process' for idea'.

[4] I shall call it hereafter for shortness 'the Meynert scheme;' for the childandflame example, as well as

the whole general notion that the hemispheres are a supernumerary surface for the projection and association

of sensations and movements natively coupled in the centres below, is due to Th. Meynert, the Austrian

anatomist. For a popular account of his views, see his pamphlet 'Zur Mechanik des Gehirnbaues,' Vienna,

1874. His most recent development of them is embodied in his 'Psychiatry,' a clinical treatise on diseases of

[7] For a thorough discussion of the various objections, see Ferrier's 'Functions of the Brain,' 2d ed., pp.

227234, and FranoisFranck's 'Leons sur les Fonctions Motrices du Cerveau'(1887), Leon 31. The most

minutely accurate experiments on irritation of cortical points are those of Paneth, in Pfl�ger's Archiv, vol 37,

p. 528.Recently the skull has been fearlessly opened by surgeons, and operations upon the human brain

performed, sometimes with the happiest results. In some of these operations the cortex has been electrically

excited for the purpose of more exactly localizing the spot, and the movements first observed in dogs and

[8] J. Loeb: 'Beitr�ge zur Physiologie des Grosshirns;' Pfl�ger's Arciv, XXXIX. 293. I simplify the author's

[11] Philosophical Transactions, vol. 179, pp. 6, 10(1888). In a later paper (ibid. p. 205) Messrs. Beevor and

Horsley go into the localization still more minutely, showing spots from which single muscles or single digits

[12] Nothnagel und Naunyn : Die Localization in den Gehirnkrankheiten (Wiesbaden, 1887), p.34

[13] An accessible account of the history of our knowledge of motor aphasia is in W.A. Hammond's 'Treatise

[14] The history up to 1885 may be found in A.Christiani: Zur Physiologie des Gehirnes (Berlin, 1885)

[15] Pfl�ger's Archiv, vol.44, p.176. Munk (Berlin Academy Sitzsungsberichte, 1889, XXXI) returns to the

charge, denying the extirpations of Schrader to be complete: "Microscopic portions of the Sehsph�re must

[16] A.Christiani: Zur Physiol. D. Gehirnes (Berlin, 1885), chaps. II, III, IV. H. Munk: Berlin Akad. Stzgsb.

[17] Luciani und Seppili: Die FunctionsLocalization auf der Grosshirnrinde (Deutsch von Fraenkel),

Leipzig, 1886, Dogs M, N, and S. Goltz in Pfl�ger's Archiv, vol.34, pp. 4906; vol. 42, p. 454. Cf. also

Munk: Berlin Akad. Stzgsb. 1886, VII, VIII, pp. 113121, and Loeb: Pfl�ger's Archiv, vol. 39, p. 337.

[19] H. Munk: Functionen der Grosshirnrinde (Berlin, 1881), pp. 3640. Ferrier: Functions, etc., 2d ed., chap.

IX, pt. I. Brown and Schaefer: Philos. Transactions, vol. 179, p. 321. Luciani u. Seppili, op. Cit. Pp. 131138.

Lannegrace found traces of sight with both occipital lobes destroyed, and in one monkey even when angular

gyri and occipital lobes were destroyed altogether. His paper is in the Archives de M�decine Exp�rimentale

for January and March, 1889. I only know it from the abstract in the Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1889, pp.

108420. The reporter doubts the evidence of vision in the monkey. It appears to have consisted in avoiding

[21] For cases see Flechsig : Die Leitungsbahnen in Gehirn u. R�ckenmark (Leipzig, 1876), pp. 112, 272;

Exner's Untersuchungen, etc., p. 83; Ferrier's Localization, etc., p. 11; FrancoisFranck's Cerveau Moteur, p.

[22] E. C. Seguin: Hemianopsia of Cerebral Origin, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. XIII. P.

30. Nothnagel und Naunyn: Ueber die Localization der Gehirnkrankheiten (Wiesbaden, 1887), p. 10.

[23] Die Seelenblindheit, etc., p. 51 ff. The mental blindness was in this woman's case moderate in degree.

[25] Nothnagel (loc. cit. p.22) says: "Dies trifft aber nicht zu." He gives, however, no case in support of his

opinion that doublesided cortical lesion may make one stoneblind and yet not destroy one's visual images;

so that I do not know whether it is an observation of fact or an a priori assumption.

[26] In a case published by C.S. Freund: Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vol. XX, the occipital lobes were injured, but

their cortex was not destroyed, on both sides. There was still vision. Cf. pp. 2915.

[27] I say 'need,' for I do not of course deny the possible coexistence of the two symptoms. Many a

brainlesion might block optical associations and at the same time impair optical imagination, without

entirely stopping vision. Such a case seems to have been the remarkable on from Charcot which I shall give

[28] Freund (in the article cited above "Ueber optisched Aphasie und Seelenblindheit') and Bruns ('Ein Fall

von Alexie,' etc., in the Neurologisches Centralblatt for 1888, pp. 581, 509) explain their cases by

brokendown conduction. Wilbrand, whose painstaking monograph on mental blindness was referred to a

moment ago, gives none but a priori reasons for his belief that the optical 'Erinnerungsfeld' must be locally

distinct from the Wahrnehmungsfeld (cf. pp. 84, 93). The a priori reasons are really the other way. Mauthner

('Gehirn u. Auge' (1881), p. 487 ff.) tries to show that the 'mental blindness' of Munk's dogs and apes after

occipital mutilation was not such, but real dimness of sight. The best case of mental blindness yet reported is

that by Lissauer, as below. The reader will also do well to read Bernard: De 1 Aphasie(1881) chap. V; Ballet:

Le Langage Int�rieur (1886), chap. VIII; and Jas. Ross's little book on Aphasia (1887), p. 74.

[29] For a case see Wernicke's Lehrb. D. Gehirnkrankheiten, vol. II. p. 554(1881).

[30] The latest account of them is the paper �ber die optischen Centren u. Bahnen' by von Monakow in the

[35] Der aphasische Symptomencomplex (1874). See in Fig. 11 the convolution marked WERNICKE.

[38] Ballet's and Bernard's works cited on p. 51 are the most accessible documents of Charcot's school.

Bastian's book on the Brain as an Organ of Mind(last three chapters) is also good.

[39] For details, see Ferrier's 'Functions,' chap, IX. Pt. III, and Chas. K. Mills: Transactions of Congress of

[42] Lezioni di Fisiologia sperimentale sul sistema nervoso encefalico (1873), p. 527 ff. Also 'Brain,' vol. IX.

[43] Bechterew (Pfl�ger's Archiv., vol. 35, p. 137) found no anaesthesia in a cat with motor symptoms from

ablation of sigmoid gyrus. Luciani got hyperaesthesia coexistent with cortical motor defect in a dog, by

simultaneously hemisecting the spinal cord (Luciani u. Seppili, op. cit. p. 234). Goltz frequently found

hyperaesthesia of the whole body to accompany motor defect after ablation of both frontal lobes, and he once

[53] E.g. Starr, loc. cit. p. 272; Leyden, Beitr�ge zur Lehre v. d. Localization im Gehirn(1888), p. 72.

[56] Trans. Of Congress of Am. Phys. And Surg. 1888, vol. I.p. 343. Beevor and Horsley's paper on electric

stimulation of the monkey's brain is the most beautiful work yet done for precision. See Phil. Trans., vol. 179,

[60] The frontal lobes as yet remain a puzzle. Wundt tries to explain them as an organ of 'apperception'

(Grundz�ge d. Physiologischen Psychologie, 3d ed., vol. I. p. 233 ff.), but I confess myself unable to

apprehend clearly the Wundtian philosophy so far as this word enters into it, so must be contented with this

bare reference. Until quite recently it was common to talk of an 'ideational centre' as of something distinct

from the aggregate of other centres. Fortunately this custom is already on the wane.

[63] I ought to add, however, that FranoisFranck(Fonctions Motrices, p. 370) got , in two dogs and a cat, a

[64] For this word, see T.K. Clifford's Lectures and Essays(1879), vol. II p. 72.

[66] Cf. Ferrier's Functions, pp. 120, 147, 414. See also Vulpian: Leons sur la Physiol. Du Syst. Nerveux, p.

548; Luciani u. Seppili, op. cit. pp. 4045; H. Maudsley: Physiology of Mind (1876), pp. 138 ff., 197 ff., and

241 ff. In G.H. Lewes's Physical Basis of Mind, Problem IV: 'The Reflex Theory,' a very full history of the

[67] Goltz: Pfl�ger's Archiv, vol. 8, p. 460; Freusberg: ibid. vol. 10, p. 174.

[72] The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), chaps. III, VI; also in Brain, vol. XI. p. 361.

[73] BrownS�quard has given a r�sum� of his opinions in the Archives de Physiologie for Oct. 1889, 5me,

[74] Goltz first applied the inhibition thoery to the brain in his 'Verrichtungen des Grosshirns,'p. 39 ff. On the

general philosophy of Inhibition the reader may consult Brunton's ' Pharmakology and Therapeutics,' p. 154

[75] E.g. Herzen, Herman u. Schwalbe's Jahresbericht for 1886, Physiol. Abth. P. 38. (Experiments on

[79] Op. cit. p. 387. See pp. 378 to 388 for a discussion of the whole question. Compare also Wundt's

[80] The Chapters on Habit, Association, Memory, and Perception will change our present preliminary

conjecture that that is one of its essential uses, into an unshakable conviction.

[84] Loc. cit. pp. 80, 823. Schrader also found a bitingreflex developed when the medulla oblongata is cut

[89] Goltz: Pfl�ger's Archiv, vol. 42, p. 447; Schrader : ibid. vol. 44, p. 219 ff. It is possible that this

[90] A few years ago one of the strongest arguements for the theory that the hemispheres are purely

supernumerary was Soltmann's oftenquoted observation that in newborn puppies the motor zone of the

cortex is not excitable by electricity and only becomes so in the course of a fortnight, presumably after the

experiences of the lower centres have educated it to motor duties. Paneth's later observations, however, seem

to show that Soltmann may have been misled through overnarcotizing his victims (Pfl�ger's Archiv, vol. 37,

p. 202). In the Neurologisches Centralblatt for 1889, p. 513, Bechterw returns to the subject on Soltmann's

[91] M�nsterberg (Die Willenshandlung, 1888, p. 134) challenges Meynert's scheme in toto, saying that

whilst we have in our personal experience plenty of examples of acts which were at first voluntary becoming

secondarily automatic and reflex, we have no conscious record of a single originally reflex act growing

voluntary. As far as conscious record is concerned, we could not possibly have it even if the Meynert

scheme were wholly true, for the education of the hemispheres which that scheme postulates must in the

nature of things antedate recollection. But it seems to me that M�nsterberg's rejection of the scheme may

possibly be correct as regards reflexes from the lower centres. Everywhere in this department of

[93] Naturally, as Schiff long ago pointed out (Lehrb. D. Muskelu. Nervenphysiologie, 1859, p. 213 ff.), the

'R�ckenmarksseele,' if it now exist, can have no higher senseconsciousness, for its incoming currents are

solely from the skin. But it may, in its dim way, both feel, prefer, and desire. See, for the view favorable to

the text: B.H. Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life(1860), chap. IX. Goltz (Nervencentren des Frosches,

1869, pp. 102130) thinks that the frog's cord has no adaptive power. This may be the case in such

experiments as his, because the beheaded frog's short span of life does not give it time to learn the new tricks

asked for. But Rosenthal (Biologisches Centralblatt, vol. IV. p. 247) and Mendelssohn (Berlin Akad.

Sitzungsberichte, 1885, p. 107) in their investigations on the simple reflexes of the frog's cord, show that

there is some adaptation to new conditions, inasmuch as when usual paths of conduction are interrupted by a

cut, new paths are taken. According to Rosenthal, these grow more pervious (i.e. require a smaller stimulus)

[94] Whether this evolution takes place through the inheritance of habits acquired, or through the

preservation of lucky variations, is an alternative which we need not discuss here. We shall consider it in the

last chapter in the book. For our present purpose the modus operandi of the evolution makes no difference,

[95] See Schrader's Observations, loc. cit. Classics in the History of Psychology An internet resource

developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario (Return to index)

The elementary properties of nervetissue on which the brainfunctions depend are far from being

satisfactorily made out. The scheme that suggests itself in the first instance to the mind, because it is so

obvious, is certainly false: I mean the notion that each cell stands for an idea or part of an idea, and that the

ideas are associated or 'bound into bundles' (to use a phrase of Locke's) by the fibres. If we make a symbolic

diagram on a blackboard, of the laws of association between ideas, we are inevitably led to draw circles, or

closed figures of some kind, and to connect them by lines. When we hear that the nervecentres contain cells

which send off fibres, we say that Nature has realized our diagram for us, and that the mechanical substratum

of thought is plain. In some way, it is true, our diagram must be realized in the brain; but surely in no such

visible and palpable way as we at first suppose.[1] An enormous number of the cellular bodies in the

hemispheres are fibreless. Where fibres are sent off they soon divide into untraceable ramifications; and

nowwhere do we see a simple coarse anatomical connection, like a line on the blackboard, between two cells.

Too much anatomy has been found to order for theoretic purposes, even by the anatomists; and the

popularscience notions of cells and fibres are almost wholly wide of the truth. Let us therefore relegate the

subject of the intimate workings of the brain to the physiology of the future, save in respect to a few points of

[sic] in the same nervetract. This is a property extremely important for the understanding of a great many

phenomena of the neural, and consequently of the mental, life; and it behooves us to gain a clear conception

The law is this, that a stimulus which would be inadequate by itself to excite a nervecentre to effective

discharge may, by acting with one or more other stimuli (equally ineffectual by themselves alone) bring the

discharge about. The natural way to consider this is as a summation of tensions which at last overcome a

resistance. The first of them produce a 'latent excitement' or a 'heightened irritability'the phrase is

immaterial so far as practical consequences go; the last is the straw which breaks the camel's back. Where the

neural process is one that has consciousness for its accompaniment, the final explosion would in all cases

seem to involve a vivid state of feeling of a more or less substantive kind. But there is no ground for

supposing that the tensions whilst yet submaximal or outwardly ineffective, may not also have a share in

determining the total consciousness present in the individual at the time. In later chapters we shall see

abundant reason to suppose that they do have such a share, and that without their contribution the fringe of

relations which is at every moment a vital ingredient of the mind's object, would not come to consciousness

The subject belongs too much to physiology for the evidence to be cited in detail in these pages. I will throw

into a note a few references for such readers as may be interested in following it out,[2] and simply say that

the direct electrical irritation of the cortical centres sufficiently proves the point. For it was found by the

earliest experimenters here that whereas it takes an exceedingly strong current to produce any movement

when a single inductionshock is used, a rapid succession of inductionshocks ('faradization') will produce

movements when the current is comparatively weak. A single quotation from an excellent investigation will

"If we continue to stimulate the cortex at short intervals with the strength of current which produces the

minimal muscular contraction [of the dog's digital extensor muscle], the amount of contraction gradually

increases till it reaches the maximum. Each earlier stimulation leaves thus an effect behind it, which increases

the efficacy of the following one. In this summation of the stimuli....the following points may be noted: 1)

Single stimuli entirely inefficacious when alone may become efficacious by sufficiently rapid reiteration. If

the current used is very much less than that which provokes the first beginning of contraction, a very large

number of successive shocks may be needed before the movement appears20, 50, once 106 shocks were

needed. 2) The summation takes place easily in proportion to the shortness of the interval between the

stimuli. A current too weak to give effective summation when its shocks are 3 seconds apart will be capable

of so doing when the interval is shortened to 1 second. 3) Not only electrical irritation leaves a modification

which goes to swell the following stimulus, but every sort of irritant which can produce a contraction does so.

If in any way a reflex contraction of the muscle experimented on has been produced, or if it is contracted

spontaneously by the animal (as not unfrequently happens 'by sympathy,' during a deep inspiration), it is

found that an electrical stimulus, until then inoperative, operates energetically if immediately applied."[3]

"In a certain stage of the morphianarcosis an ineffectively weak shock will become powerfully effective, if,

immediately before its appli cation to the motor centre, the skin of certain parts of the body is exposed to

gentle tactile stimulation....If, having ascertained the subminimal strength of current and convinced one's self

repeatedly of its inefficacy, we draw our hand a single time lightly over the skin of the paw whose cortical

centre is the object of stimulation, we find the current at once strongly effective. The increase of irritability

lasts some seconds before it disappears. Sometimes the effect of a single light stroking of the paw is only

sufficient to make the previously ineffectual current produce a very weak contraction. Repeating the tactile

We constantly use the summation of stimuli in our practical appeals. If a carhorse balks, the final way of

starting him is by applying a number of customary incitements at once. If the driver uses reins and voice, if

one bystander pulls at his head, another lashes his hind quarters, and the conductor rings the bell, and the

dismounted passengers shove the car, all at the same moment, his obstinacy generally yields, and he goes on

his way rejoicing. If we are striving to remember a lost name or fact, we think of as many 'cues' as possible,

so that by their joint action they may recall what no one of them can recall alone. The sight of a dead prey

will often not stimulate a beast to pursuit, but if the sight of movement be added to that of form, pursuit

occurs. "Br�cke noted that his brainless hen, which made no attempt to peck at the grain under her very eyes,

began pecking if the grain were thrown on the ground with force, so as to produce a rattling sound." [5] "Dr.

Allen Thomson hatched out some chickens on a carpet, where he kept them for several days. They showed no

inclination to scrape,...but when Dr. Thomson sprinkled a little gravel on the carpet,...the chickens

immediately began their scraping movements."[6] A strange person, and darkness, are both of them stimuli to

fear and mistrust in dogs (and for the matter of that, in men). Neither circum stance alone may awaken

outward manifestations, but together, i.e. when the stange man is met in the dark, the dog will be excited to

violent defiance.[7] Streethawkers well know the efficacy of summation, for they arrange themselves in a

line upon the sidewalk, and the passer often buys from the last one of them, through the effect of the

reiterated solicitation, what he refused to buy from the first in the row. Aphasia shows many examples of

summation. A patient who cannot name an object simply shown him, will name it if he touches as well as

Instances of summation might be multiplied indefinetely, but it is hardly worth while to forestall subsequent

chapters. Those on Instinct, the Stream of Thought, Attention, Discrimination, Association, Memory,

Aesthetics, and Will, will contain numerous exemplifications of the reach of the principle in the purely

One of the lines of experimental investigation most diligently followed of late years is that of the

ascertainment of the time occupied by nervous events. Helmholtz led off by discovering the rapidity of the

current in the sciatic nerve of the frog. But the methods he used were soon applied to the sensory nerves and

the centres, and the results caused much popular scientific admiration when described as measurements of the

'velocity of thought.' The phrase 'quick as thought' had from time immemorial signified all that was

wonderful and elusive of determination in the line of speed; and the way in which Science laid her doomful

hand upon this mystery reminded people of the day when Franklin first 'eripuit coelo fulmen,' fore

shadowing the region of a newer and colder race of gods. We shall take up the various operations measured,

each in the chapter to which it more naturally pertains. I may say, however, immediately, that the phrase

'velocity of thought' is misleading, for it is by no means clear in any of the cases what particular act of

thought occurs during the time which is measured. 'Velocity of nerveaction' is liable to the same criticism,

for in most cases we do not know what particular nerveprocesses occur. What the times in question really

represent is the total duration of certain reactions upon stimuli. Certain of the conditions of the reaction are

prepared beforehand; they consist in the assumption of those motor and sensory tensions which we name the

expectant state. Just what happens during the actual time occupied by the reaction (in other words, just what

is added to the preexistent tensions to produce the actual discharge) is not made out at present, either from

The method is essentially the same is all these investigations. A signal of some sort is communicated to the

subject, and at the same instant records itself on a timeregistering apparatus. The subject then makes a

muscular movement of some sort, which is the 'reaction,' and which also records itself automatically. The

time found to have elapsed between the two records is the total time of that observation. The timeregistering

instruments are of various types. One type is that of the revolving drum covered with smoked paper, on

which one electric pen traces a line which the signal breaks and the 'reaction' draws again; whilst another

electric pen (connected with a pendulum or a rod of metal vibrating at a known rate) traces alongside of the

former line a 'timeline' of which each undulation or link stands for a certain fraction of a second, and against

which the break in the reactionline can be measured. Compare Fig.21, where the line is broken by the signal

at the first arrow, and continued again by the reaction at the second. Ludwig's Kymograph, Marey's

Another type of instrument is represented by the stopwatch, of which the most perfect from is Hipp's

Chronoscope. The hand on the dial measures intervals as short as 1/1000 of a second. The signal (by an

appropriate electric connection) starts it; the reaction stops it; and by reading off its initial and terminal

positions we have immediately and with no farther trouble the time we seek. A still simpler instrument,

though one not very satisfactory in its working, is the 'psychodometer' of Exner Obersteiner, of which I

picture a modification devised by my colleague Professor H.P. Bowditch, which works very well. The

manner in which the signal and reaction are connected with the chronographic apparatus varies indefinitely in

different experiments. Every new problem requires some new electric or mechanical disposition of apparatus.

The least complicated timemeasurement is that known as simple reactiontime, in which there is but one

possible signal and one possible movement, and both are known in advance. The movement is generally the

closing of an electric key with the hand. The foot, the jaw, the lips, even the eyelid, have been in turn made

organs of reaction, and the apparatus has been modified accordingly.[9] The time usually elapsing between

stimulus and movement lies between one and three tenths of a second, varying according to circumstances

The subject of experiment, whenever the reactions are short and regular, is in a state of extreme tension, and

feels, when the signal comes, as if it started the reaction, by a sort of fatality, and as if no psychic process of

perception or volition had a chance to intervene. The whole succession is so rapid that perception seems to be

retrospective, and the timeorder of events to be read off in memory rather than known at the moment. This

at least is my own personal experience in the matter, and with it I find others to agree. The question is, What

happens inside of us, either in brain or mind? and to answer that we must analyze just what processes the

reaction involves. It is evident that some time is lost in each of the following stages:

1. The stimulus excites the peripheral senseorgan adequately for a current to pass into the sensory nerve; 2.

The sensory nerve is traversed; 3. The transformation (or reflection) of the sensory into a motor current

occurs in the centres; 4. The spinal cord and motor nerve are traversed; 5. The motor current excites the

Time is also lost, of course, outside the muscle, in the joints, skin, etc., and between the parts of the

apparatus; and when the stimulus which serves as signal is applied to the skin of the trunk or limbs, time is

The stage marked 3 is the only one that interests us here. The other stages answer to purely physiological

processes, but stage 3 is psychophysical; that is, it is a highercentral process, and has probably some sort

Wundt has little difficulty in deciding that it is consciousness of a quite elaborate kind. He distinguishes

between two stages in the conscious reception of an impression, calling one perception, and the other

apperception, and likening the one to the mere entrance of an object into the periphery of the field of vision,

and the other to its coming to occupy the focus or point of view. Inattentive awareness of an object, and

attention to it, are, it seems to me, equivalents for perception and apperception, as Wundt uses the words. To

these two forms of awareness of the impression Wundt adds the conscious volition to react, gives to the trio

the name of 'psychophysical' processes, and assumes that they actually follow upon each other in the

succession in which they have been named.[10] So at least I understand him. The simplest way to determine

the time taken up by this psychophysical stage No. 3 would be to determine separately the duration of the

several purely physical processes, 1, 2, 4, and 5, and to subtract them from the total reactiontime. Such

attempts have been made.[11] But the data for calculation are too inaccurate for use, and, as Wundt himself

admits,[12] the precise duration of stage 3 must at present be left enveloped with that of the other processes,

My own belief is that no such succession of conscious feelings as Wundt describes takes place during stage 3.

It is a process of central excitement and discharge, with which doubtless some feeling coexists, but what

feeling we cannot tell, because it is so fugitive and so immediately eclipsed by the more substantive and

enduring memory of the impression as it came in, and of the executed movement of response. Feeling of the

impression, attention to it, thought of the reaction, volition to react, would, undoubtedly, all be links of the

process under other conditions,[13] and would lead to the same reactionafter an indefinitely longer time.

But these other conditions are not those of the experiments we are discussing; and it is mythological

psychology (of which we shall see many later examples) to conclude that because two mental processes lead

to the same result they must be similar in their inward subjective constitution. The feeling of stage 3 is

certainly no articulate perception. It can be nothing but the mere sense of a reflex discharge. The reaction

whose time is measured is, in short, a reflex action pure and simple, and not a psychic act. A foregoing

psychic condition is, it is true, a prerequisite for this reflex action. The preparation of the attention and

volition; the expectation of the signal and the readiness of the hand to move, the instant it shall come; the

nervous tension in which the subject waits, are all conditions of the formation in him for the time being of a

new path or arc of reflex discharge. The tract from the senseorgan which receives the stimulus, into the

motor centre which discharges the reaction, is already tingling with premonitory innervation, is raised to such

a pitch of heightened irritability by the expectant attention, that the signal is instantaneously sufficient to

cause the overflow.[14] No other tract of the nervous system is, at the moment, in this hairtrigger condition.

The consequences is that one sometimes responds to a wrong signal, especially if it be an impression of the

same kind with the signal we expect.[15] But if by chance we are tired, or the signal is unexpectedly weak,

and we do not react instantly, but only after an express perception that the signal has come, and an express

volition, the time becomes quite disproportionately long (a second or more, according to Exner[16] ), and we

In fact, the reactiontime experiments are a case to which we can immediately apply what we have just

learned about the summation of stimuli. 'Expectant attention' is but the subjective name for what objectively

is a partial stimulation of a certain pathway, the pathway from the 'centre' for the signal to that for the

discharge. In Chapter XI we shall see that all attention involves excitement from within of the tract concerned

in feeling the objects to which attention is given. The tract here is the excitomotor arc about to be traversed.

The signal is but the spark from without which touches off a train already laid. The performance, under these

conditions, exactly resembles any reflex action. The only difference is that whilst, in the ordinarily socalled

reflex acts, the reflex arc is a permanent result of organic growth, it is here a transient result of previous

I am happy to say that since the preeceding paragraphs (and the notes thereto appertaining) were written,

Wundt has himself become converted to the view which I defend. He now admits that in the shortest

reactions "there is neither apperception nor will, but that they are merely brainreflexes due to practice."[18]

The means of his conversion are certain experiments performed in his laboratory by Herr L. Lange,[19] who

was led to distinguish between two ways of setting the attention in reacting on a signal, and who found that

they gave very different timeresults. In the 'extreme sensorial' way, as Lange calls it, of reacting, one keeps

one's mind as intent as possible upon the expected signal, and 'purposely avoids'[20] thinking of the

movement to be executed; in the 'extreme muscular' way one 'does not think at all'[21] of the signal, but

stands as ready as possible for the movement. The muscular reactions are much shorter than the sensorial

ones, the average difference being in the neighborhood of a tenth of a second. Wundt accordingly calls them

'shortened reactions' and, with Lange, admits them to be mere reflexes; whilst the sensorial reactions he calls

'complete,' and holds to his original conception as far as they are concerned. The facts, however, do not seem

to me to warrant even this amount of fidelity to the original Wundtian position. When we begin to react in the

'extreme sensorial' way, Lange says that we get times so very long that they must be rejected from the count

as nontypical. "Only after the reacter has succeeded by repeated and conscientious practice in bringing

about an extremely precise coordination of his voluntary impulse with his senseimpression do we get times

which can be regarded as typical sensorial reactiontimes."[22] Now it seems to me that these excessive and

'untypical' times are probably the real 'complete times,' the only ones in which distinct processes of actual

perception and volition occur (see above, pp.889). The typical sensorial time which is attained by practice is

probably another sort of reflex, less perfect than the reflexes prepared by straining one's attention towards the

movement.[23] The times are much more variable in the sensorial way than in the muscular. The several

muscular reactions differ little from each other. Only in them does the phenomenon occur of reacting on a

false signal, or of reacting before the signal. Times intermediate between these two types occur according as

the attention fails to turn itself exclusively to one of the extremes. It is obvious that Herr Lange's distinction

between the two types of reaction is a highly important one, and that the 'extreme muscular method,' giving

both the shortest times and the most constant ones, ought to be aimed at in all comparative investigations.

These reactiontime experiments are then in no sense measurements of the swiftness of thought. Only when

we complicate them is there a chance for anything like an intellectual operation to occur. They may be

complicated in various ways. The reaction may be withheld until the signal has consciously awakened a

distinct idea (Wundt's discriminationtime, associationtime) and then performed. Or there may be a variety

of possible signals, each with a different reaction assigned to it, and the reacter may be uncertain which one

he is about to receive. The reaction would then hardly seem to occur without a preliminary recognition and

choice. We shall see, however, in the appropriate chapters, that the discrimination and choice involved in

such a reaction are widely different from the intellectual operations of which we are ordinarily conscious

under those names. Meanwhile the simple reactiontime remains as the starting point of all these

superinduced complications. It is the fundamental physiological constant in all timemeasurements. As such,

The reactiontime varies with the individual and his age. An individual may have it particularly long in

respect of signals of one sense (Buccola, p.147), but not of others. Old and uncultivated people have it long

(nearly a second, in an old pauper observed by Exner, Pfl�ger's Archiv, VII. 6124). Children have it long

Practice shortens it to a quantity which is for each individual a minimum beyond which no farther reduction

can be made. The aforesaid old pauper's time was, after much practice, reduced to 0.1866 sec. (loc. cit.

p.626). Fatigue lengthens it. Concentration of attention shortens it. Details will be given in the chapter on

Attention. The nature of the signal makes it vary.[25] Wundt writes: "I found that the reactiontime for

impressions on the skin with electric stimulus is less than for true touchsensations, as the following averages

Average Average Variation Sound 0.167 sec. 0.0221 sec. Light 0.222 sec. 0.0219 sec. Electric skinsensation

" I here bring together the averages which have been obtained by some other observers: Hirsch. Hankel.

Exner. Sound 0.149 0.1505 0.1360 Light 0.200 0.2246 0.1506 Skinsensation 0.182 0.1546 0.1337"[26]

Thermic reactions have been lately measured by A. Goldscheider and by Vintschgau (1887), who find them

slower than reactions from touch. That from heat especially is very slow, more so than from cold, the

differences (according to Goldscheider) depending on the nerveterminations in the skin.

Gustatory reactions were measured by Vintschgau. They differed according to the substances used, running

up to half a second as a maximum when identification took place. The mere perception of the presence of the

substance on the tongue varied from 0".159 to 0".219 (Pfl�ger's Archiv, XIV.529).

Olfactory reactions have been studied by Vintschgau, Buccola, and Beaunis. They are slow, averaging about

half a second (cf. Beaunis, Recherches exp. sur l'Activit� C�r�brale, 1884, p.49 ff.)

It will be observed that sound is more promptly reacted on than either sight or touch. Taste and smell are

slower than either. One individual, who reacted to touch upon the tip of the tongue in 0".125, took 0".993 to

react upon the taste of quinine applied to the same spot. In another, upon the base of the tongue, the reaction

to touch being 0".141, that to sugar was 0".552 (Vintschgau, quoted by Buccola, p.103). Buccola found the

reaction to odors to vary from 0".334 to 0".681, according to the perfume used and the individual.

The intensity of the signal makes a difference. The intenser the stimulus the shorter the time. Herzen

(Grundlinien einer allgem. Psychophysiologie, p.101) compared the reaction from a corn on the toe with that

from the skin of the hand of the same subject. The two places were stimulated simultaneously, and the subject

tried to react simultaneously with both hand and foot, but the foot always went quickest. When the sound skin

of the foot was touched instead of the corn, it was the hand which always reacted first. Wundt tries to show

that when the signal is made barely perceptible, the time is probably the same in all the senses, namely about

Where the signal is of touch, the place to which it is applied makes a difference in the resultant

reactiontime. G.S. Hall and V. Kries found (Archiv f. Anat. u. Physiol., 1879) that when the fingertip was

the place the reaction was shorter than when the middle of the upper arm was used, in spite of the greater

length of nervetrunk to be traversed in the latter case. This discovery invalidates the measurements of the

rapidity of transmission of the current in human nerves, for they are all based on the method of comparing

reactiontimes from places near the root and near the extremity of a limb. The same observers found that

signals seen by the periphery of the retina gave longer times than the same signals seen by direct vision.

The season makes a difference, the time being some hun dredths of a second shorter on cold winter days

Intoxicants alter the time. Coffee and tea appear to shorten it. Small doses of wine and alcohol first shorten

and then lengthen it; but the shortening stage tends to disappear if a large dose be given immediately. This, at

least, is the report of two German observers. Dr. J. W. Warren, whose observations are more thorough than

any previous ones, could find no very decided effects from ordinary doses (Journal of Physiology, VIII. 311).

Morphia lengthens the time. Amylnitrite lengthens it, but after the inhalation it may fall to less than the

normal. Ether and chloroform lengthen it (for authorities, etc., see Buccola, p.189).

The hypnotic trance has no constant effect, sometimes shortening and sometimes lengthening it (Hall, Mind,

The time taken to inhibit a movement (e.g. to cease contraction of jawmuscles) seems to be about the same

as to produce one (Gad, Archiv f.(Anat.u.) Physiol., 1887, 468; Orchansky, ibid., 1889, 1885).

An immense amount of work has been done on reactiontime, of which I have cited but a small part. It is a

sort of work which appeals particularly to patient and exact minds, and they have not failed to profit by the

The next point to occupy our attention is the changes of circulation which accompany cerebral activity.

All parts of the cortex, when electrically excited, produce alterations both of respiration and circulation. The

bloodpressure rises, as a rule, all over the body, no matter where the cortical irritation is applied, though the

motor zone is the most sensitive region for the purpose. Elsewhere the current must be strong enough for an

epileptic attack to be produced.[27] Slowing and quickening of the heart are also observed, and are

independent of the vasoconstrictive phenomenon. Mosso, using his ingenious 'plethysmo graph' as an

indicator, discovered that the bloodsupply to the arms diminished during intellectual activity, and found

furthermore that the arterial tension (as shown by the sphygmograph) was increased in these members (see

Fig.23). So slight an emotion as that produced by the entrance of Professor Ludwig into the laboratory was

instantly followed by a shrinkage of the arms.[28] The brain itself is an excessively vascular organ, a sponge

full of blood, in fact; and another of Mosso's inventions showed that when less blood went to the arms, more

went to the head. The subject to be observed lay on a delicately balanced table which could tip downward

either at the head or at the foot if the weight of either end were increased. The moment emotional or

intellectual activity began in the subject, down went the balance at the headend, in consequence of the

redistribution of blood in his system. But the best proof of the immediate afflux of blood to the brain during

mental activity is due to Mosso's observations on three persons whose brain had been laid bare by lesion of

the skull. By means of apparatus described in his book,[29] this physiologist was enabled to let the

brainpulse record itself directly by a tracing. The intracranial bloodpressure rose immediately whenever

the subject was spoken to, or when he began to think actively, as in solving a problem in mental arithmetic.

Mosso gives in his work a large number of reproductions of tracings which show the instantaneity of the

change of bloodsupply, whenever the mental activity was quickened by any cause whatever, intellectual or

emotional. He relates of his female subject that one day whilst tracing her brainpulse he observed a sudden

rise with no apparent outer or inner cause. She however confessed to him afterwards that at that moment she

had caught sight of a skull on top of a piece of furniture in the room, and that this had given her a slight

The fluctuations of the bloodsupply to the brain were independent of respiratory changes,[30] and followed

the quickening of mental activity almost immediately. We must suppose a very delicate adjustment whereby

the circulation follows the needs of the cerebral activity. Blood very likely may rush to each region of the

cortex according as it is most active, but of this we know nothing. I need hardly say that the activity of the

nervous matter is the primary phenomenon, and the afflux of blood its secondary consequence. Many popular

writers talk as if it were the other way about, and as if mental activity were due to the afflux of blood. But, as

Professor H.N. Martin has well said, "that belief has no physiological foundation whatever; it is even directly

opposed to all that we know of cell life."[31] A chronic pathological congestion may , it is true, have

secondary consequences, but the primary congestions which we have been considering follow the activity of

the braincells by an adaptive reflex vasomotor mechanism doubtless as elaborate as that which harmonizes

bloodsupply with cellaction in any muscle or gland. Of the changes in the cerebral circulation during sleep,

Brainactivity seems accompanied by a local disengagement of heat. The earliest careful work in this

direction was by Dr. J.S. Lombard in 1867. Dr. Lombard's latest results include the records of over 60,000

observations.[32] He noted the changes in delicate thermometers and electric piles placed against the scalp in

human beings, and found that any intellectual effort, such as computing, composing, reciting poetry silently

or aloud, and especially that emotional excitement such as an anger fit, caused a general rise of temperature,

which rarely exceeded a degree Fahrenheit. The rise was in most cases more marked in the middle region of

the head than elsewhere. Strange to say, it was greater in reciting poetry silently than in reciting it aloud. Dr.

Lombard's explanation is that "in internal recitation an additional portion of energy, which in recitation aloud,

was converted into nervous and muscular force, now appears as heat."[33] I should suggest rather, if we must

have a theory, that the surplus of heat in recitation to one's self is due to inhibitory processes which are absent

when we recite aloud. In the chapter on the Will we shall see that the simple central process is to speak when

we think; to think silently involves a check in addition. In 1870 the indefatigable Schiff took up the subject,

experimenting on live dogs and chickens, plunging thermoelectric needles into the substance of their brain,

to eliminate possible errors from vascular changes in the skin when the thermometers were placed upon the

scalp. After habituation was established, he tested the animals with various sensations, tactile, optic,

olfactory, and auditory. He found very regularly an immediate deflection of the galvanometer, indicating an

abrupt alteration of the intracerebral temperature. When, for instance, he presented an empty roll of paper to

the nose of his dog as it lay motionless, there was a small deflection, but when a piece of meat was in the

paper the deflection was much greater. Schiff concluded from these and other experiments that sensorial

activity heats the braintissue, but he did not try to localize the increment of heat beyond finding that it was

in both hemispheres, whatever might be the sensation applied.[34] Dr. R.W. Amidon in 1880 made a farther

step forward, in localizing the heat produced by voluntary muscular contractions. Applying a number of

delicate surfacethermometers simultaneously against the scalp, he found that when different muscles of the

body were made to contract vigorously for ten minutes or more, different regions of the scalp rose in

temperature, that the regions were well focalized, and that the rise of temperature was often considerably over

a Fahrenheit degree. As a result of his investigations he gives a diagram in which numbered regions represent

the centres of highest temperature for the various special movements which were investigated. To a large

extent they correspond to the centres for the same movements assigned by Ferrier and others on other

Chemical action must of course accompany brainactivity. But little definite is known of its exact nature.

Cholesterin and creatin are both excrementitious products, and are both found in the brain. The subject

belongs to chemistry rather than to psychology, and I only mention it here for the sake of saying a word about

a widespread popular error about brainactivity and phosphorus. 'Ohme Phosphor, kein Gedanke,' was a

noted warcry of the 'materialists' during the excitement on that subject which filled Germany in the '60s.

The brain, like every other organ of the body, contains phosphorus, and a score of other chemicals besides.

Why the phosphorus should be picked out as its essence, no one knows. It would be equally true to say 'Ohne

Wasser kein Gedanke,' or 'Ohne Kochsalz kein Gedanke'; for thought would stop as quickly if the brain

should dry up or lose its NaCl as if it lost its phosphorus. In America the phosphorusdelusion has twined

itself round a saying quoted (rightly or wrongly) from Professor L. Agassiz, to the effect that fishermen are

more intelligent than farmers because they eat so much fish, which contains so much phosphorus. All the

The only straight way to ascertain the importance of phosphorus to thought would be to find whether more is

excreted by the brain during mental activity than during rest. Unfortunately we cannot do this directly, but

can only gauge the amount of PO5 in the urine, which represents other organs as well as the brain, and this

procedure, as Dr. Edes says, is like measuring the rise of water at the mouth of the Mississippi to tell where

there has been a thunderstorm in Minnesota.[36] It has been adopted, however, by a variety of observers,

some of whom found the phosphates in the urine diminished, whilst others found them increased, by

intellectual work. On the whole, it is impossible to trace any constant relation. In maniacal excitement less

phosphorus than usual seems to be excreted. More is excreted during sleep. There are differences between the

alkaline and earthy phosphates into which I will not enter, as my only aim is to show that the popular way of

looking at the matter has no exact foundation.[37] The fact that phosphorouspreparations may do good in

nervous exhaustion proves nothing as to the part played by phosphorus in mental activity. Like iron, arsenic,

and other remedies it is a stimulant or tonic, of whose intimate workings in the system we know absolutely

nothing, and which moreover does good in an extremely small number of the cases in which it is prescribed.

The phosphorousphilosophers have often compared thought to a secretion. "The brain secretes thought, as

the kidneys secrete urine, or as the liver secretes bile," are phrases which one sometimes hears. The lame

analogy need hardly be pointed out. The materials which the brain pours into the blood (cholesterin, creatin,

xanthin, or whatever they may be) are the analogues of the urine and the bile, being in fact real material

excreta. As far as these matters go, the brain is a ductless gland. But we know of nothing connected with

liverand kidneyactivity which can be in the remotest degree compared with the stream of thought that

There remains another feature of general brainphysiology, and indeed for psychological purposes the most

important feature of all. I refer to the aptitude of the brain for acquiring habits. But I will treat of that in a

Footnotes [1] I shall myself in later places indulge in much of this schematization. The reader will understand

once for all that it is symbolic; and that the use of it is hardly more than to show what a deep congruity there

is between mental processes and mechanical processes of some kind, not necessarily of the exact kind

[2] Valentin: Archiv f. d. gesammt. Physiol., 1873, p.458. Stirling: Leipzig Acad. Berichte, 1875, p.372

(Journal of Physiol., 1875). J. Ward: Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol., 1880, p.72. H. Sewall: Johns Hopkins

Studies, 1880, p.30. Kronecker u. Nicolaides: Archiv f. (Anat.u.) Physiol., 1880, p.437. Exner: Archiv f. die

ges. Physiol., Bd. 28, p.487 (1882). Eckhard: in Hermann's Hdbch. D. Physiol., Bd. I. Thl. II. p.31.

Fran�oisFranck: Le�ons sur les Fonctions motrices du Cerveau, p.51 ff., 339.For the process of summation

in nerves and muscles, cf. Hermann: ibid. Thl. I. p.109, and vol. I. p.40. Also Wundt: Physiol. Psych., I. 243

ff.; Richet: Travaux du Laboratoire de Marey, 1877, p.97; L'Homme et l'Intelligence, pp.24 ff., 468; Revue

Philosophique, t.XXI. p. 564. Kronecker u. Hall: Archiv f. (Anat.u.) Physiol., 1879; Sch�nlein: ibid. 1882,

p.357. Sertoli (Hofmann and Schwalbe's Jahresbericht, 1882. p.25. De Watteville: Neurologisches

Centralblatt, 1883, No. 7. Gr�nhagen: Arch. f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. 34, p.301(1884).

[3] Bubnoff und Heidenhain: Ueber Erregungsund Hemmungsvorg�nge innerhalb der motorischen

[4] Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd.26, p.176(1881). Exner thinks (ibid. Bd.28, p.497(1882) that the summation

here occurs in the spinal cord. It makes no difference where this particular summation occurs, so far as the

[5] G.H. Lewes: Physical Basis of Mind, p.479, where many similar examples are given, 4879.

[7] See a similar instance in Mach: Beitr�ge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, p.36, a sparrow being the

animal. My young children are afraid of their own pugdog, if he enters their room after they are in bed and

the lights are out. Compare this statement also: "The first question to a peasant seldom proves more than a

flapper to rouse the torpid adjustments of his ears. The invariable answer of a Scottish peasant is, 'What's

your wull?'that of the English, a vacant stare. A second and even a third question may be required to elicit

an answer." (R.Fowler: Some Observations on the Mental State of the Blind, and Deaf, and Dumb (Salisbury,

[8] The reader will find a great deal about chronographic apparatus in J. Marey: La M�thode Graphique, pt.

II. chap. II. One can make pretty fair measurements with no other instrument than a watch, by making a large

number of reactions, each serving as a signal for the following one, and dividing the total time they take by

their number. Dr. O. W. Holmes first suggested this method., which has been ingeniously elaborated and

[10] Physiol. Psych., II. 2212. Cf. also the first edition, 7289. I must confess to finding all Wundt's

utterances about 'apperception' both vacillating and obscure. I see no use whatever for the word, as he

employs it, in Psychology. Attention, perception, conception, volition, are its ample equivalents. Why we

should need a single word to denote all these things by turns, Wundt fails to make clear. Consult, however,

his pupil Staude's article, 'Uber den Begriff der Apperception,' etc., in Wundt's periodical Psychologische

Studien, I. 149, which may be supposed official. For minute criticism of Wundt's 'apperception,' see Marty:

[13] For instance, if, on the previous day, one had resolved to act on a signal when it should come, and it now

[14] "I need hardly mention that success in these experiments depends in a high degree on our concentration

of attention. If inattentive, one gets very discrepant figures...This concentration of the attention is in the

highest degree exhausting. After some experiments in which I was concerned to get results as uniform as

possible, I was covered with perspiration and excessively fatigued although I had as quietly in my chair all

[17] In short, what M. Delboeuf calls an 'organe adventice.' The reactiontime, moreover, is quite compatible

with the reaction itself being of a reflex order. Some reflexes (sneezing, e.g.) are very slow. The only

timemeasurement of a reflex act in the human subject with which I am acquainted is Exner's measurement

of winking (in Pfl�ger's Archiv f. d. gesammt. Physiol., Bd. VIII. P.526, 1874). He found that when the

stimulus was a flash of light it took the wink 0.2168 sec. to occur. A strong electric shock to the cornea

shortened the time ot 0.0578 sec. The ordinary 'reactiontime' is midway between these values. Exner

'reduces' his times by eliminating the physiological process of conduction. His 'reduced winkingtime' is then

0.471 as a minimum (ibid. 531), whilst his reduced reactiontime is 0.0828 (ibid. VII. 637). These figures

have really no scientific value beyond that of showing, according to Exner's own belief (VII. 531) that

reactiontime and reflextime measure processes of essentially the same order. His description, moreover, of

the process is an excellent description of a reflex act. "Every one," says he, "who makes reactiontime

experiments for the first time is surprised to dind how little he is master of his own movements, so soon as it

becomes a question of executing them with a maximum of speed. Not only does their energy lie, as it were,

outside the field of choice, but even the time in which the movement occurs depends only partly upon

ourselves. We jerk our arm, and we can afterwards tell with astonishing precision whether we have jerked it

quicker or slower than another time, although we have no power to jerk it exactly at the wishedfor

moment."Wundt himself admits that when we await a strong signal with tense preparation there is no

consciousness of any duality of 'apperception' and motor response; the two are continuous (Physiol. Psych.,

II. 226).Mr. Cattell's view is identical with the one I defend. "I think," he says, "that if the processes of

perception and willing are present at all they are very rudimentary....The subject, by a voluntary effort[before

the signal comes], puts the lines of communication between the centre for "the stimulus " and the centre for

the coordination of motions...in a state of unstable equilibrium. When, therefore, a nervous impulse reaches

the "former centre," it causes brainchanges in two directions; an impulse moves along to the cortex and calls

forth there a perception corresponding to the stimulus, while at the same time an impulse follows a line of

small resistance to the centre for the coordination of motions, and the proper nervous impulse, already

prepared and waiting for the signal, is sent from the centre to the muscle of the hand. When the reaction has

often been made the entire cerebral process becomes automatic, the impulse of itself takes the welltravelled

way to the motor centre and releases the motor impulse." (Mind, XI. 2323.) Finally, Prof. Lipps has, in his

elaborate way (Grundtatsachen, 179188), made mincemeat of the view that stage 3 involves either

[23] Lange has an interesting hypothesis as to the brainprocess concerned in the latter, for which I can only

[24] The reader who wishes to know more about the matter will find a most faithful compilation of all that

has been done, together with much original matter, in G. Buccola's 'Legge del Tempo.' etc. See also chapter

XVI of Wundt's Physiol. Psychology; Exner in Hermann's Hdbch., Bd. 2, Thl. II. pp.252280; also Ribot's

[25] The nature of the movement also seems to make it vary. Mr. B. I. Gilman and I reacted to the same

signal by simply raising our hand, and again by carrying our hand towards our back. The moment registered

was always that at which the hand broke and electric contact in starting to move. But it started one or two

hundredths of a second later when the more extensive movement was the one to be made. Orchansky, on the

other hand, experimenting on contractions of the masseter muscle, found (Archiv f. (Anat.u. ) Physiol., 1889,

p.187) that the greater the amplitude of contraction intended, the shorter grew the time of reaction. He

explains this by the fact that a more ample contraction makes a greater appeal to the attention, and this

[29] Ueber den Kreislauf des Blutes im menschlichen Gehirn (1881), chap. II. The Introduction gives the

[30] In this conclusion M. Gley (Archives de Physiologie, 1881, p.742) agrees with Professor Mosso. Gley

found his pulse rise 13 beats, his carotid dilate, and his radial artery contract during hard mental work.

[32] See his book. "Experimental Researches on the Regional Temperature of the Head" (London, 1879).

[34] The most convenient account of Schiff's experiments is by Prof. Herzen, in the Revue Philosophique,

[35] A New Study of Cerebral Cortical Localization (N.Y., Putnam, 1880), pp.4853.

[37] Without multiplying references, I will simply cite Mendel (Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vol, III, 1871), Mairet

(Archives de Neurologie, vol. IX, 1885), and Beaunis (Rech. Exp�rimentales sur l'Activit� C�r�brale, 1887).

Richet gives a partial bibliography in the Revue Scientifique, vol. 38, p.788 (1886). Classics in the History of

Psychology An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario

When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that

they are bundles of habits. In wild animals, the usual round of daily behavior seems a necessity implanted at

birth; in animals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems, to a great extent, to be the result of education.

The habits to which there is an innate tendency are called instincts; some of those due to education would by

most persons be called acts of reason. It thus appears that habit covers a very large part of life, and that one

engaged in studying the objective manifestations of mind is bound at the very outset to define clearly just

The moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led to the fundamental properties of matter. The laws of

Nature are nothing but the immutable habits which the different elementary sorts of matter follow in their

actions and reactions upon each other. In the organic world, however, the habits are more variable than this.

Even instincts vary from one individual to another of a kind; and are modified in the same individual, as we

shall later see, to suit the exigencies of the case. The habits of an elementary particle of matter cannot change

(on the principles of the atomistic philosophy), because the particle is itself an unchangeable thing; but those

of a compound mass of matter can change, because they are in the last instance due to the structure of the

compound, and either outward forces or inward tensions can, from one hour to another, turn that structure

into something different from what it was. That is, they can do so if the body be plastic enough to maintain its

integrity, and be not disrupted when its structure yields. The change of structure here spoken of need not

involve the outward shape; it may be invisible and molecular, as when a bar of iron becomes magnetic or

crystalline through the action of certain outward causes, or Indiarubber becomes friable, or plaster 'sets.' All

these changes are rather slow; the material in question opposes a certain resistance to the modifying cause,

which it takes time to overcome, but the gradual yielding whereof often saves the material from being

disintegrated altogether. When the structure has yielded, the same inertia becomes a condition of its

comparative permanence in the new form, and of the new habits the body then manifests. Plasticity, then, in

the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but

strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is

marked by what we may call a new set of habits. Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed

with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort; so that we may without hesitation lay down as our

first proposition the following, that the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity [2] of the

But the philosophy of habit is thus, in the first instance, a chapter in physics rather than in physiology or

psychology. That it is at bottom a physical principle is admitted by all good recent writers on the subject.

They call attention to analogues of acquired habits exhibited by dead matter. Thus, M. L�on Dumont, whose

"Every one knows how a garment, after having been worn a certain time, clings to the shape of the body

better than when it was new; there has been a change in the tissue, and this change is a new habit of cohesion.

A lock works better after being used some time; at the outset more force was required to overcome certain

roughnesses in the mechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is a phenomenon of habituation. It costs

less trouble to fold a paper when it has been folded already. This saving of trouble is due to the essential

nature of habit, which brings it about that, to reproduce the effect, a less amount of the outward cause is

required. The sounds of a violin improve by use in the hands of an able artist, because the fibres of the wood

at last contract habits of vibration conformed to harmonic relations. This is what gives such inestimable value

to instruments that have belonged to great masters. Water, in flowing, hollows out for itself a channel, which

grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes, when it flows again, the path traced

by itself before. Just so, the impressions of outer objects fashion for themselves in the nervous system more

and more appropriate paths, and these vital phenomena recur under similar excitements from without, when

Not in the nervous system alone. A scar anywhere is a locus minoris resistentioe, more liable to be abraded,

inflamed, to suffer pain and cold, than are the neighboring parts. A sprained ankle, a dislocated arm, are in

danger of being sprained or dislocated again; joints that have once been attacked by rheumatism or gout,

mucous membranes that have been the seat of catarrh, are with each fresh recurrence more prone to a relapse,

until often the morbid state chronically substitutes itself for the sound one. And if we ascend to the nervous

system, we find how many socalled functional diseases seem to keep themselves going simply because they

happen to have once begun; and how the forcible cutting short by medicine of a few attacks is often sufficient

to enable the physiological forces to get possession of the field again, and to bring the organs back to

functions of health. Epilepsies, neuralgias, convulsive affections of various sorts, insomnias, are so many

cases in point. And, to take what are more obviously habits, the success with which a 'weaning' treatment can

often be applied to the victims of unhealthy indulgence of passion, or of mere complaining or irascible

disposition, shows us how much the morbid manifestations themselves were due to the mere inertia of the

Can we now form a notion of what the inward physical changes may be like, in organs whose habits have

thus struck into new paths? In other words, can we say just what mechanical facts the expression 'change of

habit' covers when it is applied to a nervous system? Certainly we cannot in anything like a minute or definite

way. But our usual scientific custom of interpreting hidden molecular events after the analogy of visible

massive ones enables us to frame easily an abstract and general scheme of processes which the physical

changes in question may be like. And when once the possibility of some kind of mechanical interpretation is

established, Mechanical Science, in her present mood, will not hesitate to set her brand of ownership upon the

matter, feeling sure that it is only a question of time when the exact mechanical explanation of the case shall

If habits are due to the plasticity of materials to outward agents, we can immediately see to what outward

influences, if to any, the brainmatter is plastic. Not to mechanical pressures, not to thermal changes, not to

any of the forces to which all the other organs of our body are exposed; for nature has carefully shut up our

brain and spinal cord in bony boxes where no influences of this sort can get at them. She has floated them in

fluid so that only the severest shocks can give them a concussion, and blanketed and wrapped them about in

an altogether exceptional way. The only impressions that can be made upon them are through the blood, on

the one hand, and through the sensory nerveroots, on the other; and it is to the infinitely attenuated currents

that pour in through these latter channels that the hemispherical cortex shows itself to be so peculiarly

susceptible. The currents, once in, must find a way out. In getting out they leave their traces in the paths

which they take. The only thing they can do, in short, is to deepen old paths or to make new ones; and the

whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up in two words when we call it an organ in which currents pouring

in from the senseorgans make with extreme facility paths which do not easily disappear. For, of course, a

simple habit, like every other nervous event the habit of snuffling, for example, or of putting one's hands

into one's pockets, or of biting one's nails is, mechanically, nothing but a reflex discharge; and its

anatomical substratum must be a path in the system. The most complex habits, as we shall presently see more

fully, are, from the same point of view, nothing but concatenated discharges in the nervecentres, due to the

presence there of systems of reflex paths, so organized as to wake each other up successively the

impression produced by one muscular contraction serving as a stimulus to provoke the next, until a final

impression inhibits the process and closes the chain. The only difficult mechanical problem is to explain the

formulation de novo of a simple reflex or path in a preexisting nervous system. Here, as in so many other

cases, it is only the premier pas qui co�te. For the entire nervous system is nothing but a system of paths

between a sensory terminus a quo and a muscular, glandular, or other terminus ad quem. A path once

traversed by a nervecurrent might be expected to follow the law of most of the paths we know, and to be

scooped out and made more permeable than before;[4] and this ought to be repeated with each new passage

of the current. Whatever obstructions may have kept it at first from being a path should then, little by little,

and more and more, be swept out of the way, until at last it might become a natural drainagechannel. This is

what happens where either solids or liquids pass over a path; there seems no reason why is should not happen

where the thing that passes is a mere wave of rearrangement in matter that does not displace itself, but merely

changes chemically or turns itself round in place, or vibrates across the line. The most plausible views of the

nervecurrent make it out to be the passage of some such wave of rearrangement as this. If only a part of the

matter of the path were to 'rearrange' itself, the neighboring parts remaining inert, it is easy to see how their

inertness might oppose a friction which it would take many waves of rearrangement to break down and

overcome. If we call the path itself the 'organ,' and the wave of rearrangement the 'function,' then it is obvi

ously a case for repeating the celebrated French formula of 'La fonction fait l'organe.'

So nothing is easier than to imagine how, when a current once has traversed a path, it should traverse it more

readily still a second time. But what made it ever traverse it the first time?[5] In answering this question we

can only fall back on our general conception of a nervous system as a mass of matter whose parts, constantly

kept in states of different tension, are as constantly tending to equalize their states. The equalization between

any two points occurs through whatever path may at the moment be most pervious. But, as a given point of

the system may belong, actually or potentially, to many different paths, and, as the play of nutrition is subject

to accidental changes, blocks may from time to time occur, and make currents shoot through unwonted lines.

Such an unwonted line would be a newcreated path, which if traversed repeatedly, would become the

beginning of a new reflex arc. All this is vague to the last degree, and amounts to little more than saying that

a new path may be formed by the sort of chances that in nervous material are likely to occur. But, vague as it

It must be noticed that the growth of structural modification in living matter may be more rapid than in any

lifeless mass, because the incessant nutritive renovation of which the living matter is the seat tends often to

corroborate and fix the impressed modification, rather than to counteract it by renewing the original

constitution of the tissue that has been impressed. Thus,we notice after exercising our muscles or our brain in

a new way, that we can do so no longer at that time; but after a day or two of rest, when we resume the

discipline, our increase in skill not seldom surprises us. I have often noticed this in learning a tune; and it has

led a German author to say that we learn to swim during the winter and to skate during the summer.

"It is a matter of universal experience that every kind of training for special aptitudes is both far more

effective, and leaves a more permanent impress, when exerted on the growing organism than when brought to

bear on the adult. The effect of such training is shown in the tendency of the organ to 'grow to' the mode in

which it is habitually exercised; as is evidenced by the increased size and power of particular sets of muscles,

and the extraordinary flexibility of joints, which are acquired by such as have been early exercised in

gymnastic performances...There is no part of the organism of man in which the reconstructive activity is so

great, during the whole period of life, as it is in the ganglionic substance of the brain. This is indicated by the

enormous supply of blood which it receives....It is, moreover, a fact of great significance that the

nervesubstance is specially distinguished by its reparative power. For while injuries of other tissues (such as

the muscular) which are distinguished by the speciality of their structure and endowments, are repaired by

substance of a lower or less specialized type, those of nervesubstance are repaired by a complete

reproduction of the normal tissue; as is evidenced in the sensibility of the newly forming skin which is

closing over an open wound, or in the recovery of the sensibility of a piece of 'transplanted' skin, which has

for a time been rendered insensible by the complete interruption of the continuity of its nerves. The most

remarkable example of this reproduction, however, is afforded by the results of M. BrownS�quard's[8]

experiments upon the gradual restoration of the functional activity of the spinal cord after its complete

division; which takes place in way that indicates rather a reproduction of the whole, or the lower part of the

cord and of the nerves proceeding from it, than a mere reunion of divided surfaces. This reproduction is but a

special manifestation of the reconstructive change which is always taking place in the nervous system; it

being not less obvious to the eye of reason that the 'waste' occasioned by its functional activity must be

constantly repaired by the production of new tissue, than it is to the eye of sense that such reparation supplies

"Now, in this constant and active reconstruction of the nervous system, we recognize a most marked

conformity to the general plan manifested in the nutrition of the organism as a whole. For, in the first place, it

is obvious that there is a tendency to the production of a determinate type of structure; which type is often not

merely that of the species, but some special modification of it which characterized one or both of the

progenitors. But this type is peculiarly liable to modification during the early period of life; in which the

functional activity of the nervous system (and particularly of the brain) is extraordinarily great, and the

reconstructive process proportionally active. And this modifiability expresses itself in the formation of the

mechanism by which those secondarily automatic modes of movement come to be established, which, in

man, take the place of those that are congenital in most of the animals beneath him; and those modes of

senseperception come to be acquired, which are elsewhere clearly instinctive. For there can be no

reasonable doubt that, in both cases, a nervous mechanism is developed in the course of this selfeducation,

corresponding with that which the lower animals inherit from their parents. The plan of that rebuilding

process, which is necessary to maintain the integrity of the organism generally, and which goes on with

peculiar activity in this portion of it, is thus being incessantly modified; and in this manner all that portion of

it which ministers to the external life of sense and motion that is shared by man with the animal kingdom at

large, becomes at adult age the expression of the habits which the individual has acquired during the period of

growth and development. Of these habits, some are common to the race generally, while others are peculiar

to the individual; those of the former kind (such as walking erect) being universally acquired, save where

physical inability prevents; while for the latter a special training is needed, which is usually the more

effective the earlier it is begun as is remarkably seen in the case of such feats of dexterity as require a

conjoint education of the perspective and of the motor powers. And when thus developed during the period of

growth, so as to have become a part of the constitution of the adult, the acquired mechanism is thenceforth

maintained in the ordinary course of the nutritive operations, so as to be ready for use when called upon, even

"What is so clearly true of the nervous apparatus of animal life can scarcely be otherwise than true of that

which ministers to the automatic activity of the mind. For, as already shown, the study of psychology has

evolved no more certain result than that there are uniformities of mental action which are so entirely

conformable to those of bodily action as to indicate their intimate relation to a 'mechanism of thought and

feeling,' acting under the like conditions with that of sense and motion. The psychical principles of

association, indeed, and the physiological principles of nutrition, simply express the former in terms of

mind, the latter in terms of brain the universally admitted fact that any sequence of mental action which has

been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think,

feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like circumstances, without any

consciously formed purpose, or anticipation of results. For there is no reason to regard the cerebrum as an

exception to the general principle that, while each part of the organism tends to form itself in accordance with

the mode in which it is habitually exercised, this tendency will be especially strong in the nervous apparatus,

in virtue of that incessant regeneration which is the very condition of its functional activity. It scarcely,

indeed, admits of doubt that every state of ideational consciousness which is either very strong or is

habitually repeated leaves an organic impression on the cerebrum; in virtue of which that same state may be

reproduced at any future time, in respondence to a suggestion fitted to excite it...... The 'strength of early

association' is a fact so universally recognized that the expression of it has become proverbial; and this

precisely accords with the physiological principle that, during the period of growth and development, the

formative activity of the brain will be most amenable to directing influences. It is in this way that what is

early 'learned by heart' becomes branded in (as it were) upon the cerebrum; so that its 'traces' are never lost,

even though the conscious memory of it may have completely faded out. For, when the organic modification

has been once fixed in the growing brain, it becomes a part of the normal fabric, and is regularly maintained

by nutritive substitution; so that it may endure to the end of life, like the scar of a wound."

Dr. Carpenter's phrase that our nervous system grows to the modes in which it has been exercised expresses

the philosophy of habit in a nutshell. We may now trace some of the practical applications of the principle to

The first result of it is that habit simplifies the movements required to achieve a given result, makes them

"The beginner at the piano not only moves his finger up and down in order to depress the key, he moves the

whole hand, the forearm and even the entire body, especially moving its least rigid part, the head, as if he

would press down the key with that organ too. Often a contraction of the abdominal muscles occurs as well.

Principally, however, the impulse is determined to the motion of the hand and of the single finger. This is, in

the first place, because the movement of the finger is the movement thought of, and, in the second place,

because its movement and that of the key are the movements we try to perceive, along with the results of the

latter on the ear. The more often the process is repeated, the more easily the movement follows, on account of

"But the more easily the movement occurs, the slighter is the stimulus required to set it up; and the slighter

"Thus, an impulse which originally spread its effects over the whole body, or at least over many of its

movable parts, is gradually determined to a single definite organ, in which it effects the contraction of a few

limited muscles. In this change the thoughts and perceptions which start the impulse acquire more and more

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

inclining, on the whole, toward certain muscles, but with the escape thither somewhat clogged. Then streams

of water will, on the whole, tend most to fill the drains that go towards these muscles and to wash out the

escape. In case of a sudden 'flushing,' however, the whole system of channels will fill itself, and the water

overflow everywhere before it escapes. But a moderate quantity of water invading the system will flow

"Just so with the pianoplayer. As soon as his impulse, which has gradually learned to confine itself to single

muscles, grows extreme, it overflows into larger muscular regions. He usually plays with his fingers, his body

being at rest. But no sooner does he get excited than his whole body becomes 'animated,' and he moves his

head and trunk, in particular, as if these also were organs with which he meant to belabor the keys."[9]

Man in born with a tendency to do more things than he has readymade arrangements for in his

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

enormous, that most of them must be the fruit of painful study. If practice did not make perfect, nor habit

economize the expense of nervous and muscular energy, he would therefore be in a sorry plight. As Dr.

:If an act became no easier after being done several times, if the careful direction of consciousness were

necessary to its accomplishment on each occasion, it is evident that the whole activity of a lifetime might be

confined to one or two deeds that no progress could take place in development. A man might be occupied

all day in dressing and un dressing himself; the attitude of his body would absorb all his attention and

energy; the washing of his hands or the fastening of a button would be as difficult to him on each occasion as

to the child on its first trial; and he would, furthermore, be completely exhausted by his exertions. Think of

the pains necessary to teach a child to stand, of the many efforts which it must make, and of the ease with

which it at last stands, unconscious of any effort. For while secondarily automatic acts are accomplished with

comparatively little weariness in this regard approaching the organic movements, or the original reflex

movements the conscious effort of the will soon produces exhaustion. A spinal cord without... memory

would simply be an idiotic spinal cord... It is impossible for an individual to realize how much he owes to its

The next result is that habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed.

One may state this abstractly thus: If an act require for its execution a chain, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc., of

successive nervous events, then in the first performances of the action the conscious will must choose each of

these events from a number of wrong alternatives that tend to present themselves; but habit soon brings it

about that each event calls up its own appropriate successor without any alternative offering itself, and

without any reference to the conscious will, until at last the whole chain, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, rattles itself off

as soon as A occurs, just as if A and the rest of the chain were fused into a continuous stream. When we are

learning to walk, to ride, to swim, skate, fence, write, play, or sing, we interrupt ourselves at every step by

unnecessary movements and false notes. When we are proficients, on the contrary, the results not only follow

with the very minimum of muscular action requisite to bring them forth, they also follow from a single

instantaneous 'cue.' The marksman sees the bird, and, before he knows it, he has aimed and shot. A gleam in

his adversary's eye, a momentary pressure from his rapier, and the fencer finds that he has instantly made the

right parry and return. A glance at the musical hieroglyphics, and the pianist's fingers have ripped through a

cataract of notes. And not only is it the right thing at the right time that we thus involuntarily do, but the

wrong thing also, if it be an habitual thing. Who is there that has never wound up his watch on taking off his

waistcoat in the daytime, or taken his latchkey out on arriving at the doorstep of a friend? Very

absentminded persons in going to their bedroom to dress for dinner have been known to take off one

garment after another and finally to get into bed, merely because that was the habitual issue of the first few

movements when performed at a later hour. The writer well remembers how, on revisiting Paris after ten

years' absence, and, finding himself in the street in which for one winter he had attended school, he lost

himself in a brown study, from which he was awakened by finding himself upon the stairs which led to the

apartment in a house many streets away in which he had lived during that earlier time, and to which his steps

from the school had then habitually led. We all of us have a definite routine manner of performing certain

daily offices connected with the toilet, with the opening and shutting of familiar cupboards, and the like. Our

lower centres know the order of these movements, and show their knowledge by their 'surprise' if the objects

are altered so as to oblige the movement to be made in a different way. But our higher thoughtcentres know

hardly anything about the matter. Few men can tell offhand which sock, shoe, or trousersleg they put on

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

performed. So of the questions, Which valve of my double door opens first? Which way does my door

swing? etc. I cannot tell the answer; yet my hand never makes a mistake. No one can describe the order in

which he brushes his hair or teeth; yet it is likely that the order is a pretty fixed one in all of us.

In action grown habitual, what instigates each new muscular contraction to take place in its appointed order is

not a thought or a perception, but the sensation occasioned by the muscular contraction just finished. A

strictly voluntary act has to be guided by idea, perception, and volition, throughout its whole course. In an

habitual action, mere sensation is a sufficient guide, and the upper regions of brain and mind are set

comparatively free. A diagram will make the matter clear: Let A, B, C, D, E, F, G represent an habitual chain

of muscular contractions, and let a, b, c, d, e, f stand for the respective sensations which these contractions

excite in us when they are successively performed. Such sensations will usually be of the muscles, skin, or

joints of the parts moved, but they may also be effects of the movement upon the eye or the ear. Through

them, and through them alone, we are made aware whether the contraction has or has not occurred. When the

series, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, is being learned, each of these sensations becomes the object of a separate

perception by the mind. By it we test each movement, to see if it be right before advancing to the next. We

hesitate, compare, choose, revoke, reject, etc., by intellectual means; and the order by which the next

movement is discharged is an express order from the ideational centres after this deliberation has been gone

In habitual action, on the contrary, the only impulse which the centres of idea or perception need send down

is the initial impulse, the command to start. This is represented in the diagram by V; it may be a thought of

the first movement or of the last result, or a mere perception of some of the habitual conditions of the chain,

the presence, e.g., of the keyboard near the hand. In the present case, no sooner has the conscious thought or

volition instigated movement A, than A, through the sensation a of its own occurrence, awakens B reflexly; B

then excites C through b, and so on till the chain is ended when the intellect generally takes cognizance of the

final result. The process, in fact, resembles the passage of a wave of 'peristaltic' motion down the bowels. The

intellectual perception at the end is indicated in the diagram by the effect of G being represented, at G', in the

ideational centres above the merely sensational line. The sensational impressions, a, b, c, d, e, f, are all

supposed to have their seat below the ideational lines. That our ideational centres, if involved at all by a, b, c,

d, e, f, are involved in a minimal degree, is shown by the fact that the attention may be wholly absorbed

elsewhere. We may say our prayers, or repeat the alphabet, with our attention far away.

"A musical performer will play a piece which has become familiar by repetition while carrying on an

animated conversation, or while continuously engrossed by some train of deeply interesting thought; the

accustomed sequence of movements being directly prompted by the sight of the notes, or by the remembered

succession of the sounds (if the piece is played from memory), aided in both cases by the guiding sensations

derived from the muscles themselves. But, further, a higher degree of the same 'training' (acting on an

organism specially fitted to profit by it) enables an accomplished pianist to play a difficult piece of music at

sight; the movements of the hands and fingers following so immediately upon the sight of the notes that it

seems impossible to believe that any but the very shortest and most direct track can be the channel of the

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

class of acquired aptitudes, which differ from instincts only in being prompted to action by the will, is

"'With a view of cultivating the rapidity of visual and tactile perception, and the precision of respondent

movements, which are necessary for the success in every kind of prestidigitation, Houdin early practised the

art of juggling with balls in the air; and having, after a month's practice, become thorough master of the art of

keeping up four balls at once, he placed a book before him, and, while the balls were in the air, accustomed

himself to read without hesitation. 'This,' he says, 'will probably seem to my readers very extraordinary; but I

shall surprise them still more when I say that I have just amused myself with repeating this curious

experiment. Though thirty years have elapsed since the time I was writing, and though I have scarcely once

touched the balls during that period, I can still manage to read with ease while keeping three balls up.'"

We have called a, b, c, d, e, f, the antecedents of the successive muscular attractions, by the name of

sensations. Some authors seem to deny that they are even this. If not even this, they can only be centripetal

nervecurrents, not sufficient to arouse feeling, but sufficient to arouse motor response.[12] It may be at once

admitted that they are not distinct volitions. The will, if any will be present, limits itself to a permission that

"There may still be metaphysicians who maintain that actions which were originally prompted by the will

with a distinct intention, and which are still entirely under its control, can never cease to be volitional; and

that either an infinitesimally small amount of will is required to sustain them when they have been once set

going, or that the will is in a sort of pendulumlike oscillation between the two actions the maintenance of

the train of thought, and the maintenance of the train of movement. But if only an infinitesimally small

amount of will is necessary to sustain them, is not this tantamount to saying that they go on by a force of their

own? And does not the experience of the perfect continuity of our train of thought during the performance of

movements that have become habitual, entirely negative the hypothesis of oscillation? Besides, if such an

oscillation existed, there must be intervals in which each action goes on of itself; so that its essentially

automatic character is virtually admitted. The physiological explanation, that the mechanism of locomotion,

as of other habitual movements, grows to the mode in which it is early exercised, and that it then works

automatically under the general control and direction of the will, can scarcely be put down by any assumption

of an hypothetical necessity, which rests only on the basis of ignorance of one side of our composite

But if not distinct acts of will, these immediate antecedents of each movement of the chain are at any rate

accompanied by consciousness of some kind. They are sensations to which we are usually inattentive, but

which immediately call out attention if they go wrong. Schneider's account of these sensations deserves to be

quoted. In the act of walking, he says, even when our attention is entirely off,

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

impulses to keep our equilibrium and to set down one leg after another. It is doubtful whether we could

preserve equilibrium if no sensation of our body's attitude were there, and doubtful whether we should

advance our leg if we had no sensation of its movements as executed, and not even a minimal feeling of

impulse to set it down. Knitting appears altogether mechanical, and the knitter keeps up her knitting even

while she reads or is engaged in lively talk. But if we ask her how this be possible, she will hardly reply that

the knitting goes on of itself. She will rather say that she has a feeling of it, that she feels in her hands that she

knits and how she must knit, and that therefore the movements of knitting are called forth and regulated by

"So of every one who practises, apparently automatically, a longfamiliar handicraft. The smith turning his

tongs as he smites the iron, the carpenter wielding his plane, the lacemaker with her bobbin, the weaver at

his loom, all will answer the same question in the same way by saying that they have a feeling of the proper

"In these cases, the feelings which are conditions of the appropriate acts are very faint. But none the less are

they necessary. Imagine your hands not feeling; your movements could then only be provoked by ideas, and

if your ideas were then diverted away, the movements ought to come to a standstill, which is a consequence

"An idea makes you take, for example, a violin into your left hand. But it is not necessary that your idea

remain fixed on the contraction of the muscles of the left hand and fingers in order that the violin may

continue to be held fast and not let fall. The sensations themselves which the holding of the instrument

awakens in the hand, since they are associated with the motor impulse of grasping, are sufficient to cause this

impulse, which then lasts as long as the feeling itself lasts, or until the impulse is inhibited by the idea of

"It sometimes happens, in beginning these simultaneous combinations, that one movement or impulse will

cease if the consciousness turn particularly toward another, because at the outset the guiding sensations must

all be strongly felt. The bow will perhaps slip from the fingers, because some of the muscles have relaxed.

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

"The following experiment shows this well: When one begins to play on the violin, to keep him from raising

his right elbow in playing a book is placed under his right armpit, which he is ordered to hold fast by keeping

the upper arm tight against his body. The muscular feelings, and feelings of contact connected with the book,

provoke an impulse to press it tight. But often it happens that the beginner, whose attention gets absorbed in

the production of the notes, lets drop the book. Later, however, this never happens; the faintest sensations of

contact suffice to awaken the impulse to keep it in its place, and the attention may be wholly absorbed by the

notes and the fingering with the left hand. The simultaneous combination of movements is thus in the first

instance conditioned by the facility with which in us, alongside of intellectual processes, processes of

This brings us by a very natural transition to the ethical implications of the law of habit. They are numerous

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

enforced the principle that our organs grow to the way in which they have been exercised, and dwelt upon its

consequences, that his book almost deserves to be called a work of edification, on this account alone. We

"Habit a second nature! Habit is ten times nature," the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed; and the

degree to which this is true no one can probably appreciate as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself.

The daily drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man completely over again, as to most of the

"There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a

discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, 'Attention!' whereupon the man instantly

brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its

Riderless cavalryhorses, at many a battle, have been seen to come together and go through their customary

evolutions at the sound of the buglecall. Most trained domestic animals, dogs and oxen, and omnibus and

car horses, seem to be machines almost pure and simple, undoubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to

minute the duties they have been taught, and giving no sign that the possibility of an alternative ever suggests

itself to their mind. Men grown old in prison have asked to be readmitted after being once set free. In a

railroad accident to a travelling menagerie in the United States some time in 1884, a tiger, whose cage had

broken open, is said to have emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much bewildered by his new

Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps

us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the

poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up

to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deckhand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his

darkness, and nails the countryman to his logcabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it

protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the

battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees,

because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social

strata from mixing. Already at the age of twentyfive you see the professional mannerism settling down on

the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counselloratlaw.

You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the

ways of the 'shop,' in a word, from which the man can byandby no more escape than his coatsleeve can

suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that

in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the formation of intellectual and professional

habits, the period below twenty is more important still for the fixing of personal habits, properly so called,

such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address. Hardly ever is a language learned after

twenty spoken without a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth transferred to the society of his betters

unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly

ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he even learn to dress like a

gentlemanborn. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest 'swell,' but he simply

cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this

year as he was the last; and how his betterbred acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be for

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to

fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make

automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing

into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. The more of the

details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers

of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in

whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup,

the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express

volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which

ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily

duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.

In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some admirable practical remarks laid down. Two

great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off

of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.

Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reenforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously

in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public

pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new

beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might;

and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all.

The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.

Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes

more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the

"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the

presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary,

above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of

many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers

that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to

enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental

The need of securing success at the outset is imperative. Failure at first is apt to dampen the energy of all

future attempts, whereas past experience of success nerves one to future vigor. Goethe says to a man who

consulted him about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers: "Ach! you need only blow on your hands!"

And the remark illustrates the effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habitually successful career. Prof.

Baumann, from whom I borrow the anecdote,[17] says that the collapse of barbarian nations when Europeans

come among them is due to their despair of ever succeeding as the newcomers do in the larger tasks of life.

The question of 'taperingoff,' in abandoning such habits as drink and opiumindulgence, comes in here, and

is a question about which experts differ within certain limits, and in regard to what may be best for an

individual case. In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree that abrupt acquisition of the new habit

is the best way, if there be a real possibility of carrying it out. We must be careful not to give the will so stiff

a task as to insure its defeat at the very outset; but, provided one can stand it, a sharp period of suffering, and

then a free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in simply

changing one's hours of rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be never

"One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow

path, before one can begin 'to make one's self over again.' He who every day makes a fresh resolve is like one

who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to leap, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Without unbroken

advance there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces possible, and to make this possible, and

to exercise us and habituate us in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular work."[18]

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every

resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits

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

effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain. As the author last quoted

"The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes the fulcrum upon which the lever can rest,

by means of which the moral will may multiply its strength, and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid ground

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be,

if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely

unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. An this is an obvious

consequence of the principles we have laid down. A 'character,' as J.S. Mill says, 'is a completely fashioned

will'; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt

and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively

ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the

brain 'grows' to their use. Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical

fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from

taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the

nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but

who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to

follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is

the classical example of what I mean. But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glowing for an

abstractly formulated Good, he practically ignores some actual case, among the squalid 'other particulars' of

which that same Good lurks disguised, treads straight on Rousseau's path. All Goods are disguised by the

vulgarity of their concomitants, in this workaday world; but woe to him who can only recognize them

when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of excessive novelreading and theatregoing

will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the

play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere

happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither

performers themselves nor musically gifted enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a

relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without

prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up. The remedy would be, never to

suffer one's self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in some active way.[19] Let

the expression be the least thing in the world speaking genially to one's aunt, or giving up one's seat in a

These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of

discharge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain. Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get

into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before

we know it the effortmaking capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention,

presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are, as we shall see later, but two names for the

same psychic fact. To what brainprocesses they correspond we do not know. The strongest reason for

believing that they do depend on brainprocesses at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that

they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law. As a final practical maxim,

relative to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in

you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary

points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when

the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of

this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the

time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his

salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention,

energetic volition, and selfdenial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks

around him, and when his softer fellowmortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be

endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by

habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will

become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of

vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for

every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time!' Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may

not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nervecells and fibres the molecules are

counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we

ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As

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

authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let

no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep

faithfully busy each hour of the workingday, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with

perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his

generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently, between all the details of his business, the

power of judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never

pass away. Young people should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably engendered

more discouragement and faintheartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put

Footnotes [1] This chapter has already appeared in the Popular Science Monthly for February 1887.

[2] In the sense above explained, which applies to inner structure as well as to outer form.

[4] Some paths, to be sure, are banked up by bodies moving through them under too great pressure, and made

[5] We cannot say the will, for, though many, perhaps most, human habits were once voluntary actions, no

action, as we shall see in a later chapter, can be primarily such. While an habitual action may once have been

voluntary, the voluntary action must before that, at least once, have been impulsive or reflex. It is this very

[6] Those who desire a more definite formulation may consult J. Fiske's 'Cosmic Philosophy,' vol. II. pp.

142146 and Spencer's 'Principles of Biology,' sections 302 and 303, and the part entitled 'Physical Synthesis'

of his 'Principles of Psychology.' Mr. Spencer there tries, not only to show how new actions may arise in

nervous systems and form new reflex arcs therein, but even how nervous tissue may actually be born by the

passage of new waves of isometric transformation through an originally indifferent mass. I cannot help

thinking that Mr. Spencer's data, under a great show of precision, conceal vagueness and improbability, and

[8] [See, later, Masius in Van Benedens' and Van Bambeke's 'Archives de Biologie,' vol. I (Li�ge, 1880).

[9] G. H. Schneider: 'Der menschliche Wille' (1882), pp. 417419 (freely translated). For the drainsimile,

[12] Von Hartmann devotes a chapter of his 'Philosophy of the Unconscious' (English translation, vol. I. p.

[15] 'Der menschliche Wille,' p. 439. The last sentence is rather freely translated the sense is unaltered.

[17] See the admirable passage about success at the outset, in his Handbuch der Moral (1878), pp. 3843.

[19] See for remarks on this subject a readable article by Miss V. Scudder on 'Musical Devotees and Morals,'

in the Andover Review for January 1887. Classics in the History of Psychology An internet resource

developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario (Return to index)

In describing the functions of the hemispheres a short way back, we used language derived from both the

bodily and the mental life, saying now that the animal made indeterminate and unforeseeable reactions, and

anon that he was swayed by considerations of future good and evil; treating his hemispheres sometimes as the

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

addition to his reflex machinery. This sort of vacillation in the point of view is a fatal incident of all ordinary

talk about these questions; but I must now settle my scores with those readers to whom I already dropped a

word in passing (see page 24, note) and who have probably been dissatisfied with my conduct ever since.

Suppose we restrict our view to facts of one and the same plane, and let that be the bodily plane: cannot all

the outward phenomena of intelligence still be exhaustively described? Those mental images, those

'considerations,' whereof we spoke, presumably they do not arise without neural processes arising

simultaneously with them, and presumably each consideration corresponds to a process sui generis, and

unlike all the rest. In other words, however numerous and delicately differentiated the train of ideas may be,

the train of brainevents that runs alongside of it must in both respects be exactly its match, and we must

postulate a neural machinery that offers a living counterpart for every shading, however fine, of the history of

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

must be quite as extreme, otherwise we should have to admit that there may be mental events to which no

brainevents correspond. But such an admission as this the physiologist is reluctant to make. It would violate

all his beliefs. 'No psychosis without neurosis,' is one form which the principle of continuity takes in his

But this principle forces the physiologist to make still another step. If neural action is as complicated as mind;

and if in the sympathetic system and lower spinal cord we see what, so far as we know, is unconscious neural

action executing deeds that to all outward intent may be called intelligent; what is there to hinder us from

supposing that even where we know consciousness to be there, the still more complicated neural action which

we believe to be its inseparable companion is alone and of itself the real agent of whatever intelligent deeds

may appear? "As actions of a certain degree of complexity are brought about by mere mechanism, why may

not actions of a still greater degree of complexity be the result of a more refined mechanism?" The

conception of reflex action is surely one of the best conquests of physiological theory; why not be radical

with it? Why not say that just as the spinal cord is a machine with few reflexes, so the hemispheres are a

machine with many, and that that is all the difference? The principle of continuity would press us to accept

But what on this view could be the function of the consciousness itself? Mechanical function it would have

none. The senseorgans would awaken the braincells; these would awaken each other in rational and

orderly sequence, until the time for action came; and then the last brainvibration would discharge downward

into the motor tracts. But this would be a quite autonomous chain of occurrences, and whatever mind went

with it would be there only as an 'epiphenomenon,' an inert spectator, a sort of 'foam, aura, or melody' as Mr.

Hodgson says, whose opposition or whose furtherance would be alike powerless over the occurrences

themselves. When talking, some time ago, we ought not, accordingly, as physiologists, to have said anything

about 'considerations' as guiding the animal. We ought to have said 'paths left in the hemispherical cortex by

Now so simple and attractive is this conception from the consistently physiological point of view, that it is

quite wonderful to see how late it was stumbled on in philosophy, and how few people, even when it has been

explained to them, fully and easily realize its import. Much of the polemic writing against it is by men who

have as yet failed to take it into their imaginations. Since this has been the case, it seems worth while to

devote a few more words to making it plausible, before criticising it ourselves.

To Descartes belongs the credit of having first been bold enough to conceive of a completely selfsufficing

nervous mechanism which should be able to perform complicated and apparently intelligent acts. By a

singularly arbitrary restriction, however, Descartes stopped short at man, and while contending that in beasts

the nervous machinery was all, he held that the higher acts of man were the result of the agency of his

rational soul. The opinion that beasts have no consciousness at all was of course too paradoxical to maintain

itself long as anything more than a curious item in the history of philosophy. And with its abandonment the

very notion that the nervous system per se might work the work of intelligence, which was an integral,

though detachable part of the whole theory, seemed also to slip out of men's conception, until, in this century,

the elaboration of the doctrine of reflex action made it possible and natural that it should again arise. But it

was not till 1870, I believe, that Mr. Hodgson made the decisive step, by saying that feelings, no matter how

intensely they may be present, can have no causal efficacy whatever, and comparing them to the colors laid

on the surface of a mosaic, of which the events in the nervous system are represented by the stones.[1]

Obviously the stones are held in place by each other and not by the several colors which they support.

About the same time Mr. Spalding, and a little later Messrs. Huxley and Clifford, gave great publicity to an

identical doctrine, though in their case it was backed by less refined metaphysical considerations.[2]

A few sentences from Huxley and Clifford may be subjoined to make the matter entirely clear. Professor

"The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral

product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the

steamwhistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence on its machinery.

Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes...

The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the

sound which the bell gives out when it is struck... Thus far I have strictly confined myself to the automatism

of brutes... It is quite true that, to the best of my judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds

equally good of men; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, as in them, are immediately caused

by molecular changes of the brainsubstance. It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is no proof that

any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of the matter of the organism. If these

positions are well based, it follows that our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the

changes which take place automatically in the organism; and that, to take an extreme illustration, the feeling

we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the

"All the evidence that we have goes to show that the physical world gets along entirely by itself, according to

practically universal rules.... The train of physical facts between the stimulus sent into the eye, or to any one

of our senses, and the exertion which follows it, and the train of physical facts which goes on in the brain,

even when there is no stimulus and no exertion, these are perfectly complete physical trains, and every step

is fully accounted for by mechanical conditions.... The two things are on utterly different platforms the

physical facts go along by themselves, and the mental facts go along by themselves. There is a parallelism

between them, but there is no interference of one with the other. Again, if anybody says that the will

influences matter, the statement is not untrue, but it is nonsense. Such an assertion belongs to the crude

materialism of the savage. The only thing which influences matter is the position of surrounding matter or the

motion of surrounding matter.... The assertion that another man's volition, a feeling in his consciousness that I

cannot perceive, is part of the train of physical facts which I may perceive, this is neither true non untrue,

but nonsense; it is a combination of words whose corresponding ideas will not go together.... Sometimes one

series is known better, and sometimes the other; so that in telling a story we speak sometimes of mental and

sometimes of material facts. A feeling of chill made a man run; strictly speaking, the nervous disturbance

which coexisted with that feeling of chill made him run, if we want to talk about material facts; or the feeling

of chill produced the form of subconsciousness which coexists with the motion of legs, if we want to talk

about mental facts....When, therefore, we ask: 'What is the physical link between the ingoing message from

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

much right to be amused as if we had asked our friend with the picture what pigment was used in painting the

cannon in the foreground, and received the answer, 'Wrought iron.' It will be found excellent practice in the

mental operations required by this doctrine to imagine a train, the fore part of which is an engine and three

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

bond between the two parts being made up out of the sentiments of amity subsisting between the stoker and

To comprehend completely the consequences of the dogma so confidently enunciated, one should

unflinchingly apply it to the most complicated examples. The movements of our tongues and pens, the

flashings of our eyes in conversation, are of course events of a material order, and as such their causal

antecedents must be exclusively material. If we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shakespeare, and as

thoroughly all his environing conditions, we should be able to show why at a certain period of his life his

hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper those crabbed little black marks which we for shortness' sake

call the manuscript of Hamlet. We should understand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein, and

we should understand all this without in the slightest degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in

Shakespeare's mind. The words and sentences would be taken, not as signs of anything beyond themselves,

but as little outward facts, pure and simple. In like manner we might exhaustively write the biography of

those two hundred pounds, more or less, of warmish albuminoid matter called Martin Luther, without ever

But, on the other hand, nothing in all this could prevent us from giving an equally complete account of either

Luther's or Shakespeare's spiritual history, an account in which every gleam of thought and emotion should

find its place. The mindhistory would run alongside of the bodyhistory of each man, and each point in the

one would correspond to, but not react upon, a point in the other. So the melody floats from the harpstring,

but neither checks nor quickens its vibrations; so the shadow runs alongside the pedestrian, but in no way

Another inference, apparently more paradoxical still, needs to be made, though, as far as I am aware, Dr.

Hodgson is the only writer who has explicitly drawn it. That inference is that feelings, not causing

nerveactions, cannot even cause each other. To ordinary common sense, felt pain is, as such, not only the

cause of outward tears and cries, but also the cause of such inward events as sorrow, compunction, desire, or

inventive thought. So the consciousness of good news is the direct producer of the feeling of joy, the

awareness of premises that of the belief in conclusions. But according to the automatontheory, each of the

feelings mentioned is only the correlate of some nervemovement whose cause lay wholly in a previous

nervemovement. The first nervemovement called up the second; whatever feeling was attached to the

second consequently found itself following upon the feeling that was attached to the first. If, for example,

good news was the consciousness correlated with the first movement, then joy turned out to be the correlate

in consciousness of the second. But all the while the items of the nerve series were the only ones in causal

continuity; the items of the conscious series, however inwardly rational their sequence, were simply

The 'conscious automatontheory,' as this conception is generally called, is thus a radical and simple

conception of the manner in which certain facts may possibly occur. But between conception and belief,

proof ought to lie. And when we ask, 'What proves that all this is more than a mere conception of the

possible?' it is not easy to get a sufficient reply. If we start from the frog's spinal cord and reason by

continuity, saying, as that acts so intelligently, though unconscious, so the higher centres, though conscious,

may have the intelligence they show quite as mechanically based; we are immediately met by the exact

counterargument from continuity, an argument actually urged by such writers as Pfl�ger and Lewes, which

starts from the acts of the hemispheres, and says: "As these owe their intelligence to the consciousness which

we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence

of a consciousness lower in degree." All arguments from continuity work in two ways, you can either level up

or level down by their means; and it is clear that such arguments as these can eat each other up to all eternity.

There remains a sort of philosophic faith, bred like most faiths from an aesthetic demand. Mental and

physical events are, on all hands, admitted to present the strongest contrast in the entire field of being. The

chasm which yawns between them is less easily bridged over by the mind than any interval we know. Why,

then, not call it an absolute chasm, and say not only that the two worlds are different, but that they are

independent? This gives us the comfort of all simple and absolute formulas, and it makes each chain

homogeneous to our consideration. When talking of nervous tremors and bodily actions, we may feel secure

against intrusion from an irrelevant mental world. When, on the other hand, we speak of feelings, we may

with equal consistency use terms always of one denomination, and never be annoyed by what Aristotle calls

'slipping into another kind.' The desire on the part of men educated in laboratories not to have their physical

reasonings mixed up with such incommensurable factors as feelings is certainly very strong. I have heard a

most intelligent biologist say: "It is high time for scientific men to protest against the recognition of any such

thing as consciousness in a scientific investigation." In a word, feeling constitutes the 'unscientific' half of

existence, and any one who enjoys calling himself a 'scientist' will be too happy to purchase an untrammelled

homogeneity of terms in the studies of his predilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualism which, in the

same breath that it allows to mind an independent status of being, banishes it to a limbo of causal inertness,

Over and above this great postulate that matters must be kept simple, there is, it must be confessed, still

another highly abstract reason for denying causal efficacity to our feelings. We can form no positive image of

the modus operandi of a volition or other thought affecting the cerebral molecules.

"Let us try to imagine an idea, say of food, producing a movement, say of carrying food to the mouth.... What

is the method of its action? Does it assist the decomposition of the molecules of the gray matter, or does it

retard the process, or does it alter the direction in which the shocks are distributed? Let us imagine the

molecules of the gray matter combined in such a way that they will fall into simpler combinations on the

impact of an incident force. Now suppose the incident force, in the shape of a shock from some other centre,

to impinge upon these molecules. By hypothesis it will decompose them, and they will fall into the simpler

combination. How is the idea of food to prevent this decomposition? Manifestly it can do so only by

increasing the force which binds the molecules together. Good! Try to imagine the idea of a beefsteak

binding two molecules together. It is impossible. Equally impossible is it to imagine a similar idea loosening

This passage from an exceedingly clever writer expresses admirably the difficulty to which I allude.

Combined with a strong sense of the 'chasm' between the two worlds, and with a lively faith in reflex

machinery, the sense of this difficulty can hardly fail to make one turn consciousness out of the door as a

superfluity so far as one's explanations go. One may bow her out politely, allow her to remain as a

"Having thoroughly recognized the fathomless abyss that separates mind from matter, and having so blended

the very notion into his very nature that there is no chance of his ever forgetting it or failing to saturate with it

all his meditations, the student of psychology has next to appreciate the association between these two orders

of phenomena.... They are associated in a manner so intimate that some of the greatest thinkers consider them

different aspects of the same process.... When the rearrangement of molecules takes place in the higher

regions of the brain, a change of consciousness simultaneously occurs.... The change of consciousness never

takes place without the change in the brain; the change in the brain never... without the change in

consciousness. But why the two occur together, or what the link is which connects them, we do not know,

and most authorities believe that we never shall and never can know. Having firmly and tenaciously grasped

these two notions, of the absolute separateness of mind and matter, and of the invariable concomitance of a

mental change with a bodily change, the student will enter on the study of psychology with half his

Half his difficulties ignored, I should prefer to say. For this 'concomitance' in the midst of 'absolute

separateness' is an utterly irrational notion. It is to my mind quite inconceivable that consciousness should

have nothing to do with a business which it so faithfully attends. And the question, 'What has it to do?' is one

which psychology has no right to 'surmount,' for it is her plain duty to consider it. The fact is that the whole

question of interaction and influence between things is a metaphysical question, and cannot be discussed at

all by those who are unwilling to go into matters thoroughly. It is truly enough hard to imagine the 'idea of a

beefsteak binding two molecules together;' but since Hume's time it has been equally hard to imagine

anything binding them together. The whole notion of 'binding' is a mystery, the first step towards the solution

of which is to clear scholastic rubbish out of the way. Popular science talks of 'forces,' 'attractions' or

'affinities' as binding the molecules; but clear science, though she may use such words to abbreviate

discourse, has no use for the conceptions, and is satisfied when she can express in simple 'laws' the bare

spacerelations of the molecules as functions of each other and of time. To the more curiously inquiring

mind, however, this simplified expression of the bare facts is not enough; there must be a 'reason' for them,

and something must 'determine' the laws. And when one seriously sits down to consider what sort of a thing

one means when one asks for a 'reason,' one is led so far afield, so far away from popular science and its

scholasticism, as to see that even such a fact as the existence or nonexistence in the universe of 'the idea of a

beefsteak' may not be wholly indifferent to other facts in the same universe, and in particular may have

something to do with determining the distance at which two molecules in that universe shall lie apart. If this

is so, then commonsense, though the intimate nature of causality and of the connection of things in the

universe lies beyond her pitifully bounded horizon, has the root and gist of the truth in her hands when she

obstinately holds to it that feelings and ideas are causes. However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy

may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists

are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical

criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only,

as the automatists do, and to say that that causation is unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes

about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born. One cannot thus blow hot and

cold. One must be impartially naif or impartially critical. If the latter, the reconstruction must be

thoroughgoing or 'metaphysical,' and will probably preserve the commonsense view that ideas are forces,

in some translated form. But Psychology is a mere natural science, accepting certain terms uncritically as her

data, and stopping short of metaphysical reconstruction. Like physics, she must be na�ve; and if she finds that

in her very peculiar field of study ideas seem to be causes, she had better continue to talk of them as such.

She gains absolutely nothing by a breach with commonsense in this matter, and she loses, to say the least,

all naturalness of speech. If feelings are causes, of course their effects must be furtherances and checkings of

internal cerebral motions, of which in themselves we are entirely without knowledge. It is probable that for

years to come we shall have to infer what happens in the brain either from our feelings or from motor effects

which we observe. The organ will be for us a sort of vat in which feelings and motions somehow go on

stewing together, and in which innumerable things happen of which we catch but the statistical result. Why,

under these circumstances, we should be asked to forswear the language of our childhood I cannot well

imagine, especially as it is perfectly compatible with the language of physiology. The feelings can produce

nothing absolutely new, they can only reinforce and inhibit reflex currents, and the original organization by

physiological forces of these in paths must always be the groundwork of the psychological scheme.

My conclusion is that to urge the automatontheory upon us, as it is now urged, on purely a priori and

quasimetaphysical grounds, is an unwarrantable impertinence in the present state of psychology.

But there are much more positive reasons than this why we ought to continue to talk in psychology as if

consciousness had causal efficacy. The particulars of the distribution of consciousness, so far as we know

It is very generally admitted, though the point would be hard to prove, that consciousness grows the more

complex and intense the higher we rise in the animal kingdom. That of a man must exceed that of an oyster.

From this point of view it seems an organ, superadded to the other organs which maintain the animal in the

struggle for existence; and the presumption of course is that is helps him in some way in the struggle, just as

they do. But it cannot help him without being in some way efficacious and influencing the course of his

bodily history. If now it could be shown in what way consciousness might help him, and if, moreover, the

defects of his other organs (where consciousness is most developed) are such as to make them need just the

kind of help that consciousness would bring provided it were efficacious; why, then the plausible infer ence

would be that it came just because of its efficacy in other words, its efficacy would be inductively proved.

Now the study of the phenomena of consciousness which we shall make throughout the rest of this book will

show us that consciousness is at all times primarily a selecting agency.[5] Whether we take it in the lowest

sphere of sense, or in the highest of intellection, we find it always doing one thing, choosing one out of

several of the materials so presented to its notice, emphasizing and accentuating that and suppressing as far as

possible all the rest. The item emphasized is always in close connection with some interest felt by

But what are now the defects of the nervous system in those animals whose consciousness seems most highly

developed? Chief among them must be instability. The cerebral hemispheres are the characteristically 'high'

nervecentres, and we saw how indeterminate and unforeseeable their performances were in comparison with

those of the basal ganglia and the cord. But this very vagueness constitutes their advantage. They allow their

possessor to adapt his conduct to the minutest alterations in the environing circumstances, any one of which

may be for him a sign, suggesting distant motives more powerful than any present solicitations of sense. It

seems as if certain mechanical conclusions should be drawn from this state of things. An organ swayed by

slight impressions is an organ whose natural state is one of unstable equilibrium. We may imagine the various

lines of discharge in the cerebrum to be almost on a par in point of permeability what discharge a given

small impression will produce may be called accidental, in the sense in which we say it is a matter of accident

whether a raindrop falling on a mountain ridge descend the eastern or the western slope. It is in this sense

that we may call it a matter of accident whether a child be a boy or a girl. The ovum is so unstable a body that

certain causes too minute for our apprehension may at a certain moment tip it one way or the other. The

natural law of an organ constituted after this fashion can be nothing but a law of caprice. I do not see how one

could reasonably expect from it any certain pursuance of useful lines of reaction, such as the few and fatally

determined performances of the lower centres constitute within their narrow sphere. The dilemma in regard to

the nervous system seems, in short, to be of the following kind. We may construct one which will react

infallibly and certainly, but it will then be capable of reacting to very few changes in the environment it

will fail to be adapted to all the rest. We may, on the other hand, construct a nervous system potentially

adapted to respond to an infinite variety of minute features in the situation; but its fallibility will then be as

great as its elaboration. We can never be sure that its equilibrium will be upset in the appropriate direction. In

short, a high brain may do many things, and may do each of them at a very slight hint. But its hairtrigger

organization makes of it a happygolucky, hitormiss affair. It is as likely to do the crazy as the sane thing

at any given moment. A low brain does few things, and in doing them perfectly forfeits all other use. The

performances of a high brain are like dice thrown forever on a table. Unless they be loaded, what chance is

All this is said of the brain as a physical machine pure and simple. Can consciousness increase its efficiency

Loading its dice would mean bringing a more or less constant pressure to bear in favor of those of its

performances which make for the most permanent interests of the brain's owner; it would mean a constant

Well, just such pressure and such inhibition are what consciousness seems to be exerting all the while. And

the interests in whose favor it seems to exert them are its interests and its alone, interests which it creates, and

which, but for it, would have no status in the realm of being whatever. We talk, it is true, when we are

darwinizing, as if the mere body that owns the brain had interests; we speak about the utilities of its various

organs and how they help or hinder the body's survival; and we treat the survival as if it were an absolute end,

existing as such in the physical world, a sort of actual shouldbe, presiding over the animal and judging his

reactions, quite apart from the presence of any commenting intelligence outside. We forget that in the

absence of some such superadded commenting intelligence (whether it be that of the animal itself, or only

ours or Mr. Darwin's), the reactions cannot be properly talked of as 'useful' or 'hurtful' at all. Considered

merely physically, all that can be said of them is that if they occur in a certain way survival will as a matter of

fact prove to be their incidental consequence. The organs themselves, and all the rest of the physical world,

will, however, all the time be quite indifferent to this consequence, and would quite as cheerfully, the

circumstances changed, compass the animal's destruction. In a word, survival can enter into a purely

physiological discussion only as an hypothesis made by an onlooker about the future. But the moment you

bring a consciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer is it, "if survival is to

occur, then so and so must brain and other organs work." It has now become an imperative decree: "Survival

shall occur, and therefore organs must so work!" Real ends appear for the first time now upon the world's

stage. The conception of consciousness as a purely cognitive form of being, which is the pet way of regarding

it in many idealisticmodern as well as ancient schools, is thoroughly antipsychological, as the remainder of

this book will show. Every actually existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate to be a fighter for ends,

of which many, but for its presence, would not be ends at all. Its powers of cognition are mainly subservient

Now let consciousness only be what it seems to itself, and it will help an instable brain to compass its proper

ends. The movements of the brain per se yield the means of attaining these ends mechanically, but only out of

a lot of other ends, if so they may be called, which are not the proper ones of the animal, but often quite

opposed. The brain is an instrument of possibilities, but of no certainties. But the consciousness, with its own

ends present to it, and knowing also well which possibilities lead thereto and which away, will, if endowed

with causal efficacy, reinforce the favorable possibilities and repress the unfavorable or indifferent ones. The

nervecurrents, coursing through the cells and fibres, must in this case be supposed strengthened by the fact

of their awaking one consciousness and dampening by awakening another. How such reaction of the

consciousness upon the currents may occur must remain at present unsolved: it is enough for my purpose to

have shown that it may not uselessly exist, and that the matter is less simple than the brainautomatists hold.

All the facts of the natural history of consciousness lend color to this view. Consciousness, for example, is

only intense when nerveprocesses are hesitant. In rapid, automatic, habitual action it sinks to a minimum.

Nothing could be more fitting than this, if consciousness have the teleological function we suppose; nothing

more meaningless, if not. Habitual actions are certain, and being in no danger of going astray from their end,

need no extraneous help. In hesitant action, there seem many alternative possibilities of final nervous

discharge. The feeling awakened by the nascent excitement of each alternative nervetract seems by its

attractive or repulsive quality to determine whether the excitement shall abort or shall become complete.

Where indecision is great, as before a dangerous leap, consciousness is agonizingly intense. Feeling, from

this point of view, may be likened to a crosssection of the chain of nervous discharge, ascertaining the links

already laid down, and groping among the fresh ends presented to it for the one which seems best to fit the

The phenomena of 'vicarious function' which we studied in Chapter II seems to form another bit of

circumstantial evidence. A machine in working order acts fatally in one way. Our consciousness calls this the

right way. Take out a valve, throw a wheel out of gear or bend a pivot, and it becomes a different machine,

acting just as fatally in another way which we call the wrong way. But the machine itself knows nothing of

wrong or right: matter has no ideals to pursue. A locomotive will carry its train through an open drawbridge

A brain with part of it scooped out is virtually a new machine, and during the first days after the operation

functions in a thoroughly abnormal manner. As a matter of fact, however its performances become from day

to day more normal, until at last a practised eye may be needed to suspect anything wrong. Some of the

restoration is undoubtedly due to 'inhibitions' passing away. But if the consciousness which goes with the rest

of the brain, be there not only in order to take cognizance of each functional error, but also to exert an

efficient pressure to check it if it be a sin of commission, and to lend a strengthening hand if it be a weakness

or sin of omission, nothing seems more natural than that the remaining parts, assisted in this way, should by

virtue of the principle of habit grow back to the old teleological modes of exercise for which they were at first

incapacitated. Nothing, on the contrary, seems at first sight more unnatural than that they should vicariously

take up the duties of a part now lost without those duties as such exerting any persuasive or coercive force. At

There is yet another set of facts which seem explicable on the supposition that consciousness has causal

efficacy. It is a wellknown fact that pleasures are generally associated with beneficial, pains with

detrimental, experiences. All the fundamental vital processes illustrate this law. Starvation, suffocation,

privation of food, drink and sleep, work when exhausted, burns, wounds, inflammation, the effects of poison,

are as disagreeable as filling the hungry stomach, enjoying rest and sleep after fatigue, exercise after rest, and

a sound skin and unbroken bones at all times, are pleasant. Mr. Spencer and others have suggested that these

coincidences are due, not to any preestablished harmony, but to the mere action of natural selection which

would certainly kill off in the longrun any breed of creatures to whom the fundamentally noxious

experience seemed enjoyable. An animal that should take pleasure in a feel ling of suffocation would, if that

pleasure were efficacious enough to make him immerse his head in water, enjoy a longevity of four or five

minutes. But if pleasures and pains have no efficacy, one does not see (without some such � priori rational

harmony as would be scouted by the 'scientific' champions of the automatontheory) why the most noxious

acts, such as burning, might not give thrills of delight, and the most necessary ones, such as breathing, cause

agony. The exceptions to the law are, it is true, numerous, but relate to experiences that are either not vital or

not universal. Drunkenness, for instance, which though noxious, is to many persons delightful, is a very

exceptional experience. But, as the excellent physiologist Fick remarks, if all rivers and springs ran alcohol

instead of water, either all men would now be born to hate it or our nerves would have been selected so as to

drink it with impunity. The only considerable attempt, in fact, that has been made to explain the distribution

of our feelings is that of Mr. Grant Allen in his suggestive little work Physiological Aesthetics; and his

reasoning is based exclusively on that causal efficacy of pleasures and pains which the 'doubleaspect'

Thus, them, from every point of view the circumstantial evidence against that theory is strong. A priori

analysis of both brainaction and conscious action shows us that if the latter were efficacious it would, by its

selective emphasis, make amends for the indeterminateness of the former; whilst the study a posteriori of the

distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of

steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself. The conclusion that it is useful is, after all

this, quite justifiable. But, if it is useful, it must be so through its causal efficaciousness, and the

automatontheory must succumb to the theory of commonsense. I, at any rate (pending metaphysical

reconstructions not yet successfully achieved), shall have no hesitation in using the language of

[2] The present writer recalls how in 1869, when still a medical student, he began to write an essay showing

how almost every one who speculated about brainprocesses illicitly interpolated into his account of them

links derived from the entirely heterogeneous universe of Feeling. Spencer, Hodgson (in his Time and

Space), Maudsley, Lockhart Clarke, Bain, Dr. Carpenter, and other authors were cited as having been guilty

of the confusion. The writing was soon stopped because he perceived that the view which he was upholding

against these authors was a pure conception, with no proofs to be adduced of its reality. Later it seemed to

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The reader who found himself swamped with too much metaphysics in the last chapter will have a still worse

time of it in this one, which is exclusively metaphysical. Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually

obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us,

but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science

without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve. When these assumptions have once

established themselves (as they have a way of doing in our very descriptions of the phenomenal facts) it is

almost impossible to get rid of them afterwards or to make any one see that they are not essential features of

the subject. The only way to prevent this disaster is to scrutinize them beforehand and make them give an

articulate account of themselves before letting them pass. One of the obscurest of the assumptions of which I

speak is the assumption that our mental states are composite in structure, made up of smaller states conjoined.

This hypothesis has outward advantages which make it almost irresistibly attractive to the intellect, and yet it

is inwardly quite unintelligible. Of its unintelligibility, however, half the writers on psychology seem

unaware. As our own aim is to understand if possible, I make no apology for singling out this particular

notion for very explicit treatment before taking up the descriptive part of our work. The theory of 'mindstuff'

is the theory that our mental states are compounds, expressed in its most radical form.

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY DEMANDS A MINDDUST. In a general theory of evolution the

inorganic comes first, then the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life, then forms of life that possess

mentality, and finally those like ourselves that possess it in a high degree. As long as we keep to the

consideration of purely outward facts, even the most complicated facts of biology, our task as evolutionists is

comparatively easy. We are dealing all the time with matter and its aggregations and separations; and

although our treatment must perforce be hypothetical, this does not prevent it from being continuous. The

point which as evolutionists we are bound to hold fast to is that all the new forms of being that make their

appearance are really nothing more than results of the redistribution of the original and unchanging materials.

The selfsame atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in

peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of the brains, if understood, would be simply the

account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed. In this story no new natures, no factors not

But with the dawn of consciousness an entirely new nature seems to slip in, something whereof the potency

The enemies of evolution have been quick to pounce upon this undeniable discontinuity in the data of the

world, and many of them, from the failure of evolutionary explanations at this point, have inferred their

general incapacity all along the line. Every one admits the entire incommensurability of feeling as such with

material motion as such. "A motion became a feeling!" no phrase that our lips can frame is so devoid of

apprehensible meaning. Accordingly, even the vaguest of evolutionary enthusiasts, when deliberately

comparing material with mental facts, have been as forward as any one else to emphasize the 'chasm' between

"Can the oscillations of a molecule," says Mr. Spencer, "be represented side by side with a nervous shock [he

means a mental shock], and the two be recognized as one? No effort enables us to assimilate them. That a

unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit of motion becomes more than ever manifest when we bring

"Suppose it to have become quite clear that a shock in consciousness and a molecular motion are the

subjective and objective faces of the same thing; we continue utterly incapable of uniting the two, so as to

In other words, incapable of perceiving in them any common character. So Tyndall, in that lucky paragraph

"The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable.

Granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; we do not

possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a

"We can trace the development of a nervous system and correlate with it the parallel phenomena of sensation

and thought. We see with undoubting certainty that they go hand in hand. But we try to soar in a vacuum the

moment we seek to comprehend the connection between them... There is no fusion possible between the two

classes of facts no motor energy in the intellect of man to carry it without logical rupture from the one to

None the less easily, however, when the evolutionary afflatus is upon them, do the very same writers leap

over the breach whose flagrancy they are the foremost to announce, and talk as if mind grew out of body in a

continuous way. Mr. Spencer, looking back on his review of mental evolution, tells us how "in tracing up the

increase we found ourselves passing without break from the phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of

mental life." [5] And Mr. Tyndall, in the same Belfast Address from which we just quoted, delivers his other

"Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to make before you is that I prolong the vision

backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter which we, in our

ignorance and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with

opprobrium the promise and potency of every form and quality of life." [6] mental life included, as a matter

So strong a postulate is continuity! Now this book will tend to show that mental postulates are on the whole

to be respected. The demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true

prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn

of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature,

Merely to call the consciousness 'nascent' will not serve our turn.[7] It is true that the word signifies not yet

quite born, and so seems to form a sort of bridge between existence and nonentity. But that is a verbal

quibble. The fact is that discontinuity comes in if a new nature comes in at all. The quantity of the latter is

quite immaterial. The girl in 'Midshipman Easy' could not excuse the illegitimacy of her child by saying, 'it

was a very small one.' And Consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that

starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution.

If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of

things. Accordingly we find that the more clearsighted evolutionary philosophers are beginning to posit it

there. Each atom of the nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with

it; and, just as the material atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing themselves together, so the

mental atoms, by an analogous process of aggregation, have fused into those larger consciousnesses which

we know in ourselves and suppose to exist in our fellowanimals. Some such doctrine of atomistic hylozoism

as this is an indispensable part of a thoroughgoing philosophy of evolution. According to it there must be an

infinite number of degrees of conscious ness, following the degrees of complication and aggregation of the

primordial minddust. To prove the separate existence of these degrees of consciousness by indirect

evidence, since direct intuition of them is not to be had, becomes therefore the first duty of psychological

SOME ALLEGED PROOFS THAT MINDDUST EXISTS. Some of this duty we find already performed

by a number of philosophers who, though not interested at all in evolution, have nevertheless on independent

grounds convinced themselves of the existence of a vast amount of subconscious mental life. The criticism

of this general opinion and its grounds will have to be postponed for a while. At present let us merely deal

with the arguments assumed to prove aggregation of bits of mindstuff into distinctly sensible feelings. They

The German physiologist A. Fick, in 1862, was, so far as I know, the first to use them. He made experiments

on the discrimination of the feelings of warmth and of touch, when only a very small portion of the skin was

excited through a hole in a card, the surrounding parts being protected by the card. He found that under these

circumstances mistakes were frequently made by the patient,[8] and concluded that this must be because the

number of sensations from the elementary nervetips affected was too small to sum itself distinctly into

either of the qualities of feeling in question. He tried to show how a different manner of the summation might

" A feeling of temperatures," he says," arises when the intensities of the units of feeling are evenly gradated,

so that between two elements a and b no other unit can spatially intervene whose intensity is not also between

that of a and b. A feeling of contact perhaps arises when this condition is not fulfilled. Both kinds of feeling,

But it is obviously far clearer to interpret such a gradation of intensities as a brainfact than as a mindfact. If

in the brain a tract were first excited in one of the ways suggested by Prof. Fick, and then again in the other, it

might very well happen, for aught we can say to the contrary, that the psychic accompaniment in the one case

would be heat, and in the other pain. The pain and the heat would, however, not be composed of psychic

units, but would each be the direct result of one total brainprocess. So long as this latter interpretation

Later, both Spencer and Taine, independently of each other, took up the same line of thought. Mr. Spencer's

"Although the individual sensations and emotions, real or ideal, of which consciousness is built up, appear to

be severally simple, homogeneous, unanalyzable, or of inscrutable natures, yet they are not so. There is at

least one kind of feeling which, as ordinarily experienced, seems elementary, that is demonstrably not

elementary. And after resolving it into its proximate components, we can scarcely help suspecting that other

apparentlyelementary feelings are also compound, and may have proximate components like those which

"Musical sound is the name we give to this seemingly simple feeling which is clearly resolvable into simpler

feelings. Well known experiments prove that when equal blows or taps are made one after another at a rate

not exceeding some sixteen per second, the effect of each is perceived as a separate noise; but when the

rapidity with which the blows follow one another exceeds this, the noises are no longer identified in separate

states of consciousness, and there arises in place of them a continuous state of consciousness, called a tone. In

further increasing the rapidity of the blows, the tone undergoes the change of quality distinguished as rise in

pitch; and it continues to rise in pitch as the blows continue to increase in rapidity, until it reaches an

acuteness beyond which it is no longer appreciable as a tone. So that out of units of feeling of the same kind,

many feelings distinguishable from one another in quality result, according as the units are more or less

"This is not all. The inquiries of Professor Helmholtz have shown that when, along with one series of these

rapidlyrecurring noises, there is generated another series in which the noises are more rapid though not so

loud, the effect is a change in that quality known as its timbre. As various musical instruments show us, tones

which are alike in pitch and strength are distinguishable by their harshness or sweetness, their ringing or their

liquid characters; and all their specific peculiarities are proved to arise from the combination of one, two,

three, or more, supplementary series of recurrent noises with the chief series of recurrent noises. So that while

the unlikenesses of feeling known as differences of pitch in tones are due to differences of integration among

the recurrent noises of one series, the unlikenesses of feeling known as differences of timbre, are due to the

simultaneous integration with this series of other series having other degrees of integration. And thus an

enormous number of qualitativelycontrasted kinds of consciousness that seem severally elementary prove to

be composed of one simple kind of consciousness, combined and recombined with itself in multitudinous

"Can we stop short here? If the different sensations known as sounds are built out of a common unit, is it not

to be rationally inferred that so likewise are the different sensations known as tastes, and the different

sensations known as odors, and the different sensations known as colors? Nay, shall we not regard it as

probable that there is a unit common to all these stronglycontrasted classes of sensations? If the

unlikenesses among the sensations of each class may be due to unlikenesses among the modes of aggregation

of a unit of consciousness common to them all; so too may the much greater unlikenesses between the

sensations of each class and those of other classes. There may be a single primordial element of

consciousness, and the countless kinds of consciousness may be produced by the compounding of this

element with itself and the recompounding of its compounds with one another in higher and higher degrees;

"Have we any clue to this primordial element? I think we have. That simple mental impression which proves

to be the unit of composition of the sensation of musical tone, is allied to certain other simple mental

impressions differently originated. The subjective effect produced by a crack or noise that has no appreciable

duration is little else than a nervous shock. Though we distinguish such a nervous shock as belonging to what

we call sounds, yet it does not differ very much from nervous shocks of other kinds. An electric discharge

sent through the body causes a feeling akin to that which a sudden loud report causes. A strong unexpected

impression made through the eyes, as by a flash of lightning, similarly gives rise to a start or shock; and

though the feeling so named seems, like the electric shock, to have the body at large for its seat, and may

therefore be regarded as the correlative rather of the efferent than of the afferent disturbance yet on

remembering the mental change that results from the instantaneous transit of an object across the field of

vision, I think it may be perceived that the feeling accompanying the efferent disturbance is itself reduced

very nearly to the same form. The state of consciousness so generated is, in fact, comparable in quality to the

initial state of consciousness caused by a blow (distinguishing it from the pain or other feeling that

commences the instant after); which state of consciousness caused by a blow may be taken as the primitive

and typical form of the nervous shock. The fact that sudden brief disturbances thus set up by different stimuli

through different sets of nerves cause feelings scarcely distinguishable in quality will not appear strange

when we recollect that distinguishableness of feeling implies appreciable duration; and that when the duration

is greatly abridged, nothing more is known than that some mental change has occurred and ceased. To have a

sensation of redness, to know a tone as acute or grave, to be conscious of a taste as sweet, implies in each

case a considerable continuity of state. If the state does not last long enough to admit of its being

contemplated, it cannot be classed as of this or that kind; and becomes a momentary modification very

"It is possible, then may we not even say probable? that something of the same order as that which we

call nervous shock is the ultimate unit of consciousness, and that all the unlikenesses among our feelings

result from unlike modes of integration of this ultimate unit. I say of the same order, because there are

discernible differences among nervous shocks that are differently caused; and the primitive nervous shock

probably differs somewhat form each of them. And I say of the same order, for the further reason that while

we may ascribe to them a general likeness in nature, we must suppose a great unlikeness in degree. The

nervous shocks recognized as such are violent must be violent before they can be perceived amid the

procession of multitudinous vivid feelings suddenly interrupted by them. But the rapidlyrecurring nervous

shocks of which the different forms of feeling consist, we must assume to be of comparatively moderate, or

even of very slight intensity. Were our various sensations and emotions composed of rapidlyrecurring

shocks as strong as those ordinarily called shocks, they would be unbearable; indeed life would cease at once.

We must think of them rather as successive faint pulses of subjective change, each having the same quality as

REFUTATION OF THESE PROOFS. Convincing as this argument of Mr. Spencer's may appear on a first

reading, it is singular how weak it really is.[10] We do, it is true, when we study the connection between a

musical note and its outward cause, find the note simple and continuous while the cause is multiple and

discrete. Somewhere, then, there is a transformation, reduction, or fusion. The question is, Where in the

nerveworld or in the mindworld? Really we have no experimental proof by which to decide; and if decide

we must, analogy and a priori probability can alone guide us. Mr. Spencer assumes that the fusion must come

to pass in the mental world, and that the physical processes get through air and ear, auditory nerve and

medulla, lower brain and hemispheres, without their number being reduced. Figure 25, on the previous page,

Let the line a b represent the threshold of consciousness: then everything drawn below that line will

symbolize a physical process, everything above it will mean a fact of mind. Let the crosses stand for the

physical blows, the circles for the events in successively higher orders of nervecells, and the horizontal

marks for the facts of feeling. Spencer's argument implies that each order of cells transmits just as many

impulses as it receives to the cells above it; so that if the blows come at the rate of 20,000 in a second the

cortical cells discharge at the same rate, and one unit of feeling corresponds to each one of the 20,000

discharges. Then, and only then, does 'integration' occur, by the 20,000 units of feeling 'compounding with

themselves' into the 'continuous state of consciousness' represented by the short line at the top of the figure.

Now such an interpretation as this flies in the face of physical analogy, no less than of logical intelligibility.

A pendulum may be deflected by a single blow, and swing back. Will it swing back the more often the more

we multiply the blows? No; for it they rain upon the pendulum too fast, it will not swing at all but remain

deflected in a sensibly stationary state. In other words, increasing the cause numerically need not equally

increase numerically the effect. Blow through a tube: you get a certain musical note; and increasing the

blowing increases for a certain time the loudness of the note. Will this be true indefinitely? No; for when a

certain force is reached, the note, instead of growing louder, suddenly disappears and is replaced by its higher

octave. Turn on the gas slightly and light it: you get a tiny flame. Turn on more gas, and the breadth of the

flame increases. Will this relation increase indefinitely? No, again; for at a certain moment up shoots the

flame into a ragged streamer and begins to hiss. Send slowly through the nerve of a frog's gastrocnemius

muscle a succession of galvanic shocks: you get a succession of twitches. Increasing the number of shocks

does not increase the twitching; on the contrary, it stops it, and we have the muscle in the apparently

stationary state of contraction called tetanus. This last fact is the true analogue of what must happen between

the nervecell and the sensory fibre. It is certain that cells are more inert than fibres, and that rapid vibrations

in the latter can only arouse relatively simple processes or states in the former. The higher cells may have

even a slower rate of explosion than the lower, and so the twenty thousand supposed blows of the outer air

may be 'integrated' in the cortex into a very small number of celldischarges in a second. This other diagram

will serve to contrast this supposition with Spencer's. In Fig. 26 all 'integration' occurs below the threshold of

consciousness. The frequency of cellevents becomes more and more reduced as we approach the cells to

which feeling is most directly attached, until at last we come to a condition of things symbolized by the larger

ellipse, which may be taken to stand for some rather massive and slow process of tension and discharge in the

cortical centres, to which, as a whole, the feeling of musical tone symbolized by the line at the top of the

diagram simply and totally corresponds. It is as if a long file of men were to start one after the other to reach

a distant point. The road at first is good and they keep their original distance apart. Presently it is intersected

by bogs each worse than the last, so that the front men get so retarded that the hinder ones catch up with them

On this supposition there are no unperceived units of mindstuff preceding and composing the full

consciousness. The latter is itself an immediate psychic fact and bears an immediate relation to the neural

state which is its unconditional accompaniment. Did each neural shock give rise to its own psychic shock,

and the psychic shocks then combine, it would be impossible to understand why severing one part of the

central nervous system from another should break up the integrity of the consciousness. The cut has nothing

to do with the psychic world. The atoms of mindstuff ought to float off from the nervematter on either side

of it, and come together over it and fuse, just as well as if it had not been made. We know, however, that they

do not; that severance of the paths of conduction between a man's left auditory centre or optical centre and

the rest of his cortex will sever all communication between the words which he hears or sees written and the

Moreover, if feelings can mix into a tertium quid, why do we not take a feeling of greenness and a feeling of

redness, and make a feeling of yellowness out of them? Why has optics neglected the open road to truth, and

wasted centuries in disputing about theories of colorcomposition which two minutes of introspection would

have settled forever?[12] We cannot mix feelings as such, though we may mix the objects we feel, and from

their mixture get new feelings. We cannot even (as we shall later see) have two feelings in our mind at once.

At most we can compare together objects previously presented to us in distinct feelings; but then we find

each object stubbornly maintaining its separate identity before consciousness, whatever the verdict of the

SELFCOMPOUNDING OF MENTAL FACTS IS INADMISSIBLE. But there is a still more fatal objection

to the theory of mental units 'compounding with themselves' or 'integrating.' It is logically unintelligible; it

All the 'combinations' which we actually know are EFFECTS, wrought by the units said to be 'combined,'

UPON SOME ENTITY OTHER THAN THEMSELVES. Without this feature of a medium or vehicle, the

"A multitude of contractile units, by joint action, and by being all connected, for instance, with a single

tendon, will pull at the same, and will bring about a dynamical effect which is undoubtedly the resultant of

their combined individual energies.... On the whole, tendons are to muscular fibres, and bones are to tendons,

combining recipients of mechanical energies. A medium of composition is indispensable to the summation of

energies. To realize the complete dependence of mechanical resultants on a combining substratum, one may

fancy for a moment all the individually contracting muscular elements severed from their attachments. They

might then still be capable of contracting with the same energy as before, yet no cooperative result would be

accomplished. The medium of dynamical combination would be wanting. The multiple energies, singly

exerted on no common recipient, would lose themselves on entirely isolated and disconnected efforts."[14]

In other words, no possible number of entities (call them as you like, whether forces, material particles, or

mental elements) can sum themselves together. Each remains, in the sum, what it always was; and the sum

itself exists only for a bystander who happens to overlook the units and to apprehend the sum as such; or else

it exists in the shape of some other effect on an entity external to the sum itself. Let it not be objected that H2

and O combine of themselves into 'water,' and thenceforward exhibit new properties. They do not. The 'water'

is just the old atoms in the new position, HOH; the 'new properties' are just their combined effects, when in

this position, upon external media, such as our senseorgans and the various reagents on which water may

"Aggregations are organized wholes only when they behave as such in the presence of other things. A statue

is an aggregation of particles of marble; but as such it has no unity. For the spectator it is one; in itself it is an

aggregate; just as, to the consciousness of an ant crawling over it, it may again appear a mere aggregate. No

summing up of parts can make an unity of a mass of discrete constituents, unless this unity exist for some

Just so, in the parallelogram of forces, the 'forces' themselves do not combine into the diagonal resultant; a

body is needed on which they may impinge, to exhibit their resultant effect. No more do musical sounds

combine per se into concords or discords. Concord and discord are names for their combined effects on that

Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings, the case is in no wise altered. Take a hundred of them,

shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can (whatever that may mean); still each remains the

same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the other feelings are and

mean. There would be a hundredandfirst feeling there, if, when a group or series of such feelings were set

up, a consciousness belonging to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feeling would be a totally

new fact; the 100 original feelings might, by a curious physical law, be a signal for its creation, when they

came together; but they would have no substantial identity with it, nor it with them, and one could never

deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligible sense) say that they evolved it.

Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a

row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a

consciousness of the whole sentence.[16] We talk of the 'spirit of the age,' and the 'sentiment of the people,'

and in various ways we hypostatize 'public opinion.' But we know this to be symbolic speech, and never

dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and additional to, that of

the several individuals whom the words 'age,' 'people,' or 'public' denote. The private minds do not

agglomerate into a higher compound mind. This has always been the invincible contention of the spiritualists

against the associationists in Psychology, a contention which we shall take up at greater length in Chapter

X. The associationists say the mind is constituted by a multiplicity of distinct 'ideas' associated into a unity.

There is, they say, an idea of a, and also an idea of b. Therefore, they say, there is an idea of a + b, or of a and

b together. Which is like saying that the mathematical square of a plus that of b is equal to the square of a + b,

a palpable untruth. Idea of a + idea of b is not identical with idea of (a + b). It is one, they are two; in it, what

knows a also knows b; in them, what knows a is expressly posited as not knowing b; etc. In short, the two

separate ideas can never by any logic be made to figure as one and the same thing as the 'associated' idea.

This is what the spiritualists keep saying; and since we do, as a matter of fact, have the 'compounded' idea,

and do know a and b together, they adopt a farther hypothesis to explain that fact. The separate ideas exist,

they say, but affect a third entity, the soul. This has the 'compounded' idea, if you please so to call it; and the

compounded idea is an altogether new psychic fact to which the separate ideas stand in the relation, not of

This argument of the spiritualists against the associationists has never been answered by the latter. It holds

good against any talk about selfcompounding amongst feelings, against any 'blending,' or 'complication,' or

'mental chemistry,' or 'psychic synthesis,' which supposes a resultant consciousness to float off from the

constituents per se, in the absence of a supernumerary principle of consciousness which they may affect. The

mindstuff theory, in short, is unintelligible. Atoms of feeling cannot compose higher feelings, any more than

atoms of matter can compose physical things! The 'things,' for a clearheaded atomistic evolutionist, are not.

Nothing is but the everlasting atoms. When grouped in a certain way, we name them this 'thing' or that; but

the thing we name has no existence out of our mind. So of the states of mind which are supposed to be

compound because they know many different things together. Since indubitably such states do exist, they

must exist as single new facts, effects, possibly, as the spiritualists say, on the Soul (we will not decide that

point here), but at any rate independent and integral, and not compounded of psychic atoms.[17]

CAN STATES OF MIND BE UNCONSCIOUS? The passion for unity and smoothness is in some minds so

insatiate that, in spite of the logical clearness of these reasonings and conclusions, many will fail to be

influenced by them. They establish a sort of disjointedness in things which in certain quarters will appear

intolerable. They sweep away all chance of 'passing without break' either from the material to the mental, or

from the lower to the higher mental; and they thrust us back into a pluralism of consciousness each arising

discontinuity in the midst of two disconnected worlds, material and mental which is even worse than the

old notion of the separate creation of each particular soul. But the malcontents will hardly try to refute our

reasonings by direct attack. It is more probable that, turning their back upon them altogether, they will devote

themselves to sapping and mining the region roundabout until it is a bog of logical liquefaction, into the

midst of which all definite conclusions of any sort may be trusted ere long to sink and disappear.

Our reasonings have assumed that the 'integration' of a thousand psychic units must be either just the units

over again, simply rebaptized, or else something real, but then other than and additional to those units; that if

a certain existing fact is that of a thousand feelings, it cannot at the same time be that of ONE feeling; for the

essence of feeling is to be felt, and as a psychic existent feels, so it must be. If the one feeling feels like no

one of the thousand, in what sense can it be said to be the thousand? These assumptions are what the monists

will seek to undermine. The Hegelizers amongst them will take high ground at once, and say that the glory

and beauty of the psychic life is that in it all contradictions find their reconciliation; and that it is just because

the facts we are considering are facts of the self that they are both one and many at the same time. With this

intellectual temper I confess that I cannot contend. As in striking at some unresisting gossamer with a club,

one but overreaches one's self, and the thing one aims at gets no harm. So I leave this school to its devices.

The other monists are of less deliquescent frame, and try to break down distinctness among metal states by

making a distinction. This sounds paradoxical, but it is only ingenious. The distinction is that between the

unconscious and the conscious being of the mental state. It is the sovereign means for believing what one

likes in psychology, and of turning what might become a science into a tumblingground for whimsies. It has

numerous champions, and elaborate reasons to give for itself. We must therefore accord it due consideration.

DO UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL STATES EXIST? it will be best to give the list of socalled proofs as

briefly as possible, and to follow each by its objection, as in scholastic books.[18]

First Proof. The minimum visible, the minimum audible, are objects composed of parts. How can the whole

affect the sense unless each part does? And yet each part does so without being separately sensible. Leibnitz

calls the total consciousness an 'aperception,' the supposed insensible consciousness by the name of 'petites

"To judge of the latter," he says, "I am accustomed to use the example of the roaring of the sea with which

one is assailed when near the shore. To hear this noise as one does, on must hear the parts which compose its

totality, that is, the noise of each wave,... although this noise would not be noticed if its wave were alone. One

must be affected a little by the movement of one wave, one must have some perception of each several noise,

however small it be. Otherwise one would not hear that of 100,000 waves, for of 100,000 zeros one can never

Reply. This is an excellent example of the socalled 'fallacy of division,' or predicating what is true only of a

collection, of each member of the collection distributively. It no more follows that if a thousand things

together cause sensation, one thing alone must cause it, than it follows that if one pound weight moves a

balance, then one ounce weight must move it too, in less degree. One ounce weight does not move it at all; its

movement begins with the pound. At most we can say that each ounce affects it in some way which helps the

advent of that movement. And so each infrasensible stimulus to a nerve no doubt affects the nerve and helps

the birth of sensation when the other stimuli come. But this affection is a nerveaffection, and there is not the

slightest ground for supposing it to be a 'perception' unconscious of itself. "A certain quantity of the cause

may be a necessary condition to the production of any of the effect,"[20] when the latter is a mental state.

Second Proof. In all acquired dexterities and habits, secondarily automatic performances as they are called,

we do what originally required a chain of deliberately conscious perceptions and volitions. As the actions still

keep their intelligent character, intelligence must still preside over their execution. But since our

consciousness seems all the while elsewhere engaged, such intelligence must consist of unconscious

Reply. There is more than one alternative explanation in accordance with larger bodies of fact. One is that the

perceptions and volitions in habitual actions may be performed consciously, only so quickly and inattentively

that no memory of them remains. Another is that the consciousness of these actions exists, but is splitoff

from the rest of the consciousness of the hemispheres. We shall find in Chapter X numerous proofs of the

reality of this splitoff condition of portions of consciousness. Since in man the hemispheres indubitably

cooperate in these secondarily automatic acts, it will not do to say either that they occur without

consciousness or that their consciousness is that of the lower centres, which we know nothing about. But

either lack of memory or splitoff cortical consciousness will certainly account for all of the facts.[21]

Third Proof. Thinking of A, we presently find ourselves thinking of C. Now B is the natural logical link

between A and C, but we have no consciousness of having thought of B. It must have been in our mind

Reply. Here again we have a choice between more plausible explanations. Either B was consciously there,

but the next instant forgotten, or its braintract alone was adequate to do the whole work of coupling A with

C, without the idea B being aroused at all, whether consciously or 'unconsciously.'

Fourth Proof. Problems unsolved when we go to bed are found solved in the morning when we wake.

Somnambulists do rational things. We awaken punctually at an hour predetermined overnight, etc.

Unconscious thinking, volition, timeregistration, etc., must have presided over these acts.

Fifth Proof. Some patients will often, in an attack of epileptiform unconsciousness, go through complicated

processes, such as eating a dinner in a restaurant and paying for it, or making a violent homicidal attack. In

trance, artificial or pathological, long and complex performances, involving the use of the reasoning powers,

Reply. Rapid and complete oblivescence is certainly the explanation here. The analogue again is hypnoticism.

Tell the subject of an hypnotic trance, during his trance, that he will remember, and he may remember

everything perfectly when he awakes, though without your telling him no memory would have remained. The

Sixth Proof. In a musical concord the vibrations of the several notes are in relatively simple ratios. The mind

must unconsciously count the vibrations, and be pleased by the simplicity which it finds.

Reply. The brainprocess produced by the simple ratios may be as directly agreeable as the conscious

process of comparing them would be. No counting, either conscious or 'unconscious,' is required.

Seventh Proof. Every hour we make theoretic judgments and emotional reactions, and exhibit practical

tendencies, for which we can give no explicit logical justification, but which are good inferences from certain

premises. We know more than we can say. Our conclusions run ahead of our power to analyze their grounds.

A child, ignorant of the axiom that two things equal to the same are equal to each other, applies it

nevertheless in his concrete judgments unerringly. A boor will use the dictum de omni et nullo who is unable

"We seldom consciously think how our house is painted, what the shade of it is, what the pattern of our

furniture is, or whether the door opens to the right or left, or out or in. But how quickly should we notice a

change in any of these things! Think of the door you have most often opened, and tell, if you can, whether it

opens to the right or left, out or in. Yet when you open the door you never put the hand on the wrong side to

find the latch, nor try to push it when it opens with a pull.... What is the precise characteristic in your friend's

step that enables you to recognize it when he is coming? Did you ever consciously think the idea, 'if I run into

a solid piece of matter I shall get hurt, or be hindered in my progress'? and do you avoid running into

obstacles because you ever distinctly conceived, or consciously acquired and thought, that idea?"[22]

Most of our knowledge is at all times potential. We act in accordance with the whole drift of what we have

learned, but few items rise into consciousness at the time. Many of them, however, we may recall at will. All

this cooperation of unrealized principles and facts, of potential knowledge, with our actual thought is quite

inexplicable unless we suppose the perpetual existence of an immense mass of ideas in an unconscious state,

all of them exerting a steady pressure and influence upon our conscious thinking, and many of them in such

Reply. No such mass of ideas is supposable. But there are all kinds of shortcuts in the brain; and processes

not aroused strongly enough to give any 'idea' distinct enough to be a premise, may, nevertheless, help to

determine just that resultant process of whose psychic accompaniment the said idea would be a premise, if

the idea existed at all. A certain overtone may be a feature of my friend's voice, and may conspire with the

other tones thereof to arouse in my brain the process which suggests to my consciousness his name. And yet I

may be ignorant of the overtone per se, and unable, even when he speaks, to tell whether it be there or no. It

leads me to the idea of the name; but it produces in me no such cerebral process as that to which the idea of

the overtone would correspond. And similarly of our learning. Each subject we learn leaves behind it a

modification of the brain, which makes it impossible for the latter to react upon things just as it did before;

and the result of the difference may be a tendency to act, though with no idea, much as we should if we were

consciously thinking about the subject. The becoming conscious of the latter at will is equally readily

explained as a result of the brainmodification. This, as Wundt phrases it, is a 'predisposition' to bring forth

the conscious idea of the original subject, a predisposition which other stimuli and brainprocesses may

convert into an actual result. But such a predisposition is no 'unconscious idea;' it is only a particular

Eighth Proof. Instincts, as pursuits of ends by appropriate means, are manifestations of intelligence; but as the

Reply. Chapter XXIV will show that all the phenomena of instinct are explicable as actions of the nervous

Ninth Proof. In senseperception we have results in abundance, which can only be explained as conclusions

drawn by a process of unconscious inference from data given to sense. A small human image on the retina is

referred, not to a pygmy, but to a distant man of normal size. A certain gray patch is inferred to be a white

object seen in a dim light. Often the inference leads us astray: e.g., pale gray against pale green looks red,

because we take a wrong premise to argue from. We think a green film is spread over everything; and

knowing that under such a film a red thing would look gray, we wrongly infer from the gray appearance that

a red thing must be there. Our study of spaceperception in Chapter XVIII will give abundant additional

examples both of the truthful and illu sory percepts which have been explained to result from unconscious

Reply. That chapter will also in many cases refute this explanation. Color and lightcontrast are certainly

purely sensational affairs, in which inference plays no part. This has been satisfactorily proved by

Hering,[23] and shall be treated of again in Chapter XVII. Our rapid judgments of size, shape, distance, and

the like, are best explained as processes of simple cerebral association. Certain senseimpressions directly

stimulate braintracts, of whose activity readymade conscious percepts are the immediate psychic

counterparts. They do this by a mechanism either connate or acquired by habit. It is to be remarked that

Wundt and Helmholtz, who in their earlier writings did more than any one to give vogue to the notion that

unconscious inference is a vital factor in senseperception, have seen fit on later occasions to modify their

views and to admit that results like those of reasoning may accrue without any actual reasoning process

unconsciously taking place.[24] Maybe the excessive and riotous applications made by Hartmann of their

principle have led them to this change. It would be natural to feel towards him as the sailor in the story felt

towards the horse who got his foot into the stirrup, "If you're going to get on, I must get off."

Hartmann fairly boxes the compass of the universe with the principle of unconscious thought. For him there

is no namable thing that does not exemplify it. But his logic is so lax and his failure to consider the most

obvious alternatives so complete that it would, on the whole, be a waste of time to look at his arguments in

detail. The same is true of Schopenhauer, in whom the mythology reaches its climax. The visual perception,

for example, of an object in space results, according to him, from the intellect performing the following

operations, all unconscious. First, it apprehends the inverted retinal image and turns it right side up,

constructing flat space as a preliminary operation; then it computes from the angle of convergence of the

eyeballs that the two retinal images must be the projection of but a single object; thirdly, it constructs the

third dimension and sees this object solid; fourthly, it assigns its distance; and fifthly, in each and all of these

operations it gets the objective character of what it 'constructs' by unconsciously inferring it as the only

possible cause of some sensation which it unconsciously feels.[25] Comment on this seems hardly called for.

None of these facts, then, appealed to so confidently in proof of the existence of ideas in an unconscious

state, prove anything of the sort. They prove either that conscious ideas were present which the next instant

were forgotten; or they prove that certain results, similar to results of reasoning, may be wrought out by rapid

brainprocesses to which no ideation seems attached. But there is one more argument to be alleged, less

obviously insufficient than those which we have reviewed, and demanding a new sort of reply.

Tenth Proof. There is a great class of experiences in our mental life which may be described as discoveries

that a subjective condition which we have been having is really something different from what we had

supposed. We suddenly find ourselves bored by a thing which we thought we were enjoying well enough; or

in love with a person whom we imagined we only liked. Or else we deliberately analyze our motives, and

find that at bottom they contain jealousies and cupidities which we little suspected to be there. Our feelings

towards people are perfect wells of motivation, unconscious of itself, which introspection brings to light. And

our sensations likewise: we constantly discover new elements in sensations which we have been in the habit

of receiving all our days, elements, too, which have been there from the first, since otherwise we should have

been unable to distinguish the sensations containing them from others nearly allied. The elements must exist,

for we use them to discriminate by; but they must exist in an unconscious state, since we so completely fail to

single them out.[26] The books of the analytic school of psychology abound in examples of the kind. Who

knows the countless associations that mingle with his each and every thought? Who can pick apart all the

nameless feelings that stream in at every moment from his various internal organs, muscles, heart, glands,

lungs, etc., and compose in their totality his sense of bodily life? Who is aware of the part played by feelings

of innervation and suggestions of possible muscular exertion in all his judgments of distance, shape, and size?

Consider, too, the difference between a sensation which we simply have and one which we attend to.

Attention gives results that seem like fresh creations; and yet the feelings and elements of feeling which it

reveals must have been already there in an unconscious state. We all know practically the difference

between the socalled sonant and the socalled surd consonants, between D, B, Z, G, V, and T, P, S, K, F,

respectively. But comparatively few persons know the difference theoretically, until their attention has been

called to what it is, when they perceive it readily enough. The sonants are nothing but the surds plus a certain

element, which is alike in all, superadded. That element is the laryngeal sound with which they are uttered,

surds having no such accompaniment. When we hear the sonant letter, both its component elements must

really be in our mind; but we remain unconscious of what they really are, and mistake the letter for a simple

quality of sound until an effort of attention teaches us its two components. There exist a host of sensations

which most men pass through life and never attend to, and consequently have only in an unconscious way.

The feelings of opening and closing the glottis, of making tense the tympanic membrane, of accommodating

for near vision, of intercepting the passage from the nostrils to the throat, are instances of what I mean. Every

one gets these feelings many times an hour; but few readers, probably, are conscious of exactly what

sensations are meant by the names I have just used. All these facts, and an enormous number more, seem to

prove conclusively that, in addition to the fully conscious way in which an idea may exist in the mind, there

is also an unconscious way; that it is unquestionably the same identical idea which exists in these two ways;

and that therefore any arguments against the mindstuff theory, based on the notion that esse in our mental

life is sentiri, and that an idea must consciously be felt as what it is, fall to the ground.

Objection. These reasonings are one tissue of confusion. Two states of mind which refer to the same external

reality, or two states of mind the later one of which refers to the earlier, are described as the same state of

mind, or 'idea,' published as it were in two editions; and then whatever qualities of the second edition are

found openly lacking in the first are explained as having really been there, only in an 'unconscious' way. It

would be difficult to believe that intelligent men could be guilty of so patent a fallacy, were not the history of

psychology there to give the proof. The psychological stockintrade of some authors is the belief that two

thoughts about one thing are virtually the same thought, and that this same thought may in subsequent

reflections become more and more conscious of what it really was all along from the first. But once make the

distinction between simply having an idea at the moment of its presence and subsequently knowing all sorts

of things about it; make moreover that between a state of mind itself, taken as a subjective fact, on the one

hand, and the objective thing it knows, on the other, and one has no difficulty in escaping from the labyrinth.

Take the latter distinction first: Immediately all the arguments based on sensations and the new features in

them which attention brings to light fall to the ground. The sensations of the B and the V when we attend to

these sounds and analyze out the laryngeal contribution which makes them differ from P and F respectively,

are different sensations from those of the B and the V taken in a simple way. They stand, it is true, for the

same letters, and thus mean the same outer realities; but they are different mental affections, and certainly

depend on widely different processes of cerebral activity. It is unbelievable that two mental states so different

as the passive reception of a sound as a whole, and the analysis of that whole into distinct ingredients by

voluntary attention, should be due to processes at all similar. And the subjective difference does not consist in

that the firstnamed state is the second in an 'unconscious' form. It is an absolute psychic difference, even

greater than that between the states to which two different surds will give rise. The same is true of the other

sensations chosen as examples. The man who learns for the first time how the closure of his glottis feels,

experiences in this discovery an absolutely new psychic modification, the like of which he never had before.

He had another feeling before, a feeling incessantly renewed, and of which the same glottis was the organic

starting point; but that was not the later feeling in an 'unconscious' state; it was a feeling sui generis

altogether, although it took cognizance of the same bodily part, the glottis. We shall see, hereafter, that the

same reality can be cognized by an endless number of psychic states, which may differ toto coelo among

themselves, without ceasing on that account to refer to the reality in question. Each of them is a conscious

fact; none of them has any mode of being whatever except a certain way of being felt at the moment of being

present. It is simply unintelligible and fantastical to say, because they point to the same outer reality, that they

must therefore be so many editions of the same 'idea,' now in conscious and now in an 'unconscious' phase.

There is only one 'phase' in which an idea can be, and that is a fully conscious condition. If it is not in that

condition, then it is not at all. Something else is, in its place. The something else may be a merely physical

brainprocess, or it may be another conscious idea. Either of these things may perform much the same

function as the first idea, refer to the same object, and roughly stand in the same relations to the upshot of our

thought. But that is no reason why we should throw away the logical principle of identity in psychology, and

say that, however it may fare in the outer world, the mind at any rate is a place in which a thing can be all

Now take the other cases alleged, and the other distinc tion, that namely between having a mental state and

knowing all about it. The truth is here even simpler to unravel. When I decide that I have, without knowing it,

been for several weeks in love, I am simply giving a name to a state which previously I have not named, but

which was fully conscious; which had no residual mode of being except the manner in which it was

conscious; and which, though it was a feeling towards the same person for whom I now have much more

inflamed feeling, and though it continuously led into the latter, and is similar enough to be called by the same

name, is yet in no sense identical with the latter, and least of all in an 'unconscious' way. Again, the feelings

from our viscera and other dimlyfelt organs, the feelings of innervation (if such there be), and those of

muscular exertion which, in our spatial judgments, are supposed unconsciously to determine what we shall

perceive, are just exactly what we feel them, perfectly determinate conscious states, not vague editions of

other conscious states. They may be faint and weak; they may be very vague cognizers of the same realities

which other conscious states cognize and name exactly; they may be unconscious of much in the reality

which the other states are conscious of. But that does not make them in themselves a whit dim or vague or

unconscious. They are eternally as they feel when they exist, and can, neither actually nor potentially, be

identified with anything else than their own faint selves. A faint feeling may be looked back upon and

classified and understood in its relations to what went before or after it in the stream of thought. But it, on the

one hand, and the later state of mind which knows all these things about it, on the other, are surely not two

conditions, one conscious and the other 'unconscious,' of the same identical psychic fact. It is the destiny of

thought that, on the whole, our early ideas are superseded by later ones, giving fuller accounts of the same

realities. But none the less do the earlier and the later ideas preserve their own several substantive identities

as so many several successive states of mind. To believe the contrary would make any definite science of

psychology impossible. The only identity to be found among our successive ideas is their similarity of

cognitive or representa tive function as dealing with the same objects. Identity of being, there is none; and I

believe that throughout the rest of this volume the reader will reap the advantages of the simpler way of

So we seem not only to have ascertained the unintelligibility of the notion that a mental fact can be two things

at once, and that what seems like one feeling, of blueness for example, or of hatred, may really and

'unconsciously' be ten thousand elementary feelings which do not resemble blueness or hatred at all, but we

find that we can express all the observed facts in other ways. The mind stuff theory, however, though

scotched, is, we may be sure, not killed. If we ascribe consciousness to unicellular animalcules, then single

cells can have it, and analogy should make us ascribe it to the several cells of the brain, each individually

taken. And what a convenience would it not be for the psychologist if, by the adding together of various

doses of this separatecellconsciousness, he could treat thought as a kind of stuff or material, to be

measured out in great or small amount, increased and subtracted from and baled about at will! He feels an

imperious craving to be allowed to construct synthetically the successive mental states which he describes.

The mindstuff theory so easily admits of the construction being made, that it seems certain that 'man's

unconquerable mind' will devote much future pertinacity and ingenuity to setting it on its legs again and

getting it into some sort of plausible workingorder. I will therefore conclude the chapter with some

consideration of the remaining difficulties which beset the matter as it at present stands.

DIFFICULTY OF STATING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MIND AND BRAIN. It will be remembered

that in our criticism of the theory of the integration of successive conscious units into a feeling of musical

pitch, we decided that whatever integration there was was that of the airpulses into a simpler and simpler

sort of physical effect, as the propagations of material change got higher and higher in the nervous system. At

last, we said (p. 23), there results some simple and massive process in the auditory centres of the

hemispherical cortex, to which, as a whole, the feeling of musical pitch directly corresponds. Already, in

discussing the localization of functions in the brain, I had said (pp.1589) that consciousness accompanies

the stream of innervation through that organ and varies in quality with the character of the currents, being

mainly of things seen if the occipital lobes are much involved, of things heard if the action is focalized in the

temporal lobes, etc., etc.; and I had added that a vague formula like this was as much as one could safely

venture on in the actual state of physiology. The facts of mental deafness and blindness, of auditory and

optical aphasia, show us that the whole brain must act together if certain thoughts are to occur. The

consciousness, which is itself an integral thing not made of parts, 'corresponds' to the entire activity of the

brain, whatever that may be, at the moment. This is a way of expressing the relation of mind and brain from

which I shall not depart during the remainder of the book, because it expresses the bare phenomenal fact with

no hypothesis, and is exposed to no such logical objections as we have found to cling to the theory of ideas in

Nevertheless, this formula which is so unobjectionable if taken vaguely, positivistically, or scientifically, as a

mere empirical law of concomitance between our thoughts and our brain, tumbles to pieces entirely if we

assume to represent anything more intimate or ultimate by it. The ultimate of ultimate problems, of course, in

the study of the relations of thought and brain, is to understand why and how such disparate things are

connected at all. But before that problem is solved (if it ever is solved) there is a less ultimate problem which

must first be settled. Before the connection of thought and brain can be explained, it must at least be stated in

an elementary form; and there are great difficulties about so stating it. To state it in elementary form one must

reduce it to its lowest terms and know which mental fact and which cerebral fact are, so to speak, in

immediate juxtaposition. We must find the minimal mental fact whose being reposes directly on a brainfact;

and we must similarly find the minimal brainevent which will have a mental counterpart at all. Between the

mental and the physical minima thus found there will be an immediate relation, the expression of which, if

Our own formula escapes the unintelligibility of psychic atoms by taking the entire thought (even of a

complex object) as the minimum with which it deals on the mental side. But in taking the entire

brainprocess as its minimal fact on the material side it confronts other difficulties almost as bad.

In the first place, it ignores analogies on which certain critics will insist, those, namely, between the

composition of the total brainprocess and that of the object of the thought. The total brainprocess is

composed of parts, of simultaneous processes in the seeing, the hearing, the feeling, and other centres. The

object thought of is also composed of parts, some of which are seen, others heard, others perceived by touch

and muscular manipulation. "How then," these critics will say, "should the thought not itself be composed of

parts, each the counterpart of a part of the object and of a part of the brainprocess?" So natural is this way of

looking at the matter that it has given rise to what is on the whole the most flourishing of all psychological

systems that of the Lockian school of associated ideas of which school the mindstuff theory is nothing

The second difficulty is deeper still. The 'entire brainprocess' is not a physical fact at all. It is the appearance

to an onlooking mind of a multitude of physical facts. 'Entire brain' is nothing but our name for the way in

which a million of molecules arranged in certain positions may affect our sense. On the principles of the

corpuscular or mechanical philosophy, the only realities are the separate molecules, or at most the cells. Their

aggregation into a 'brain' is a fiction of popular speech. Such a fiction cannot serve as the objectively real

counterpart to any psychic state whatever. Only a genuinely physical fact can so serve. But the molecular fact

is the only genuine physical fact whereupon we seem, if we are to have an elementary psychophysic law

at all, thrust right back upon something like the mindstuff theory, for the molecular fact, being an element of

the 'brain,' would seem naturally to correspond, not to the total thoughts, but to elements in the thought.

What shall we do? Many would find relief at this point in celebrating the mystery of the Unknowable and the

'awe' which we should feel at having such a principle to take final charge of our perplexities. Others would

rejoice that the finite and separatist view of things with which we started had at last developed its

contradictions, and was about to lead us dialectically upwards to some 'higher synthesis' in which

inconsistencies cease from troubling and logic is at rest. It may be a constitutional infirmity, but I can take no

comfort in such devices for making a luxury of intellectual defeat. They are but spiritual chloroform. Better

THE MATERIAL MONAD THEORY. The most rational thing to do is to suspect that there may be a third

possibility, an alternative supposition which we have not considered. Now there is an alternative supposition

a supposition moreover which has been frequently made in the history of philosophy, and which is freer

from logical objections than either of the views we have ourselves discussed. It may be called the theory of

Every braincell has its own individual consciousness, which no other cell knows anything about, all

individual consciousness being 'ejective' to each other. There is, however, among the cells one central or

pontifical one to which our consciousness is attached. But the events of all the other cells physically influence

this archcell; and through producing their joint effects on it, these other cells may be said to 'combine.' The

archcell is, in fact, one of those 'external media' without which we saw that no fusion or integration of a

number of things can occur. The physical modifications of the archcell thus form a sequence of results in

the production whereof every other cell has a share, so that, as one might say, every other cell is represented

therein. And similarly, the conscious correlates to these physical modifications form a sequence of thoughts

or feelings, each one of which is, as to its substantive being, an integral and uncompounded psychic thing, but

each one of which may (in the exercise of its cognitive function) be aware of THINGS many and complicated

in proportion to the number of other cells that have helped to modify the central cell.

By a conception of this sort, one incurs neither of the internal contradictions which we found to beset the

other two theories. One has no unintelligible selfcombining of psychic units to account for on the one hand;

and on the other hand, one need not treat as the physical counterpart of the stream of consciousness under

observation, a 'total brainactivity' which is nonexistent as a genuinely physiological fact. But, to offset

these advantages, one has physiological difficulties and improbabilities. There is no cell or group of cells in

the brain of such anatomical or functional preeminence as to appear to be the keystone or centre of gravity

of the whole system. And even if there were such a cell, the theory of multiple monadism would, in strictness

of thought, have no right to stop at it and treat it as a unit. The cell is no more a unit, materially considered,

than the total brain is a unit. It is a compound of molecules, just as the brain is a compound of cells and

fibres. And the molecules, according to the prevalent physical theories, are in turn compounds of atoms. The

theory in question, therefore, if radically carried out, must set up for its elementary and irreducible

psychophysic couple, not the cell and its consciousness, but the primordial and eternal atom and its

consciousness. We are back at Leibnitzian monadism, and therewith leave physiology behind us and dive into

regions inaccessible to experience and verification; and our doctrine, although not selfcontradictory,

becomes so remote and unreal as to be almost as bad as if it were. Speculative minds alone will take an

interest in it; and metaphysics, not psychology, will be responsible for its career. That the career may be a

successful one must be admitted as a possibility a theory which Leibnitz, Herbart, and Lotze have taken

THE SOUL THEORY. But is this my last word? By no means. Many readers have certainly been saying to

themselves for the last few pages: "Why on earth doesn't the poor man say the Soul and have done with it?"

Other readers, of antispiritualistic training and prepossessions, advanced thinkers, or popular evolutionists,

will perhaps be a little sur prised to find this muchdespised word now sprung upon them at the end of so

physiological a train of thought. But the plain fact is that all the arguments for a 'pontifical cell' or an

'archmonad' are also arguments for that wellknown spiritual agent in which scholastic psychology and

commonsense have always believed. And my only reason for beating the bushes so, and not bringing it in

earlier as a possible solution of our difficulties, has been that by this procedure I might perhaps force some of

these materialistic minds to feel the more strongly the logical respectability of the spiritualistic position. The

fact is that one cannot afford to despise any of these great traditional objects of belief. Whether we realize it

or not, there is always a great drift of reasons, positive and negative, towing us in their direction. If there be

such entities as Souls in the universe, they may possibly be affected by the manifold occurrences that go on in

the nervous centres. To the state of the entire brain at a given moment they may respond by inward

modifications of their own. These changes of state may be pulses of consciousness, cognitive of objects few

or many, simple or complex. The soul would be thus a medium upon which (to use our earlier phraseology)

the manifold brainprocesses combine their effects. Not needing to consider it as the 'inner aspect' of any

archmolecule or braincell, we escape that physiological improbability; and as its pulses of consciousness

are unitary and integral affairs from the outset, we escape the absurdity of supposing feelings which exist

separately and then 'fuse together' by themselves. The separateness is in the brainworld, on this theory, and

the unity in the soulworld; and the only trouble that remains to haunt us is the metaphysical one of

understanding how one sort of world or existent thing can affect or influence another at all. This trouble,

however, since it also exists inside of both worlds, and involves neither physical improbability nor logical

I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brainstates and

responding to them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance, so far

If it does not strictly explain anything, it is at any rate less positively objectionable than either mindstuff or a

materialmonad creed. The bare PHENOMENON, however, the IMMEDIATELY KNOWN thing which on

the mental side is in apposition with the entire brainprocess is the state of consciousness and not the soul

itself. Many of the stanchest believers in the soul admit that we know it only as an inference from

experiencing its states. In Chapter X, accordingly, we must return to its consideration again, and ask

ourselves whether, after all, the ascertainment of a blank unmediated correspondence, term for term, of the

succession of states of consciousness with the succession of total brainprocesses, be not the simplest

psychophysic formula, and the last word of a psychology which contents itself with verifiable laws, and

seeks only to be clear, and to avoid unsafe hypotheses. Such a mere admission of the empirical parallelism

will there appear the wisest course. By keeping to it, our psychology will remain positivistic and

nonmetaphysical; and although this is certainly only a provisional haltingplace, and things must some day

be more thoroughly thought out, we shall abide there in this book, and just as we have rejected minddust,

we shall take no account of the soul. The spiritualistic reader may nevertheless believe in the soul if he will;

whilst the positivistic one who wishes to give a tinge of mystery to the expression of his positivism can

continue to say that nature in her unfathomable designs has mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind,

that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being, but how or why, no mortal

[4] Belfast Address, 'Nature,' August 20, 1874, p. 318. I cannot help remarking that the disparity between

motions and feelings on which these authors lay so much stress, is somewhat less absolute than at first sight it

seems. There are categories common to the two worlds. Not only temporal succession (as Helmholtz admits,

Physiol. Optik, p. 445), but such attributes as intensity, volume, simplicity or complication, smooth or

impeded change, rest or agitation, are habitually predicated of both physical facts and mental facts. Where

[7] 'Nascent' is Mr. Spencer's great word. In showing how at a certain point consciousness must appear upon

the evolving scene this author fairly outdoes himself in vagueness. "In its higher forms, Instinct is probably

accompanied by a rudimentary consciousness. There cannot be coordination of many stimuli without some

ganglion through which they are all brought into relation. In the process of bringing them into relation, this

ganglion must be subject to the influence of each must undergo many changes. And the quick succession of

changes in a ganglion, implying as it does perpetual experiences of differences and likenesses, constitutes the

raw material of consciousness. The implication is that as fast as Instinct is developed, some kind of

consciousness becomes nascent." (Psychology, � 195.) The words 'raw material' and 'implication' which I

have italicized are the words which do the evolving. They are supposed to have all the rigor which the

'synthetic philosophy' requires. In the following passage, when 'impressions' pass through a common 'centre

of communication' in succession (much as people might pass into a theatre through a turnstile) consciousness,

nonexistent until then, is supposed to result: "Separate impressions are received by the senses by different

parts of the body. If they go no further than the places at which they are received, they are useless. Or if only

some of them are brought into relation with one another, they are useless. That an effectual adjustment may

be made, they must be all brought into relation with one another. But this implies some centre of

communication common to them all, through which they severally pass; and as they cannot pass through it

simultaneously, they must pass through it in succession. So that as the external phenomena responded to

become greater in number and more complicated in kind, the variety and rapidity of the changes to which this

common centre of communication is subject must increase there must result an unbroken series of these

changes there must arise a consciousness. "Hence the progress of the correspondence between the organism

and its environment necessitates a gradual reduction of the sensorial changes to a succession; and by so doing

evolves a distinct consciousness a consciousness that becomes higher as the succession becomes more

rapid and the correspondence more complete." (Ibid. � 179.) It is true that in the Fortnightly Review (vol.

XIV. p. 716) Mr. Spencer denies that he means by this passage to tell us anything about the origin of

consciousness at all. It resembles, however, too many other places in his Psychology (e.g. �� 43, 110, 244)

not to be taken as a serious attempt to explain how consciousness must at a certain point be 'evolved.' That,

when a critic calls his attention to the inanity of his words, Mr. Spencer should say he never meant anything

particular by them, is simply an example of the scandalous vagueness with which this sort of

[8] His own words are: "Mistakes are made in the sense that he admits having been touched, when in reality it

was radiant heat that affected his skin. In our own beforementioned experiments there was never any

deception on the entire palmar side of the hand or on the face. On the back of the hand in one case in a series

of 60 stimulations 4 mistakes occurred, in another case 2 mistakes in 45 stimulations. On the extensor side of

the upper arm 3 deceptions out of 48 stimulations were noticed, and in the case of another individual, 1 out of

31. In one case over the spine 3 deceptions in a series of 11 excitations were observed; in another, 4 out of 19.

On the lumbar spine 6 deceptions came among 29 stimulations, and again 4 out of 7. There is certainly not

yet enough material on which to rest a calculation of probabilities, but any one can easily convince himself

that on the back there is no question of even a moderately accurate discrimination between warmth and a

light pressure so far as but small portions of skin come into play. It has been as yet impossible to make

corresponding experiments with regard to sensibility to cold." (Lehrb. d. Anat. u. Physiol. d. Sinnesorgane

[10] Oddly enough, Mr. Spencer seems quite unaware of the general function of the theory of elementary

units of mindstuff in the evolutionary philosophy. We have seen it to be absolutely indispensable, if that

philosophy is to work, to postulate consciousness in the nebula, the simplest way being, of course, to

suppose every atom animated. Mr. Spencer, however, will have it (e.g. First Principles, � 71) that

consciousness is only the occasional result of the 'transformation' of a certain amount of 'physical force' to

which it is 'equivalent.' Presumably a brain must already be there before any such 'transformation' can take

place; and so the argument quoted in the text stands as a mere local detail, without general bearings.

[11] The compounding of colors may be dealt with in an identical way. Helmholtz has shown that if green

light and red light fall simultaneously on the retina, we see the color yellow. The mindstuff theory would

interpret this as a case where the feeling green and the feeling red 'combine' into the tertium quid of feeling,

yellow. What really occurs is no doubt that a third kind of nerveprocess is set up when the combined lights

impinge on the retina, not simply the process of red plus the process of green, but something quite different

from both or either. Of course, then, there are no feelings, either of red or of green, present to the mind at all;

but the feeling of yellow which is there, answers as directly to the nerveprocess which momentarily then

exists, as the feelings of green and red would answer to their respective nerveprocesses did the latter happen

[13] I find in my students an almost invincible tendency to think that we can immediately perceive that

feelings do combine. "What!" they say, "is not the taste of lemonade composed of that of lemon plus that of

sugar?" This is taking the combining of objects for that of feelings. The physical lemonade contains both the

lemon and the sugar, but its taste does not contain their tastes, for if there are any two things which are

certainly not present in the taste of lemonade, those are the lemonsour on the one hand and the sugarsweet

on the other. These tastes are absent utterly. The entirely new taste which is present resembles, it is true, both

those tastes; but in Chapter XIII we shall see that resemblance can not always be held to involve partial

[15] J. Royce, 'Mind,' VI. p. 376. Lotze has set forth the truth of this law more clearly and copiously than any

other writer. Unfortunately he is too lengthy to quote. See his Microcosmus, bk. II. ch. I. � 5; Metaphysik, ��

242, 260; Outlines of Metaphysics, part II. chap. I. �� 3, 4, 5. Compare also Reid's Intellectual Powers, essay

V, chap. III ad fin.; Bowne's Metaphysics, pp. 36176; St. J. Mivart: Nature and Thought, pp. 98101; E.

Gurney: 'Monism,' in 'Mind,' VI. 153; and the article by Prof. Royce, just quoted, on 'Mindstuff and Reality.'

In defence of the mindstuff view, see W. K. Clifford: 'Mind,' III. 57 (reprinted in his 'Lectures and Essays,'

II. 71); G. T. Fechner, Psychophysik, Bd. II. cap. XLV; H. Taine: on Intelligence, bk. III; E. Haeckel.

'Zellseelen u. Seelenzellen ' in Gesammelte pop. Vortr�ge, Bd. I. p. 143; W. S. Duncan. Conscious Matter,

passim; H. Zollner; Natur d. Cometen, pp. 320 ff.; Alfred Barratt: 'Physical Ethic' and Physical Metempiric,'

passum' J. Soury: 'Hylozoismus,' in Kosmos,' V. Jahrg., Heft X. p. 241; A. Main: 'Mind,' I. 292, 431, 566; II.

129, 402; Id. Revue Philos., II. 86, 88, 419; III. 51, 502; IV. 402; F. W. Frankland: 'Mind,' VI. 116;

Whittaker: 'Mind,' VI. 498 (historical); Morton Prince: The Nature of Mind and Human Automatism (1885);

A. Riehl: Der philosophische Kriticismus, Bd. II. Theil 2, 2ter Abschnitt, 2tes Cap. (1887). The clearest of all

[16] "Someone might say that although it is true that neither a blind man nor a deaf man by himself can

compare sounds with colors, yet since one hears and the other sees they might do so both together.... But

whether they are apart or close together makes no difference; not even if they permanently keep house

together; no, not if they were Siamese twins, or more than Siamese twins, and were inseparably grown

together, would it make the assumption any more possible. Only when sound and color are represented in the

same reality is it thinkable that they should be compared." (Brentano; Psychologie, p. 209.)

[17] The reader must observe that we are reasoning altogether about the logic of the mindstuff theory, about

whether it can explain the constitution of higher mental states by viewing them as identical with lower ones

summed together. We say the two sorts of fact are not identical: a higher state is not a lot of lower states; it is

itself. When, however, a lot of lower states have come together, or when certain brainconditions occur

together which, if they occurred separately, would produce a lot of lower states, we have not for a moment

pretended that a higher state may not emerge. In fact it does emerge under those conditions; and our Chapter

IX will be mainly devoted to the proof of this fact. But such emergence is that of a new psychic entity, and is

toto coelo different from such an 'integration' of the lower states as the mindstuff theory affirms. It may

seem strange to suppose that anyone should mistake criticism of a certain theory about a fact for doubt of the

fact itself. And yet the confusion is made in high quarters enough to justify our remarks. Mr. J. Ward, in his

article Psychology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, speaking of the hypothesis that "a series of feelings can

be aware of itself as a series," says (p. 39): "Paradox is too mild a word for it, even contradiction will hardly

suffice." Whereupon, Professor Bain takes him thus to task: "As to 'a series of states being aware of itself, I

confess I see no insurmountable difficulty. It may be a fact, or not a fact; it may be a very clumsy expression

for what it is applied to; but it is neither paradox nor contradiction. A series merely contradicts an individual,

or it may be two or more individuals as coexisting; but that is too general to exclude the possibility of

selfknowledge. It certainly does not bring the property of selfknowledge into the foreground, which,

however, is not the same as denying it. An algebraic series might know itself, without any contradiction: the

only thing against it is the want of evidence of the fact." ('Mind,' XI, 459). Prof. Bain thinks, then, that all the

bother is about the difficulty of seeing how a series of feelings can have the knowledge of itself added to it!!!

As if anybody ever was troubled about that. That, notoriously enough, is a fact: our consciousness is a series

of feelings to which every now and then is added a retrospective consciousness that they have come and

gone. What Mr. Ward and I are troubled about is merely the silliness of the mindstuffists and associationists

continuing to say that the 'series of states' is the 'awareness of itself;' that if the states be posited severally,

their collective consciousness is eo ipso given; and that we need no farther explanation, or 'evidence of the

[18] The writers about 'unconscious cerebration' seem sometimes to mean that and sometimes unconscious

thought. The arguments which follow are culled from various quarters. The reader will find them most

systematically urged by E. von Hartmann: Philosophy of the Unconscious, vol. I, and by E. Colsenet: La vie

Inconsciente de l'Esprit (1880). Consult also T. Laycock: Mind and Brain, vol, I. chap. V (1860); W. B.

Carpenter: Mental Physiology, chap. XIII; F. P. Cobbe: Darwinism in Morals and other Essays, essay XI,

Unconscious Cerebration (1872); F. Bowen: Modern Philosophy, pp. 428480; R. H. Hutton: Contemporary

Review, vol. XXIV. p. 201; J. S. Mill: Exam. of Hamilton, chap. XV; G. H. Lewes; Problems of life and

Mind, 3d series, Prob. II. chap. X, and also Prob. III. chap. II; D. G. Thompson: A System of Psychology,

[22] J. E. Maude: 'The Unconscious in Education,' in 'Education' vol. I. p. 401 (1882).

[24] Cf. Wundt: Ueber den Einfluss der Philosophie, etc. Antrittsrede (1876), pp. 1011; Helmholtz: Die

[25] Cf. Satz vom Grunde, pp. 5965. Compare also F. Z�llner's Natur der Kometen, pp. 342 ff., and 425.

[27] The text was written before Professor Lipps's Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (1883) came into my

hands. In Chapter III of that book the notion of unconscious thought is subjected to the clearest and most

searching criticism which it has yet received, [sic] Some passages are so similar to what I have myself written

that I must quote them in a note. After proving that dimness and clearness, incompleteness and completeness

do not pertain to a state of mind as such since every state of mind must be exactly what it is, and nothing

else but only pertain to the way in which states of mind stand for objects, which they more or less dimly,

more or less clearly, represent; Lipps takes the case of those sensations which attention is said to make more

clear. "I perceive an object," he says, "now in clear daylight, and again at night. Call the content of the

dayperception a, and that of the eveningperception a1. There will probably be a considerable difference

between a and a1. The colors of a will be varied and intense, and will be sharply bounded by each other;

those of a1 will be less luminous, and less strongly contrasted, and will approach a common gray or brown,

and merge more into each other. Both percepts, however, as such, are completely determinate and distinct

from all others. The colors of a1 appear before my eye neither neither more nor less decidedly dark and

blurred than the colors of a appear bright and sharply bounded. But now I know, or believe I know, that one

and the same real Object A corresponds to both a and a1. I am convinced, moreover, that a represents A

better than does a1. Instead, however, of giving to my conviction this, its only correct, expression, and

keeping the content of the consciousness, and the real object, the representation and what it means, distinct

from each other, I substitute the real object for the content of the consciousness, and talk of the experience as

if it consisted in one and the same object (namely, the surreptitiously introduced real one), constituting twice

over the content of my consciousness, once in a clear and distinct, the other time in an obscure and vague

fashion. I talk now of a distincter and of a less distinct consciousness of A, whereas I am only justified in

talking of two consciousnesses, a and a1, equally distinct in se, but to which the supposed external object A

corresponds with different degrees of distinctness." (P. 389.) Classics in the History of Psychology

An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario (Return to index)

We have now finished the physiological preliminaries of our subject and must in the remaining chapters

study the mental states themselves whose cerebral conditions and concomitants we have been considering

hitherto. Beyond the brain, however, there is an outer world to which the brainstates themselves

'correspond.' And it will be well, ere we advance farther, to say a word about the relation of the mind to this

PSYCHOLOGY IS A NATURAL SCIENCE. That is, the mind which the psychologist studies is the mind of

distinct individuals inhabiting definite portions of a real space and of a real time. With any other sort of mind,

absolute Intelligence, Mind unattached to a particular body, or Mind not subject to the course of time, the

psychologist as such has nothing to do. 'Mind,' in his mouth, is only a class name for minds. Fortunate will it

be if his more modest inquiry result in any generalizations which the philosopher devoted to absolute

To the psychologist, then, the minds he studies are objects, in a world of other objects. Even when he

introspectively analyzes his own mind, and tells what he finds there, he talks about it in an objective way. He

says, for instance, that under certain circumstances the color gray appears to him green, and calls the

appearance an illusion. This implies that he compares two objects, a real color seen under conditions, and a

mental perception which he believes to represent it, and that he declares the relation between them to be of a

certain kind. In making this critical judgment, the psychologist stands as much outside of the perception

which he criticises as he does of the color. Both are his objects. And if this is true of him when he reflects on

his own conscious states, how much truer is it when he treats of those of others! In German philosophy since

Kant the word Erkenntnisstheorie, criticism of the faculty of knowledge, plays a great part. Now the

psychologist necessarily becomes such an Erkenntnisstheoretiker. But the knowledge he theorizes about is

not the bare function of knowledge which Kant criticises he does not inquire into the possibility of

knowledge �berhaupt. He assumes it to be possible, he does not doubt its presence in himself at the moment

he speaks. The knowledge he criticises is the knowledge of particular men about the particular things that

surround them. This he may, upon occasion, in the light of his own unquestioned knowledge, pronounce true

It is highly important that this naturalscience point of view should be understood at the outset. Otherwise

more may be demanded of the psychologist than he ought to be expected to perform.

A diagram will exhibit more emphatically what the assumptions of Psychology must be: 1 The Psychologist 2

These four squares contain the irreducible data of psychology. No. 1, the psychologist, believes Nos. 2, 3, and

4, which together form his total object, to be realities, and reports them and their mutual relations as truly as

he can without troubling himself with the puzzle of how he can report them at all. About such ultimate

puzzles he in the main need trouble himself no more than the geometer, the chemist, or the botanist do, who

Of certain fallacies to which the psychologist is exposed by reason of his peculiar point of view that of

being a reporter of subjective as well as of objective facts, we must presently speak. But not until we have

THE METHODS OF INVESTIGATION. Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and

foremost and always. The word introspection need hardly be defined it means, of course, the looking into

our own minds and reporting what we there discover. Every one agrees that we there discover states of

consciousness. So far as I know, the existence of such states has never been doubted by any critic, however

sceptical in other respects he may have been. That we have cogitations of some sort is the inconcussum in a

world most of whose other facts have at some time tottered in the breath of philosophic doubt. All people

unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves thinking, and that they distinguish the mental state as an

inward activity or passion, from all the objects with which it may cognitively deal. I regard this belief as the

most fundamental of all the postulates of Psychology, and shall discard all curious inquiries about its

A Question of Nomenclature. We ought to have some general term by which to designate all states of

consciousness merely as such, and apart from their particular quality or cognitive function. Unfortunately

most of the terms in use have grave objections. 'Mental state,' 'state of consciousness,' 'conscious

modification,' are cumbrous and have no kindred verbs. The same is true of 'subjective condition.' 'Feeling'

has the verb 'to feel,' both active and neuter, and such derivatives as 'feelingly,' 'felt,' 'feltness,' etc., which

make it extremely convenient. But on the other hand it has specific meanings as well as its generic one,

sometimes standing for pleasure and pain, and being sometimes a synonym of 'sensation' as opposed to

thought ; whereas we wish a term to cover sensation and thought indifferently. Moreover, 'feeling' has

acquired in the hearts of platonizing thinkers a very opprobrious set of implications ; and since one of the

greatest obstacles to mutual understanding in philosophy is the use of words eulogistically and disparagingly,

impartial terms ought always, if possible, to be preferred. The word psychosis has been proposed by Mr.

Huxley. It has the advantage of being correlative to neurosis (the name applied by the same author to the

corresponding nerveprocess), and is moreover technical and devoid of partial implications. But it has no

verb or other grammatical form allied to it. The expressions 'affection of the soul,' 'modification of the ego,'

are clumsy, like 'state of consciousness,' and they implicitly assert theories which it is not well to embody in

terminology before they have been openly discussed and approved. 'Idea' is a good vague neutral word, and

was by Locke employed in the broadest generic way ; but notwithstanding his authority it has not

domesticated itself in the language so as to cover bodily sensations. It has no opprobrious connotation such as

'feeling' has, and it immediately suggests the omnipresence of cognition (or reference to an object other than

the mental state itself), which we shall soon see to be of the mental life's essence. But can the expression

'thought of a toothache' ever suggest to the reader the actual present pain itself? It is hardly possible ; and we

thus seem about to be forced back on some pair of terms like Hume's 'impression and idea,' or Hamilton's

'presentation and representation,' or the ordinary 'feeling and thought,' if we wish to cover the whole ground.

In this quandary we can make no definitive choice, but must, according to the convenience of the context, use

sometimes one, sometimes another of the synonyms that have been mentioned. My own partiality is for either

FEELING or THOUGHT. I shall probably often use both words in a wider sense than usual, and alternately

startle two classes of readers by their unusual sound ; but if the connection makes it clear that mental states at

large, irrespec tive of their kind, are meant, this will do no harm, and may even do some good.[2]

The inaccuracy of introspective observation has been made a subject of debate. It is important to gain some

The commonest spiritualistic opinion is that the Soul or Subject of the mental life is a metaphysical entity,

inaccessible to direct knowledge, and that the various mental states and operations of which we reflectively

become aware are objects of an inner sense which does not lay hold of the real agent in itself, any more than

sight or hearing gives us direct knowledge of matter in itself. From this point of view introspection is, of

course, incompetent to lay hold of anything more than the Soul's phenomena. But even then the question

Some authors take high ground here and claim for it a sort of infallibility. Thus Ueberweg:

"When a mental image, as such, is the object of my apprehension, there is no meaning in seeking to

distinguish its existence in my consciousness (in me) from its existence out of my consciousness (in itself) ;

for the object apprehended is, in this case, one which does not even exist, as the objects of external perception

"The phenomena inwardly apprehended are true in themselves. As they appear of this the evidence with

which they are apprehended is a warrant so they are in reality. Who, then, can deny that in this a great

"No one can doubt whether the psychic condition he apprehends in himself be, and be so, as he apprehends it.

Whoever should doubt this would have reached that finished doubt which destroys itself in destroying every

Others have gone to the opposite extreme, and maintained that we can have no introspective cognition of our

own minds at all. A deliverance of Auguste Comte to this effect has been so often quoted as to be almost

"in these latter days imagined themselves able to distinguish, by a very singular subtlety, two sorts of

observation of equal importance, one external, the other internal, the latter being solely destined for the study

of intellectual phenomena.... I limit myself to pointing out the principal consideration which proves clearly

that this pretended direct contemplation of the mind by itself is a pure illusion.... It is in fact evident that, by

an invincible neccessity, [sic] the human mind can observe directly all phenomena except its own proper

states. For by whom shall the observation of these be made? It is conceivable that a man might observe

himself with respect to the passions that animate him, for the anatomical organs of passion are distinct from

those whose function is observation. Though we have all made such observations on ourselves, they can

never have much scientific value, and the best mode of knowing the passions will always be that of observing

them from without ; for every strong state of passion... is necessarily incompatible with the state of

observation. But, as for observing in the same way intellectual phenomena at the time of their actual

presence, that is a manifest impossibility. The thinker cannot divide himself into two, of whom one reasons

whilst the other observes him reason. The organ observed and the organ observing being, in this case,

identical, how could observation take place? This pretended psychological method is then radically null and

void. On the one hand, they advise you to isolate yourself, as far as possible, from every external sensation,

especially every intellectual work, for if you were to busy yourself even with the simplest calculation, what

would become of internal observation? on the other hand, after having with the utmost care attained this

state of intellectual slumber, you must begin to contemplate the operations going on in your mind, when

nothing there takes place! Our descendants will doubtless see such pretensions some day ridiculed upon the

stage. The results of so strange a procedure harmonize entirely with its principle. For all the two thousand

years during which metaphysicians have thus cultivated psychology, they are not agreed about one

intelligible and established proposition. 'Internal observation' gives almost as many divergent results as there

Comte hardly could have known anything of the English, and nothing of the German, empirical psychology.

The 'results' which he had in mind when writing were probably scholastic ones, such as principles of internal

activity, the faculties, the ego, the liberum arbitrium indifferentioe, etc. John Mill, in replying to him,[6] says:

"It might have occurred to M. Comte that a fact may be studied through the medium of memory, not at the

very moment of our perceiving it, but the moment after : and this is really the mode in which our best

knowledge of our intellectual acts is generally acquired. We reflect on what we have been doing when the act

is past, but when its impression in the memory is still fresh. Unless in one of these ways, we could not have

acquired the knowledge which nobody denies us to have, of what passes in our minds. M. Comte would

scarcely have affirmed that we are not aware of our own intellectual operations. We know of our observings

and our reasonings, either at the very time, or by memory the moment after ; in either case, by direct

knowledge, and not (like things done by us in a state of somnambulism) merely by their results. This simple

fact destroys the whole of M. Comte's argument. Whatever we are directly aware of, we can directly

Where now does the truth lie? Our quotation from Mill is obviously the one which expresses the most of

practical truth about the matter. Even the writers who insist upon the absolute veracity of our immediate inner

apprehension of a conscious state have to contrast with this the fallibility of our memory or observation of it,

a moment later. No one has emphasized more sharply than Brentano himself the difference between the

immediate feltness of a feeling, and its perception by a subsequent reflective act. But which mode of

consciousness of it is that which the psychologist must depend on? If to have feelings or thoughts in their

immediacy were enough, babies in the cradle would be psychologists, and infallible ones. But the

psychologist must not only have his mental states in their absolute veritableness, he must report them and

write about them, name them, classify and compare them and trace their relations to other things. Whilst alive

they are their own property ; it is only postmortem that they become his prey.[7] And as in the naming,

classing, and know ing of things in general we are notoriously fallible, why not also here? Comte is quite

right in laying stress on the fact that a feeling, to be named, judged, or perceived, must be already past. No

subjective state, whilst present, is its own object ; its object is always something else. There are, it is true,

cases in which we appear to be naming our present feeling, and so to be experiencing and observing the same

inner fact at a single stroke, as when we say 'I feel tired,' 'I am angry,' etc. But these are illusory, and a little

attention unmasks the illusion. The present conscious state, when I say 'I feel tired,' is not the direct state of

tire ; when I say "I feel angry,' it is not the direct state of anger. It is the state of sayingIfeeltired, of

sayingIfeelangry, entirely different matters, so different that the fatigue and anger apparently included

in them are considerable modifications of the fatigue and anger directly felt in the previous instant. The act of

The only sound grounds on which the infallible veracity of the introspective judgment might be maintained

are empirical. If we had reason to think it has never yet deceived us, we might continue to trust it. This is the

"The illusions of our senses." says this author," have undermined our belief in the reality of the outer world ;

but in the sphere of inner observation our confidence is intact, for we have never found ourselves to be in

error about the reality of an act of thought or feeling. We have never been misled into thinking we were not in

doubt or in anger when these conditions were really states of our consciousness."[9]

But sound as the reasoning here would be, were the premises correct, I fear the latter cannot pass. However it

may be with such strong feelings as doubt or anger, about weaker feelings, and about the relations to each

other of all feelings, we find ourselves in continual error and uncertainty so soon as we are called on to name

and class, and not merely to feel. Who can be sure of the exact order of his feelings when they are excessively

rapid? Who can be sure, in his sensible perception of a chair, how much comes from the eye and how much is

supplied out of the previous knowledge of the mind? Who can compare with precision the quantities of

disparate feelings even where the feelings are very much alike. For instance, where an object is felt now

against the back and now against the cheek, which feeling is most extensive? Who can be sure that two given

feelings are or are not exactly the same? Who can tell which is briefer or longer than the other when both

occupy but an instant of time? Who knows, of many actions, for what motive they were done, or if for any

motive at all? Who can enumerate all the distinct ingredients of such a complicated feeling as anger? and who

can tell offhand whether or no a perception of distance be a compound or a simple state of mind. The whole

mindstuff controversy would stop if we could decide conclusively by introspection that what seem to us

Mr. Sully, in his work on Illusions, has a chapter on those of Introspection from which we might now quote.

But, since the rest of this volume will be little more than a collection of illustrations of the difficulty of

discovering by direct introspection exactly what our feelings and their relations are, we need not anticipate

our own future details, but just state our general conclusion that introspection is difficult and fallible ; and

that the difficulty is simply that of all observation of whatever kind. Something is before us ; we do our best

to tell what it is, but in spite of our good will we may go astray, and give a description more applicable to

some other sort of thing. The only safeguard is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge about the

thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, until at last the harmony of a consistent system is

reached. Such a system, gradually worked out, is the best guarantee the psychologist can give for the

soundness of any particular psychologic observation which he may report. Such a system we ourselves must

The English writers on psychology, and the school of Herbart in Germany, have in the main contented

themselves with such results as the immediate introspection of single individuals gave, and shown what a

body of doctrine they may make. The works of Locke, Hume, Reid, Hartley, Stewart Brown, the Mills, will

always be classics in this line ; and in Professor Brain's Treatises we have probably the last word of what this

method taken mainly by itself can do the last monument of the youth of our science, still untechnical and

generally intelligible, like the Chemistry of Lavoisier, or Anatomy before the microscope was used.

The Experimental Method. But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one

may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of

course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale

and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a

country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously

cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on

studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are

embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack

having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must

submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must

sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism,

pendulum, and chronographphilosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and

that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed

to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day

No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar

with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt. The principal fields of

experimentation so far have been : 1) the connection of conscious states with their physical conditions,

including the whole of brainphysiology, and the recent minutely cultivated physiology of the senseorgans,

together with what is technically known as 'psychophysics,' or the laws of correlation between sensations

and the outward stimuli by which they are aroused ; 2) the analysis of spaceperception into its sensational

elements ; 3) the measurement of the duration of the simplest mental processes ; 4) that of the accuracy of

reproduction in the memory of sensible experiences and of intervals of space and time ; 5) that of the manner

in which simple mental states influence each other, call each other up, or inhibit each other's reproduction ; 6)

that of the number of facts which consciousness can simultaneously discern ; finally, 7) that of the elementary

laws of oblivescence and retention. It must be said that in some of these fields the results have as yet borne

little theoretic fruit commensurate with the great labor expended in their acquisition. But facts are facts, and if

we only get enough of them they are sure to combine. New ground will from year to year be broken, and

theoretic results will grow. Meanwhile the experimental method has quite changed the face of the science so

The comparative method, finally, supplements the intro spective and experimental methods. This method

presupposes a normal psychology of introspection to be established in its main features. But where the origin

of these features, or their dependence upon one another, is in question, it is of the utmost importance to trace

the phenomenon considered through all its possible variations of type and combination. So it has come to

pass that instincts of animals are ransacked to throw light on our own ; and that the reasoning faculties of

bees and ants, the minds of savages, infants, madmen, idiots, the deaf and blind, criminals, and eccentrics, are

all invoked in support of this or that special theory about some part of our own mental life. The history of

sciences, moral and political institutions, and languages, as types of mental product, are pressed into the same

service. Messrs. Darwin and Galton have set the example of circulars of questions sent out by the hundred to

those supposed able to reply. The custom has spread, and it will be well for us in the next generation if such

circulars be not ranked among the common pests of life. Meanwhile information grows, and results emerge.

There are great sources of error in the comparative method. The interpretation of the 'psychoses' of animals,

savages, and infants is necessarily wild work, in which the personal equation of the investigator has things

very much its own way. A savage will be reported to have no moral or religious feeling if his actions shock

the observer unduly. A child will be assumed without selfconsciousness because he talks of himself in the

third person, etc., etc. No rules can be laid down in advance. Comparative observations, to be definite, must

usually be made to test some preexisting hypothesis ; and the only thing then is to use as much sagacity as

THE SOURCES OF ERROR IN PSYCHOLOGY. The first of them arises from the Misleading Influence of

Speech. Language was originally made by men who were not psychologists, and most men today employ

almost exclusively the vocabulary of outward things. The cardinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate,

hope, and the most comprehensive divisions of our intellectual activity, to remember, expect, think, know,

dream, with the broadest genera of aesthetic feeling, joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a

subjective order which this vocabulary deigns to note by special words. The elementary qualities of sensation,

bright, loud, red, blue, hot, cold, are, it is true, susceptible of being used in both an objective and a subjective

sense. They stand for outer qualities and for the feelings which these arouse. But the objective sense is the

original sense ; and still today we have to describe a large number of sensations by the name of the object

from which they have most frequently been got. An orange color, an odor of violets, a cheesy taste, a

thunderous sound, a fiery smart, etc., will recall what I mean. This absence of a special vocabulary for

subjective facts hinders the study of all but the very coarsest of them. Empiricist writers are very fond of

emphasizing one great set of delusions which language inflicts on the mind. Whenever we have made a word,

they say, to denote a certain group of phenomena, we are prone to suppose a substantive entity existing

beyond the phenomena, of which the word shall be the name. But the lack of a word quite as often leads to

the directly opposite error. We are then prone to suppose that no entity can be there ; and so we come to

overlook phenomena whose existence would be patent to us all, had we only grown up to hear it familiarly

recognized in speech.[10] It is hard to focus our attention on the nameless, and so there results a certain

But a worse defect than vacuousness comes from the dependence of psychology on common speech. Naming

our thought by its own objects, we almost all of us assume that as the objects are, so the thought must be. The

thought of several distinct things can only consist of several distinct bits of thought, or 'ideas ;' that of an

abstract or universal object can only be an abstract or universal idea. As each object may come and go, be

forgotten and then thought of again, it is held that the thought of it has a precisely similar independence,

selfidentity, and mobility. The thought of the object's recurrent identity is regarded as the identity of its

recurrent thought ; and the perceptions of multiplicity, of coexistence, of succession, are severally conceived

to be brought about only through a multiplicity, a coexistence, a succession, of perceptions. The continuous

flow of the mental stream is sacrificed, and in its place an atomism, a brickbat plan of construction, is

preached, for the existence of which no good introspective grounds can be brought forward, and out of which

presently grow all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions, the heritage of woe of students of the mind.

These words are meant to impeach the entire English psychology derived from Locke and Hume, and the

entire German psychology derived from Herbart, so far as they both treat 'ideas' as separate subjective entities

that come and go. Examples will soon make the matter clearer. Meanwhile our psychologic insight is vitiated

'The Psychologist's Fallacy.' The great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with

that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall hereafter call this the 'psychologist's

fallacy' par excellence. For some of the mischief, here too, language is to blame. The psychologist, as we

remarked above (p. 183), stands outside of the mental state he speaks of. Both itself and its object are objects

for him. Now when it is a cognitive state (percept, thought, concept, etc.), he ordinarily has no other way of

naming it than as the thought, percept, etc., of that object. He himself, meanwhile, knowing the selfsame

object in his way, gets easily led to suppose that the thought, which is of it, knows it in the same way in

which he knows it, although this is often very far from being the case.[11] The most fictitious puzzles have

been introduced into our science by this means. The socalled question of presentative or representative

perception, of whether an object is present to the thought that thinks it by a counterfeit image of itself, or

directly and without any intervening image at all ; the question of nominalism and conceptualism, of the

shape in which things are present when only a general notion of them is before the mind ; are comparatively

easy questions when once the psychologist's fallacy is eliminated from their treatment, as we shall ere long

Another variety of the psychologist' fallacy is the assumption that the mental state studied must be conscious

of itself as the psychologist is conscious of it. The mental state is aware of itself only from within ; it grasps

what we call its own content, and nothing more. The psychologist, on the contrary, is aware of it from

without, and knows its relations with all sorts of other things. What the thought sees is only its own object ;

what the psychologist sees is the thought's object, plus the thought itself, plus possibly all the rest of the

world. We must be very careful therefore, in discussing a state of mind from the psychologist's point of view,

to avoid foisting into its own ken matters that are only there for ours. We must avoid substituting what we

know the consciousness is, for what it is a consciousness of, and counting its outward, and so to speak

physical, relations with other facts of the world, in among the objects of which we set it down as aware.

Crude as such a confusion of standpoints seems to be when abstractly stated, it is nevertheless a snare into

which no psychologist has kept himself at all times from falling, and which forms almost the entire

stockintrade of certain schools. We cannot be too watchful against its subtly corrupting influence.

Summary. To sum up the chapter, Psychology assumes that thoughts successively occur, and that they know

objects in a world which the psychologist also knows. These thoughts are the subjective data of which he

treats, and their relations to their objects, to the brain, and to the rest of the world constitute the

subjectmatter of psychologic science. Its methods are introspection, experimentation, and comparison. But

introspection is no sure guide to truths about our mental states ; and in particular the poverty of the

psychological vocabu. [sic] lary leads us to drop out certain states from our consideration, and to treat others

as if they knew themselves and their objects as the psychologist knows both, which is a disastrous fallacy in

Footnotes [1] On the relation between Psychology and General Philosophy, see G. C. Robertson, 'Mind,' vol.

[7] Wundt says: "The first rule for utilizing inward observation consists in taking, as far as possible,

experiences that are accidental, unexpected, and not intentionally brought about.... First it is best as far as

possible to rely on Memory and not on immediate Apprehension.... Second, internal observation is better

fitted to grasp clearly conscious states, especially voluntary mental acts: such inner processes as are obscurely

conscious and involuntary will almost entirely elude it, because the effort to observe interferes with them, and

[8] In cases like this, where the state outlasts the act of naming it, exists before it, and recurs when it is past,

we probably run little practical risk of error when we talk as if the state knew itself. The state of feeling and

the state of naming the feeling are continuous, and the infallibility of such prompt introspective judgments is

probably great. But even here the certainty of our knowledge ought not to be argued on the a priori ground

that percipi and esse are in psychology the same. The states are really two ; the naming state and the named

[10] In English we have not even the generic distinction between thethingthoughtof and

thethoughtthinkingit, which in German is expressed by the opposition between Gedachtes and Gedanke,

Since, for psychology, a mind is an object in a world of other objects, its relation to those other objects must

TIMERELATIONS. Minds, as we know them, are temporary existences. Whether my mind had a being

prior to the birth of my body, whether it shall have one after the latter's decease, are questions to be decided

by my general philosophy or theology rather than by what we call 'scientific facts' I leave out the facts of

socalled spiritualism, as being still in dispute. Psychology, as a natural science, confines itself to the present

life, in which every mind appears yoked to a body through which its manifestations appear. In the present

world, then, minds precede, succeed, and coexist with each other in the common receptacle of time, and of

their collective relations to the latter nothing more can be said. The life of the individual consciousness in

Are we ever wholly unconscious? becomes one which must be discussed. Sleep, fainting, coma, epilepsy, and

other 'unconscious' conditions are apt to break in upon and occupy large durations of what we nevertheless

consider the mental history of a single man. And, the fact of interruption being admitted, is it not possible that

it may exist where we do not suspect it, and even perhaps in an incessant and finegrained form?

This might happen, and yet the subject himself never know it. We often take ether and have operations

performed without a suspicion that our consciousness has suf fered a breach. The two ends join each other

smoothly over the gap; and only the sight of our wound assures us that we must have been living through a

time which for our immediate consciousness was nonexistent. Even in sleep this sometimes happens: We

think we have had no nap, and it takes the clock to assure us that we are wrong.[1] We thus may live through

a real outward time, a time known by the psychologist who studies us, and yet not feel the time, or infer it

from any inward sign. The question is, how often does this happen? Is consciousness really discontinuous,

incessantly interrupted and recommencing (from the psychologist's point of view)? and does it only seem

continuous to itself by an illusion analogous to that of the zoetrope? Or is it at most times as continuous

It must be confessed that we can give no rigorous answer to this question. Cartesians, who hold that the

essence of the soul is to think, can of course solve it a priori, and explain the appearance of thoughtless

intervals either by lapses in our ordinary memory, or by the sinking of consciousness to a minimal state, in

which perhaps all that it feels is a bare existence which leaves no particulars behind to be recalled. If,

however, one have no doctrine about the soul or its essence, one is free to take the appearances for what they

Locke was the first prominent champion of this latter view, and the pages in which he attacks the Cartesian

belief are as spirited as any in his Essay. "Every drowsy nod shakes their doctrine who teach that their soul is

always thinking." He will not believe that men so easily forget. M. Jouffroy and Sir W. Hamilton, attacking

the question in the same empirical way, are led to an opposite conclusion. Their reasons, briefly stated, are

In somnambulism, natural or induced, there is often a great display of intellectual activity, followed by

On being suddenly awakened from a sleep, however profound, we always catch ourselves in the middle of a

dream. Common dreams are often remembered for a few minutes after waking, and then irretrievably lost.

Frequently, when awake and absentminded, we are visited by thoughts and images which the next instant

Our insensibility to habitual noises, etc., whilst awake, proves that we can neglect to attend to that which we

nevertheless feel. Similarly in sleep, we grow inured, and sleep soundly in presence of sensations of sound,

cold, contact, etc., which at first prevented our complete repose. We have learned to neglect them whilst

asleep as we should whilst awake. The mere senseimpressions are the same when the sleep is deep as when

it is light; the difference must lie in a judgment on the part of the apparently slumbering mind that they are

This discrimination is equally shown by nurses of the sick and mothers of infants, who will sleep through

much noise of an irrelevant sort, but waken at the slightest stirring of the patient or the babe. This last fact

Many people have a remarkable faculty of registering when asleep the flight of time. They will habitually

wake up at the same minute day after day, or will wake punctually at an unusual hour determined upon

overnight. How can this knowledge of the hour (more accurate often than anything the waking consciousness

Such are what we may call the classical reasons for admitting that the mind is active even when the person

afterwards ignores the fact.[3] Of late years, or rather, one may say, of late months, they have been reinforced

by a lot of curious observations made on hysterical and hypnotic subjects, which prove the existence of a

highly developed consciousness in places where it has hitherto not been suspected at all. These observations

throw such a novel light upon human nature that I must give them in some detail. That at least four different

and in a certain sense rival observers should agree in the same conclusion justifies us in accepting the

'Unconsciousness' in Hysterics. One of the most constant symptoms in persons suffering from hysteric

disease in its extreme forms consists in alterations of the natural sensibility of various parts and organs of the

body. Usually the alteration is in the direction of defect, or anaesthesia. One or both eyes are blind, or

colorblind, or there is hemianopsia (blindness to one half the field of view), or the field is contracted.

Hearing, taste, smell may similarly disappear, in part or in totality. Still more striking are the cutaneous

anaesthesias. The old witchfinders looking for the 'devil's seals' learned well the existence of those

insensible patches on the skin of their victims, to which the minute physical examinations of recent medicine

have but recently attracted attention again. They may be scattered anywhere, but are very apt to affect one

side of the body. Not infrequently they affect an entire lateral half, from head to foot; and the insensible skin

of, say, the left side will then be found separated from the naturally sensitive skin of the right by a perfectly

sharp line of demarcation down the middle of the front and back. Sometimes, most remarkable of all, the

entire skin, hands, feet, face, everything, and the mucous membranes, muscles and joints so far as they can be

ex plored, become completely insensible without the other vital functions becoming gravely disturbed.

These hysterical anaesthesias can be made to disappear more or less completely by various odd processes. It

has been recently found that magnets, plates of metal, or the electrodes of a battery, placed against the skin,

have this peculiar power. And when one side is relieved in this way, the anaesthesia is often found to have

transferred itself to the opposite side, which until then was well. Whether these strange effects of magnets and

metals be due to their direct physiological action, or to a prior effect on the patient's mind ('expectant

attention' or 'suggestion') is still a mooted question. A still better awakener of sensibility is the hypnotic

trance, into which many of these patients can be very easily placed, and in which their lost sensibility not

infrequently becomes entirely restored. Such returns of sensibility succeed the times of insensibility and

alternate with them. But Messrs. Pierre Janet[4] and A. Binet[5] have shown that during the times of

anaesthesia, and coexisting with it, sensibility to the anaesthetic parts is also there, in the form of a secondary

consciousness entirely cut off from the primary or normal one, but susceptible of being tapped and made to

Chief amongst these is what M. Janet calls 'the method of distraction.' These hysterics are apt to possess a

very narrow field of attention, and to be unable to think of more than one thing at a time. When talking with

any person they forget everything else. "When Lucie talked directly with any one," says M. Janet, "she ceased

to be able to hear any other person. You may stand behind her, call her by name, shout abuse into her ears,

without making her turn round; or place yourself before her, show her objects, touch her, etc., without

attracting her notice. When finally she becomes aware of you, she thinks you have just come into the room

again, and greets you accordingly. This singular forgetfulness makes her liable to tell all her secrets aloud,

Now M. Janet found in several subjects like this that if he came up behind them whilst they were plunged in

conversation with a third party, and addressed them in a whisper, telling them to raise their hand or perform

other simple acts, they would obey the order given, although their talking intelligence was quite unconscious

of receiving it. Leading them from one thing to another, he made them reply by signs to his whispered

questions, and finally made them answer in writing, if a pencil were placed in their hand. The primary

consciousness meanwhile went on with the conversation, entirely unaware of these performances on the

hand's part. The consciousness which presided over these latter appeared in its turn to be quite as little

disturbed by the upper consciousness's concerns. This proof by 'automatic' writing, of a secondary

consciousness's existence, is the most cogent and striking one; but a crowd of other facts prove the same

The apparently anaesthetic hand of these subjects, for one thing, will often adapt itself discriminatingly to

whatever object may be put into it. With a pencil it will make writing movements; into a pair of scissors it

will put its fingers and will open and shut them, etc., etc. The primary consciousness, so to call it, is

meanwhile unable to say whether or no anything is in the hand, if the latter be hidden from sight. "I put a pair

of eyeglasses into L�onie's anaesthetic hand, this hand opens it and raises it towards the nose, but half way

thither it enters the field of vision of L�onie, who sees it and stops stupefied: 'Why,' says she, 'I have an

eyeglass in my left hand!'" M. Binet found a very curious sort of connection between the apparently

anaesthetic skin and the mind in some Salp�tri�resubjects. Things placed in the hand were not felt, but

thought of (apparently in visual terms) and in no wise referred by the subject to their starting point in the

hand's sensation. A key, a knife, placed in the hand occasioned ideas of a key or a knife, but the hand felt

nothing. Similarly the subject thought of the number 3, 6, etc., if the hand or finger was bent three or six

In certain individuals there was found a still odder phenomenon, which reminds one of that curious

idiosyncrasy of 'colored hearing' of which a few cases have been lately described with great care by foreign

writers. These individuals, namely, saw the impression received by the hand, but could not feel it; and the

thing seen appeared by no means associated with the hand, but more like an independent vision, which

usually interested and surprised the patient. Her hand being hidden by a screen, she was ordered to look at

another screen and to tell of any visual image which might project itself thereon. Numbers would then come,

corresponding to the number of times the insensible member was raised, touched, etc. Colored lines and

figures would come, corresponding to similar ones traced on the palm; the hand itself or its fingers would

come when manipulated; and finally objects placed in it would come; but on the hand itself nothing would

ever be felt. Of course simulation would not be hard here; but M. Binet disbelieves this (usually very

The usual way in which doctors measure the delicacy of our touch is by the compasspoints. Two points are

normally felt as one whenever they are too close together for discrimination; but what is 'too close' on one

part of the skin may seem very far apart on another. In the middle of the back or on the thigh, less than 3

inches may be too close; on the fingertip a tenth of an inch is far enough apart. Now, as tested in this way,

with the appeal made to the primary consciousness, which talks through the mouth and seems to hold the

field alone, a certain person's skin may be entirely anaesthetic and not feel the compasspoints at all; and yet

this same skin will prove to have a perfectly normal sensibility if the appeal be made to that other secondary

or subconsciousness, which expresses itself automatically by writing or by movements of the hand. M.

Binet, M. Pierre Janet, and M. Jules Janet have all found this. The subject, whenever touched, wonld [sic]

signify 'one point' or 'two points,' as accurately as if she were a normal person. She would signify it only by

these movements; and of the movements themselves her primary self would be as unconscious as of the facts

they signified, for what the submerged consciousness makes the hand do automatically is unknown to the

Messrs. Bernheim and Pitres have also proved, by observations too complicated to be given in this spot, that

the hysterical blindness is no real blindness at all. The eye of an hysteric which is totally blind when the other

or seeing eye is shut, will do its share of vision perfectly well when both eyes are open together. But even

where both eyes are semiblind from hysterical disease, the method of automatic writing proves that their

perceptions exist, only cut off from communication with the upper consciousness. M. Binet has found the

hand of his patients unconsciously writing down words which their eyes were vainly endeavoring to 'see,' i.e.,

to bring to the upper consciousness. Their submerged consciousness was of course seeing them, or the hand

could not have written as it did. Colors are similarly perceived by the subconscious self, which the

hysterically colorblind eyes cannot bring to the normal consciousness. Pricks, burns, and pinches on the

anaesthetic skin, all unnoticed by the upper self, are recollected to have been suffered, and complained of, as

soon as the under self gets a chance to express itself by the passage of the subject into hypnotic trance.

It must be admitted, therefore, that in certain persons, at least, the total possible consciousness may be split

into parts which coexist but mutually ignore each other, and share the objects of knowledge between them.

More remarkable still, they are complementary. Give an object to one of the consciousnesses, and by that fact

you remove it from the other or others. Barring a certain common fund of information, like the command of

language, etc., what the upper self knows the under self is ignorant of, and vice versa. M. Janet has proved

this beautifully in his subject Lucie. The following experiment will serve as the type of the rest: In her trance

he covered her lap with cards, each bearing a number. He then told her that on waking she should not see any

card whose number was a multiple of three. This is the ordinary socalled 'posthypnotic suggestion,' now

well known, and for which Lucie was a welladapted subject. Accordingly, when she was awakened and

asked about the papers on her lap, she counted and said she saw those only whose number was not a multiple

of 3. To the 12, 18, 9, etc., she was blind. But the hand, when the subconscious self was interrogated by the

usual method of engrossing the upper self in another conversation, wrote that the only cards in Lucie's lap

were those numbered 12, 18, 9, etc., and on being asked to pick up all the cards which were there, picked up

these and let the others lie. Similarly when the sight of certain things was suggested to the subconscious

Lucie, the normal Lucie suddenly became partially or totally blind. "What is the matter? I can't see!" the

normal personage suddenly cried out in the midst of her conversation, when M. Janet whispered to the

secondary personage to make use of her eyes. The anaesthesias, paralyses, contractions and other

irregularities from which hysterics suffer seem then to be due to the fact that their secondary personage has

enriched itself by robbing the primary one of a function which the latter ought to have retained. The curative

indication is evident: get at the secondary personage, by hypnotization or in whatever other way, and make

her give up the eye, the skin, the arm, or whatever the affected part may be. The normal self thereupon

regains possession, sees, feels, or is able to move again. In this way M. Jules Janet easily cured the

wellknown subject of the Salp�tri�re, Wit., of all sorts of afflictions which, until he discovered the secret of

her deeper trance, it had been difficult to subdue. "Cessez cette mauvaise plaisanterie," he said to the

secondary self and the latter obeyed. The way in which the various personages share the stock of possible

sensations between them seems to be amusingly illustrated in this young woman. When awake, her skin is

insensible everywhere except on a zone about the arm where she habitually wears a gold bracelet. This zone

has feeling; but in the deepest trance, when all the rest of her body feels, this particular zone becomes

Sometimes the mutual ignorance of the selves leads to incidents which are strange enough. The acts and

movements performed by the subconscious self are withdrawn from the conscious one, and the subject will

do all sorts of incongruous things of which he remains quite unaware. "I order Lucie [by the method of

distraction] to make a pied de nez, and her hands go forthwith to the end of her nose. Asked what she is

doing, she replies that she is doing nothing, and continues for a long time talking, with no apparent suspicion

that her fingers are moving in front of her nose. I make her walk about the room; she continues to speak and

M. Janet observed similar acts in a man in alcoholic delirium. Whilst the doctor was questioning him, M. J.

made him by whispered suggestion walk, sit, kneel, and even lie down on his face on the floor, he all the

while believing himself to be standing beside his bed. Such bizarreries sound incredible, until one has seen

their like. Long ago, without understanding it, I myself saw a small example of the way in which a person's

knowledge may be shared by the two selves. A young woman who had been writing automatically was sitting

with a pencil in her hand, trying to recall at my request the name of a gentleman whom she had once seen.

She could only recollect the first syllable. Her hand meanwhile, without her knowledge, wrote down the last

two syllables. In a perfectly healthy young man who can write with the planchette, I lately found the hand to

be entirely anaesthetic during the writing act; I could prick it severely without the Subject knowing the fact.

The writing on the planchette, however, accused me in strong terms of hurting the hand. Pricks on the other

(nonwriting) hand, meanwhile, which awakened strong protest from the young man's vocal organs, were

We get exactly similar results in the socalled posthypnotic suggestion. It is a familiar fact that certain

subjects, when told during a trance to perform an act or to experience an hallucination after waking, will

when the time comes, obey the command. How is the command registered? How is its performance so

accurately timed? These problems were long a mystery, for the primary personality remembers nothing of the

trance or the suggestion, and will often trump up an improvised pretext for yielding to the unaccountable

impulse which possesses the man so suddenly and which he cannot resist. Edmund Gurney was the first to

discover, by means of automatic writing, that the secondary self is awake, keeping its attention constantly

fixed on the command and watching for the signal of its execution. Certain trancesubjects who were also

automatic writers, when roused from trance and put to the planchette, not knowing then what they wrote,

and having their upper attention fully engrossed by reading aloud, talking, or solving problems in mental

arithmetic, would inscribe the orders which they had received, together with notes relative to the time

elapsed and the time yet to run before the execution.[8] It is therefore to no 'automatism' in the mechanical

sense that such acts are due: a self presides over them, a splitoff, limited and buried, but yet a fully

conscious, self. More than this, the buried self often comes to the surface and drives out the other self whilst

the acts are performing. In other words, the subject lapses into trance again when the moment arrives for

execution, and has no subsequent recollection of the act which he has done. Gurney and Beaunis established

this fact, which has since been verified on a large scale; and Gurney also showed that the patient became

suggestible again during the brief time of the performance. M. Janet's observations, in their turn, well

"I tell Lucie to keep her arms raised after she shall have awakened. Hardly is she in the normal state, when up

go her arms above her head, but she pays no attention to them. She goes, comes, converses, holding her arms

high in the air. If asked what her arms are doing, she is surprised at such a question, and says very sincerely:

'My hands are doing nothing; they are just like yours.'... I com mand her to weep, and when awake she

really sobs, but continues in the midst of her tears to talk of very gay matters. The sobbing over, there

The primary self often has to invent an hallucination by which to mask and hide from its own view the deeds

which the other self is enacting. L�onie 3 [9] writes real letters, whilst L�onie 1 believes that she is knitting;

or Lucie 3 really comes to the doctor's office, whilst Lucie 1 believes herself to be at home. This is a sort of

delirium. The alphabet, or the series of numbers, when handed over to the attention of the secondary

personage may for the time be lost to the normal self. Whilst the hand writes the alphabet, obediently to

command, the 'subject,' to her great stupefaction, finds herself unable to recall it, etc. Few things are more

curious than these relations of mutual exclusion, of which all gradations exist between the several partial

How far this splitting up of the mind into separate consciousnesses may exist in each one of us is a problem.

M. Janet holds that it is only possible where there is abnormal weakness, and consequently a defect of

unifying or coordinating power. An hysterical woman abandons part of her consciousness because she is too

weak nervously to hold it together. The abandoned part meanwhile may solidify into a secondary or

subconscious self. In a perfectly sound subject, on the other hand, what is dropped out of mind at one

moment keeps coming back at the next. The whole fund of experiences and knowledges remains integrated,

and no splitoff portions of it can get organized stably enough to form subordinate selves. The stability,

monotony, and stupidity of these latter is often very striking. The posthypnotic subconsciousness seems to

think of nothing but the order which it last received; the cataleptic subconsciousness, of nothing but the last

position imprinted on the limb. M. Janet could cause definitely circumscribed reddening and tumefaction of

the skin on two of his subjects, by suggesting to them in hypnotism the hallucination of a mustardpoultice of

any special shape. "J'ai tout le temps pens� � votre sinapisme," says the subject, when put back into trance

after the suggestion has taken effect. A man N.,... whom M. Janet operated on at long intervals, was

betweenwhiles tampered with by another operator, and when put to sleep again by M. Janet, said he was 'too

far away to receive orders, being in Algiers.' The other operator, having suggested that hallucination, had

forgotten to remove it before waking the subject from his trance, and the poor passive trancepersonality had

stuck for weeks in the stagnant dream. L�onie's subconscious performances having been illustrated to a

caller, by a 'pied de nez' executed with her left hand in the course of conversation, when, a year later, she

meets him again, up goes the same hand to her nose again, without L�onie's normal self suspecting the fact.

All these facts, taken together, form unquestionably the beginning of an inquiry which is destined to throw a

new light into the very abysses of our nature. It is for that reason that I have cited them at such length in this

early chapter of the book. They prove one thing conclusively, namely, that we must never take a person's

testimony, however sincere, that he has felt nothing, as proof positive that no feeling has been there. It may

have been there as part of the consciousness of a 'secondary personage,' of whose experiences the primary

one whom we are consulting can naturally give no account. In hypnotic subjects (as we shall see in a later

chapter) just as it is the easiest thing in the world to paralyze a movement or member by simple suggestion,

so it is easy to produce what is called a systematized anaesthesia by word of command. A systematized

anaesthesia means an insensibility, not to any one element of things, but to some one concrete thing or class

of things. The subject is made blind or deaf to a certain person in the room and to no one else, and thereupon

denies that that person is present, or has spoken, etc. M. P. Janet's Lucie, blind to some of the numbered cards

in her lap (p. 207 above), is a case in point. Now when the object is simple, like a red wafer or a black cross,

the subject, although he denies that he sees it when he looks straight at it, nevertheless gets a 'negative

afterimage' of it when he looks away again, showing that the optical impression of it has been received.

Moreover reflection shows that such a subject must distinguish the object from others like it in order to be

blind to it. Make him blind to one person in the room, set all the persons in a row, and tell him to count them.

He will count all but that one. But how can he tell which one not to count without recognizing who he is? In

like manner, make a stroke on paper or blackboard, and tell him it is not there, and he will see nothing but the

clean paper or board. Next (he not looking) surround the original stroke with other strokes exactly like it, and

ask him what he sees. He will point out one by one all the new strokes, and omit the original one every time,

no matter how numerous the new strokes may be, or in what order they are arranged. Similarly, if the original

single stroke to which he is blind be doubled by a prism of some sixteen degrees placed before one of his

eyes (both being kept open), he will say that he now sees one stroke, and point in the direction in which the

Obviously, then, he is not blind to the kind of stroke in the least. He is blind only to one individual stroke of

that kind in a particular position on the board or paper that is to a particular complex object; and,

paradoxical as it may seem to say so, he must distinguish it with great accuracy from others like it, in order to

remain blind to it when the others are brought near. He discriminates it, as a preliminary to not seeing it at all.

Again, when by a prism before one eye a previously invisible line has been made visible to that eye, and the

other eye is thereupon closed or screened, its closure makes no difference; the line still remains visible. But if

then the prism be removed, the line will disappear even to the eye which a moment ago saw it, and both eyes

We have, then, to deal in these cases neither with a blindness of the eye itself, nor with a mere failure to

notice, but with something much more complex; namely, an active counting out and positive exclusion of

certain objects. It is as when one 'cuts' an acquaintance, 'ignores' a claim, or 'refuses to be influenced' by a

consideration. But the perceptive activity which works to this result is disconnected from the consciousness

which is personal, so to speak, to the subject, and makes of the object concerning which the suggestion is

The mother who is asleep to every sound but the stirrings of her babe, evidently has the babeportion of her

auditory sensibility systematically awake. Relatively to that, the rest of her mind is in a state of systematized

anaesthesia. That department, split off and disconnected from the sleeping part, can none the less wake the

latter up in case of need. So that on the whole the quarrel between Descartes and Locke as to whether the

mind ever sleeps is less near to solution than ever. On a priori speculative grounds Locke's view that thought

and feeling may at times wholly disappear seems the more plausible. As glands cease to secrete and muscles

to contract, so the brain should sometimes cease to carry currents, and with this minimum of its activity might

well coexist a minimum of consciousness. On the other hand, we see how deceptive are appearances, and are

forced to admit that a part of consciousness may sever its connections with other parts and yet continue to be.

On the whole it is best to abstain from a conclusion. The science of the near future will doubtless answer this

RELATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO SPACE. This is the problem known in the history of philosophy as

the question of the seat of the soul. It has given rise to much literature, but we must ourselves treat it very

briefly. Everything depends on what we conceive the soul to be, an extended or an inextended entity. If the

former, it may occupy a seat. If the latter, it may not; though it has been thought that even then it might still

have a position. Much hairsplitting has arisen about the possibility of an inextended thing nevertheless being

present throughout a certain amount of extension. We must distinguish the kinds of presence. In some manner

our consciousness is 'present' to everything with which it is in relation. I am cognitively present to Orion

whenever I perceive that constellation, but I am not dynamically present there, I work no effects. To my

brain, however, I am dynamically present, inasmuch as my thought and feelings seem to react upon the

processes thereof. If, then, by the seat of the mind is meant nothing more than the locality with which it

stands in immediate dynamic relations, we are certain to be right in saying that its seat is somewhere in the

cortex of the brain. Descartes, as is well known, thought that the inextended soul was immediately present to

the pineal gland. Others, as Lotze in his earlier days, and W. Volkmann, think its position must be at some

point of the structureless matrix of the anatomical brainelements, at which point they suppose that all

nervecurrents may cross and combine. The scholastic doctrine is that the soul is totally present, both in the

whole and in each and every part of the body. This mode of presence is said to be due to the soul's inextended

nature and to its simplicity. Two extended entities could only correspond in space with one another, part to

part, but not so does the soul, which has no parts, correspond with the body. Sir Wm. Hamilton and

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

Mr. J. E. Walter,[11] maintain the soul to be a spacefilling prin ciple. Fichte calls it the inner body, Ulrici

likens it to a fluid of nonmolecular composition. These theories remind us of the 'theosophic' doctrines of

the present day, and carry us back to times when the soul as vehicle of consciousness was not discriminated ,

as it now is, from the vital principle presiding over the formation of the body. Plato gave head, breast, and

abdomen to the immortal reason, the courage, and the appetites, as their seats respectively. Aristotle argues

that the heart is the sole seat. Elsewhere we find the blood, the brain, the lungs, the liver the kidneys even, in

The truth is that if the thinking principle is extended we neither know its form nor its seat; whilst if

unextended, it is absurd to speak of its having any spacerelations at all. Spacerelations we shall see

hereafter to be sensible things. The only objects that can have mutual relations of position are objects that are

perceived coexisting in the same felt space. A thing not perceived at all, such as the inextended soul must be,

cannot coexist with any perceived objects in this way. No lines can be felt stretching from it to the other

objects. It can form no terminus to any spaceinterval. It can therefore in no intelligible sense enjoy position.

Its relations cannot be spatial, but must be exclusively cognitive or dynamic, as we have seen. So far as they

are dynamic to talk of the soul being 'present' is only a figure of speech. Hamilton's doctrine that the soul is

present to the whole body is at any rate false: for cognitively its presence extends far beyond the body, and

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER OBJECTS are either relations to other minds, or to material

things. The material things are either the mind's own brain, on the one hand, or anything else, on the other.

The relations of a mind to its own brain are of a unique and utterly mysterious sort; we discussed them in the

The mind's relations to other objects than the brain are cognitive and emotional relations exclusively, so far as

we know. It knows them, and it inwardly welcomes or rejects them, but it has no other dealings with them.

When it seems to act upon them, it only does so through the intermediary of its own body, so that not it but

the body is what acts on them, and the brain must first act upon the body. The same is true when other things

seem to act on it they only act on its body, and through that on its brain.[14] All that it can do directly is to

know other things, misknow or ignore them, and to find that they interest it, in this fashion or in that.

Now the relation of knowing is the most mysterious thing in the world. If we ask how one thing can know

another we are led into the heart of Erkenntnisstheorie and metaphysics. The psychologist, for his part, does

not consider the matter so curiously as this. Finding a world before him which he cannot but believe that he

knows, and setting himself to study his own past thoughts, or someone else's thoughts, of what he believes to

be that same world; he cannot but conclude that those other thoughts know it after their fashion even as he

knows it after his. Knowledge becomes for him an ultimate relation that must be admitted, whether it be

explained or not, just like difference or resemblance, which no one seeks to explain.

Were our topic Absolute Mind instead of being the concrete minds of individuals dwelling in the natural

world, we could not tell whether that Mind had the function of knowing or not, as knowing is commonly

understood. We might learn the complexion of its thoughts; but, as we should have no realities outside of it to

compare them with, for if we had, the Mind would not be Absolute, we could not criticise them, and find

them either right or wrong; and we should have to call them simply the thoughts, and not the knowledge, of

the Absolute Mind. Finite minds, however, can be judged in a different way, because the psychologist

himself can go bail for the independent reality of the objects of which they think. He knows these to exist

outside as well as inside the minds in question; he thus knows whether the minds think and know, or only

think; and though his knowledge is of course that of a fallible mortal, there is nothing in the conditions that

Now by what tests does the psychologist decide whether the state of mind he is studying is a bit of

He uses the tests we all practically use. If the state of mind resembles his own idea of a certain reality; or if

without resembling his idea of it, it seems to imply that reality and refer to it by operating upon it through the

bodily organs; or even if it resembles and operates on some other reality that implies, and leads up to, and

terminates in, the first one, in either or all of these cases the psychologist admits that the state of mind takes

cognizance, directly or remotely, distinctly or vaguely, truly or falsely, of the reality's nature and position in

the world. If, on the other hand, the mental state under examination neither resembles nor operates on any of

the realities known to the psychologist, he calls it a subjective state pure and simple, possessed of no

cognitive worth. If, again, it resemble a reality or a set of realities as he knows them, but altogether fail to

operate on them or modify their course by producing bodily motions which the psychologist sees, then the

psychologist, like all of us, may be in doubt. Let the mental state, for example, occur during the sleep of its

subject. Let the latter dream of the death of a certain man, and let the man simultaneously die. Is the dream a

mere coincidence, or a veritable cognition of the death? Such puzzling cases are what the Societies for

'Psychical Research' are collecting and trying to interpret in the most reasonable way.

If the dream were the only one of the kind the subject ever had in his life, if the context of the death in the

dream differed in many particulars from the real death's context, and if the dream led to no action about the

death, unquestionably we should all call it a strange coincidence, and naught besides. But if the death in the

dream had a long context, agreeing point for point with every feature that attended the real death; if the

subject were constantly having such dreams, all equally perfect, and if on awaking he had a habit of acting

immediately as if they were true and so getting 'the start' of his more tardily informed neighbors, we should

probably all have to admit that he had some mysterious kind of clairvoyant power, that his dreams in an

inscrutable way knew just those realities which they figured, and that the word 'coincidence' failed to touch

the root of the matter. And whatever doubts any one preserved would completely vanish if it should appear

that from the midst of his dream he had the power of interfering with the course of the reality, and making the

events in it turn this way or that, according as he dreamed they should. Then at least it would be certain that

he and the psychologist were dealing with the same. It is by such tests as these that we are convinced that the

The psychologist's attitude towards cognition will be so important in the sequel that we must not leave it until

it is made perfectly clear. It is a thoroughgoing dualism. It supposes two elements, mind knowing and thing

known, and treats them as irreducible. Neither gets out of itself or into the other, neither in any way is the

other, neither makes the other. They just stand face to face in a common world, and one simply knows, or is

known unto, its counterpart. This singular relation is not to be expressed in any lower terms, or translated into

any more intelligible name. Some sort of signal must be given by the thing to the mind's brain, or the

knowing will not occur we find as a matter of fact that the mere existence of a thing outside the brain is not

a sufficient cause for our knowing it: it must strike the brain in some way, as well as be there, to be known.

But the brain being struck, the knowledge is constituted by a new construction that occurs altogether in the

mind. The thing remains the same whether known or not.[15] And when once there, the knowledge may

By the ancients, and by unreflecting people perhaps today, knowledge is explained as the passage of

something from without into the mind the latter, so far, at least, as its sensible affections go, being passive

and receptive. But even in mere senseimpression the duplication of the object by an inner construction must

take place. Consider, with Professor Bowne, what happens when two people converse together and know

"No thoughts leave the mind of one and cross into the mind of the other. When we speak of an exchange of

thought, even the crudest mind knows that this is a mere figure of speech.... To perceive another's thought, we

must construct his thought within ourselves;... this thought is our own and is strictly original with us. At the

same time we owe it to the other; and if it had not originated with him, it would probably not have originated

with us. But what has the other done?... This: by an entirely mysterious worldorder, the speaker is enabled

to produce a series of signs which are totally unlike [the] thought, but which, by virtue of the same

mysterious order, act as a series of incitements upon the hearer, so that he constructs within himself the

corresponding mental state. The act of the speaker consists in availing himself of the proper incitements. The

act of the hearer is immediately only the reaction of the soul against the incitement.... All communication

between finite minds is of this sort.... Probably no reflecting person would deny this conclusion, but when we

say that what is thus true of perception of another's thought is equally true of the perception of the outer

world in general, many minds will be disposed to question, and not a few will deny it outright. Yet there is no

alternative but to affirm that to perceive the universe we must construct it in thought, and that our knowledge

of the universe is but the unfolding of the mind's inner nature.... By describing the mind as a waxen tablet,

and things as impressing themselves upon it, we seem to get great insight until we think to ask where this

extended tablet is, and how things stamp themselves on it, and how the percep tive act would be explained

even if they did.... The immediate antecedents of sensation and perception are a series of nervous changes in

the brain. Whatever we know of the outer world is revealed only in and through these nervous changes. But

these are totally unlike the objects assumed to exist as their causes. If we might conceive the mind as in the

light, and in direct contact with its objects, the imagination at least would be comforted; but when we

conceive the mind as coming in contact with the outer world only in the dark chamber of the skull, and then

not in contact with the objects perceived, but only with a series of nervechanges of which, moreover, it

knows nothing, it is plain that the object is a long way off. All talk of pictures, impressions, etc., ceases

because of the lack of all the conditions to give such figures any meaning. It is not even clear that we shall

ever find our way out of the darkness into the world of light and reality again. We begin with complete trust

in physics and the senses, and are forthwith led away from the object into a nervous labyrinth, where the

object is entirely displaced by a set of nervous changes which are totally unlike anything but themselves.

Finally, we land in the dark chamber of the skull. The object has gone completely, and knowledge has not yet

appeared. Nervous signs are the raw material of all knowledge of the outer world according to the most

decided realism. But in order to pass beyond these signs into a knowledge of the outer world, we must posit

an interpreter who shall read back these signs into their objective meaning. But that interpreter, again, must

implicitly contain the meaning of the universe within itself; and these signs are really but excitations which

cause the soul to unfold what is within itself. Inasmuch as by common consent the soul communicates with

the outer world only through these signs, and never comes nearer to the object than such signs can bring it, it

follows that the principles of interpretation must be in the mind itself, and that the resulting construction is

primarily only an expression of the mind's own nature. All reaction is of this sort; it expresses the nature of

the reacting agent, and knowledge comes under the same head. this [sic] fact makes it necessary for us either

to admit a preestablished harmony between the laws and nature of thought and the laws and nature of

things, or else to allow that the objects of perception, the universe as it appears, are purely phenomenal, being

The dualism of Object and Subject and their preestablished harmony are what the psychologist as such must

assume, whatever ulterior monistic philosophy he may, as an individual who has the right also to be a

metaphysician, have in reserve. I hope that this general point is now made clear, so that we may leave it, and

There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively

knowledge of acquaintance and knowledgeabout. Most languages express the distinction; thus, g n v n a i , e

i d e n a i; noscere, scire; kennen, wissen; conna�tre, savoir.[17] I am acquainted with many people and

things, which I know very little about, except their presence in the places where I have met them. I know the

color blue when I see it, and the flavor of a pear when I taste it; I know an inch when I move my finger

through it; a second of time, when I feel it pass; an effort of attention when I make it; a difference between

two things when I notice it; but about the inner nature of these facts or what makes them what they are, I can

say nothing at all. I cannot impart acquaintance with them to any one who has not already made it himself. I

cannot describe them, make a blind man guess what blue is like, define to a child a syllogism, or tell a

philosopher in just what respect distance is just what it is, and differs from other forms of relation. At most, I

can say to my friends, Go to certain places and act in certain ways, and these objects will probably come. All

the elementary natures of the world, its highest genera, the simple qualities of matter and mind, together with

the kinds of relation that subsist between them, must either not be known at all, or known in this dumb way

of acquaintance without knowledgeabout. In minds able to speak at all there is, it is true, some knowledge

about everything. Things can at least be classed, and the times of their appearance told. But in general, the

less we analyze a thing, and the fewer of its relations we perceive, the less we know about it and the more our

familiarity with it is of the acquaintancetype. The two kinds of knowledge are, therefore, as the human mind

practically exerts them, relative terms. That is, the same thought of a thing may be called knowledgeabout it

in comparison with a simpler thought, or acquaintance with it in compari son with a thought of it that is

The grammatical sentence expresses this. Its 'subject' stands for an object of acquaintance which, by the

addition of the predicate, is to get something known about it. We may already know a good deal, when we

hear the subject named its name may have rich connotations. But, know we much or little then, we know

more still when the sentence is done. We can relapse at will into a mere condition of acquaintance with an

object by scattering our attention and staring at it in a vacuous trancelike way. We can ascend to knowledge

about it by rallying our wits and proceeding to notice and analyze and think. What we are only acquainted

with is only present to our minds; we have it, or the idea of it. But when we know about it, we do more than

merely have it; we seem, as we think over its relations, to subject it to a sort of treatment and to operate upon

it with our thought. The words feeling and thought give voice to the antithesis. Through feelings we become

acquainted with things, but only by our thoughts do we know about them. Feelings are the germ and starting

point of cognition, thoughts the developed tree. The minimum of grammatical subject, of objective presence,

of reality known about, the mere beginning of knowledge, must be named by the word that says the least.

Such a word is the interjection, as lo! there! ecco! voil�! or the article or demonstrative pronoun introducing

the sentence, as the, it, that. In Chapter XII we shall see a little deeper into what this distinction, between the

The mental states usually distinguished as feelings are the emotions, and the sensations we get from skin,

muscle, viscus, eye, ear, nose, and palate. The 'thoughts,' as recognized in popular parlance, are the

conceptions and judgments. When we treat of these mental states in particular we shall have to say a word

about the cognitive function and value of each. It may perhaps be well to notice now that our senses only give

us acquaintance with facts of body, and that of the mental states of other persons we only have conceptual

knowledge. Of our own past states of mind we take cognizance in a peculiar way. They are 'objects of

memory,' and appear to us endowed with a sort of warmth and intimacy that makes the perception of them

Footnotes [1] Messrs. PaytonSpence (Journal of Spec. Phil., X. 338, XIV. 286) and M. M. Garver (Amer.

Jour. of Science, 3d series, XX. 189) argue, the one from speculative, the other from experimental grounds,

that, the physical condition of consciousness being neural vibration, the consciousness must itself be

incessantly interrupted by unconsciousness about fifty times a second, according to Garver.

[2] That the appearance of mental activity here is real can be proved by suggesting to the 'hypnotized'

[3] For more details, cf. Malebranche, Rech. de la Verit�, bk. III. chap. I; J. Locke, Essay conc. H. U., book

II. ch. I; C. Wolf, Psychol. rationalis, � 59; Sir W. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaph., lecture XVII; J. Bascom,

Science of Mind, � 12; Th. Jouffroy, M�langes Philos., 'du Sommeil'; H. Holland, Chapters on Mental

Physiol., p. 80; B. Brodie, Psychol. Researches, p. 147; E. M. Chesley, Journ. of Spec. Phil., vol. XI. p. 72;

Th. Ribot, Maladies de la Personnalit�, pp. 810; H. Lotze, Metaphysics, � 533.

[5] See his articles in the Chicago Open Court, for July, August and November, 1889. Also in the Revue

[6] This whole phenomena shows how an idea which remains itself below the threshold of a certain conscious

self may occasion associative effects therein. The skinsensations unfelt by the patient's primary

[9] M. Janet designates by numbers the different personalities which the subject may display.

[10] How to conceive of this state of mind is not easy. It would be much simpler to understand the process, if

adding new strokes made the first one visible. There would then be two different objects apperceived as

totals, paper with one stroke, paper with many strokes; and, blind to the former, he would see all that was in

the latter, because he would have apperceived it as a different total in the first instance.

A process of this sort occurs sometimes (not always) when the new strokes, instead of being mere repetitions

of the original one, are lines which combine with it into a total object, say a human face. The subject of the

trance then may regain his sight of the line to which he had previously been blind, by seeing it as part of the

[12] For a very good condensed history of the various opinions, see W. Volkmann von Volkmar, Lehrbuch d.

Psychologie, � 16. Anm. Complete references to Sir W. Hamilton are given in J. E. Walter, Perception of

[13] Most contemporary writers ignore the question of the soul's seat. Lotze is the only one who seems to

have been much concerned about it, and his views have varied. Cf. Medicinische Psychol., � 10.

Microcosmus, bk. III. ch. 2. Metaphysic, bk. III. ch. 5. Outlines of Psychol., part II. ch. 3. See also G. T.

[14] I purposely ignore 'clairvoyance' and action upon distant things by 'mediums,' as not yet matters of

[15] I disregard consequences which may later come to the thing from the fact that it is known. The knowing

[16] B. P. Bowne: Metaphysics, pp. 40710. Cf. also Lotze: Logik, �� 308, 3267.

[17] Cf. John Grote: Exploratio Philosophica, p. 60; H. Helmholtz, Popular Scientific Lectures, London, p.

We now begin our study of the mind from within. Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental

facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning

the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our

natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results

of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree. It is astonishing what havoc is wrought in

psychology by admitting at the outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless contain a flaw. The

bad consequences develop themselves later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the whole texture

of the work. The notion that sensations, being the simplest things, are the first things to take up in psychology

is one of these suppositions. The only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is the fact

of thinking itself, and that must first be taken up and analyzed. If sensations then prove to be amongst the

elements of the thinking, we shall be no worse off as respects them than if we had taken them for granted at

The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on. I use the word thinking, in

accordance with what was said on p. 186, for every form of consciousness indiscriminately. If we could say

in English 'it thinks,' as we say 'it rains' or 'it blows,' we should be stating the fact most simply and with the

How does it go on? We notice immediately five important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:

5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects chooses from

In considering these five points successively, we shall have to plunge in medias res as regards our

vocabulary, and use psychological terms which can only be adequately defined in later chapters of the book.

But every one knows what the terms mean in a rough way; and it is only in a rough way that we are now to

take them. This chapter is like a painter's first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear.

1) Thought tends to Personal Form. When I say every thought is part of a personal consciousness, 'personal

consciousness' is one of the terms in question, Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it, but

to give an accurate account of it is the most difficult of philosophic tasks. This task we must confront in the

In this room this lectureroom, say there are a multitude of thoughts, yours and mine, some of which

cohere mutually, and some not. They are as little eachforitself and reciprocally independent as they are

allbelonging together. They are neither: no one of them is separate, but each belongs with certain others

and with none beside. My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other

thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody's thought, we have no

means of ascertaining, for we have no experience of its like. The only states of consciousness that we

naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and you's.

Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No

thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute

insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this

thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity

in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this

barrier of belonging to different personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute

breaches in nature. Everyone will recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of something

corresponding to the term 'personal mind' is all that is insisted on, without any particular view of its nature

being implied. On these terms the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the immediate

datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not 'feelings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I

feel.'[2] No psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of personal selves. The worst a psychology

can do is so to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their worth. A French writer, speaking of

our ideas, says somewhere in a fit of antispiritualistic excitement that, misled by certain peculiaritities

which they display, we 'end by personifying' the procession which they make, such personification being

regarded by him as a great philosophic blunder on our part. It could only be a blunder if the notion of

personality meant something essentially different from anything to be found in the mental procession. But if

that procession be itself the very 'original' of the notion of personality, to personify it cannot possibly be

wrong. It is already personified. There are no marks of personality to be gathered aliunde, and then found

lacking in the train of thought. It has them all already; so that to whatever farther analysis we may subject that

form of personal selfhood under which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain, true that the thoughts which

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

writing, etc., of which we studied a few in the last chapter. The buried feelings and thoughts proved now to

exist in hysterical an�sthetics, in recipients of posthypnotic suggestion, etc.,themselves are parts of

secondary personal selves. These selves are for the most part very stupid and contracted, and are cut off at

ordinary times from communication with the regular and normal self of the individual; but still they form

conscious unities, have continuous memories, speak, write, invent distinct names for themselves, or adopt

names that are suggested; and, in short, are entirely worthy of that title of secondary personalities which is

now commonly given them. According to M. Janet these secondary personalities are always abnormal, and

result from the splitting of what ought to be a single complete self into two parts, of which one lurks in the

background whilst the other appears on the surface as the only self the man or woman has. For our present

purpose it is unimportant whether this account of the origin of secondary selves is applicable to all possible

cases of them or not, for it certainly is true of a large number of them. Now although the size of a secondary

self thus formed will depend on the number of thoughts that are thus splitoff from the main consciousness,

the form, of it tends to personality, and the later thoughts pertaining to it remember the earlier ones and adopt

them as their own. M. Janet caught the actual moment of inspissation (so to speak) of one of these secondary

personalities in his an�sthetic somnambulist Lucie. He found that when this young woman's attention was

absorbed in conversation with a third party, her an�sthetic hand would write simple answers to questions

whispered to her by himself. "Do you hear?" he asked. "No," was the unconsciously written reply. "But to

answer you must hear." "Yes, quite so." "Then how do you manage?" "I don't know." "There must be some

one who hears me." "Yes." "Who?" "Someone other than Lucie." "Ah! another person. Shall we give her a

name?" "No." "Yes, it will be more convenient." "Well, Adrienne, then." "Once baptized, the subconscious

personage," M. Janet continues, "grows more definitely outlined and displays better her psychological

characters. In particular she shows us that she is conscious of the feelings excluded from the consciousness of

the primary or normal personage. She it is who tells us that I am pinching the arm or touching the little finger

In other cases the adoption of the name by the secondary self is more spontaneous. I have seen a number of

incipient automatic writers and mediums as yet imperfectly 'developed,' who immediately and of their own

accord write and speak in the name of departed spirits. These may be public characters, as Mozart, Faraday,

or real persons formerly known to the subject, or altogether imaginary beings. Without prejudicing the

question of real 'spiritcontrol' in the more developed sorts of trance utterance, I incline to think that these

(often deplorably unintelligent) rudimentary utterances are the work of an inferior fraction of the subject's

own natural mind, set free from control by the rest, and working after a set pattern fixed by the prejudices of

the social environment. In a spiritualistic community we get optimistic messages, whilst in an ignorant

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

Beneath these tracts of thought, which, however rudimentary, are still organized selves with a memory,

habits, and sense of their own identity, M. Janet thinks that the facts of catalepsy in hysteric patients drive us

to suppose that there are thoughts quite unorganized and impersonal. A patient in cataleptic trance (which can

be produced artificially in certain hypnotized subjects) is without memory on waking, and seems insensible

and unconscious as long as the cataleptic condition lasts. If, however, one raises the arm of such a subject it

stays in that position, and the whole body can thus be moulded like wax under the hands of the operator,

retaining for a considerable time whatever attitude he communicates to it. In hysterics whose arm, for

example, is an�sthetic, the same thing may happen. The an�sthetic arm may remain passively in positions

which it is made to assume; or if the hand be taken and made to hold a pencil and trace a certain letter, it will

continue tracing that letter indefinitely on the paper. These acts, until recently, were supposed to be

accompanied by no consciousness at all: they were physiological reflexes. M. Janet considers with much

more plausibility that feeling escorts them. The feeling is probably merely that of the position or movement

of the limb, and it produces no more than its natural effects when it discharges into the motor centres which

keep the position maintained, or the movement incessantly renewed.[5] Such thoughts as these, says M.

Janet, "are known by no one, for disaggregated sensations reduced to a state of mental dust are not

synthetized in any personality."[6] He admits, however, that these very same unutterably stupid thoughts tend

to develop memory, the cataleptic ere long moves her arm at a bare hint; so that they form no important

exception to the law that all thought tends to assume the form of personal consciousness.

2) Thought is in Constant Change. I do not mean necessarily that no one state of mind has any duration

The change which I have more particularly in view is that which takes place in sensible intervals of time; and

the result on which I wish to lay stress is this, that no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it

"I go straight to the facts, without saying I go to perception, or sensation, or thought, or any special mode at

all. What I find when I look at my consciousness at all is that what I cannot divest myself of, or not have in

consciousness, if I have any consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings. I may shut my eyes and

keep perfectly still, and try not to contribute anything of my own will; but whether I think or do not think,

whether I perceive external things or not, I always have a succession of different feelings. Anything else that

I may have also, of a more special character, comes in as parts of this succession. Not to have the succession

of different feelings is not to be conscious at all� The chain of consciousness is a sequence of differents."[7]

Such a description as this can awaken no possible protest from any one. We all recognize as different great

classes of our conscious states. Now we are seeing, now hearing; now reasoning, now willing; now

recollecting, now expecting; now loving, now hating; and in a hundred other ways we know our minds to be

alternately engaged. But all these are complex states. The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to

simplicity; and in psychological science we have the celebrated 'theory of ideas' which, admitting the great

difference among each other of what may be called concrete conditions of mind, seeks to show how this is all

the resultant effect of variations in the combination of certain simple elements of consciousness that always

remain the same. These mental atoms or molecules are what Locke called 'simple ideas.' Some of Locke's

successors made out that the only simple ideas were the sensations strictly so called. Which ideas the simple

ones may be does not, however, now concern us. It is enough that certain philosophers have thought they

could see under the dissolvingviewappearance of the mind elementary facts of any sort that remained

And the view of these philosophers has been called little into question, for our common experience seems at

first sight to corroborate it entirely. Are not the sensations we get from the same object, for example, always

the same? Does not the same pianokey, struck with the same force, make us hear in the same way? Does not

the same grass give us the same feeling of green, the same sky the same feeling of blue, and do we not get the

same olfactory sensation no matter how many times we put our nose to the same flask of cologne? It seems a

piece of metaphysical sophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet a close attention to the matter shows that

What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We hear the same note over and over again; we see the same quality

of green, or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the same species of pain. The realities, concrete

and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up

again before our thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our 'ideas' of them are the same

ideas. When we come, some time later, to the chapter on Perception, we shall see how inveterate is our habit

of not attending to sensations as subjective facts, but of simply using them as steppingstones to pass over to

the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal. The grass out of the window now looks to me of

the same green in the sun as in the shade, and yet a painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown,

another part bright yellow, to give its real sensational effect. We take no heed, as a rule, of the different way

in which the same things look and sound and smell at different distances and under different circumstances.

The sameness of the things is what we are concerned to ascertain; and any sensations that assure us of that

will probably be considered in a rough way to be the same with each other. This is what makes offhand

testimony about the subjective identity of different sensations wellnigh worthless as a proof of the fact. The

entire history of Sensation is a commentary on our inability to tell whether two sensations received apart are

exactly alike. What appeals to our attention far more than the absolute quality or quantity of a given sensation

is its ratio to whatever other sensations we may have at the same time. When everything is dark a somewhat

less dark sensation makes us see an object white. Helmholtz calculates that the white marble painted in a

picture representing an architectural view by moonlight is, when seen by daylight, from ten to twenty

Such a difference as this could never have been sensibly learned; it had to be inferred from a series of indirect

considerations. There are facts which make us believe that our sensibility is altering all the time, so that the

same object cannot easily give us the same sensation over again. The eye's sensibility to light is at its

maximum when the eye is first exposed, and blunts itself with surprising rapidity. A long night's sleep will

make it see things twice as brightly on wakening, as simple rest by closure will make it see them later in the

day.[9] We feel things differently according as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired;

differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and in winter, and above all things differently

in childhood, manhood, and old age. Yet we never doubt that our feelings reveal the same world, with the

same sensible qualities and the same sensible things occupying it. The difference of the sensibility is shown

best by the difference of our emotion about the things from one age to another, or when we are in different

organic moods. What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The bird's song is

To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, following the mutations of our capacity for feeling, are

always undergoing an essential change, must be added another presumption, based on what must happen in

the brain. Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. For an identical sensation to recur it would

have to occur the second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological

impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an impossibility; for to every brainmodification, however small,

must correspond a change of equal amount in the feeling which the brain subserves.

All this would be true if even sensations came to us pure and single and not combined into 'things.' Even then

we should have to confess that, however we might in ordinary conversation speak of getting the same

sensation again, we never in strict theoretic accuracy could do so; and that whatever was true of the river of

life, of the river of elementary feeling, it would certainly be true to say, like Heraclitus, that we never descend

But if the assumption of 'simple ideas of sensation' recurring in immutable shape is so easily shown to be

baseless, how much more baseless is the assumption of immutability in the larger masses of our thought!

For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never precisely the same. Every thought we have

of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of

the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat

different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared. And the thought by

which we cognize it is the thought of itinthoserelations, a thought suffused with the consciousness of all

that dim context. Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our successive views of the same

thing. We wonder how we ever could have opined as we did last month about a certain matter. We have

outgrown the possibility of that state of mind, we know not how. From one year to another we see things in

new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the

world for are shrunken to shadows; the women, once so divine, the stars, the woods, and the waters, how now

so dull and common; the young girls that brought an aura, of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable

existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books, what was there to find so mysteriously significant in

Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more zestful than ever is the work, the work; and

But what here strikes us so forcibly on the flagrant scale exists on every scale, down to the imperceptible

transition from one hour's outlook to that of the next. Experience is remoulding us every moment, and our

mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date.

The analogies of brainphysiology must again be appealed to to corroborate our view.

Our earlier chapters have taught us to believe that, whilst we think, our brain changes, and that, like the

aurora borealis, its whole internal equilibrium shifts with every pulse of change. The precise nature of the

shifting at a given moment is a product of many factors. The accidental state of local nutrition or

bloodsupply may be among them. But just as one of them certainly is the influence of outward objects on

the senseorgans during the moment, so is another certainly the very special susceptibility in which the organ

has been left at that moment by all it has gone through in the past. Every brainstate is partly determined by

the nature of this entire past succession. Alter the latter in any part, and the brainstate must be somewhat

different. Each present brainstate is a record in which the eye of Omniscience might read all the foregone

history of its owner. It is out of the question, then, that any total brainstate should identically recur.

Something like it may recur; but to suppose it to recur would be equivalent to the absurd admission that all

the states that had intervened between its two appearances had been pure nonentities, and that the organ after

their passage was exactly as it was before. And (to consider shorter periods) just as, in the senses, an

impression feels very differently according to what has preceded it; as one color succeeding another is

modified by the contrast, silence sounds delicious after noise, and a note, when the scale is sung up, sounds

unlike itself when the scale is sung down; as the presence of certain lines in a figure changes the apparent

form of the other lines, and as in music the whole �sthetic effect comes from the manner in which one set of

sounds alters our feeling of another; so, in thought, we must admit that those portions of the brain that have

just been maximally excited retain a kind of soreness which is a condition of our present consciousness, a

Ever some tracts are waning in tension, some waxing, whilst others actively discharge. The states of tension

have as positive an influence as any in determining the total condition, and in deciding what the psychosis

shall be. All we know of submaximal nerveirritations, and of the summation of apparently ineffective

stimuli, tends to show that no changes in the brain are physiologically ineffective, and that presumably none

are bare of psychological result. But as the braintension shifts from one relative state of equilibrium to

another, like the gyrations of a kaleidoscope, now rapid and now slow, is it likely that its faithful psychic

concomitant is heavierfooted than itself, and that it cannot match each one of the organ's irradiations by a

shifting inward iridescence of its own? But if it can do this, its inward iridescences must be infinite, for the

brainredistributions are in infinite variety. If so coarse a thing as a telephoneplate can be made to thrill for

years and never reduplicate its inward condition, how much more must this be the case with the infinitely

I am sure that this concrete and total manner of regarding the mind's changes is the only true manner, difficult

as it may be to carry it out in detail. If anything seems obscure about it, it will grow clearer as we advance.

Meanwhile, if it be true, it is certainly also true that no two 'ideas' are ever exactly the same, which is the

proposition we started to prove. The proposition is more important theoretically than it at first sight seems.

For it makes it already impossible for us to follow obediently in the footprints of either the Lockian or the

Herbartian school, schools which have had almost unlimited influence in Germany and among ourselves. No

doubt it is often convenient to formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sort of way, aud to treat the higher

states of consciousness as if they were all built out of unchanging simple ideas. It is convenient often to treat

curves as if they were composed of small straight lines, and electricity and nerveforce as if they were fluids.

But in the one case as in the other we must never forget that we are talking symbolically, and that there is

nothing in nature to answer to our words. A permanently existing 'idea' or 'Vorstellung' which makes its

appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals, is as mythological an entity as the

What makes it convenient to use the mythological formulas is the whole organization of speech, which, as

was remarked a while ago, was not made by psychologists, but by men who were as a rule only interested in

the facts their mental states revealed. They only spoke of their states as ideas of this or of that thing. What

wonder, then, that the thought is most easily conceived under the law of the thing whose name it bears! If the

thing is composed of parts, then we suppose that the thought of the thing must be composed of the thoughts

of the parts. If one part of the thing have appeared in the same thing or in other things on former occasions,

why then we must be having even now the very same 'idea' of that part which was there on those occasions. If

the thing is simple, its thought is simple. If it is multitudinous, it must require a multitude of thoughts to think

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

on ad libitum. What after all is so natural as to assume that one object, called by one name, should be known

by one affection of the mind? But, if language must thus influence us, the agglutinative languages, and even

Greek and Latin with their declensions, would be the better guides. Names did not appear in them inalterable,

but changed their shape to suit the context in which they lay. It must have been easier then that now to

conceive of the same object as being thought of at different times in nonidentical conscious states.

This, too, will grow clearer as we proceed. Meanwhile a necessary consequence of the belief in permanent

selfidentical psychic facts that absent themselves and recur periodically is the Humian doctrine that our

thought is composed of separate independent parts and is not a sensibly continuous stream. That this doctrine

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

3) Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous. I can only define 'continuous' as that

which is without breach, crack, or division. I have already said that the breach from one mind to another is

perhaps the greatest breach in nature. The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within the limits

of a single mind would either be interruptions, timegaps during which the consciousness went out altogether

to come into existence again at a later moment; or they would be breaks in the quality, or content, of the

thought, so abrupt that the segment that followed had no connection whatever with the one that went before.

The proposition that within each personal consciousness thought feels continuous, means two things:

1. That even where there is a timegap the consciousness after it feels as if it belonged together with the

2. That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely

The case of the timegaps, as the simplest, shall be taken first. And first of all, a word about timegaps of

On page 200 we saw that such timegaps existed, and that they might be more numerous than is usually

supposed. If the consciousness is not aware of them, it cannot feel them as interruptions. In the

unconsciousness produced by nitrous oxide and other an�sthetics, in that of epilepsy and fainting, the broken

edges of the sentient life may meet and merge over the gap, much as the feelings of space of the opposite

margins of the 'blind spot' meet and merge over that objective interruption to the sensitiveness of the eye.

Such consciousness as this, whatever it be for the onlooking psychologist, is for itself unbroken. It feels

unbroken; a waking day of it is sensibly a unit as long as that day lasts, in the sense in which the hours

themselves are units, as having all their parts next each other, with no intrusive alien substance between. To

expect the consciousness to feel the interruptions of its objective continuity as gaps, would be like expecting

the eye to feel a gap of silence because it does not hear, or the ear to feel a gap of darkness because it does

With the felt gaps the case is different. On waking from sleep, we usually know that we have been

unconscious, and we often have an accurate judgment of how long. The judgment here is certainly an

inference from sensible signs, and its ease is due to long practice in the particular field.[11] The result of it,

however, is that the consciousness is, for itself, not what it was in the former case, but interrupted and

continuous, in the mere timesense of the words. But in the other sense of continuity, the sense of the parts

being inwardly connected and belonging together because they are parts of a common whole, the

consciousness remains sensibly continuous and one. What now is the common whole? The natural name for it

When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and recognize that they have been asleep, each one of them

mentally reaches back and makes connection with but one of the two streams of thought which were broken

by the sleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried in the ground unerringly finds its way to its own

similarly buried mate, across no matter how much intervening earth; so Peter's present instantly finds out

Peter's past, and never by mistake knits itself on to that of Paul. Paul's thought in turn is as little liable to go

astray. The past thought of Peter is appropriated by the present Peter alone. He may have a knowledge, and a

correct one too, of what Paul's last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep, but it is an entirely

different sort of knowledge from that which he has of his own last states. He remembers his own states,

whilst he only conceives Paul's. Remembrance is like direct feeling; its object is suffused with a warmth and

intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains. This quality of warmth and intimacy and

immediacy is what Peter's present thought also possesses for itself. So sure as this present is me, is mine, it

says, so sure is anything else that comes with the same warmth and intimacy and immediacy, me and mine.

What the qualities called warmth and intimacy may in themselves be will have to be matter for future

consideration. But whatever past feeling appear with those qualities must be admitted to receive the greeting

of the present mental state, to be owned by it, and accepted as belonging together with it in a common self.

This community of self is what the timegap cannot break in twain, and is why a present thought, although

not ignorant of the timegap, can still regard itself as continuous with certain chosen portions of the past.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not

describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; if flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are

the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of

thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. But now there appears, even within the limits of the same

self, and between thoughts all of which alike have this same sense of belonging together, a kind of jointing

and separateness among the parts, of which this statement seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that

are produced by sudden contrasts in the quality of the successive segments of the stream of thought. If the

words 'chain' and 'train' had no natural fitness in them, how came such words to be used at all? Does not a

loud explosion rend the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks, in twain? Does not every sudden shock,

appearance of a new object, or change in a sensation, create a real interruption, sensibly felt as such, which

cuts the conscious stream across at the moment at which it appears? Do not such interruptions smite us every

hour of our lives, and have we the right, in their presence, still to call our consciousness a continuous stream?

This objection is based partly on a confusion and partly on a superficial introspective view.

The confusion is between the thoughts themselves, taken as subjective facts, and the things of which they are

aware. It is natural to make this confusion, but easy to avoid it when once put on one's guard. The things are

discrete and discontinuous; they do pass before us in a train or chain, making often explosive appearances

and rending each other in twain. But their comings and goings and contrasts no more break the flow of the

thought that thinks them than they break the time and the space in which they lie. A silence may be broken by

a thunderclap, and we may be so stunned and confused for a moment by the shock as to give no instant

account to ourselves of what has happened. But that very confusion is a mental state, and a state that passes

us straight over from the silence to the sound. The transition between the thought of one object and the

thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a

The superficial introspective view is the overlooking, even when the things are contrasted with each other

most violently, of the large amount of affinity that may still remain between the thoughts by whose means

they are cognized. Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and

thunderbreakinguponsilenceandcontrastingwithit.[12] Our feeling of the same objective thunder,

coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous

thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also

a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness of

man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went before. Here, again,

language works against our perception of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if

each knew its own thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with

dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to be named after all of them, but it never is. Some of them

are always things known a moment ago more clearly; others are things to be known more clearly a moment

hence.[13] Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness,

however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know, We think; and as we

think we feel our bodily selves as the seat of the thinking. If the thinking be our thinking, it must be suffused

through all its parts with that peculiar warmth and intimacy that make it come as ours. Whether the warmth

and intimacy be anything more than the feeling of the same old body always there, is a matter for the next

chapter to decide. Whatever the content of the ego may be, it is habitually felt with everything else by us

humans, and must form a liaison between all the things of which we become successively aware.[14]

On this gradualness in the changes of our mental content the principles of nerveaction can throw some more

light. When studying, in Chapter III, the summation of nervous activities, we saw that no state of the brain

can be supposed instantly to die away. If a new state comes, the inertia of the old state will still be there and

modify the result accordingly. Of course we cannot tell, in our ignorance, what in each instance the

modifications ought to be. The commonest modifications in senseperception are known as the phenomena

of contrast. In �sthetics they are the feelings of delight or displeasure which certain particular orders in a

series of impressions give. In thought, strictly and narrowly so called, they are unquestionably that

consciousness of the whence and the whither that always accompanies its flows. If recently the braintract a

was vividly excited, and then b, and now vividly c, the total present consciousness is not produced simply by

c's excitement, but also by the dying vibrations of a and b as well. If we want to represent the brainprocess

we must write it thus: abc three different processes coexisting, and correlated with them a thought which is

no one of the three thoughts which they would have produced had each of them occurred alone. But whatever

this fourth thought may exactly be, it seems impossible that it should not be something like each of the three

other thoughts whose tracts are concerned in its production, though in a fastwaning phase.

It all goes back to what we said in another connection only a few pages ago (p. 233). As the total neurosis

changes, so does the total psychosis change. But as the changes of neurosis are never absolutely

discontinuous, so must the successive psychoses shade gradually into each other, although their rate of

This difference in the rate of change lies at the basis of a difference of subjective states of which we ought

immediately to speak. When the rate is slow we are aware of the object of our thought in a comparatively

restful and stable way. When rapid, we are aware of a passage, a relation, a transition from it, or between it

and something else. As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what

strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of

flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence,

and every sentence closed by a period. The restingplaces are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of

some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated

without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most

part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.

Let us call the restingplaces the 'substantive parts,' and the places of flight the 'transitive parts,' of the stream

of thought. It then appears that the main end of our thinking is at all times the attainment of some other

substantive part than the one from which we have just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of

Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but

flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached. is really annihilating

them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it so exceeds them in vigor and stability that it quite

eclipses and swallows them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look

at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is. The rush of

the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if

our purpose is nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snowflake crystal

caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation

moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were

pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite

evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch

its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. And the challenge to

produce these psychoses, which is sure to be thrown by doubting psychologists at anyone who contends for

their existence, is as unfair as Zeno's treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them to point out in

what place an arrow is when it moves, he argues the falsity of their thesis from their inability to make to so

The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful. If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of

thought's stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be the failure to

a moment since in danger of ignoring any feeling transitive between the silence and the thunder, and of

treating their boundary as a sort of break in the mind? Now such ignoring as this has historically worked in

two ways. One set of thinkers have been led by it to Sensationalism. Unable to lay their hands on any coarse

feelings corresponding to the innumerable relations and forms of connection between the facts of the world,

finding no named subjective modifications mirroring such relations, they have for the most part denied that

feelings of relation exist, and many of them, like Hume, have gone so far as to deny the reality of most

relations out of the mind as well as in it. Substantive psychoses, sensations and their copies and derivatives,

juxtaposed like dominoes in a game, but really separate, everything else verbal illusion, such is the upshot

of this view.[15] The Intellectualists, on the other hand, unable to give up the reality of relations extra

mentem, but equally unable to point to any distinct substantive feelings in which they were known, have

made the same admission that the feelings do not exist. But they have drawn an opposite conclusion. The

relations must be known, they say, in something that is no feeling, no mental modification continuous and

consubstantial with the subjective tissue out of which sensations and other substantive states are made. They

are known, these relations, by something that lies on an entirely different plane, by an actus purus of

Thought, Intellect, or Reason, all written with capitals and considered to mean something unutterably

But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sensationalists are wrong. If there be such things as

feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum natur�, so surely, and more surely, do

feelings exist to which these relations are known. There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an

adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading

or other of relation which we at some moment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought.

If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream

of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are

numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we

say a feel ing of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing

the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use. The

Empiricists have always dwelt on its influence in making us suppose that where we have a separate name, a

separate thing must needs be there to correspond with it; and they have rightly denied the existence of the

mob of abstract entities, principles, and forces, in whose favor no other evidence than this could be brought

up. But they have said nothing of that obverse error, of which we said a word in Chapter VII, (see p. 195), of

supposing that where there is no name no entity can exist. All dumb or anonymous psychic states have,

owing to this error, been coolly suppressed; or, if recognized at all, have been named after the substantive

perception they led to, as thoughts 'about' this object or 'about' that, the stolid word about engulfing all their

delicate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound. Thus the greater and greater accentuation and isolation of

Once more take a look at the brain. We believe the brain to be an organ whose internal equilibrium is always

in a state of change, the change affecting every part. The pulses of change are doubtless more violent in one

place than in another, their rhythm more rapid at this time than at that. As in a kaleidoscope revolving at a

uniform rate, although the figures are always rearranging themselves, there are instants during which the

transformation seems minute and interstitial and almost absent, followed by others when it shoots with

magical rapidity, relatively stable forms thus alternating with forms we should not distinguish if seen again;

so in the brain the perpetual rearrangement must result in some forms of tension lingering relatively long,

whilst others simply come and pass. But if consciousness corresponds to the fact of rearrangement itself,

why, if the rearrangement stop not, should the consciousness ever cease? And if a lingering rearrangement

brings with it one kind of consciousness, why should not a swift rearrangement bring another kind of

consciousness as peculiar as the rearrangement itself? The lingering consciousnesses, if of simple objects, we

call 'sensations' or 'images,' according as they are vivid or faint; if of complex objects, we call them 'percepts'

when vivid, 'concepts' or 'thoughts' when faint. For the swift consciousnesses we have only those names of

'transitive states,' or 'feelings of relation,' which we have used.[16] As the brainchanges are continuous, so

do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted

Feelings of Tendency. So much for the transitive states. But there are other unnamed states or qualities of

states that are just as im portant and just as cognitive as they, and just as much unrecognized by the

traditional sensationalist and intellectualist philosophies of mind. The first fails to find them at all, the second

finds their cognitive function, but denies that anything in the way of feeling has a share in bringing it about.

Examples will make clear what these inarticulate psychoses, due to waxing and waning excitements of the

Suppose three successive persons say to us: 'Wait!' 'Hark!' 'Look!' Our consciousness is thrown into three

quite different attitudes of expectancy, although no definite object is before it in any one of the three cases.

Leaving out different actual bodily attitudes, and leaving out the reverberating images of the three words,

which are of course diverse, probably no one will deny the existence of a residual conscious affection, a sense

of the direction from which an impression is about to come, although no positive impression is yet there.

Meanwhile we have no names for the psychoses in question but the names hark, look, and wait.

Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name, The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein;

but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a

given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back

without the longedfor term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately

so as to negate them. They do not fit into its mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of

another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps. When I vainly try

to recall the name of Spalding, my consciousness is far removed from what it is when I vainly try to recall the

name of Bowles. Here some ingenious persons will say: "How can the two consciousnesses be different when

the terms which might make them different are not there? All that is there, so long as the effort to recall is

vain, is the bare effort itself. How should that differ in the two cases? You are making it seem to differ by

prematurely filling it out with the different names, although these, by the hypothesis, have not yet come.

Stick to the two efforts as they are, without naming them after facts not yet existent, and you'll be quite

unable to designate any point in which they differ," Designate, truly enough. We can only designate the

difference by borrowing the names of objects not yet in the mind. Which is to say that our psychological

vocabulary is wholly inadequate to name the differences that exist, even such strong differences as these. But

namelessness is compatible with existence. There are innumerable consciousnesses of emptiness, no one of

which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each other. The ordinary way is to assume that they

are all emptinesses of consciousness, and so the same state. But the feeling of an absence is toto c�lo other

than the absence of a feeling. It is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound

to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us

fitfully, without growing more distinct. Every one must know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of

some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's mind, striving to be filled out with words.

Again, what is the strange difference between an experience tasted for the first time and the same experience

recognized as familiar, as having been enjoyed before, though we cannot name it or say where or when? A

tune, an odor, a flavor sometimes carry this inarticulate feeling of their familiarity so deep into our

consciousness that we are fairly shaken by its mysterious emotional power. But strong and characteristic as

this psychosis is it probably is due to the submaximal excitement of widespreading associational

braintracts the only name we have for all its shadings is 'sense of familiarity.'

When we read such phrases as 'naught but,' 'either one or the other,' 'a is b, but,' although it is, nevertheless,'

'it is an excluded middle, there is no tertium quid,' and a host of other verbal skeletons of logical relation, is it

true that there is nothing more in our minds than the words themselves as they pass? What then is the

meaning of the words which we think we understand as we read? What makes that meaning different in one

phrase from what it is in the other? 'Who?' 'When?' 'Where?' Is the difference of felt meaning in these

interrogatives nothing more than their difference of sound? And is it not (just like the difference of sound

itself) known and understood in an affection of consciousness correlative to it, though so impalpable to direct

examination? Is not the same true of such negatives as 'no,' 'never,' 'not yet'?

The truth is that large tracts of human speech are noth ing but signs of direction in thought, of which

direction we nevertheless have an acutely discriminate sense, though no definite sensorial image plays any

part in it whatsoever. Sensorial images are stable psychic facts; we can hold them still and look at them as

long as we like. These bare images of logical movement, on the contrary, are psychic transitions, always on

the wing, so to speak, and not to be glimpsed except in flight. Their function is to lead from one set of images

to another. As they pass, we feel both the waxing and the waning images in a way altogether peculiar and a

way quite different from the way of their full presence. If we try to hold fast the feeling of direction, the full

presence comes and the feeling of direction is lost. The blank verbal scheme of the logical movement gives us

the fleeting sense of the movement as we read it, quite as well as does a rational sentence awakening definite

What is that first instantaneous glimpse of some one's meaning which we have, when in vulgar phrase we say

we 'twig' it? Surely an altogether specific affection of our mind. And has the reader never asked himself what

kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention,

distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore; and yet how much

of it consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and the

words and things come into the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination is there no more. But as the

words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them successively and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects

them and calls them wrong if they do not. If has therefore a nature of its own of the most positive sort, and

yet what can we say about it without using words that belong to the later mental facts that replace it? The

intention tosaysoandso is the only name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic

life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate. How

comes it about that a man reading something aloud for the first time is able immediately to emphasize all his

words aright, unless from the very first he have a sense of at least the form of the sentence yet to come, which

sense is fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modifies its emphasis in his mind so as to

make him give it the proper accent as he utters it? Emphasis of this kind is almost altogether a matter of

grammatical construction. If we read 'no more' we expect presently to come upon a 'than'; if we read

'however' at the outset of a sentence it is a 'yet,' a 'still,' or a 'nevertheless,' that we expect. A noun in a certain

position demands a verb in a certain mood and number, in another position it expects a relative pronoun.

Adjectives call for nouns, verbs for adverbs, etc., etc. And this foreboding of the coming grammatical scheme

combined with each successive uttered word is so practically accurate that a reader incapable of

understanding four ideas of the book he is reading aloud, can nevertheless read it with the most delicately

Some will interpret these facts by calling them all cases in which certain images, by laws of association,

awaken others so very rapidly that we think afterwards we felt the very tendencies of the nascent images to

arise, before they were actually there. For this school the only possible materials of consciousness are images

of a perfectly definite nature. Tendencies exist, but they are facts for the outside psychologist rather than for

the subject of the observation. The tendency is thus a psychical zero; only its results are felt.

Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to show, is that 'tendencies' are not only descriptions from

without, but that they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must

be described as in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to

name them at all. It is in short, the reinstatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I

am so anxious to press on the attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have, as we shall see in Chapter XVIII,

made one step in advance in exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no

images but of perfectly definite things. Another is made in the overthrow of the equally ridiculous notion

that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed to our knowledge in subjective feelings, relations are not.

But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough. What must be admitted is that the definite

images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live. The

traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful,

quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually

standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of

consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in

the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of

whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value, of the image is

all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, or rather that is fused into one with it and has

become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before,

What is that shadowy scheme of the 'form' of an opera, play, or book, which remains in our mind and on

which we pass judgment when the actual thing is done? What is our notion of a scientific or philosophical

system? Great thinkers have vast premonitory glimpses of schemes of relation between terms, which hardly

even as verbal images enter the mind, so rapid is the whole process.[18] We all of us have this permanent

consciousness of whither our thought is going. It is a feeling like any other, a feeling of what thoughts are

next to arise, before they have arisen. This field of view of consciousness varies very much in extent,

depending largely on the degree of mental freshness or fatigue. When very fresh, our minds carry an immense

horizon with them. The present image shoots its perspective far before it, irradiating in advance the regions in

which lie the thoughts as yet unborn. Under ordinary conditions the halo of felt relations is much more

circumscribed. And in states of extreme brainfag the horizon is narrowed almost to the passing word, the

associative machinery, however, providing for the next word turning up in orderly sequence, until at last the

tired thinker is led to some kind of a conclusion. At certain moments he may find himself doubting whether

his thoughts have not come to a full stop; but the vague sense of a plus ultra makes him ever struggle on

towards a more definite expression of what it may be; whilst the slowness of his utterance shows how

The awareness that our definite thought has come to a stop is an entirely different thing from the awareness

that our thought is definitively completed. The expression of the latter state of mind is the falling inflection

which betokens that the sentence is ended, and silence. The expression of the former state is 'hemming and

hawing,' or else such phrases as 'et cetera,' or 'and so forth.' But notice that every part of the sentence to be

left incomplete feels differently as it passes, by reason of the premonition we have that we shall be unable to

end it. The 'and so forth' casts its shadow back, and is as integral a part of the object of the thought as the

Again, when we use a common noun, such as man, in a universal sense, as signifying all possible men, we are

fully aware of this intention on our part, and distinguish it carefully from our intention when we mean a

certain group of men, or a solitary individual before us. In the chapter on Conception we shall see how

important this difference of intention is. It casts its influence over the whole of the sentence, both before and

Nothing is easier than to symbolize all these facts in terms of brainaction. Just as the echo of the whence,

the sense of the starting point of our thought, is probably due to the dying excitement of processes but a

moment since vividly aroused; so the sense of the whither, the foretaste of the terminus, must be due to the

waxing excitement of tracts or processes which, a moment hence, will be the cerebral correlatives of some

thing which a moment hence will be vividly present to the thought. Represented by a curve, the neurosis

Each point of the horizontal line stands for some braintract or process. The height of the curve above the

line stands for the intensity of the process. All the processes are present, in the intensities shown by the curve.

But those before the latter's apex were more intense a moment ago; those after it will be more intense a

moment hence. If I recite a, b, c, d, e, f, g, at the moment of uttering d, neither a, b, c, nor e, f, g, are out of

my consciousness altogether, but both, after their respective fashions, 'mix their dim lights' with the stronger

There is a common class of mistakes which shows how brainprocesses begin to be excited before the

thoughts attached to them are duedue, that is, in substantive and vivid form. I mean those mistakes of

speech or writing by which, in Dr. Carpenter's words, "we mispronounce or misspell a word, by introducing

into it a letter or syllable of some other, whose turn is shortly to come; or, it may be, the whole of the

anticipated word is substituted for the one which ought to have been expressed."[19] In these cases one of

two things must have happened: either some local accident of nutrition blocks the process that is due, so that

other processes discharge that ought as yet to be but nascently aroused; or some opposite local accident

furthers the latter processes and makes them explode before their time. In the chapter on Association of Ideas,

numerous instances will come before us of the actual effect on consciousness of neuroses not yet maximally

It is just like the 'overtones' in music. Different instruments give the 'same note,' but each in a different voice,

because each gives more than that note, namely, various upper harmonics of it which differ from one

instrument to another. They are not separately heard by the ear; they blend with the fundamental note, and

suffuse it, and alter it; and even so do the waxing and waning brainprocesses at every moment blend with

and suffuse and alter the psychic effect of the processes which are at their culminating point.

Let us use the words psychic overtone, suffusion, or fringe, to designate the influence of a faint brainprocess

upon our thought, as it makes it aware of relations and objects but dimly perceived.[20]

If we then consider the cognitive function of different states of mind, we may feel assured that the difference

between those that are mere 'acquaintance,' and those that are 'knowledgesabout' (see p. 221) is reducible

almost entirely to the absence or presence of psychic fringes or overtones. Knowledge about a thing is

knowledge of its relations. Acquaintance with it is limitation to the bare impression which it makes. Of most

of its relations we are only aware in the penumbral nascent way of a 'fringe' of unarticulated affinities about

it. And, before passing to the next topic in order, I must say a little of this sense of affinity, as itself one of the

In all our voluntary thinking there is some topic or subject about which all the members of the thought

revolve. Half the time this topic is a problem, a gap we cannot yet fill with a definite picture, word, or phrase,

but which, in the manner described some time back, influences us in an intensely active and determinate

psychic way. Whatever may be the images and phrases that pass before us, we feel their relation to this

aching gap. To fill it up is our thought's destiny. Some bring us nearer to that consummation. Some the gap

negates as quite irrelevant. Each swims in a felt fringe of relations of which the aforesaid gap is the term. Or

instead of a definite gap we may merely carry a mood of interest about with us. Then, however vague the

mood, it will still act in the same way, throwing a mantle of felt affinity over such representations, entering

the mind, as suit it, and tingeing with the feeling of tediousness or discord all those with which it has no

Relation, then, to our topic or interest is constantly felt in the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony

and discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. When the sense of furtherance is there, we are 'all right;'

with the sense of hindrance we are dissatisfied and perplexed, and cast about us for other thoughts. Now any

thought the quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves 'all right,' is an acceptable member of our thinking,

whatever kind of thought it may otherwise be. Provided we only feel it to have a place in the scheme of

relations in which the in teresting topic also lies, that is quite sufficient to make of it a relevant and

For the important thing about a train of thought is its conclusion. That is the meaning, or, as we say, the topic

of the thought. That is what abides when all its other members have faded from memory. Usually this

conclusion is a word or phrase or particular image, or practical attitude or resolve, whether rising to answer a

problem or fill a preexisting gap that worried us, or whether accidentally stumbled on in revery. In either

case it stands out from the other segments of the stream by reason of the peculiar interest attaching to it. This

interest arrests it, makes a sort of crisis of it when it comes, induces attention upon it and makes us treat it in

The parts of the stream that precede these substantive conclusions are but the means of the latter's attainment.

And, provided the same conclusion be reached, the means may be as mutable as we like, for the 'meaning' of

the stream of thought will be the same. What difference does it make what the means are? "Qu'importe le

flacon, pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse?" The relative unimportance of the means appears from the fact that when

the conclusion is there, we have always forgotten most of the steps preceding its attainment. When we have

uttered a proposition, we are rarely able a moment afterwards to recall our exact words, though we can

express it in different words easily enough. The practical upshot of a book we read remains with us, though

The only paradox would seem to lie in supposing that the fringe of felt affinity and discord can be the same in

two heterogeneous sets of images. Take a train of words passing through the mind and leading to a certain

conclusion on the one hand, and on the other hand an almost wordless set of tactile, visual and other fancies

leading to the same conclusion. Can the halo, fringe, or scheme in which we feel the words to lie be the same

as that in which we feel the images to lie? Does not the discrepancy of terms involve a discrepancy of felt

If the terms be taken qu� mere sensations, it assuredly does. For instance, the words may rhyme with each

other, the visual images can have no such affinity as that. But qu� thoughts, qu� sensations understood, the

words have contracted by long association fringes of mutual repugnance or affinity with each other and with

the conclusion, which run exactly parallel with like fringes in the visual, tactile and other ideas. The most

important element of these fringes is, I repeat, the mere feeling of harmony or discord, of a right or wrong

direction in the thought. Dr. Campbell has, so far as I know, made the best analysis of this fact, and his

words, often quoted, deserve to be quoted again. The chapter is entitled "What is the cause that nonsense so

often escapes being detected, both by the writer and by the reader?" The author, in answering this question,

"That connection [he says] or relation which comes gradually to subsist among the different words of a

language, in the minds of those who speak it, � is merely consequent on this, that those words are employed

as signs of connected or related things. It is an axiom in geometry that things equal to the same thing are

equal to one another. It may, in like manner, be admitted as an axiom in psychology that ideas associated by

the same idea will associate one another. Hence it will happen that if, from experiencing the connection of

two things, there results, as infallibly there will result, an association between the ideas or notions annexed to

them, as each idea will moreover be associated by its sign, there will likewise be an association between the

ideas of the signs. Hence the sounds considered as signs will be conceived to have a connection analogous to

that which subsisteth among the things signified; I say, the sounds considered as signs; for this way of

considering them constantly attends us in speaking, writing, hearing, and reading. When we purposely

abstract from it, and regard them merely as sounds, we are instantly sensible that they are quite unconnected,

and have no other relation than what ariseth from similitude of tone or accent. But to consider them in this

manner commonly results from previous design, and requires a kind of effort which is not exerted in the

ordinary use of speech. In ordinary use they are regarded solely as signs, or, rather, they are confounded with

the things they signify; the consequence of which is that, in the manner just now explained, we come

insensibly to conceive a connection among them of a very different sort from that of which sounds are

"Now this conception, habit, or tendency of the mind, call it which you please, is considerably strengthened

by the frequent use of language and by the structure of it. Language is the sole channel through which we

communicate our knowledge and discoveries to others, and through which the knowledge and discoveries of

others are communicated to us. By reiterated recourse to this medium, if necessarily happens that when things

are related to each other, the words signifying those things are more commonly brought together in discourse.

Hence the words and names by themselves, by customary vicinity, contract in the fancy a relation additional

to that which they derive purely from being the symbols of related things. Farther, this tendency is

strengthened by the structure of language. All languages whatever, even the most barbarous, as far as hath yet

appeared, are of a regular and analogical make. The consequence is that similar relations in things will be

expressed similarly; that is, by similar inflections, derivations, compositions, arrangement of words, or

juxtaposition of particles, according to the genius or grammatical form of the particular tongue. Now as, by

the habitual use of a language (even though it were quite irregular), the signs would insensibly become

connected in the imagination wherever the things signified are connected in nature, so, by the regular

structure of a language, this connection among the signs is conceived as analogous to that which subsisteth

If we know English and French and begin a sentence in French, all the later words that come are French; we

hardly ever drop into English. And this affinity of the French words for each other is not something merely

operating mechanically as a brainlaw, it is something we feel at the time. Our understanding of a French

sentence heard never falls to so low an ebb that we are not aware that the words linguistically belong

together. Our attention can hardly so wander that if an English word be suddenly introduced we shall not start

at the change. Such a vague sense as this of the words belonging together is the very minimum of fringe that

can accompany them, if 'thought' at all. Usually the vague perception that all the words we hear belong to the

same language and to the same special vocabulary in that language, and that the grammatical sequence is

familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that what we hear is sense. But if an unusual foreign word

be introduced, if the grammar trip, or if a term from an incongruous vocabulary suddenly appear, such as

'rattrap' or 'plumber's bill' in a philosophical discourse, the sentence detonates, as it were, we receive a shock

from the incongruity, and the drowsy assent is gone. The feeling of rationality in these cases seems rather a

negative than a positive thing, being the mere absence of shock, or sense of discord, between the terms of

So delicate and incessant is this recognition by the mind of the mere fitness of words to be mentioned

together that the slightest misreading, such as 'casualty' for 'causality,' or 'perpetual' for 'perceptual,' will be

corrected by a listener whose attention is so relaxed that he gets no idea of the meaning of the sentence at all.

Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences

with absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. Discourses at

prayermeetings, reshuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and the whole genus of

pennyalineisms and newspaperreporter's flourishes give illustrations of this. "The birds filled the

treetops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I remember

reading once in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by

the hurried reporter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire volume of 784 pages lately published in

"The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their outlets at the terminal loop of each culminate

link on the surface of the nuclear organism is continuous as their respective atmospheric fruitage up to the

altitudinal limit of their expansibility, whence, when atmosphered by like but coalescing essences from

higher altitudes, those sensibly expressed as the essential qualities of external forms, they descend, and

There are every year works published whose contents show them to be by real lunatics. To the reader, the

book quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning to end. It is impossible to divine, in such a case, just

what sort of feeling of rational relation between the words may have appeared to the author's mind. The

border line between objective sense and nonsense is hard to draw; that between subjective sense and

nonsense, impossible. Subjectively, any collocation of words may make sense even the wildest words in a

dream if one only does not doubt their belonging together. Take the obscurer passages in Hegel: it is a fair

question whether the rationality included in them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a

common vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation, immediacy,

selfrelation, and what not, which has habitually recurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the

subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even

To sum up, certain kinds of verbal associate, certain grammatical expectations fulfilled, stand for a good part

of our impression that a sentence has a meaning and is dominated by the Unity of one Thought. Nonsense in

grammatical form sounds half rational; sense with grammatical sequence upset sounds nonsensical; e.g.,

"Elba the Napoleon English faith had banished broken to he Saint because Helena at." Finally, there is about

each word the psychic 'overtone' of feeling that it brings us nearer to a forefelt conclusion. Suffuse all the

words of a sentence, as they pass, with these three fringes or haloes of relation, let the conclusion seem worth

arriving at, and all will admit the sentence to be an expression of thoroughly continuous, unified, and rational

Each word, in such a sentence, is felt, not only as a word, but as having a meaning. The 'meaning' of a word

taken thus dynamically in a sentence may be quite different from its meaning when taken statically or without

context. The dynamic meaning is usually reduced to the bare fringe we have described, of felt suitability or

unfitness to the context and conclusion. The static meaning, when the word is concrete, as 'table,' 'Boston,'

consists of sensory images awakened; when it is abstract, as 'criminal legislation,' 'fallacy,' the meaning

Hegel's celebrated dictum that pure being is identical with pure nothing results from his taking the words

statically, or without the fringe they wear in a context. Taken in isolation, they agree in the single point of

awakening no sensorial images. But taken dynamically, or as significant, as thought, their fringes of

relation, their affinities and repugnances, their function and meaning, are felt and understood to be absolutely

Such considerations as these remove all appearance of paradox from those cases of extremely deficient visual

imagery of whose existence Mr. Galton has made us aware (see below). An exceptionally intelligent friend

informs me that he can frame no image whatever of the appearance of his breakfasttable. When asked how

he then remembers it at all, he says he simple 'knows' that it seated four people, and was covered with a white

cloth on which were a butterdish, a coffeepot, radishes, and so forth. The mindstuff of which this

'knowing' is made seems to be verbal images exclusively. But if the words 'coffee,' 'bacon,' 'muffins,' and

'eggs' lead a man to speak to his cook, to pay his bills, and to take measures for the morrow's meal exactly as

visual and gustatory memories would, why are they not, for all practical intents and purposes, as good a kind

of material in which to think? In fact, we may suspect them to be for most purposes better than terms with a

richer imaginative coloring. The scheme of relationship and the conclusion being the essential things in

thinking, that kind of mindstuff which is handiest will be the best for the purpose. Now words, uttered or

unexpressed, are the handiest mental elements we have. Not only are they very rapidly revivable, but they are

revivable as actual sensations more easily than any other items of our experience. Did they not possess some

such advantage as this, it would hardly be the case that the older men are and the more effective as thinkers,

the more, as a rule, they have lost their visualizing power and depend on words. This was ascertained by Mr.

Galton to be the case with members of the Royal Society. The present writer observes it in his own person

On the other hand, a deaf and dumb man can weave his tactile and visual images into a system of thought

quite as effective and rational as that of a worduser. The question whether thought is possible without

language has been a favorite topic of discussion among philosophers. Some interesting reminiscences of his

childhood by Mr. Ballard, a deafmute instructor in the National College at Washington, show it to be

"In consequence of the loss of my hearing in infancy, I was debarred from enjoying the advantages which

children in the full possession of their senses derive from the exercises of the common primary school, from

the everyday talk of their schoolfellows and playmates, and from the conversation of their parents and

"I could convey my thoughts and feelings to my parents and brothers by natural signs or pantomime, and I

could understand what they said to me by the same medium; our intercourse being, however, confined to the

daily routine of home affairs and hardly going beyond the circle of my own observation....

"My father adopted a course which he thought would, in some measure, compensate me for the loss of my

hearing. It was that of taking me with him when business required him to ride abroad; and he took me more

frequently than he did my brothers; giving, as the reason for his apparent partiality, that they could acquire

information through the ear, while I depended solely upon my eye for acquaintance with affairs of the outside

"I have a vivid recollection of the delight I felt in watching the different scenes we passed through, observing

the various phases of nature, both animate and inanimate; though we did not, owing to my infirmity, engage

in conversation. It was during those delightful rides, some two or three years before my initiation into the

rudiments of written language, that I began to ask myself the question: How came the world into being?

When this question occurred to my mind, I set myself to thinking it over a long time. My curiosity was

awakened as to what was the origin of human life in its first appearance upon the earth, and of vegetable life

as well, and also the cause of the existence of the earth, sun, moon, and stars.

"I remember at one time when my eye fell upon a very large old stump which we happened to pass in one of

our rides, I asked myself, 'Is it possible that the first man that ever came into the world rose out of that stump?

But that stump is only a remnant of a once noble magnificent tree, and how came that tree? Why, it came

only by beginning to grow out of the ground just like those little trees now coming up.' And I dismissed from

my mind, as an absurd idea, the connection between the origin of man and a decaying old stump....

"I have no recollection of what it was that first suggested to me the question as to the origin of things. I had

before this time gained ideas of the descent from parent to child, of the propagation of animals, and of the

production of plants from seeds. The question that occurred to my mind was: whence came the first man, the

first animal, and the first plant, at the remotest distance of time, before which there was no man, no animal,

"It is impossible to state the exact order in which these different questions arose, i.e., about men, animals,

plants, the earth, sun, moon, etc. The lower animals did not receive so much thought as was bestowed upon

man and the earth; perhaps because I put man and beast in the same class, since I believed that man would be

annihilated and there was no resurrection beyond the grave, though I am told by my mother that, in answer

to my question, in the case of a deceased uncle who looked to me like a person in sleep, she had tried to make

me understand that he would awake in the far future. It was my belief that man and beast derived their being

from the same source and were to be laid down in the dust in a state of annihilation. Considering the brute

animal as of secondary importance, and allied to man on a lower level, man and the earth were the two things

"I think I was five years old, when I began to understand the descent from parent to child and the propagation

of animals. I was nearly eleven years old, when I entered the Institution where I was ed ucated; and I

remember distinctly that it was at least two years before this time that I began to ask myself the question as to

"Of the form of the earth, I had no idea in my childhood, except that, from a look at a map of the

hemispheres, I inferred there were two immense disks of matter lying near each other. I also believed the sun

and moon to be round, flat plates of illuminating matter; and for those luminaries I entertained a sort of

reverence on account of their power of lighting and heating the earth. I thought from their coming up and

going down, travelling across the sky in so regular a manner that there must be a certain something having

power to govern their course. I believed the sun went into a hole at the west and came out of another at the

east, travelling through a great tube in the earth, describing the same curve as it seemed to describe in the sky.

"The source from which the universe came was the question about which my mind revolved in a vain struggle

to grasp it, or rather to fight the way up to attain to a satisfactory answer. When I had occupied myself with

this subject a considerable time, I perceived that it was a matter much greater than my mind could

comprehend; and I remember well that I became so appalled at its mystery and so bewildered at my inability

to grapple with it that I laid the subject aside and out of my mind, glad to escape being, as it were, drawn into

a vortex of inextricable confusion. Though I felt relieved at this escape, yet I could not resist the desire to

know the truth; and I returned to the subject; but as before, I left it, after thinking it over for some time. In

this state of perplexity, I hoped all the time to get at the truth, still believing that the more I gave thought to

the subject, the more my mind would penetrate the mystery. Thus I was tossed like a shuttlecock, returning to

"I remember that my mother once told me about a being up above, pointing her finger towards the sky and

with a solemn look on her countenance. I do not recall the circumstance which led to this communication.

When she mentioned the mysterious being up in the sky, I was eager to take hold of the subject, and plied her

with questions concerning the form and appearance of this unknown being, asking if it was the sun, moon, or

one of the stars. I knew she meant that there was a living one somewhere up in the sky; but when I realized

that she could not answer my questions, I gave it up in despair, feeling sorrowful that I could not obtain a

"One day, while we were haying in a field, there was a series of heavy thunderclaps. I asked one of my

brothers where they came from. He pointed to the sky and made a zigzag motion with his finger, signifying

lightning. I imagined there was a great man somewhere in the blue vault, who made a loud noise with his

voice out of it; and each time I heard[25] a thunderclap I was frightened, and looked up at the sky, fearing

he was speaking a threatening word."[26] Here we may pause. The reader sees by this time that it makes little

or no difference in what sort of mindstuff, in what quality of imagery, his thinking goes on. The only images

intrinsically important are the haltingplaces, the substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought.

Throughout all the rest of the stream, the feelings of relation are everything, and the terms related almost

naught. These feelings of relation, these psychic overtones, halos, suffusions, or fringes about the terms, may

be the same in very different systems of imagery. A diagram may help to accentuate this indifference of the

mental means where the end is the same. Let A be some experience from which a number of thinkers start.

Let Z be the practical conclusion rationally inferrible from it. One gets to the conclusion by one line, another

by another; one follows a course of English, another of German, verbal imagery. With one, visual images

predominate; with another, tactile. Some trains are tinged with emotions, others not; some are very abridged,

synthetic and rapid, others, hesitating and broken into many steps. But when the penultimate terms of all the

trains, however differing inter se, finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say and rightly say, that all the

thinkers have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to

be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.

Thought is in fact a kind of Algebra, as Berkeley long ago said, "in which, though a particular quantity be

marked by each letter, yet to proceed right, it is not requisite that in every step each letter suggest to your

thoughts that particular quantity it was appointed to stand for." Mr. Lewes has developed this

"The leading characteristic of algebra is that of operation on relations. This also is the leading characteristic

of Thought. Algebra cannot exist without values, nor Thought without Feelings. The operations are so many

blank forms till the values are assigned. Words are vacant sounds, ideas are blank forms, unless they

symbolize images and sensations which are their values. Nevertheless it is rigorously true, and of the greatest

importance, that analysts carry on very extensive operations with blank forms, never pausing to supply the

symbols with values until the calculation is completed; and ordinary men, no less than philosophers, carry on

long trains of thought without pausing to translate their ideas (words) into images.... Suppose some one from

a distance shouts 'a lion!' At once the man starts in alarm.... To the man the word is not only an.... expression

of all that he has seen and heard of lions, capable of recalling various experiences, but is also capable of

taking its place in a connected series of thoughts without recalling any of those experiences, without reviving

an image, however faint, of the lion simply as a sign of a certain relation included in the complex so named.

Like an algebraic symbol it may be operated on without conveying other significance than an abstract

relation: it is a sign of Danger, related to fear with all its motor sequences. Its logical position suffices....

Ideas are substitutions which require a secondary process when what is symbolized by them is translated into

the images and experiences it replaces; and this secondary process is frequently not performed at all,

generally only performed to a very small extent. Let anyone closely examine what has passed in his mind

when he has constructed a chain of reasoning, and he will be surprised at the fewness and faintness of the

images which have accompanied the ideas. Suppose you inform me that 'the blood rushed violently from the

man's heart, quickening his pulse at the sight of his enemy.' Of the many latent images in this phrase, how

many were salient in your mind and in mine? Probably two the man and his enemy and these images

were faint. Images of blood, heart, violent rushing, pulse, quickening, and sight, were either not revived at all,

or were passing shadows. Had any such images arisen, they would have hampered thought, retarding the

logical process of judgment by irrelevant connections. The symbols had substituted relations for these

values.... There are no images of two things and three things, when I say 'two and three equal five;' there are

simply familiar symbols having precise relations....The verbal symbol 'horse,' which stands for all our

experiences of horses, serves all the purposes of Thought, without recalling one of the images clustered in the

perception of horses, just as the sight of a horse's form serves all the purposes of recognition without recalling

the sound of its neighing or its tramp, its qualities as an animal of draught, and so forth.[27]

It need only be added that as the Algebrist, though the sequence of his terms is fixed by their relations rather

than by their several values, must give a real value to the final one he reaches; so the thinker in words must

let his concluding word or phrase be translated into its full sensibleimagevalue, under penalty of the

This is all I have to say about the sensible continuity and unity of our thought as contrasted with the apparent

discreteness of the words, images, and other means by which it seems to be carried on. Between all their

substantive elements there is 'transitive' consciousness, and the words and images are 'fringed,' and not as

discrete as to a careless view they seem. Let us advance now to the next head in our description of Thought's

4. Human thought appears to deal with objects independent of itself; that is, it is cognitive, or possesses the

function of knowing. For Absolute Idealism, the infinite Thought and its objects are one. The 0bjects are,

through being thought; the eternal Mind is, through thinking them. Were a human thought alone in the world

there would be no reason for any other assumption regarding it. Whatever it might have before it would be its

vision, would be there, in its 'there,' or then, in its 'then'; and the question would never arise whether an

extramental duplicate of it existed or not. The reason why we all believe that the objects of our thoughts

have a duplicate existence outside, is that there are many human thoughts, each with the same objects, as we

cannot help supposing. The judgment that my thought has the same object as his thought is what makes the

psychologist call my thought cognitive of an outer reality. The judgment that my own past thought and my

own present thought are of the same object is what makes me take the object out of either and project it by a

sort of triangulation into an independent position, from which it may appear to both. Sameness in a

multiplicity of objective appearances is thus the basis of our belief in realities outside of thought.[28] In

To show that the question of reality being extramental or not is not likely to arise in the absence of repeated

experiences of the same, take the example of an altogether unprecedented experience, such as a new taste in

the throat. Is it a subjective quality of feeling, or an objective quality felt? You do not even ask the question at

this point. It is simply that taste. But if a doctor hears you describe it, and says: "Ha! Now you know what

heartburn is," then it becomes a quality already existent extra mentem tuam; which you in turn have come

upon and learned. The first spaces, times, things, qualities, experienced by the child probably appear, like the

first heartburn, in this absolute way, as simple beings, neither in nor out of thought. But later, by having other

thoughts than this present one, and making repeated judgments of sameness among their objects, he

corroborates in himself the notion of realities, past and distant as well as present, which realities no one single

thought either possesses or engenders, but which all may contemplate and know. This, as was stated in the

last chapter, is the psychological point of view, the relatively uncritical nonidealistic point of view of all

natural science, beyond which this book cannot go. A mind which has become conscious of its own cognitive

function, plays what we have called 'the psychologist' upon itself. It not only knows the things that appear

before it; it knows that it knows them. This stage of reflective condition is, more or less explicitly, our

It cannot, however, be regarded as primitive. The consciousness of objects must come first. We seem to lapse

into this primordial condition when consciousness is reduced to a minimum by the inhalation of an�sthetics

or during a faint. Many persons testify that at a certain stage of the anaesthetic process objects are still

"During the syncope there is absolute psychic annihilation, the absence of all consciousness; then at the

beginning of coming to, one has at a certain moment a vague, limitless, infinite feeling a sense of existence

in general without the least trace of distinction between the me and the notme."

Dr. Shoemaker of Philadelphia describes during the deepest conscious stage of etherintoxication a vision of

"two endless parallel lines in swift longitudinal motion....on a uniform misty background....together with a

constant sound or whirr, not loud but distinct.... which seemed to be connected with the parallel lines....These

phenomena occupied the whole field. There were present no dreams or visions in any way connected with

human affairs, no ideas or impressions akin to anything in past experience, no emotions, of course no idea of

personality. There was no conception as to what being it was that was regarding the two lines, or that there

Similarly a friend of Mr. Herbert Spencer, quoted by him in 'Mind' (vol. III. p. 556), speaks of "an

undisturbed empty quiet everywhere except that a stupid presence lay like a heavy intrusion somewhere a

blotch on the calm." This sense of objectivity and lapse of subjectivity, even when the object is almost

indefinable, is, it seems to me, a somewhat familiar phase in chloroformization, though in my own case it is

too deep a phase for any articulate aftermemory to remain. I only know that as it vanishes I seem to wake to

a sense of my own existence as something additional to what had previously been there.[31]

Many philosophers, however, hold that the reflective consciousness of the self is essential to the cognitive

function of thought. They hold that a thought, in order to know a thing at all, must expressly distinguish

between the thing and its own self.[32] This is a perfectly wanton assumption, and not the faintest shadow of

reason exists for supposing it true. As well might I contend that I cannot dream without dreaming that I

dream, swear without swearing that I swear, deny without denying that I deny, as maintain that I cannot know

without knowing that I know. I may have either acquaintancewith, or knowledgeabout, an object O

without think about myself at all. It suffices for this that I think O, and that it exist. If, in addition to thinking

O, I also think that I exist and that I know O, well and good; I then know one more thing, a fact about of

which I previously was unmindful. That, however, does not prevent me from having already known it a good

deal. O per se, or O plus P, are as good objects of knowledge as O plus me is. The philosophers in question

simply substitute one particular object for all others, and call it the object par excellence. It is a case of the

'psychologist's fallacy' (see p. 197). They know the object to be one thing and the thought another; and they

forthwith foist their own knowledge into that of the thought of which they pretend to give a true account. To

conclude, then, thought may, but need not, in knowing, discriminate between its object and itself.

We have been using the word Object. Something must now be said about the proper use of the term in

In popular parlance the word object is commonly taken without reference to the act of knowledge, and treated

as synonymous with individual subject of existence. Thus if anyone ask what is the mind's object when you

say 'Columbus discovered America in 1492,' most people will reply 'Columbus,' or 'America,' or, at most, 'the

discovery of America.' They will name a substantive kernel or nucleus of the consciousness, and say the

thought is 'about' that, as indeed it is, and they will call that your thought's 'object.' Really that is usually

only the grammatical object, or more likely the grammatical subject, of your sentence. It is at most your

'fractional object;' or you may call it the 'topic' of your thought, or the 'subject of your discourse.' But the

Object of your thought is really its entire content or deliverance, neither more nor less. It is a vicious use of

speech to take out a substantive kernel from its content and call that its object; and it is an equally vicious use

of speech to add a substantive kernel not articulately included in its content, and to call that its object. Yet

either one of these two sins we commit, whenever we content ourselves with saying that a given thought is

simply 'about' a certain topic, or that that topic is its 'object.' The object of my thought in the previous

sentence, for example, is strictly speaking neither Columbus, nor America, nor its discovery. It is nothing

short of the entire sentence, 'Columbus discoveredAmericain1492.' And if we wish to speak of it

substantively, we must make a substantive of it by writing it out thus with hyphens between all its words.

Nothing but this can possibly name its delicate idiosyncrasy. And if we wish to feel that idiosyncrasy we

must reproduce the thought as it was uttered, with every word fringed and the whole sentence bathed in that

original halo of obscure relations, which, like an horizon, then spread about its meaning.

Our psychological duty is to cling as closely as possible to the actual constitution of the thought we are

studying. We may err as much by excess as by defect. If the kernel or 'topic,' Columbus, is in one way less

than the thought's object, so in another way it may be more. That is, when named by the psychologist, it may

mean much more than actually is present to the thought of which he is reporter. Thus, for example, suppose

you should go on to think: 'He was a daring genius!' An ordinary psychologist would not hesitate to say that

the object of your thought was still 'Columbus.' True, your thought is about Columbus. It 'terminates' in

Columbus, leads from and to the direct idea of Columbus. But for the moment it is not fully and immediately

Columbus, it is only 'he,' or rather 'hewasadaringgenius;' which, though it may be an unimportant

difference for conversational purposes, is, for introspective psychology, as great a differences as there can be.

The object of every thought, then, is neither more nor less than all that the thought thinks, exactly as thought

thinks it, however complicated the matter, and however symbolic the manner of the thinking may be. It is

needless to say that memory can seldom accurately reproduce such an object, when once it has passed from

before the mind. It either makes too little or too much of it. Its best plan is to repeat the verbal sentence, if

there was one, in which the object was expressed. But for inarticulate thoughts there is not even this resource,

and introspection must confess that the task exceeds her powers. The mass of our thinking vanishes for ever,

beyond hope of recovery, and psychology only gathers up a few of the crumbs that fall from the feast. The

next point to make clear is that, however complex the object may be, the thought of it is one undivided state

"I have already spoken too often to require again to caution you against the mistake into which, I confess, that

the terms which the poverty of our language obliges us to use might of themselves very naturally lead you;

the mistake of supposing that the most complex states of mind are not truly, in their very essence, as much

one and indivisible as those which we term simple the complexity and seeming coexistence which they

involve being relative to our feeling[34] only, not to their own absolute nature. I trust I need not repeat to you

that, in itself, every notion, however seemingly complex, is, and must be, truly simple being one state or

affection, of one simple substance, mind. Our conception of a whole army, for example, is as truly this one

mind existing in this one state, as our conception of any of the individuals that compose an army. Our notion

of the abstract numbers, eight, four, two, is as truly one feeling of the mind as our notion of simple unity."

The ordinary associationistpsychology supposes, in contrast with this, that whenever an object of thought

contains many elements, the thought itself must be made up of just as many ideas, one idea for each element,

and all fused together in appearance, but really separate.[35] The enemies of this psychology find (as we have

already seen) little trouble in showing that such a bundle of separate ideas would never form one thought at

all, and they contend that an Ego must be added to the bundle to give it unity, and bring the various ideas into

relation with each other.[36] We will not discuss the ego just yet, but it is obvious that if things are to be

thought in relation, they must be thought together, and in one something, be that something ego, psychosis,

state of consciousness, or whatever you please. If not thought with each other, things are not thought in

relation at all. Now most believers in the ego make the same mistake as the associationists and sensationists

whom they oppose. Both agree that the elements of the subjective stream are discrete and separate and

constitute what Kant calls a 'manifold.' But while the asso ciationists think that a 'manifold' can form a

single knowledge, the egoists deny this, and say that the knowledge comes only when the manifold is

subjected to the synthetizing activity of an ego. Both make an identical initial hypothesis; but the egoist,

finding it won't express the facts, adds another hypothesis to correct it. Now I do not wish just yet to 'commit

myself' about the existence or nonexistence of the ego, but I do contend that we need not invoke it for this

particular reason namely, because the manifold of ideas has to be reduced to unity. There is no manifold of

coexisting ideas; the notion of such a thing is a chimera. Whatever things are thought in relation are thought

from the outset in a unity, in a single pulse of subjectivity, a single psychosis, feeling, or state of mind.

The reason why this fact is so strangely garble in the books seems to be what on an earlier page (see p. 196

ff.) I called the psychologist's fallacy. We have the inveterate habit, whenever we try introspectively to

describe one of our thoughts, of dropping the thought as it is in itself and talking of something else. We

describe the things that appear to the thought, and we describe other thoughts about those things as if these

and the original thought were the same. If, for example, the thought be 'the pack of cards is on the table,' we

say, "Well, isn't it a thought of the pack of cards? Isn't it of the cards as included in the pack? Isn't it of the

table? And of the legs of the table as well? The table has legs how can you think the table without virtually

thinking its legs? Hasn't our thought then, all these parts one part for the pack and another for the table?

And within the packpart a part for each card, as within the tablepart a part for each leg? And isn't each of

these parts an idea? And can our thought, then, be anything but an assemblage or pack of ideas, each

Now not one of these assumptions is true. The thought taken as an example is, in the first place, not of 'a pack

of cards.' It is of 'thepackofcardsisonthetable,' an entirely different subjective phenomenon, whose

Object implies the pack, and every one of the cards in it, but whose conscious constitution bears very little

resemblance to that of the thought of the pack per se. What a thought is, and what it may be developed into,

An analysis of what passes through the mind as we utter the phrase the pack of cards is on the table will, I

hope, make this clear, and may at the same time condense into a concrete example a good deal of what has

It takes time to utter the phrase. Let the horizontal line in Fig. 29 represent time. Every part of it will then

stand for a fraction, every point for an instant, of the time. Of course the thought has timeparts. The part 23

of it, though continuous with 12, is yet a different part from 12. Now I say of these timeparts that we

cannot take any one of them so short that it will not after some fashion or other be a thought of the whole

object 'the pack of cards is on the table.' They melt into each other like dissolving views, and no two of them

feel the object just alike, but each feels the total object in a unitary undivided way. This is what I mean by

denying that in the thought any parts can be found corresponding to the object's parts. Timeparts are not

Now let the vertical dimensions of the figure stand for the objects or contents of the thoughts. A line vertical

to any point of the horizontal, as 11', will then symbolize the object in the mind at the instant 1; a space

above the horizontal, as 11'2'2, will symbolize all that passes through the mind during the time 12

whose line it covers. The entire diagram from 0 to 0' represents a finite length of thought's stream.

Can we now define the psychic constitution of each vertical section of this segment? We can, though in a

very rough way. Immediately after 0, even before we have opened our mouths to speak, the entire thought is

present to our mind in the form of an intention to utter that sentence. This intention, though it has no simple

name, and though it is a transitive state immediately displaced by the first word, is yet a perfectly determinate

phase of thought, unlike anything else (see p. 253). Again, immediately before 0', after the last word of the

sentence is spoken, all will admit that we again think its entire content as we inwardly realize its completed

deliverance. All vertical sections made through any other parts of the diagram will be respectively filled with

other ways of feeling the sentence's meaning. Through 2, for example, the cards will be the part of the object

most emphatically present to the mind; through 4, the table. The stream is made higher in the drawing at its

end than at its beginning, because the final way of feeling the content is fuller and richer than the initial way.

As Joubert says, "we only know just what we meant to say, after we have said it." And as M. V. Egger

remarks, "before speaking, one barely knows what one intends to say, but afterwards one is filled with

This latter author seems to me to have kept at much closer quarters with the facts than any other analyst of

consciousness.[38] But even he does not quite hit the mark, for, as I understand him, he thinks that each word

as it occupies the mind displaces the rest of the thought's content. He distinguishes the 'idea' (what I have

called the total object or meaning) from the consciousness of the words, calling the former a very feeble state,

and contrasting it with the liveliness of the words, even when these are only silently rehearsed. "The feeling,"

he says, "of the words makes ten or twenty times more noise in our consciousness than the sense of the

phrase, which for consciousness is a very slight matter."[39] And having distinguished these two things, he

goes on to separate them in time, saying that the idea may either precede or follow the words, but that it is a

'pure illusion' to suppose them simultaneous.[40] Now I believe that in all cases where the words are

understood, the total idea may be and usually is present not only before and after the phrase has been spoken,

but also whilst each separate word is uttered.[41] It is the overtone, halo, or fringe of the word as spoken in

that sentence. It is never absent; no word in an understood sentence comes to consciousness as a mere noise.

We feel its meaning as it passes; and although our object differs from one moment to another as to its verbal

kernel or nucleus, yet it is similar throughout the entire segment of the stream. The same object is known

everywhere, now from the point of view, if we may so call it, of this word, now from the point of view of

that. And in our feeling of each word there chimes an echo or foretaste of every other. The consciousness of

the 'Idea' and that of the words are thus consubstantial. They are made of the same 'mindstuff,' and form an

unbroken stream. Annihilate a mind at any instant, cut its thought through whilst yet uncompleted, and

examine the object present to the crosssection thus suddenly made; you will find, not the bald word in

process of utterance, but that word suffused with the whole idea. The word may be so loud, as M. Egger

would say, that we cannot tell just how its suffusion, as such, feels, or how it differs from the suffusion of the

next word. But it does differ; and we may be sure that, could we see into the brain, we should find the same

processes active through the entire sentence in different degrees, each one in turn becoming maximally

excited and then yielding the momentary verbal 'kernel,' to the thought's content, at other times being only

subexcited, and then combining with the other subexcited processes to give the overtone or fringe.[42]

We may illustrate this by a farther development of the diagram on p. 279. Let the objective content of any

vertical section through the stream be represented no longer by a line, but by a plane figure, highest opposite

whatever part of the object is most prominent in consciousness at the moment when the section is made. This

part, in verbal thought, will usually be some word. A series of sections 11', taken at the moments 1, 2, 3,

The horizontal breadth stands for the entire object in each of the figures; the height of the curve above each

part of that object marks the relative prominence of that part in the thought. At the moment symbolized by the

We can easily add all these plane sections together to make a solid, one of whose solid dimensions will

represent time, whilst a cut across this at right angles will give the thought's content at the moment when the

Let it be the thought, 'I am the same I that I was yesterday.' If at the fourth moment of time we annihilate the

thinker and examine how the last pulsation of his consciousness was made, we find that it was an awareness

of the whole content with same most prominent, and the other parts of the thing known relatively less

distinct. With each prolongation of the scheme in the timedirection, the summit of the curve of section

would come further towards the end of the sentence. If we make a solid wooden frame with the sentence

written on its front, and the timescale on one of its sides, if we spread flatly a sheet of India rubber over its

top, on which rectangular coordinates are painted, and slide a smooth ball under the rubber in the direction

from 0 to 'yesterday,' the bulging of the membrane along this diagonal at successive moments will symbolize

the changing of the thought's content in a way plain enough, after what has been said, to call for no more

explanation. Or to express it in cerebral terms, it will show the relative intensities, at successive moments, of

the several nerveprocesses to which the various parts of the thoughtobject correspond.

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its

5) It is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses,

all the while it thinks. The phenomena of selective attention and of deliberative will are of course patent

examples of this choosing activity. But few of us are aware how incessantly it is at work in operations not

ordinarily called by these names. Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every perception we have. We

find it quite impossible to disperse our attention impartially over a number of impressions. A monotonous

succession of sonorous strokes is broken up into rhythms, now of one sort, now of another, by the different

accent which we place on different strokes. The simplest of these rhythms is the double one, tickt�ck,

ticktock, tickt�ck. Dots dispersed on a surface are perceived in rows and groups. Lines separate into

diverse figures. The ubiquity of the distinctions, this and that, here and there, now and then, in our minds is

the result of our laying the same selective emphasis on parts of place and time.

But we do far more than emphasize things, and unite some, and keep others apart. We actually ignore most of

To begin at the bottom, what are our very senses themselves but organs of selection? Out of the infinite chaos

of movements, of which physics teaches us that the outer world consists, each senseorgan picks out those

which fall within certain limits of velocity. To these it responds, but ignores the rest as completely as if they

did not exist. It thus accentuates particular movements in a manner for which objectively there seems no valid

ground; for, as Lange says, there is no reason whatever to think that the gap in Nature between the highest

soundwaves and the lowest heatwaves is an abrupt break like that of our sensations; or that the difference

between violet and ultraviolet rays has anything like the objective importance subjectively represented by

that between light and darkness. Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of

distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of

If the sensations we receive from a given organ have their causes thus picked out for us by the conformation

of the organ's termination, Attention, on the other hand, out of all the sensations yielded, picks out certain

ones as worthy of its notice and suppresses all the rest. Helmholtz's work on Optics is little more than a study

of those visual sensations of which common men never become aware blind spots, musc� volitantes, after

images, irradiation, chromatic fringes, marginal changes of color, double images, astigmatism, movements of

accommodation and convergence, retinal rivalry, and more besides. We do not even know without special

training on which of our eyes an image falls. So habitually ignorant are most men of this that one may be

Helmholtz says that we notice only those sensations which are signs to us of things. But what are things?

Nothing, as we shall abundantly see, but special groups of sensible qualities, which happen practically or

aesthetically to interest us, to which we therefore give substantive names, and which we exalt to this

exclusive status of independence and dignity. But in itself, apart from my interest, a particular dustwreath

on a windy day is just as much of an individual thing, and just as much or as little deserves an individual

And then, among the sensations we get from each separate thing, what happens? The mind selects again. It

chooses certain of the sensations to represent the thing most truly, and considers the rest as its appearances,

modified by the conditions of the moment. Thus my tabletop is named square, after but one of an infinite

number of retinal sensations which it yields, the rest of them being sensations of two acute and two obtuse

angles; but I call the latter perspective views, and the four right angles the true form of the table, and erect the

attribute squareness into the table's essence, for aesthetic reasons of my own In like manner, the real form of

the circle is deemed to be the sensation it gives when the line of vision is perpendicu lar to its centre all its

other sensations are signs of this sensation. The real sound of the cannon is the sensation it makes when the

ear is close by. The real color of the brick is the sensation it gives when the eye looks squarely at it from a

near point, out of the sunshine and yet not in the gloom; under other circumstances it gives us other

colorsensations which are but signs of this we then see it looks pinker or blacker than it really is. The

reader knows no object which lie does not represent to himself by preference as in some typical attitude, of

some normal size, at some characteristic distance, of some standard tint, etc., etc. But all these essential

characteristics, which together form for us the genuine objectivity of the thing and are contrasted with what

we call the subjective sensations it may yield us at a given moment, are mere sensations like the latter. The

mind chooses to suit itself, and decides what particular sensation shall be held more real and valid than all the

Thus perception involves a twofold choice. Out of all present sensations, we notice mainly such as are

significant of absent ones; and out of all the absent associates which these suggest, we again pick out a very

few to stand for the objective reality par excellence. We could have no more exquisite example of selective

That industry goes on to deal with the things thus given in perception. A man's empirical thought depends on

the things he has experienced, but what these shall be is to a large extent determined by his habits of

attention. A thing may be present to him a thousand times, but if he persistently fails to notice it, it cannot be

said to enter into his experience. We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand, but to whom,

save an entomologist, do they say anything distinct? On the other hand, a thing met only once in a lifetime

may leave an indelible experience in the memory. Let four men make a tour in Europe. One will bring home

only picturesque impressions costumes and colors, parks and views and works of architecture, pictures and

statues. To another all this will be nonexistent; and distances and prices, populations and

drainagearrangements, doorand windowfastenings, and other useful statistics will take their place. A third

will give a rich account of the theatres, restaurants, and public balls, and naught beside; whilst the fourth will

perhaps have been so wrapped in his own subjective broodings as to tell little more than a few names of

places through which he passed. Each has selected, out of the same mass of presented objects, those which

If, now, leaving the empirical combination of objects, we ask how the mind proceeds rationally to connect

them, we find selection again to be omnipotent. In a future chapter we shall see that all Reasoning depends on

the ability of the mind to break up the totality of the phenomenon reasoned about, into parts, and to pick out

from among these the particular one which, in our given emergency, may lead to the proper conclusion.

Another predicament will need another conclusion, and require another element to be picked out. The man of

genius is he who will always stick in his bill at the right point, and bring it out with the right element

'reason' if the emergency be theoretical, 'means' if it be practical transfixed upon it. I here confine myself to

this brief statement, but it may suffice to show that Reasoning is but another form of the selective activity of

If now we pass to its �sthetic department, our law is still more obvious. The artist notoriously selects his

items, rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonize with each other and with the main purpose

of his work. That unity, harmony, 'convergence of characters,' as M. Taine calls it, which gives to works of

art their superiority over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination. Any natural subject will do, if the

artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one feature of it as characteristic, and suppress all merely

Ascending, still higher, we reach the plane of Ethics, where choice reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no

ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible. To sustain the arguments for

the good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle our longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot

unflinchingly on the arduous path, these are characteristic ethical energies. But more than these; for these but

deal with the means of compassing interests already felt by the man to be supreme. The ethical energy par

excellence has to go farther and choose which interest out of several, equally coercive, shall become supreme.

The issue here is of the utmost pregnancy, for it decides a man's entire career. When he debates, Shall I

commit this crime? choose that profession? accept that office, or marry this fortune? his choice really lies

between one of several equally possible future Characters. What he shall become is fixed by the conduct of

this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given fixed character

only one reaction is possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what

consciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the character itself. The problem with the man is

less what act he shall now choose to do, than what being he shall now resolve to become.

Looking back, then, over this review, we see that the mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous

possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and

the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most

elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass

offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler

material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his

block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside

it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of

us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of

sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our

reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming

atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that

which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like

sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same

stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos ! My world is but one in

a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the

But in my mind and your mind the rejected portions and the selected portions of the original worldstuff are

to a great extent the same. The human race as a whole largely agrees as to what it shall notice and name, and

what not. And among the noticed parts we select in much the same way for accentuation and preference or

subordination and dislike. There is, however, one entirely extraordinary case in which no two men ever are

known to choose alike. One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us; and

for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw the line of division

between them in a different place. When I say that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that

those names are 'me' and 'notme' respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The altogether unique

kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a

moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. No mind can take the same interest in his neighbor's

me as in his own. The neighbor's me falls together with all the rest of things in one foreign mass, against

which his own me stands out in startling relief. Even the trodden worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts

his own suffering self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear conception either of

himself or of what the universe may be. He is for me a mere part of the world; for him it is I who am the mere

Descending now to finer work than this first general sketch, let us in the next chapter try to trace the

psychology of this fact of selfconsciousness to which we have thus once more been led.

Footnotes [1] A good deal of this chapter is reprinted from an article 'On some Omissions of Introspective

[4] Cf. A. Constans: Relation sur une Epid�mie d'hysterodemonopathie en 1861. 2me ed. Paris, 1863.

Chiap e Franzolini: L'Epidemia d'isterodemonopatie in Verzegnis. Reggio, 1879. See also J. Kerner's little

[10] It need of course not follow, because a total brainstate does not recur, that no point of the brain can

ever be twice in the same condition. That would be as improbable a consequence as that in the sea a

wavecrest should never come twice at the same point of space. What can hardly come twice is an identical

combination of waveforms all with their crests and hollows reoccupying identical places. For such a total

combination as this is the analogue of the brainstate to which our actual consciousness at any moment is

[12] Cf. Brentano; Psychologie, vol. I. pp. 21920. Altogether this chapter of Brentano's on the Unity of

[13] Honor to whom honor is due! The most explicit acknowledgment I have anywhere found of all this is in

a buried and forgotten paper by the Rev. Jas. Wills, on 'Accidental Association,' in the Transactions of the

"At every instant of conscious thought there is a certain sum of perceptions, or reflections, or both together,

present, and together constituting one whole state of apprehension. Of this some definite portion may be far

more distinct than all the rest; and the rest be in consequence proportionably vague, even to the limit of

obliteration. But still, within this limit, the most dim shade of perception enters into, and in some

infinitesimal degree modifies, the whole existing state. This state will thus be in some way modified by any

sensation or emotion, or act of distinct attention, that may give prominence to any part of it; so that the actual

result is capable of the utmost variation, according to the person or the occasion. ... To any portion of the

entire scope here described there may be a special direction of the attention, and this special direction is

recognized as strictly what is recognized as the idea present to the mind. This idea is evidently not

commensurate with the entire state of apprehension, and much perplexity has arisen from not observing this

fact. However deeply we may suppose the attention to be engaged by any thought, any considerable alteration

of the surrounding phenomena would still be perceived; the most abstruse demonstration in this room would

not prevent a listener, however absorbed, from noticing the sudden extinction of the lights. Our mental states

have always an essential unity, such that each state of apprehension, however variously compounded, is a

single whole, of which every component is, therefore, strictly apprehended (so far as it is apprehended) as a

part. Such is the elementary basis from which all our intellectual operations commence."

[15] E.g.: "The stream of thought is not a continuous current, but a series of distinct ideas, more or less rapid

in their succession; the rapidity being measurable by the number that pass through the mind in a given time."

[16] Few writers have admitted that we cognize relations through feeling. The intellectualists have explicitly

denied the possibility of such a thing e.g., Prof. T. H. Green ('Mind,' vol. VII. p. 28): "No feeling, as such or

as felt, is [of?] a relation.... Even a relation between feelings is not itself a feeling or felt." On the other hand,

the sensationalists have either smuggled in the cognition without giving any account of it, or have denied the

relations to be cognized, or even to exist, at all. A few honorable exceptions, however, deserve to be named

among the sensationalists. Destutt de Tracy, Laromigui�re, Cardaillac, Brown, and finally Spencer, have

explicitly contended for feelings of relation, consubstantial with our feelings or thoughts of the terms

'between' which they obtain. Thus Destutt de Tracy says (El�ments d'Id�ologie, T. Ier, chap. IV): "The faculty

of judgment is itself a sort of sensibility, for it is the faculty of feeling the relations among our ideas; and to

feel relations is to feel." Laromigui�re writes (Le�ons de Philosophie, IIme Partie, 3me Le�on):

"There is no one whose intelligence does not embrace simultaneously many ideas, more or less distinct, more

or less confused. Now, when we have many ideas at once, a peculiar feeling arises in us: we feel, among

these ideas, resemblances, differences, relations. Let us call this mode of feeling, common to us all, the

feeling of relation, or relationfeeling (sentimentrapport). One sees immediately that these

relationfeelings, resulting from the propinquity of ideas, must be infinitely more numerous than the

sensationfeelings (sentimentssensations) or the feelings we have of the action of our faculties. The

slightest knowledge of the mathematical theory of combinations will prove this.... Ideas of relation originate

in feelings of relation. They are the effect of our comparing them and reasoning about them."

Similarly, de Cardaillac (�tudes �lementaires de Philosophie, Section I. chap. VII):

"By a natural consequence, we are led to suppose that at the same time that we have several sensations or

several ideas in the mind, we feel the relations which exist between these sensations, and the relations which

exist between these ideas.... If the feeling of relations exists in us,... it is necessarily the most varied and the

most fertile of all human feelings: 1o the most varied, because, relations being more numerous than beings,

the feelings of relation must be in the same proportion more numbers than the sensations whose presence

gives rise to their formulation; 2o, the most fertile, for the relative ideas of which the feelingofrelation is

the source... are more important than absolute ideas, if such exist.... If we interrogate common speech, we

find the feeling of relation expressed there in a thousand different ways. If it is easy to seize a relation, we say

that it is sensible, to distinguish it from one which, because its terms are too remote, cannot be as quickly

perceived. A sensible difference, or resemblance.... What is taste in the arts, in intellectual productions? What

but the feeling of those relations among the parts which constitutes their merit?... Did we not feel relations

and should never attain to true knowledge,... for almost all our knowledge is of relations.... We never have an

isolated sensation;... we are therefore never without the feeling of relation.... An object strikes our sense; we

see in it only a sensation.... The relative is so near the absolute, the relationfeeling so near the

sensationfeeling, the two are so intimately fused in the composition of the object, that the relation appears to

us as part of the sensation itself. It is doubtless to this sort of fusion between sensations and feelings of

relation that the silence of metaphysicians as to the latter is due; and it is for the same reason that they have

obstinately persisted in asking from sensation alone those ideas of relation which it was powerless to give."

Dr. Thomas Brown writes (Lectures, XLV. init.): "There is an extensive order of our feelings which involve

this notion of relation, and which consist indeed in the mere perception of a relation of some sort.... Whether

the relation be of two or of many external objects, or of two or many affections of the mind, the feeling of

this relation... is what I term a relative suggestion; that phrase being the simplest which it is possible to

employ, for expressing, without any theory, the mere fact of the rise of certain feelings of relation, after

certain other feelings which precede them; and therefore, as involving no particular theory, and simply

expressive of an undoubted fact..... That the feelings of relation are states of the mind essentially different

from our simple perceptions, or conceptions of the objects,... that they are not what Condillac terms

transformed sensations, I proved in a former lecture, when I combated the excessive simplification of that

ingenious but not very accurate philosopher. There is an original tendency or susceptibility of the mind, by

which, on perceiving together different objects, we are instantly, without the intervention of any other mental

process, sensible of their relation in certain respects, as truly as there is an original tendency or susceptibility

by which, when external objects are present and have produced a certain affection of our sensorial organ, we

are instantly affected with the primary elementary feelings of perception; and, I may add, that as our

sensations or perceptions are of various species, so are there various species of relations; the number of

relations, indeed, even of external things, being almost infinite, while the number of perceptions is,

necessarily, limited by that of the objects which have the power of producing some affection of our organs of

sensation.... Without that susceptibility of the mind by which it has the feeling of relation, our consciousness

would be as truly limited to a single point, as our body would become, were it possible to fetter it to a single

Mr. Spencer is even more explicit. His philosophy is crude in that he seems to suppose that it is only in

transitive states that outward relations are known; whereas in truth spacerelations, relations of contrast, etc.,

are felt along with their terms, in substantive states as well as in transitive states, as we shall abundantly see.

Nevertheless Mr. Spencer's passage is so clear that it also deserves to be quoted in full (Principles of

"The proximate components of Mind are of two broadlycontrasted kinds Feelings and the relations

between feelings. Among the members of each group there exist multitudinous unlikenesses, many of which

are extremely strong; but such unlikenesses are small compared with those which distinguish members of the

one group from members of the other. Let us, in the first place, consider what are the characters which all

"Each feeling, as we here define it, is any portion of consciousness which occupies a place sufficiently large

to give it a perceivable individuality; which has its individually marked off from adjacent portions of

consciousness by qualitative contrasts; and which, when introspectively contemplated, appears to be

homogeneous. These are the essentials. Obviously if, under introspection, a state of consciousness is

decomposable into unlike parts that exist either simultaneously or successively, it is not one feeling but two

or more. Obviously if it is indistinguishable from an adjacent portion of consciousness, it forms one with that

portion is not an individual feeling, but part of one. And obviously if it does not occupy in consciousness an

"A Relation between feelings is, on the contrary, characterized by occupying no appreciable part of

consciousness. Take away the terms it unites, and it disappears along with them; having no independent

place, no individuality of its own. It is true that, under an ultimate analysis, what we call a relation proves to

be itself a kind of feeling the momentary feeling accompanying the transition from one conspicuous feeling

to an adjacent conspicuous feeling. And it is true that, notwithstanding its extreme brevity, its qualitative

character is appreciable; for relations are (as we shall hereafter see) distinguishable from one another only by

the unlikenesses of the feelings which accompany the momentary transitions. Each relational feeling may, in

fact, be regarded as one of those nervous shocks which we suspect to be the units of composition of feelings;

and, though instantaneous, it is known as of greater or less strength, and as taking place with greater or less

facility. But the contrast between these relational feelings and what we ordinarily call feelings is so strong

that we must class them apart. Their extreme brevity, their small variety, and their dependence on the terms

"Perhaps it will be well to recognize more fully the truth that this distinction cannot be absolute. Besides

admitting that, as an element of consciousness, a relation is a momentary feeling, we must also admit that just

as a relation can have no existence apart from the feelings which form its terms, so a feeling can exist only by

relations to other feelings which limit it in space or time or both. Strictly speaking, neither a feeling nor a

relation is an independent element of consciousness: there is throughout a dependence such that the

appreciable areas of consciousness occupied by feelings can no more possess individualities apart from the

relations which link them, than these relations can possess individualities apart from the feelings they link.

The essential distinction between the two, then, appears to be that whereas a relational feeling is a portion of

consciousness inseparable into parts, a feeling, ordinarily so called, is a portion of consciousness that admits

imaginary division into like parts which are related to one another in sequence or coexistence. A feeling

proper is either made up of like parts that occupy time, or it is made up of like parts that occupy space, or

both. In any case, a feeling proper is an aggregate of related like parts, while a relational feeling is

undecomposable. And this is exactly the contrast between the two which must result if, as we have inferred,

[17] M. Paulhan (Revue Philosophique, XX. 4556), after speaking of the faint mental images of objects and

emotions, says: "We find other vaguer states still, upon which attention seldom rests, except in persons who

by nature or profession are addicted to internal observation. It is even difficult to name them precisely, for

they are little known and not classed; but we may cite as an example of them that peculiar impression which

we feel when, strongly preoccupied by a certain subject, we nevertheless are engaged with, and have our

attention almost completely absorbed by, matters quite disconnected therewithal. We do not then exactly

think of the object of our preoccupation; we do not represent it in a clear manner; and yet our mind is not as it

would be without this preoccupation. Its object, absent from consciousness, is nevertheless represented there

by a peculiar unmistakable impression, which often persists long and is a strong feeling, although so obscure

for our intelligence." "A mental sign of the kind is the unfavorable disposition left in our mind towards an

individual by painful incidents erewhile experienced and now perhaps forgotten. The sign remains, but is not

[18] Mozart describes thus his manner of composing: First bits and crumbs of the piece come and gradually

join together in his mind; then the soul getting warmed to the work, the thing grows more and more, "and I

spread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in my head, even when it is a long piece,

so that I can see the whole of it at a single glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting or a handsome

human being; in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as a succession the way it must come

later but all at once, as it were. It is a rare feast! All the inventing and making goes on in me as in a

[19] Mental Physiology, � 236. Dr. Carpenter's explanation differs materially from that given in the text.

[20] Cf. also S. Stricker: Vorlesungen �ber allg. u. exp. Pathologie (1879), pp. 4623, 501, 547; Romanes:

Origin of Human Faculty, p. 82. It is so hard to make one's self clear that I may advert to a misunderstanding

of my views by the late Prof. Thos. Maguire of Dublin (Lectures on Philosophy, 1885). This author considers

that by the 'fringe' I mean some sort of psychic material by which sensations in themselves separate are made

to cohere together, and wittily says that I ought to "see that uniting sensations by their 'finges' is more vague

than to construct the universe out of oysters by platting their beards" (p. 211). But the fringe, as I use the

word, means nothing like this; it is part of the object cognized, substantive qualities and things appearing to

the mind in a fringe of relations. Some parts the transitive parts of our stream of thought cognize the

relations rather than the things; but both the transitive and the substantive parts form one continuous stream,

with no discrete 'sensations' in it such as Prof. Maguire supposes, and supposes me suppose, to be there.

[23] [Classics Editor's Note: the symbol for this footnote does not appear in the main text of the Dover

edition; however it does appear in Miller's (1981) edition.] M. G. Tarde, quoting (in Delboeuf, Le Sommeil et

les R�ves (1885), p. 226) some nonsenseverses from a dream, says they show how prosodic forms may

subsist in a mind from which logical rules are effaced.... I was able, in dreaming, to preserve the faculty of

finding two words which rhymed, to appreciate the rhyme, to fill up the verse as it first presented itself with

other words which, added, gave the right number of syllables, and yet I was ignorant of the sense of the

words.... Thus we have the extraordinary fact that the words called each other up, without calling up their

sense.... Even when awake, it is more difficult to ascend to the meaning of a word than to pass from one word

to another; or to put it otherwise, it is harder to be a thinker than to be a rhetorician, and on the whole nothing

[24] We think it odd that young children should listen with such rapt attention to the reading of stories

expressed in words half of which they do not understand, and of none of which they ask the meaning. But

their thinking is in form just what ours is when it is rapid. Both of us make flying leaps over large portions of

the sentences uttered and we give attention only to substantive starting points, turning points, and conclusions

here and there. All the rest, 'substantive' and separately intelligible as it may potentially be, actually serves

only as so much transitive material. It is internodal consciousness, giving us the sense of continuity, but

having no significance apart from its mere gapfilling function. The children probably feel no gap when

through a lot of unintelligible words they are swiftly carried to a familiar and intelligible terminus.

[25] Not literally heard, of course. Deaf mutes are quick to perceive shocks and jars that can be felt, even

[26] Quoted by Samuel Porter: 'Is Thought possible without Language?' in Princeton Review, 57th year, pp.

10812 (Jan. 1881 ?). Cf. also W. W. Ireland: The Blot upon the Brain (1886), Paper X, part II; G. J.

Romanes: Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 8183, and references therein made. Prof. Max M�ller gives a very

complete history of this controversy in pp. 3064 of his 'Science of Thought' (1887). His own view is that

Thought and Speech are inseparable; but under speech he includes any conceivable sort of symbolism or even

mental imagery, and he makes no allowance for the wordless summary glimpses which we have of systems

[27] Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series, Problem IV, chapter 5. Compare also Victor Egger: La Parole

[28] If but one person sees an apparition we consider it his private hallucination. If more than one, we begin

[30] Quoted from the Therapeutic Gazette, by the N. Y. Semiweekly Evening Post for Nov. 2, 1886.

[31] In halfstunned states selfconsciousness may lapse. A friend writes me: "We were driving back from

in a wagonette. The door flew open and X., alias 'Baldy,' fell out on the road. We pulled up at once, and

then he said, 'Did anybody fall out?' or 'Who fell out?' I don't exactly remember the words. When told that

[32] Kant originated this view. I subjoin a few English statements of it. J. Ferrier, Institutes of Metaphysic,

Proposition I: "Along with whatever any intelligence knows it must, as the ground or condition of its

knowledge, have some knowledge of itself.: Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discussions, p. 47: "We know, and we know

that we know, these propositions, logically distinct, are really identical; each implies the other.... So true is

the scholastic brocard: non sentimus nisi sentiamus nos sentire." H. S. Mansel, Metaphysics, p. 58:

"Whatever variety of materials may exist within reach of my mind, I can become conscious of them only by

recognizing them as mine.... Relation to the conscious self is thus the permanent and universal feature which

every state of consciousness as such must exhibit." T. H. Green, Introduction to Hume, p. 12: "A

consciousness by the man... of himself, in negative relation to the thing that is his object, and this

consciousness must be taken to go along with the perceptive act itself. Not less than this indeed can be

involved in any act that is to be the beginning of knowledge at all. It is the minimum of possible thought or

[34] Instead of saying to our feeling only, he should have said, to the object only.

[35] "There can be no difficulty in admitting that association does form the ideas of an indefinite number of

individuals into one complex idea; because it is an acknowledged fact. Have we not the idea of an army? And

is not that precisely the ideas of an indefinite number of men formed into one idea?" (Jas. Mill's Analysis of

[36] For their arguments, see above pp. [158162] [Classics Editor's Note: The page numbers do not appear

[37] I know there are readers whom nothing can convince that the thought of a complex object has not as

many parts as are discriminated in the object itself. Well, then, let the word parts pass. Only observe that

these parts are not the separate 'ideas' of traditional psychology. No one of them can live out of that particular

thought, any more than my head can live off of my particular shoulders. In a sense a soapbubble has parts; it

is a sum of juxtaposed spherical triangles. But these triangles are not separate realities; neither are the 'parts'

of the thought separate realities. Touch the bubble and the triangles are no more. Dismiss the thought and out

go its parts. You can no more make a new thought out of 'ideas' that have once served than you can make a

new bubble out of old triangles. Each bubble, each thought, is a fresh organic unity, sui generis.

[38] In his work, La Parole Int�rieure (Paris, 1881), especially chapters VI and VII.

[40] Page 218. To prove this point, M. Egger appeals to the fact that we often hear some one speak whilst our

mind is preoccupied, but do not understand him until some moments afterwards, when we suddenly 'realize'

what he meant. Also to our digging out the meaning of a sentence in an unfamiliar tongue, where the words

are present to us long before the idea is taken in. In these special cases the word does indeed precede the idea.

The idea, on the contrary, precedes the word whenever we try to express ourselves with effort, as in a foreign

tongue, or in an unusual field of intellectual invention. Both sets of cases, however, are exceptional, and M.

Egger would probably himself admit, on reflection, that in the former class there is some sort of a verbal

suffusion, however evanescent, of the idea, when it is grasped we hear the echo of the words as we catch

their meaning. And he would probably admit that in the second class of cases the idea persists after the words

that came with so much effort are found. In normal cases the simultaneity, as he admits, is obviously there.

[41] A good way to get the words and the sense separately is to inwardly articulate word for word the

discourse of another. One then finds that the meaning will often come to the mind in pulses, after clauses or

[42] The nearest approach (with which I am acquainted) to the doctrine set forth here is in O. Liebmann's Zur

Let us begin with the Self in its widest acceptation, and follow it up to its most delicate and subtle form,

advancing from the study of the empirical, as the Germans call it, to that of the pure, Ego.

The Empirical Self or Me. The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me.

But it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw.

We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame,

our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and

the same acts of reprisal if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they us?

Certainly men have been ready to disown their very bodies and to regard them as mere vestures, or even as

We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating material. The same object being sometimes treated as a

part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then again as if I had nothing to do with it at all. In its widest

possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his

psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation

and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bankaccount. All these things give him the same emotions. If

they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down, not

necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all. Understanding the Self in

this widest sense, we may begin by dividing the history of it into three parts, relating respectively to

1. The constituents of the Self may be divided into two classes, those which make up respectively

(a) The material Self; (b) The social Self; (c) The spiritual Self; and (d) The pure Ego.

(a) The body is the innermost part of the material Self in each of us; and certain parts of the body seem more

intimately ours than the rest. The clothes come next. The old saying that the human person is composed of

three parts soul, body and clothes is more than a joke. We so appropriate our clothes and identify

ourselves with them that there are few of us who, if asked to choose between having a beautiful body clad in

raiment perpetually shabby and unclean, and having an ugly and blemished form always spotlessly attired,

would not hesitate a moment before making a decisive reply.[1] Next, our immediate family is a part of

ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they

die, a part of our very selves is gone. If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted, our

anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place. Our home comes next. Its scenes are part of our

life; its aspects awaken the tenderest feelings of affection; and we do not easily forgive the stranger who, in

visiting it, finds fault with its arrangements or treats it with contempt. All these different things are the

objects of instinctive preferences coupled with the most important practical interests of life. We all have a

blind impulse to watch over our body, to deck it with clothing of an ornamental sort, to cherish parents, wife

and babes, and to find for ourselves a home of our own which we may live in and 'improve.'

An equally instinctive impulse drives us to collect property; and the collections thus made become, with

different degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves. The parts of our wealth most intimately ours are

those which are saturated with our labor. There are few men who would not feel personally annihilated if a

lifelong construction of their hands or brains say an entomological collection or an extensive work in

manuscript were suddenly swept away. The miser feels similarly towards his gold, and although it is true

that a part of our depression at the loss of possessions is due to our feeling that we must now go without

certain goods that we expected the possessions to bring in their train, yet in every case there remains, over

and above this, a sense of the shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to nothingness,

which is a psychological phenomenon by itself. We are all at once assimilated to the tramps and poor devils

whom we so despise, and at the same time removed farther than ever away from the happy sons of earth who

lord it over land and sea and men in the fullblown lustihood that wealth and power can give, and before

whom, stiffen ourselves as we will by appealing to antisnobbish first principles, we cannot escape an

(b) A man's Social Self is the recognition which he gets from his mates. We are not only gregarious animals,

liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed

favorably, by our kind. No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible,

than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If

no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person

we met 'cut us dead,' and acted as if we were nonexisting things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would

ere long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief; for these would make us

feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an

image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his images is to wound him.[2] But as the individuals

who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social

selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different

side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and

teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his 'tough' young friends. We do not show ourselves to our

children as to our clubcompanions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and

employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a division of the man into

several selves; and this may be a discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances

know him as he is elsewhere; or it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one tender to

The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with. The

good or bad fortunes of this self cause the most intense elation and dejection unreasonable enough as

measured by every other standard than that of the organic feeling of the individual. To his own consciousness

he is not, so long as this particular social self fails to get recognition, and when it is recognized his

A man's fame, good or bad, and his honor or dishonor, are names for one of his social selves. The particular

social self of a man called his honor is usually the result of one of those splittings of which we have spoken.

It is his image in the eyes of his own 'set,' which exalts or con demns him as he conforms or not to certain

requirements that may not be made of one in another walk of life. Thus a layman may abandon a city infected

with cholera; but a priest or a doctor would think such an act incompatible with his honor. A soldier's honor

requires him to fight or to die under circumstances where another man can apologize or run away with no

stain upon his social self. A judge, a statesman, are in like manner debarred by the honor of their cloth from

entering into pecuniary relations perfectly honorable to persons in private life. Nothing is commoner than to

hear people discriminate between their different selves of this sort: "As a man I pity you, but as an official I

must show you no mercy; as a politician I regard him as an ally, but as a moralist I loathe him;" etc., etc.

What may be called 'clubopinion' is one of the very strongest forces in life.[3] The thief must not steal from

other thieves; the gambler must pay his gamblingdebts, though he pay no other debts in the world. The code

of honor of fashionable society has throughout history been full of permissions as well as of vetoes, the only

reason for following either of which is that so we best serve one of our social selves. You must not lie in

general, but you may lie as much as you please if asked about your relations with a lady; you must accept a

challenge from an equal, but if challenged by an inferior you may laugh him to scorn: these are examples of

his psychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely; not the bare principle of personal Unity, or 'pure' Ego,

which remains still to be discussed. These psychic dispositions are the most enduring and intimate part of the

self, that which we most verily seem to be. We take a purer selfsatisfaction when we think of our ability to

argue and discriminate, of our moral sensibility and conscience, of our indomitable will, than when we survey

any of our other possessions. Only when these are altered is a man said to be alienatus a se.

Now this spiritual self may be considered in various ways. We may divide it into faculties, as just instanced,

isolating them one from another, and identifying ourselves with either in turn. This is an abstract way of

dealing with consciousness, in which, as it actually presents itself, a plurality of such faculties are always to

be simultaneously found; or we may insist on a concrete view, and then the spiritual self in us will be either

the entire stream of our personal consciousness, or the present 'segment' or 'section' of that stream, according

as we take a broader or a narrower view both the stream and the section being concrete existences in time,

and each being a unity after its own peculiar kind. But whether we take it abstractly or concretely, our

considering the spiritual self at all is a reflective process, is the result of our abandoning the outwardlooking

point of view, and of our having become able to think of subjectivity as such, to think ourselves as thinkers.

This attention to thought as such, and the identification of ourselves with it rather than with any of the objects

which it reveals, is a momentous and in some respects a rather mysterious operation, of which we need here

only say that as a matter of fact it exists; and that in everyone, at an early age, the distinction between thought

as such, and what it is 'of' or 'about,' has become familiar to the mind. The deeper grounds for this

discrimination may possibly be hard to find; but superficial grounds are plenty and near at hand. Almost

anyone will tell us that thought is a different sort of existence from things, because many sorts of thought are

of no things e.g., pleasures, pains, and emotions; others are of nonexistent things errors and fictions;

others again of existent things, but in a form that is symbolic and does not resemble them abstract ideas and

concepts; whilst in the thoughts that do resemble the things they are 'of' (percepts, sensations), we can feel,

alongside of the thing known, the thought of it going on as an altogether separate act and operation in the

Now this subjective life of ours, distinguished as such so clearly from the objects known by its means, may,

as aforesaid, be taken by us in a concrete or in an abstract way. Of the concrete way I will say nothing just

now, except that the actual 'section' of the stream will ere long, in our discussion of the nature of the principle

of unity in consciousness, play a very important part. The abstract way claims our attention first. If the stream

as a whole is identified with the Self far more than any outward thing, a certain portion of the stream

abstracted from the rest is so identified in an altogether peculiar degree, and is felt by all men as a sort of

innermost centre within the circle, of sanctuary within the citadel, constituted by the subjective life as a

whole. Compared with this element of the stream, the other parts, even of the subjective life, seem transient

external possessions, of which each in turn can be disowned, whilst that which disowns them remains. Now,

Probably all men would describe it in much the same way up to a certain point. They would call it the active

element in all consciousness; saying that whatever qualities a man's feelings may possess, or whatever

content his thought may include, there is a spiritual something in him which seems to go out to meet these

qualities and contents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by it. It is what welcomes or rejects. It

presides over the perception of sensations, and by giving or withholding its assent it influences the

movements they tend to arouse. It is the home of interest, not the pleasant or the painful, not even pleasure

or pain, as such, but that within us to which pleasure and pain, the pleasant and the painful, speak. It is the

source of effort and attention, and the place from which appear to emanate the fiats of the will. A physiologist

who should reflect upon it in his own person could hardly help, I should think, connecting it more or less

vaguely with the process by which ideas or incoming sensations are 'reflected' or pass over into outward acts.

Not necessarily that it should be this process or the mere feeling of this process, but that it should be in some

close way related to this process; for it plays a part analogous to it in the psychic life, being a sort of junction

at which sensory ideas terminate and from which motor ideas proceed, and forming a kind of link between

the two. Being more incessantly there than any other single element of the mental life, the other elements end

by seeming to accrete round it and to belong to it. It becomes opposed to them as the permanent is opposed to

One may, I think, without fear of being upset by any future Galtonian circulars, believe that all men must

single out from the rest of what they call themselves some central principle of which each would recognize

the foregoing to be a fair general description, accurate enough, at any rate, to denote what is meant, and

keep it unconfused with other things. The moment, however, they came to closer quarters with it, trying to

define more accurately its precise nature, we should find opinions beginning to diverge. Some would say that

it is a simple active substance, the soul, of which they are thus conscious; others, that it is nothing but a

fiction, the imaginary being denoted by the pronoun I; and between these extremes of opinion all sorts of

Later we must ourselves discuss them all, and sufficient to that day will be the evil thereof. Now, let us try to

settle for ourselves as definitely as we can, just how this central nucleus of the Self may feel, no matter

For this central part of the Self is felt. It may be all that Transcendentalists say it is, and all that Empiricists

say it is into the bargain, but it is at any rate no mere ens rationis, cognized only in an intellectual way, and no

mere summation of memories or mere sound of a word in our ears. It is something with which we also have

direct sensible acquaintance, and which is as fully present at any moment of consciousness in which it is

present, as in a whole lifetime of such moments. When, just now, it was called an abstraction, that did not

mean that, like some general notion, it could not be presented in a particular experience. It only meant that in

the stream of consciousness it never was found all alone. But when it is found, it is felt; just as the body is

felt, the feeling of which is also an abstraction, because never is the body felt all alone, but always together

with other things. Now can we tell more precisely in what the feeling of this central active self consists, not

necessarily as yet what the active self is, as a being or principle, but what we feel when we become aware of

I think I can in my own case; and as what I say will be likely to meet with opposition if generalized (as

indeed it may be in part inapplicable to other individuals), I had better continue in the first person, leaving my

description to be accepted by those to whose introspection it may commend itself as true, and confessing my

First of all, I am aware of a constant play of furtherances and hindrances in my thinking, of checks and

releases, tendencies which run with desire, and tendencies which run the other way. Among the matters I

think of, some range themselves on the side of the thought's interests, whilst others play an unfriendly part

thereto. The mutual inconsistencies and agreements, reinforcements and obstructions, which obtain amonst

these objective matters reverberate backwards and produce what seem to be incessant reactions of my

spontaneity upon them, welcoming or opposing, appropriating or disowning, striving with or against, saying

yes or no. This palpitating inward life is, in me, that central nucleus which I just tried to describe in terms that

all men might use. But when I forsake such general descriptions and grap ple with particulars, coming to the

closest possible quarters with the facts, it is difficult for me to detect in the activity any purely spiritual

element at all. Whenever my introspective glance succeeds in turning round quickly enough to catch one of

these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever feel distinctly is some bodily process, for the

most part taking place within the head. Omitting for a moment what is obscure in these introspective results,

let me try to state those particulars which to my own consciousness seem indubitable and distinct.

In the first place, the acts of attending, assenting, negating, making an effort, are felt as movements of

something in the head. In many cases it is possible to describe these movements quite exactly. In attending to

either an idea or a sensation belonging to a particular sensesphere, the movement is the adjustment of the

senseorgan, felt as it occurs. I cannot think in visual terms, for example, without feeling a fluctuating play of

pressures, convergences, divergences, and accommodations in my eyeballs. The direction in which the object

is conceived to lie determines the character of these movements, the feeling of which becomes, for my

consciousness, identified with the manner in which I make myself ready to receive the visible thing. My brain

appears to me as if all shot across with lines of direction, of which I have become conscious as my attention

has shifted from one senseorgan to another, in passing to successive outer things, or in following trains of

When I try to remember or reflect, the movements in question, instead of being directed towards the

periphery, seem to come from the periphery inwards and feel like a sort of withdrawal from the outer world.

As far as I can detect, these feelings are due to an actual rolling outwards and upwards of the eyeballs, such

as I believe occurs in me in sleep, and is the exact opposite of their action in fixating a physical thing. In

reasoning, I find that I am apt to have a kind of vaguely localized diagram in my mind, with the various

fractional objects of the thought disposed at particular points thereof; and the oscillations of my attention

from one of them to another are most distinctly felt as alternations of direction in movements occurring inside

In consenting and negating, and in making a mental effort, the movements seem more complex, and I find

them harder to describe. The opening and closing of the glottis play a great part in these operations, and, less

distinctly, the movements of the soft palate, etc., shutting off the posterior nares of the mouth. My glottis is

like a sensitive valve, intercepting my breath instantaneously at every mental hesitation or felt aversion to the

objects of my thought, and as quickly opening, to let the air pass through my throat and nose, the moment the

repugnance is overcome. The feeling of the movement of this air is, in me, one strong ingredient of the

feeling of assent. The movements of the muscles of the brow and eyelids also respond very sensitively to

every fluctuation in the agreeableness or disagreeableness of what comes before my mind.

In effort of any sort, contractions of the jawmuscles and of those of respiration are added to those of the

brow and glottis, and thus the feeling passes out of the head properly so called. It passes out of the head

whenever the welcoming or rejecting of the object is strongly felt. Then a set of feelings pour in from many

bodily parts, all 'expressive' of my emotion, and the headfeelings proper are swallowed up in this larger

In a sense, then, it may be truly said that, in one person at least, the 'Self of selves,' when carefully examined,

is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and

throat. I do not for a moment say that this is all it consists of, for I fully realize how desperately hard is

introspection in this field. But I feel quite sure that these cephalic motions are the portions of my innermost

activity of which I am most distinctly aware. If the dim portions which I cannot yet define should prove to be

like unto these distinct portions in me, and I like other men, it would follow that our entire feeling of spiritual

activity, or what commonly passes by that name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature is

Now, without pledging ourselves in any way to adopt this hypothesis, let us dally with it for a while to see to

In the first place, the nuclear part of the Self, intermediary between ideas and overt acts, would be a

collection of activities physiologically in no essential way different from the overt acts themselves. If we

divide all possible physiological acts into adjustments and executions, the nuclear self would be the

adjustments collectively considered; and the less intimate, more shifting self, so far as it was active, would be

the executions. But both adjustments and executions would obey the reflex type. Both would be the result of

sensorial and ideational processes discharging either into each other within the brain, or into muscles and

other parts outside. The peculiarity of the adjustments would be that they are minimal reflexes, few in

number, incessantly repeated, constant amid great fluctuations in the rest of the mind's content, and entirely

unimportant and uninteresting except through their uses in furthering or inhibiting the presence of various

things, and actions before consciousness. These characters would naturally keep us from introspectively

paying much attention to them in detail, whilst they would at the same time make us aware of them as a

coherent group of processes, strongly contrasted with all the other things consciousness contained, even

with the other constituents of the 'Self,' material, social, or spiritual, as the case might be. They are reactions,

and they are primary reactions. Everything arouses them; for objects which have no other effects will for a

moment contract the brow and make the glottis close. It is as if all that visited the mind had to stand an

entranceexamination, and just show its face so as to be either approved or sent back. These primary

reactions are like the opening or the closing of the door. In the midst of psychic change they are the

permanent core of turningstowards and truningsfrom, of yieldings and arrests, which naturally seem

central and interior in comparison with the foreign matters, apropos to which they occur, and hold a sort of

arbitrating, decisive position, quite unlike that held by any of the other constituents of the Me. It would not be

surprising, then, if we were to feel them as the birthplace of conclusions and the starting point of acts, or if

they came to appear as what we called a while back the 'sanctuary within the citadel' of our personal life.[5]

If they really were the innermost sanctuary, the ultimate one of all the selves whose being we can ever

directly experience, it would follow that all that is experienced is, strictly considered, objective; that this

Objective falls asunder into two contrasted parts, one realized as 'Self,' the other as 'notSelf;' and that over

and above these parts there is nothing save the fact that they are known, the fact of the stream of thought

being there as the indispensable subjective condition of their being experienced at all. But this condition of

the experience is not one of the things experienced at the moment; this knowing is not immediately known. It

is only known in subsequent reflection. Instead, then, of the stream of thought being one of consciousness,

"thinking its own existence along with whatever else it thinks," (as Ferrier says) it might be better called a

stream of Sciousness pure and simple, thinking objects of some of which it makes what it calls a 'Me,' and

only aware of its 'pure' Self in an abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way. Each 'section' of the stream would

then be a bit of sciousness or knowledge of this sort, including and contemplating its 'me' and its 'notme' as

objects which work out their drama together, but not yet including or contemplating its own subjective being.

The sciousness in question would be the Thinker, and the existence of this thinker would be given to us rather

as a logical postulate than as that direct inner perception of spiritual activity which we naturally believe

ourselves to have. 'Matter,' as something behind physical phenomena, is a postulate of this sort. Between the

postulated Matter and the postulated Thinker, the sheet of phenomena would then swing, some of them (the

'realities') pertaining more to the matter, others (the fictions, opinions, and errors) pertaining more to the

Thinker. But who the Thinker would be, or how many distinct Thinkers we ought to suppose in the universe,

Speculations like this traverse commonsense; and not only do they traverse common sense (which in

philosophy is no insuperable objection) but they contradict the fundamental assumption of every philosophic

school. Spiritualists, transcendentalists, and empiricists alike admit in us a continual direct perception of the

thinking activity in the concrete. However they may otherwise disagree, they vie with each other in the

cordiality of their recognition of our thoughts as the one sort of existent which skepticism cannot touch.[6] I

will therefore treat the last few pages as a parenthetical digression, and from now to the end of the volume

revert to the path of commonsense again. I mean by this that I will continue to assume (as I have assumed

all along, especially in the last chapter) a direct awareness of the process of our thinking as such, simply

insisting on the fact that it is an even more inward and subtle phenomenon than most of us suppose. At the

conclusion of the volume, however, I may permit myself to revert again to the doubts here provisionally

At present, then, the only conclusion I come to is the following: That (in some persons at least) the part of the

innermost Self which is most vividly felt turns out to consist for the most part of a collection of cephalic

movements of 'adjustments' which, for want of attention and reflection, usually fail to be perceived and

classed as what they are; that over and above these there is an obscurer feeling of something more; but

whether it be of fainter physiological processes, or of nothing objective at all, but rather of subjectivity as

such, of thought become 'its own object,' must at present remain an open question, like the question

whether it be an indivisible active soulsubstance, or the question whether it be a personification of the

Farther than this we cannot as yet go clearly in our analysis of the Self's constituents. So let us proceed to the

2. SelfFeeling. These are primarily selfcomplacency and selfdissatisfaction. Of what is called 'selflove,'

I will treat a little farther on. Language has synonyms enough for both primary feelings. Thus pride, conceit,

vanity, selfesteem, arrogance, vainglory, on the one hand; and on the other modesty, humility, confusion,

diffidence, shame, mortification, contrition, the sense of obloquy and personal despair. These two opposite

classes of affection seem to be direct and elementary endowments of our nature. Associationists would have

it that they are, on the other hand, secondary phenomena arising from a rapid computation of the sensible

pleasures or pains to which our prosperous or debased personal predicament is likely to lead, the sum of the

represented pleasures forming the selfsatisfaction, and the sum of the represented pains forming the

opposite feeling of shame. No doubt, when we are selfsatisfied, we do fondly rehearse all possible rewards

for our desert, and when in a fit of selfdespair we forebode evil. But the mere expectation of reward is not

the selfsatisfaction, and the mere apprehension of the evil is not the selfdespair, for there is a certain

average tone of selffeeling which each one of us carries about with him, and which is independent of the

objective reasons we may have for satisfaction or discontent. That is, a very meanlyconditioned man may

abound in unfaltering conceit, and one whose success in life is secure and who is esteemed by all may remain

One may say, however, that the normal provocative of selffeeling is one's actual success or failure, and the

good or bad actual position one holds in the world. "He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, and said what

a good boy am I." A man with a broadly extended empirical Ego, with powers that have uniformly brought

him success, with place and wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to be visited by the morbid diffidences

and doubts about himself which he had when he was a boy. "Is not this great Babylon, which I have

planted?"[7] Whereas he who has made one blunder after another, and still lies in middle life among the

failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow all sicklied o'er with selfdistrust, and to shrink from trials

The emotions themselves of selfsatisfaction and abasement are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be

classed as a primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or pain. Each has its own peculiar

physiognomical expression. In selfsatisfaction the extensor muscles are innervated, the eye is strong and

glorious, the gait rolling and elastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon the lips. This whole

complex of symptoms is seen in an exquisite way in lunatic asylums, which always contain some patients

who are literally mad with conceit, and whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or swaggering gait is

in tragic contrast with their lack of any valuable personal quality. It is in these same castles of despair that we

find the strongest examples of the opposite physiognomy, in good people who think they have committed 'the

unpardonable sin' and are lost forever, who crouch and cringe and slink from noticean, d [sic] are unable to

speak aloud or look us in the eye. Like fear and like anger, in similar morbid conditions, these opposite

feelings of Self may be aroused with no adequate exciting cause. And in fact we ourselves know how the

barometer of our selfesteem and confidence rises and falls from one day to another through causes that seem

to be visceral and organic rather than rational, and which certainly answer to no corresponding variations in

the esteem in which we are held by our friends. Of the origin of these emotions in the race, we can speak

3. SelfSeeking and SelfPreservation. These words cover a large number of our fundamental instinctive

impulses. We have those of bodily selfseeking, those of social selfseeking, and those of spiritual

All the ordinary useful reflex actions and movements of alimentation and defence are acts of bodily

selfpreservation. Fear and anger prompt to acts that are useful in the same way. Whilst if by selfseeking we

mean the providing for the future as distinguished from maintaining the present, we must class both anger

and fear with the hunting, the acquisitive, the homeconstructing and the toolconstructing instincts, as

impulses to selfseeking of the bodily kind. Really, however, these latter instincts, with amativeness, parental

fondness, curiosity and emulation, seek not only the development of the bodily Self, but that of the material

Our social selfseeking, in turn, is carried on directly through our amativeness and friendliness, our desire to

please and attract notice and admiration, our emulation and jealousy, our love of glory, influence, and power,

and indirectly through whichever of the material selfseeking impulses prove serviceable as means to social

ends. That the direct social selfseeking impulses are probably pure instincts is easily seen. The noteworthy

thing about the desire to be 'recognized' by others is that its strength has so little to do with the worth of the

recognition computed in sensational or rational terms. We are crazy to get a visitinglist which shall be large,

to be able to say when any one is mentioned, "Oh! I know him well," and to be bowed to in the street by half

the people we meet. Of course distinguished friends and admiring recognition are the most desirable

Thackeray somewhere asks his readers to confess whether it would not give each of them an exquisite

pleasure to be met walking down Pall Mall with a duke on either arm. But in default of dukes and envious

salutations almost anything will do for some of us; and there is a whole race of beings today whose passion

is to keep their names in the newspapers, no matter under what heading, 'arrivals and departures,' 'personal

paragraphs,' 'interviews,' gossip, even scandal, will suit them if nothing better is to be had. Guiteau,

Garfield's assassin, is an example of the extremity to which this sort of craving for the notoriety of print may

go in a pathological case. The newspapers bounded his mental horizon; and in the poor wretch's prayer on the

scaffold, one of the most heartfelt expressions was: "The newspaper press of this land has a big bill to settle

Not only the people but the places and things I know enlarge my Self in a sort of metaphoric social way. '�a

me conna�t,' as the French workman says of the implement he can use well. So that is comes about that

persons for whose opinion we care nothing are nevertheless persons whose notice we woo; and that many a

man truly great, many a woman truly fastidious in most respects, will take a deal of trouble to dazzle some

Under the head of spiritual selfseeking ought to be included every impulse towards psychic progress,

whether intellectual, moral, or spiritual in the narrow sense of the term. It must be admitted, however, that

much that commonly passes for spiritual selfseeking in this narrow sense is only material and social

selfseeking beyond the grave. In the Mohammedan desire for paradise and the Christian aspiration not to be

damned in hell, the materiality of the goods sought is undisguised. In the more positive and refined view of

heaven many of its goods, the fellowship of the saints and of our dead ones, and the presence of God, are but

social goods of the most exalted kind. It is only the search of the redeemed inward nature, the spotlessness

from sin, whether here or hereafter, that can count as spiritual selfseeking pure and undefiled.

But this broad external review of the facts of the life of the Self will be incomplete without some account of

Rivalry and Conflict of the Different Selves. With most objects of desire, physical nature restricts our choice

to but one of many represented goods, and even so it is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of

standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both

handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bonvivant, and

a ladykiller, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a

'tonepoet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the

saint's; the bonvivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the ladykiller

could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the

outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be

suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the

one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are

real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is

as strong an example as there is of that selective industry of the mind on which I insisted some pages back (p.

284 ff.). Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities,

here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of

I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more

psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there

give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I 'pretensions' to be a linguist, it would have been just the

reverse. So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the

second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing;

he has 'pitted' himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn't do that nothing else counts. He is to his own

Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat, suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago

abandoned the attempt to 'carry that line,' as the merchants say, of self at all. With no attempt there can be no

failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our selffeeling in this world depends entirely on what we back

ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities; a fraction

of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success: thus, Selfesteem = Success /

Pretensions. Such a fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the

numerator.[8] To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified; and where disappointment

is incessant and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do. The history of evangelical theology,

with its conviction of sin, its selfdespair, and its abandonment of salvation by works, is the deepest of

possible examples, but we meet others in every walk of life. There is the strangest lightness about the heart

when one's nothingness in a particular line is once accepted in good faith. All is not bitterness in the lot of the

lover sent away by the final inexorable 'No.' Many Bostonians, crede experto (and inhabitants of other cities,

too, I fear), would be happier women and men today, if they could once for all abandon the notion of

keeping up a Musical Self, and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance. How

pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young, or slender! Thank God! we say, those illusions

are gone. Everything added to the Self is a burden as well as a pride. A certain man who lost every penny

during our civil war went and actually rolled in the dust, saying he had not felt so free and happy since he was

Once more, then, our selffeeling is in our power. As Carlyle says: "Make thy claim of wages a zero, then

hast thou the world under thy feet. Well did the wisest of our time write, it is only with renunciation that life,

Neither threats nor pleadings can move a man unless they touch some one of his potential or actual selves.

Only thus can we, as a rule, get a 'purchase' on another's will. The first care of diplomatists and monarchs and

all who wish to rule or influence is, accordingly, to find out their victim's strongest principle of selfregard,

so as to make that the fulcrum of all appeals. But if a man has given up those things which are subject to

foreign fate, and ceased to regard them as parts of himself at all, we are wellnigh powerless over him. The

Stoic receipt for contentment was to dispossess yourself in advance of all that was out of your own power,

then fortune's shocks might rain down unfelt. Epictetus exhorts us, by thus narrowing and at the same time

solidifying our Self to make it invulnerable: "I must die; well, but must I die groaning too? I will speak what

appears to be right, and if the despot says, then I will put you to death, I will reply, 'When did I ever tell you

that I was immortal? You will do your part and I mine; it is yours to kill and mine to die intrepid; yours to

banish, mine to depart untroubled.' How do we act in a voyage? We choose the pilot, the sailors, the hour.

Afterwards comes a storm. What have I to care for? My part is performed. This matter belongs to the pilot.

But the ship is sinking; what then have I to do? That which alone I can do submit to being drowned without

fear, without clamor or accusing of God, but as one who knows that what is born must likewise die."[9]

This Stoic fashion, though efficacious and heroic enough in its place and time, is, it must be confessed, only

possible as an habitual mood of the soul to narrow and unsympathetic characters. It proceeds altogether by

exclusion. If I am a Stoic, the goods I cannot appropriate cease to be my goods, and the temptation lies very

near to deny that they are goods at all. We find this mode of protecting the Self by exclusion and denial very

common among people who are in other respects not Stoics. All narrow people intrench their Me, they retract

it, from the region of what they cannot securely possess. People who don't resemble them, or who treat

them with indifference, people over whom they gain no influence, are people on whose existence, however

meritorious it may intrinsically be, they look with chill negation, if not with positive hate. Who will not be

mine I will exclude from existence altogether; that is, as far as I can make it so, such people shall be as if they

were not.[10] Thus may a certain absoluteness and definiteness in the outline of my Me console me for the

Sympathetic people, on the contrary, proceed by the entirely opposite way of expansion and inclusion. The

outline of their self often gets uncertain enough, but for this the spread of its content more than atones. Nil

humani a me alienum. Let them despise this little person of mine, and treat me like a dog, I shall not negate

them so long as I have a soul in my body. They are realities as much as I am. What positive good is in them

shall be mine too, etc., etc. The magnanimity of these expansive natures is often touching indeed. Such

persons can feel a sort of delicate rapture in thinking that, however sick, illfavored, meanconditioned, and

generally forsaken they may be, they yet are integral parts of the whole of this brave world, have a fellow's

share in the strength of the drayhorses, the happiness of the young people, the wisdom of the wise ones, and

are not altogether without part or lot in the good fortunes of the Vanderbilts and the Hohenzollerns

themselves. Thus either by negating or by embracing, the Ego may seek to establish itself in reality. He who,

with Marcus Aurelius, can truly say, "O Universe, I wish all that thou wishest," has a self from which every

trace of negativeness and obstructiveness has been removed no wind can blow except to fill its sails.

A tolerably unanimous opinion ranges the different selves of which a man may be 'seized and possessed,' and

the consequent different orders of his selfregard, in an hierarchical scale, with the bodily Self at the bottom,

the spiritual Self at the top, and the extracorporeal material selves and the various social selves between. Our

merely natural selfseeking would lead us to aggrandize all these selves; we give up deliberately only those

among them which we find we cannot keep. Our unselfishness is thus apt to be a 'virtue of necessity'; and it is

not without all show of reason that cynics quote the fable of the fox and the grapes in describing our progress

therein. But this is the moral education of the race; and if we agree in the result that on the whole the selves

we can keep are the intrinsically best, we need not complain of being led to the knowledge of their superior

Of course this is not the only way in which we learn to subordinate our lower selves to our higher. A direct

ethical judgment unquestionably also plays its part, and last, not least, we apply to our own persons

judgments originally called forth by the acts of others. It is one of the strangest laws of our nature that many

things which we are well satisfied with in ourselves disgust us when seen in others. With another man's

bodily 'hoggishness' hardly anyone has any sympathy; almost as little with his cupidity, his social vanity

and eagerness, his jealousy, his despotism, and his pride. Left absolutely to myself I should probably allow

all these spontaneous tendencies to luxuriate in me unchecked, and it would be long before I formed a distinct

notion of the order of their subordination. But having constantly to pass judgment on my associates, I come

ere long to see, as Herr Horwicz says, my own lusts in the mirror of the lusts of others, and to think about

them in a very different way from that in which I simply feel. Of course, the moral generalities which from

childhood have been instilled into me accelerate enormously the advent of this reflective judgment on myself.

So it comes to pass that, as aforesaid, men have arranged the various selves which they may seek in an

hierarchical scale according to their worth. A certain amount of bodily selfishness is required as a basis for all

the other selves. But too much sensuality is despised, or at best condoned on account of the other qualities of

the individual. The wider material selves are regarded as higher than the immediate body. He is esteemed a

poor creature who is unable to forego a little meat and drink and warmth and sleep for the sake of getting on

in the world. The social self as a whole, again, ranks higher than the material self as a whole. We must care

more for our honor, our friends, our human ties, than for a sound skin or wealth. And the spiritual self is so

supremely precious that, rather than lose it, a man ought to be willing to give up friends and good fame, and

In each kind of self, material, social, and spiritual, men distinguish between the immediate and actual, and the

remote and potential, between the narrower and the wider view, to the detriment of the former and advantage

of the latter. One must forego a present bodily enjoyment for the sake of one's general health; one must

abandon the dollar in the hand for the sake of the hundred dollars to come; one must make an enemy of his

present interlocutor if thereby one makes friends of a more valued circle; one must go without learning and

Of all these wider, more potential selves, the potential social self is the most interesting, by reason of certain

apparent paradoxes to which it leads in conduct, and by reason of its connection with our moral and religious

life. When for motives of honor and conscience I brave the condemnation of my own family, club, and 'set';

when, as a protestant, I turn catholic; as a catholic, freethinker; as a 'regular practitioner,' homoeopath, or

what not, I am always inwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against the loss of my actual social self

by the thought of other and better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes against me now. The

ideal social self which I thus seek in appealing to their decision may be very remote: it may be represented as

barely possible. I may not hope for its realization during my lifetime; I may even expect the future

generations, which would approve me if they knew me, to know nothing about me when I am dead and gone.

Yet still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at

least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion, if such companion there

be.[11] This self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent Me which I seek. This judge is God, the

Absolute Mind, the 'Great Companion.' We hear, in these days of scientific enlightenment, a great deal of

discussion about the efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are given us why we should not pray, whilst others

are given us why we should. But in all this very little is said of the reason why we do pray, which is simply

that we cannot help praying. It seems probable that, in spite of all that 'science' may do to the contrary, men

will continue to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner which nothing we

know should lead us to expect. The impulse to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst the

innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius

All progress in the social Self is the substitution of higher tribunals for lower; this ideal tribunal is the

highest; and most men, either continually or occasionally, carry a reference to it in their breast. The humblest

outcast on this earth can feel himself to be real and valid by means of this higher recognition. And, on the

other hand, for most of us, a world with no such inner refuge when the outer social self failed and dropped

from us would be the abyss of horror. I say 'for most of us,' because it is probable that individuals differ a

good deal in the degree in which they are haunted by this sense of an ideal spectator. It is a much more

essential part of the consciousness of some men that of others. Those who have the most of it are possibly the

most religious men. But I am sure that even those who say they are altogether without it deceive themselves,

and really have it in some degree. Only a nongregarious animal could be completely without it. Probably no

one can make sacrifices for 'right,' without to some degree personifying the principle of right for which the

sacrifice is made, and expecting thanks from it. Complete social unselfishness, in other words, can hardly

exist; complete social suicide hardly occur to a man's mind. Even such texts as Job's, "Though He slay me yet

will I trust Him," or Marcus Aurelius's, "If gods hate me and my children, there is a reason for it," can least of

all be cited to prove the contrary. For beyond all doubt Job revelled in the thought of Jehovah's recognition of

the worship after the slaying should have been done; and the Roman emperor felt sure the Absolute Reason

would not be all indifferent to his acquiescence in the gods' dislike. The old test of piety, "Are you willing to

be damned for the glory of God?" was probably never answered in the affirmative except by those who felt

sure in their heart of hearts that God would 'credit' them with their willingness, and set more store by them

All this about the impossibility of suicide is said on the supposition of positive motives. When possessed by

the emotion of fear, however, we are in a negative state of mind; that is, our desire is limited to the mere

banishing of something, without regard to what shall take its place. In this state of mind there can

unquestionably be genuine thoughts, and genuine acts, of suicide, spiritual and social, as well as bodily.

Anything, anything, at such times, so as to escape and not to be! But such conditions of suicidal frenzy are

pathological in their nature and run dead against everything that is regular in the life of the Self in man.

What Self is Loved in 'SelfLove'? We must now try to interpret the facts of selflove and selfseeking a

A man in whom selfseeking of any sort is largely developed is said to be selfish.[12] He is on the other hand

called unselfish if he shows consideration for the interest of other selves than his own. Now what is the

intimate nature of the selfish emotion in him? and what is the primary object of its regard? We have described

him pursuing and fostering as his self first one set of things and then another: we have seen the same set of

facts gain or lose interest in his eyes, leave him indifferent, or fill him either with triumph or despair

according as he made pretensions to appropriate them, treated them as if they were potentially or actually

parts of himself, or not. We know how little it matters to us whether some man, a man taken at large and in

the abstract, prove a failure or succeed in life, he may be hanged for aught we care, but we know the utter

momentousness and terribleness of the alternative when the man is the one whose name we ourselves bear. I

must not be a failure, is the very loudest of the voices that clamor in each of our breasts: let fail who may, I at

least must succeed. Now the first conclusion which these facts suggest is that each of us is animated by a

direct feeling of regard for his own pure principle of individual existence, whatever that may be, taken merely

as such. It appears as if all our concrete manifestations of selfishness might be the conclusions of as many

syllogisms, each with this principle as the subject of its major premiss, thus: Whatever is me is precious; this

is me; therefore this is precious; whatever is mine must not fail; this is mine; therefore this must not fail, etc.

It appears, I say, as if this principle inoculated all it touched with its own intimate quality of worth; as if,

previous to the touching, everything might be matter of indifference, and nothing interesting in its own right;

as if my regard for my own body even were an interest not simply in this body, but in this body only so far as

But what is this abstract numerical principle of identity, this 'Number One' within me, for which, according to

proverbial philosophy, I am supposed to keep so constant a 'lookout'? Is it the inner nucleus of my spiritual

self, that collection of obscurely felt 'adjustments,' plus perhaps that still more obscurely perceived

subjectivity as such, of which we recently spoke? Or is it perhaps the concrete stream of my thought in its

entirety, or some one section of the same? Or may it be the indivisible SoulSubstance, in which, according

to the orthodox tradition, my faculties inhere? Or, finally, can it be the mere pronoun I? Surely it is none of

these things, that self for which I feel such hot regard. Though all of them together were put within me, I

should still be cold, and fail to exhibit anything worthy of the name of selfishness or of devotion to 'Number

One.' To have a self that I can care for, nature must first present me with some object interesting enough to

make me instinctively wish to appropriate it for its own sake, and out of it to manufacture one of those

material, social, or spiritual selves, which we have already passed in review. We shall find that all the facts of

rivalry and substitution that have so struck us, all the shiftings and expansions and contractions of the sphere

of what shall be considered me and mine, are but results of the fact that certain things appeal to primitive and

instinctive impulses of our nature, and that we follow their destinies with an excitement that owes nothing to

a reflective source. These objects our consciousness treats as the primordial constituents of its Me. Whatever

other objects, whether by association with the fate of these, or in any other way, come to be followed with the

same sort of interest, form our remoter and more secondary self. The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as

they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE designations, meaning ALL THE

THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort.

The most palpable selfishness of a man is his bodily selfishness; and his most palpable self is the body to

which that selfishness relates. Now I say that he identifies himself with this body because he loves it, and that

he does not love it because he finds it to be identified with himself. Reverting to natural historypsychology

will help us to see the truth of this. In the chapter on Instincts we shall learn that every creature has a certain

selective interest in certain portions of the world, and that this interest is as often connate as acquired. Our

interest in things means the attention and emotion which the thought of them will excite, and the actions

which their presence will evoke. Thus every species is particularly interested in its own prey or food, its own

enemies, its own sexual mates, and its own young. These things fascinate by their intrinsic power to do so;

Well, it stands not in the least otherwise with our bodies. They too are percepts in our objective field they

are simply the most interesting percepts there. What happens to them excites in us emotions and tendencies to

action more energetic and habitual than any which are excited by other portions of the 'field.' What my

comrades call my bodily selfishness or selflove, is nothing but the sum of all the outer acts which this

interest in my body spontaneously draws from me. My 'selfishness' is here but a descriptive name for

grouping together the outward symptoms which I show. When I am led by selflove to keep my seat whilst

ladies stand, or to grab something first and cut out my neighbor, what I really love is the comfortable seat, is

the thing itself which I grab. I love them primarily, as the mother loves her babe, or a generous man an heroic

deed. Wherever, as here, selfseeking is the outcome of simple instinctive propensity, it is but a name for

certain reflex acts. Something rivets my attention fatally, and fatally provokes the 'selfish' response. Could an

automaton be so skilfully constructed as to ape these acts, it would be called selfish as properly as I. It is true

that I am no automaton, but a thinker. But my thoughts, like my acts, are here concerned only with the

outward things. They need neither know nor care for any pure principle within. In fact the more utterly

'selfish' I am in this primitive way, the more blindly absorbed my thought will be in the objects and impulses

of my lusts, and the more devoid of any inward looking glance. A baby, whose con sciousness of the pure

Ego, of himself as a thinker, is not usually supposed developed, is, in this way, as some German has said, 'der

vollendeteste Egoist.' His corporeal person, and what ministers to its needs, are the only self he can possibly

be said to love. His socalled selflove is but a name for his insensibility to all but this one set of things. It

may be that he needs a pure principle of subjectivity, a soul or pure Ego (he certainly needs a stream of

thought) to make him sensible at all to anything, to make him discriminate and love uberhaupt, how that

may be, we shall see ere long; but this pure Ego, which would then be the condition of his loving, need no

more be the object of his love than it need be the object of his thought. If his interests were altruistic and all

his acts suicidal, still he would need a principle of consciousness just as he does now. Such a principle cannot

then be the principle of his bodily selfishness any more than it is the principle of any other tendency he may

So much for the bodily selflove. But my social selflove, my interest in the images other men have framed

of me, is also an interest in a set of objects external to my thought. These thoughts in other men's minds are

out of my mind and 'ejective' to me. They come and go, and grow and dwindle, and I am puffed up with

pride, or blush with shame, at the result, just as at my success or failure in the pursuit of a material thing. So

that here again, just as in the former case, the pure principle seems out of the game as an object of regard, and

present only as the general form or condition under which the regard and the thinking go on in me at all.

But, it will immediately be objected, this is giving a mutilated account of the facts. Those images of me in the

minds of other men are, it is true, things outside of me, whose changes I perceive just as I perceive any other

outward change. But the pride and shame which I feel are not concerned merely with those changes. I feel as

if something else had changed too, when I perceived my image in your mind to have changed for the worse,

something in me to which that image belongs, and which a moment ago I felt inside of me, big and strong

and lusty, but now weak, contracted, and collapsed. Is not this latter change the change I feel the shame

about? Is not the condition of this thing inside of me the proper object of my egoistic concern, of my

selfregard? And is it not, after all, my pure Ego, my bare numerical principle of distinction from other men,

No, it is no such pure principle, it is simply my total empirical selfhood again, my historic Me, a collection of

objective facts, to which the depreciated image in your mind 'belongs.' In what capacity is it that I claim and

demand a respectful greeting from you instead of this expression of disdain? It is not as being a bare I that I

claim it; it is as being an I who has always been treated with respect, who belongs to a certain family and 'set,'

who has certain powers, possessions, and public functions, sensibilities, duties, and purposes, and merits and

deserts. All this is what your disdain negates and contradicts; this is 'the thing inside of me' whose changed

treatment I feel the shame about; this is what was lusty, and now, in consequence of your conduct, is

collapsed; and this certainly is an empirical objective thing. Indeed, the thing that is felt modified and

changed for the worse during my feeling of shame is often more concrete even than this, it is simply my

bodily person, in which your conduct immediately and without any reflection at all on my part works those

muscular, glandular, and vascular changes which together make up the 'expression' of shame. In this

instinctive, reflex sort of shame, the body is just as much the entire vehicle of the selffeeling as, in the

coarser cases which we first took up, it was the vehicle of the selfseeking. As, in simple 'hoggishness,' a

succulent morsel gives rise, by the reflex mechanism, to behavior which the bystanders find 'greedy,' and

consider to flow from a certain sort of 'selfregard;' so here your disdain gives rise, by a mechanism quite as

reflex and immediate, to another sort of behavior, which the bystanders call 'shamefaced' and which they

consider due to another kind of selfregard. But in both cases there may be no particular self regarded at all

by the mind; and the name selfregard may be only a descriptive title imposed from without the reflex acts

After the bodily and social selves come the spiritual. But which of my spiritual selves do I really care for? My

Soulsubstance? my 'transcendental Ego, or Thinker'? my pronoun I? my subjectivity as such? my nucleus of

cephalic adjustments? or my more phenomenal and perishable powers, my loves and hates, willingnesses and

sensibilities, and the like? Surely the latter. But they, relatively to the central principle, whatever it may be,

are external and objective. They come and go, and it remains "so shakes the magnet, and so stands the

pole." It may indeed have to be there for them to be loved, but being there is not identical with being loved

To sum up, then, we see no reason to suppose that selflove' is primarily, or secondarily, or ever, love for

one's mere principle of conscious identity. It is always love for something which, as compared with that

And zoological psychology again comes to the aid of our understanding and shows us that this must needs be

so. In fact, in answering the question what things it is that a man loves in his selflove, we have implicitly

Unless his consciousness were something more than cognitive, unless it experienced a partiality for certain of

the objects, which, in succession, occupy its ken, it could not long maintain itself in existence; for, by an

inscrutable necessity, each human mind's appearance on this earth is conditioned upon the integrity of the

body with which it belongs, upon the treatment which that body gets from others, and upon the spiritual

dispositions which use it as their tool, and lead it either towards longevity or to destruction. Its own body,

then, first of all, its friends next, and finally its spiritual dispositions, MUST be the supremely interesting

OBJECTS for each human mind. Each mind, to begin with, must have a certain minimum of selfishness in

the shape of instincts of bodily selfseeking in order to exist. This minimum must be there as a basis for all

farther conscious acts, whether of selfnegation or of a selfishness more subtle still. All minds must have

come, by the way of survival of the fittest, if by no director path, to take an intense interest in the bodies to

which they are yoked, altogether apart from any interest in the pure Ego which they also possess.

And similarly with the images of their person in the minds of others. I should not be extant now had I not

become sensitive to looks of approval or disapproval on the faces among which my life is cast. Looks of

contempt cast on other persons need affect me in no such peculiar way. Were my mental life dependent

exclusively on some other person's welfare, either directly or in an indirect way, then natural selection would

unquestionably have brought it about that I should be as sensitive to the social vicissitudes of that other

person as I now am to my own. Instead of being egoistic I should be spontaneously altruistic, then. But in this

case, only partially realized in actual human conditions, though the self I empirically love would have

My spiritual powers, again, must interest me more than those of other people, and for the same reason. I

should not be here at all unless I had cultivated them and kept them from decay. And the same law which

My own body and what ministers to its needs are thus the primitive object, instinctively determined, of my

egoistic interests. Other objects may become interesting derivatively through association with any of these

things, either as means or as habitual concomitants; and so in a thousand ways the primitive sphere of the

This sort of interest is really the meaning of the word 'my.' Whatever has it is eo ipso a part of me. My child,

my friend dies, and where he goes I feel that part of myself now is and evermore shall be:

"For this losing is true dying; This is lordly man's downlying; This his slow but sure reclining, Star by star

his world resigning." The fact remains, however, that certain special sorts of thing tend primordially to

possess this interest, and form the natural me. But all these things are objects, properly so called, to the

subject which does the thinking.[13] And this latter fact upsets at once the dictum of the oldfashioned

sensationalist psychology, that altruistic passions and interests are contradictory to the nature of things, and

that if they appear anywhere to exist, it must be as secondary products, resolvable at bottom into cases of

selfishness, taught by experience a hypocritical disguise. If the zoological and evolutionary point of view is

the true one, there is no reason why any object whatever might not arouse passion and interest as primitively

and instinctively as any other, whether connected or not with the interests of the me. The phenomenon of

passion is in origin and essence the same, whatever be the target upon which it is discharged; and what the

target actually happens to be is solely a question of fact. I might conceivably be as much fascinated, and as

primitively so, by the care of my neighbor's body as by the care of my own. The only check to such exuberant

altruistic interests is natural selection, which would weed out such as were very harmful to the individual or

to his tribe. Many such interests, however, remain unweeded out the interest in the opposite sex, for

example, which seems in mankind stronger than is called for by its utilitarian need; and alongside of them

remain interests, like that in alcoholic intoxication, or in musical sounds, which, for aught we can see, are

without any utility whatever. The sympathetic instincts and the egoistic ones are thus coordinate. They arise,

so far as we can tell, on the same psychologic level. The only difference between them is, that the instincts

The only author whom I know to have discussed the question whether the 'pure Ego,' per se, can be an object

of regard, is Herr Horwicz, in his extremely able and acute Psychologische Analysen. He too says that all

selfregard is regard for certain objective things. He disposes so well of one kind of objection that I must

"The fact is indubitable that one's own children always pass for the prettiest and brightest, the wine from

one's own cellar for the best at least for its price, one's own house and horses for the finest. With what

tender admiration do we con over our own little deed of benevolence! our own frailties and misdemeanors,

how ready we are to acquit ourselves for them, when we notice them at all, on the ground of 'extenuating

circumstances'! How much more really comic are our own jokes than those of others, which, unlike ours, will

not bear being repeated ten or twelve times over! How eloquent, striking, powerful, our own speeches are!

How appropriate our own address! In short, how much more intelligent, soulful, better, is everything about us

than in anyone else. The sad chapter of artists' and authors' conceit and vanity belongs here.

"The prevalence of this obvious preference which we feel for everything of our own is indeed striking. Does

it not look as if our dear Ego must first lend its color and flavor to anything in order to make it please us?... Is

it not the simplest explanation for all these phenomena, so consistent among themselves, to suppose that the

Ego, the self, which forms the origin and centre of our thinking life, is at the same time the original and

central object of our life of feeling, and the ground both of whatever special ideas and of whatever special

Herr Horwicz goes on to refer to what we have already noticed, that various things which disgust us in others

"To most of us even the bodily warmth of another, for example the chair warm from another's sitting, is felt

unpleasantly, whereas there is nothing disagreeable in the warmth of the chair in which we have been sitting

After some further remarks, he replies to these facts and reasonings as follows:

"We may with confidence affirm that our own possessions in most cases please us better [not because they

are ours], but simply because we know them better, 'realize' them more intimately, feel them more deeply.

We learn to appreciate what is ours in all its details and shadings, whilst the goods of others appear to us in

coarse outlines and rude averages. Here are some examples: A piece of music which one plays one's self is

heard and understood better than when it is played by another. We get more exactly all the details, penetrate

more deeply into the musical thought. We may meanwhile perceive perfectly well that the other person is the

better performer, and yet nevertheless at times get more enjoyment from our own playing because it brings

the melody and harmony so much nearer home to us. This case may almost be taken as typical for the other

cases of selflove. On close examination, we shall almost always find that a great part of our feeling about

what is ours is due to the fact that we live closer to our own things, and so feel them more thoroughly and

deeply. As a friend of mine was about to marry, he often bored me by the repeated and minute way in which

he would discuss the details of his new household arrangements. I wondered that so intellectual a man should

be so deeply interested in things of so external a nature. But as I entered, a few years later, the same condition

myself, these matters acquired for me an entirely different interest, and it became my turn to turn them over

and talk of them unceasingly.... The reason was simply this, that in the first instance I understood nothing of

these things and their importance for domestic comfort, whilst in the latter case they came home to me with

irresistible urgency, and vividly took possession of my fancy. So it is with many a one who mocks at

decorations and titles, until he gains one himself. And this is also surely the reason why one's own portrait or

reflection in the mirror is so peculiarly interesting a thing to contemplate... not on account of any absolute

'c'est moi,' but just as with the music played by ourselves. What greets our eyes is what we know best, most

deeply understand; because we ourselves have felt it and lived through it. We know what has ploughed these

furrows, deepened these shadows, blanched this hair; and other faces may be handsomer, but none can speak

Moreover, this author goes on to show that our own things are fuller for us than those of others because of the

memories they awaken and the practical hopes and expectations they arouse. This alone would emphasize

them, apart from any value derived from their belonging to ourselves. We may conclude with him, then, that

an original central selffeeling can never explain the passionate warmth of our selfregarding emotions,

which must, on the contrary, be addressed directly to special things less abstract and empty of content. To

these things the name of 'self' may be given, or to our conduct towards them the name of 'selfishness,' but

neither in the self nor the selfishness does the pure Thinker play the 'titler�le.'

Only one more point connected with our selfregard need be mentioned. We have spoken of it so far as

active instinct or emotion. It remains to speak of it as cold intellectual selfestimation. We may weigh our

own Me in the balance of praise and blame as easily as we weigh other people, though with difficulty quite

as fairly. The just man is the one who can weigh himself impartially. Impartial weighing presupposes a rare

faculty of abstraction from the vividness with which, as Herr Horwicz has pointed out, things known as

intimately as our own possessions and performances appeal to our imagination; and an equally rare power of

vividly representing the affairs of others. But, granting these rare powers, there is no reason why a man

should not pass judgment on himself quite as objectively and well as on anyone else. No matter how he feels

about himself, unduly elated or unduly depressed, he may still truly know his own worth by measuring it by

the outward standard he applies to other men, and counteract the injustice of the feeling he cannot wholly

escape. This selfmeasuring process has nothing to do with the instinctive selfregard we have hitherto been

dealing with. Being merely one application of intellectual comparison, it need no longer detain us here.

Please note again, however, how the pure Ego appears merely as the vehicle in which the estimation is

carried on, the objects estimated being all of them facts of an empirical sort,[15] one's body, one's credit,

one's fame, one's intellectual ability, one's goodness, or whatever the case may be.

Material. Social. Spiritual. SelfSeeking. Bodily Appetites and Instincts Love of Adornment, Foppery,

Acquisitiveness, Constructiveness Love of Home, etc. Desire to please, be noticed, admired, etc. Sociability,

Emulation, Envy, Love, Pursuit of Honor, Ambition, etc. Intellectual, Moral and Reli gious Aspiration,

Conscientiousness SelfEstimation Personal Vanity, Modesty, etc. Pride of Wealth, Fear of Poverty Social

and Family Pride, Vainglory, Snobbery, Humility, Shame, etc. Sense of Moral or Mental Superiority, Purity,

Having summed up in the above table the principal results of the chapter thus far, I have said all that need be

said of the constituents of the phenomenal self, and of the nature of selfregard. Our decks are consequently

cleared for the struggle with that pure principle of personal identity which has met us all along our

preliminary exposition, but which we have always shied from and treated as a difficulty to be postponed.

Ever since Hume's time, it has been justly regarded as the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology has to

deal; and whatever view one may espouse, one has to hold his position against heavy odds. If, with the

Spiritualists, one contend for a substantial soul, or transcendental principle of unity, one can give no positive

account of what that may be. And if, with the Humians, one deny such a principle and say that the stream of

passing thoughts is all, one runs against the entire commonsense of mankind, of which the belief in a

distinct principle of selfhood seems an integral part. Whatever solution be adopted in the pages to come, we

may as well make up our minds in advance that it will fail to satisfy the majority of those to whom it is

The Sense of Personal Identity. In the last chapter it was stated in as radical a way as possible that the

thoughts which we actually know to exist do not fly about loose, but seem each to belong to some one thinker

and not to another. Each thought, out of a multitude of other thoughts of which it may think, is able to

distinguish those which belong to its own Ego from those which do not. The former have a warmth and

intimacy about them of which the latter are completely devoid, being merely conceived, in a cold and foreign

fashion, and not appearing as bloodrelatives, bringing their greetings to us from out of the past.

Now this consciousness of personal sameness may be treated either as a subjective phenomenon or as an

objective deliverance, as a feeling, or as a truth. We may explain how one bit of thought can come to judge

other bits to belong to the same Ego with itself; or we may criticise its judgment and decide how far it may

As a mere subjective phenomenon the judgment presents no difficulty or mystery peculiar to itself. It belongs

to the great class of judgments of sameness; and there is nothing more remarkable in making a judgment of

sameness in the first person than in the second or the third. The intellectual operations seem essentially alike,

whether I say 'I am the same,' or whether I say 'the pen is the same, as yesterday.' It is as easy to think this as

This sort of bringing of things together into the object of a single judgment is of course essential to all

thinking. The things are conjoined in the thought, whatever may be the relation in which they appear to the

thought. The thinking them is thinking them together, even if only with the result of judging that they do not

belong together. This sort of subjective synthesis, essential to knowledge as such (whenever it has a complex

object), must not be confounded with objective synthesis or union instead of difference or disconnection,

known among the things.[16] The subjective syn thesis is involved in thought's mere existence. Even a

really disconnected world could only be known to be such by having its parts temporarily united in the Object

The sense of personal identity is not, then, this mere synthetic form essential to all thought. It is the sense of a

sameness perceived by thought and predicated of things thoughtabout. These things are a present self and a

self of yesterday. The thought not only thinks them both, but thinks that they are identical. The psychologist,

looking on and playing the critic, might prove the thought wrong, and show there was no real identity, there

might have been no yesterday, or, at any rate, no self of yesterday; or, if there were, the sameness predicated

might not obtain, or might be predicated on insufficient grounds. In either case the personal identity would

not exist as a fact; but it would exist as a feeling all the same; the consciousness of it by the thought would be

there, and the psychologist would still have to analyze that, and show where its illusoriness lay. Let us now

be the psychologist and see whether it be right or wrong when it says, I am the same self that I was yesterday.

We may immediately call it right and intelligible so far as it posits a past time with past thoughts or selves

contained therein these were data which we assumed at the outset of the book. Right also and intelligible so

far as it thinks of a present self that present self we have just studied in its various forms. The only question

for us is as to what the consciousness may mean when it calls the present self the same with one of the past

We spoke a moment since of warmth and intimacy. This leads us to the answer sought. For, whatever the

thought we are criticising may think about its present self, that self comes to its acquaintance, or is actually

felt, with warmth and intimacy. Of course this is the case with the bodily part of it; we feel the whole cubic

mass of our body all the while, it gives us an unceasing sense of personal existence. Equally do we feel the

inner 'nucleus of the spiritual self,' either in the shape of yon faint physiological adjustments, or (adopting the

universal psychological belief), in that of the pure activity of our thought taking place as such. Our remoter

spiritual, material, and social selves, so far as they are realized, come also with a glow and a warmth; for the

thought of them infallibly brings some degree of organic emotion in the shape of quickened heartbeats,

oppressed breathing, or some other alteration, even though it be a slight one, in the general bodily tone. The

character of 'warmth,' then, in the present self, reduces itself to either of two things, something in the

feeling which we have of the thought itself, as thinking, or else the feeling of the body's actual existence at

the moment, or finally to both. We cannot realize our present self without simultaneously feeling one or

other of these two things. Any other fact which brings these two things with it into consciousness will be

thought with a warmth and an intimacy like those which cling to the present self.

Any distinct self which fulfills this condition will be thought with such warmth and intimacy. But which

Obviously those, and only those, which fulfilled it when they were alive. Them we shall imagine with the

animal warmth upon them, to them may possibly cling the aroma, the echo of the thinking taken in the act.

And by a natural consequence, we shall assimilate them to each other and to the warm and intimate self we

now feel within us as we think, and separate them as a collection from whatever selves have not this mark,

much as out of a herd of cattle let loose for the winter on some wide western prairie the owner picks out and

sorts together when the time for the roundup comes in the spring, all the beasts on which he finds his own

The various members of the collection thus set apart are felt to belong with each other whenever they are

thought at all. The animal warmth, etc., is their herdmark, the brand from which they can never more

escape. It runs through them all like a thread through a chaplet and makes them into a whole, which we treat

as a unit, no matter how much in other ways the parts may differ inter se. Add to this character the farther one

that the distant selves appear to our thought as having for hours of time been continuous with each other, and

the most recent ones of them continuous with the Self of the present moment, melting into it by slow degrees;

and we get a still stronger bond of union. As we think we see an identical bodily thing when, in spite of

changes of structure, it exists continuously before our eyes, or when, however interrupted its presence, its

quality returns unchanged; so here we think we experience an identical Self when it appears to us in an

analogous way. Continuity makes us unite what dissimilarity might otherwise separate; similarity makes us

unite what discontinuity might hold apart. And thus it is, finally, that Peter, awakening in the same bed with

Paul, and recalling what both had in mind before they went to sleep, reidentifies and appropriates the 'warm'

ideas as his, and is never tempted to confuse them with those cold and paleappearing ones which he ascribes

to Paul. As well might he confound Paul's body, which he only sees, with his own body, which he sees but

also feels. Each of us when he awakens says, Here's the same old self again, just as he says, Here's the same

The sense of our own personal identity, then, is exactly like any one of our other perceptions of sameness

among phenomena. It is a conclusion grounded either on the resemblance in a fundamental respect, or on the

And it must not be taken to mean more than these grounds warrant, or treated as a sort of metaphysical or

absolute Unity in which all differences are overwhelmed. The past and present selves compared are the same

just so far as they are the same, and no farther. A uniform feeling of 'warmth,' of bodily existence (or an

equally uniform feeling of pure psychic energy?) pervades them all; and this is what gives them a generic

unity, and makes them the same in kind. But this generic unity coexists with generic differences just as real as

the unity. And if from the one point of view they are one self, from others they are as truly not one but many

selves. And similarly of the attribute of continuity; it gives its own kind of unity to the self that of mere

connectedness, or unbrokenness, a perfectly definite phenomenal thing but it gives not a jot or tittle more.

And this unbrokenness in the stream of selves, like the unbrokenness in an exhibition of 'dissolving views,' in

no wise implies any farther unity or contradicts any amount of plurality in other respects.

And accordingly we find that, where the resemblance and the continuity are no longer felt, the sense of

personal identity goes too. We hear from our parents various anecdotes about our infant years, but we do not

appropriate them as we do our own memories. Those breaches of decorum awaken no blush, those bright

sayings no selfcomplacency. That child is a foreign creature with which our present self is no more

identified in feeling than it is with some stranger's living child today. Why? Partly because great timegaps

break up all these early years we cannot ascend to them by continuous memories; and partly because no

representation of how the child felt comes up with the stories. We know what he said and did; but no

sentiment of his little body, of his emotions, of his psychic strivings as they felt to him, comes up to

contribute an element of warmth and intimacy to the narrative we hear, and the main bond of union with our

present self thus disappears. It is the same with certain of our dimlyrecollected experiences. We hardly

know whether to appropriate them or to disown them as fancies, or things read or heard and not lived

through. Their animal heat has evaporated; the feelings that accompanied them are so lacking in the recall, or

so different from those we now enjoy, that no judgment of identity can be decisively cast.

Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings (especially bodily feelings) experienced along with

things widely different in all other regards, thus constitutes the real and verifiable 'personal identity' which we

feel. There is no other identity than this in the 'stream' of subjective consciousness which we described in the

last chapter. Its parts differ, but under all their differences they are knit in these two ways; and if either way

of knitting disappears, the sense of unity departs. If a man wakes up some fine day unable to recall any of his

past experiences, so that he has to learn his biography afresh, or if he only recalls the facts of it in a cold

abstract way as things that he is sure once happened; or if, without this loss of memory, his bodily and

spiritual habits all change during the night, each organ giving a different tone, and the act of thought

becoming aware of itself in a different way; he feels, and he says, that he is a changed person. He disowns his

former me, gives himself a new name, identifies his present life with nothing from out of the older time. Such

cases are not rare in mental pathology; but, as we still have some reasoning to do, we had better give no

This description of personal identity will be recognized by the instructed reader as the ordinary doctrine

professed by the empirical school. Associationists in England and France, Herbartians in Germany, all

describe the Self as an aggregate of which each part, as to its being, is a separate fact. So far so good, then;

thus much is true whatever farther things may be true; and it is to the imperishable glory of Hume and

Herbart and their successors to have taken so much of the meaning of personal identity out of the clouds and

But in leaving the matter here, and saying that this sum of passing things is all, these writers have neglected

certain more subtle aspects of the Unity of Consciousness, to which we next must turn.

Our recent simile of the herd of cattle will help us. It will be remembered that the beasts were brought

together into one herd because their owner found on each of them his brand. The 'owner' symbolized here that

'section' of consciousness, or pulse of thought, which we have all along represented as the vehicle of the

judgment of identity; and the 'brand' symbolizes the characters of warmth and continuity, by reason of which

the judgment is made. There is found a selfbrand, just as there is found a herdbrand. Each brand, so far, is

the mark, or cause of our knowing, that certain things belongtogether. But if the brand is the ratio

cognoscendi of the belonging, the belonging, in the case of the herd, is in turn the ratio existendi of the brand.

No beast would be so branded unless he belonged to the owner of the herd. They are not his because they are

branded; they are branded because they are his. So that it seems as if our description of the

belongingtogether of the various selves, as a belongingtogether which is merely represented, in a later

pulse of thought, had knocked the bottom out of the matter, and omitted the most characteristic one of all the

features found in the herd a feature which commonsense finds in the phenomenon of personal identity as

well, and for our omission of which she will hold us to a strict account. For commonsense insists that the

unity of all the selves is not a mere appearance of similarity or continuity, ascertained after the fact. She is

sure that it involves a real belonging to a real Owner, to a pure spiritual entity of some kind. Relation to this

entity is what makes the self's constituents stick together as they do for thought. The individual beasts do not

stick together, for all that they wear the same brand. Each wanders with whatever accidental mates it finds.

The herd's unity is only potential, its centre ideal, like the 'centre of gravity' in physics, until the herdsman or

owner comes. He furnishes a real centre of accretion to which the beasts are driven and by which they are

held. The beasts stick together by sticking severally to him. Just so, commonsense insists, there must be a

real proprietor in the case of the selves, or else their actual accretion into a 'personal consciousness' would

To the usual empiricist explanation of personal consciousness this is a formidable reproof, because all the

individual thoughts and feelings which have succeeded each other 'up to date' are represented by ordinary

Associationism as in some inscrutable way 'integrating' or gumming themselves together on their own

account, and thus fusing into a stream. All the incomprehensibilities which in Chapter VI we saw to attach to

the idea of things fusing without a medium apply to the empiricist description of personal identity.

But in our own account the medium is fully assigned, the herdsman is there, in the shape of something not

among the things collected, but superior to them all, namely, the real, present onlooking, remembering,

'judging thought' or identifying 'section' of the stream. This is what collects, 'owns' some of the past facts

which it surveys, and disowns the rest, and so makes a unity that is actualized and anchored and does not

merely float in the blue air of possibility. And the reality of such pulses of thought, with their function of

knowing, it will be remembered that we did not seek to deduce or explain, but simply assumed them as the

But this assumption, though it yields much, still does not yield all that commonsense demands. The unity

into which the Thought as I shall for a time proceed to call, with a capital T, the present mental state

binds the individual past facts with each other and with itself, does not exist until the Thought is there. It is as

if wild cattle were lassoed by a newlycreated settler and then owned for the first time. But the essence of the

matter to commonsense is that the past thoughts never were wild cattle, they were always owned. The

Thought does not capture them, but as soon as it comes into existence it finds them already its own. How is

this possible unless the Thought have a substantial identity with a former owner, not a mere continuity or a

resemblance, as in our account, but a real unity? Commonsense in fact would drive us to admit what we

may for the moment call an ArchEgo, dominating the entire stream of thought and all the selves that may be

represented in it, as the ever selfsame and changeless principle implied in their union. The 'Soul' of

Metaphysics and the 'Transcendental Ego' of the Kantian Philosophy, are, as we shall soon see, but attempts

to satisfy this urgent demand of commonsense. But, for a time at least, we can still express without any such

hypotheses that appearance of neverlapsing ownership for which commonsense contends.

For how would it be if the Thought, the present judging Thought, instead of being in any way substantially or

transcendentally identical with the former owner of the past self, merely inherited his 'title,' and thus stood as

his legal representative now? It would then, if its birth coincided exactly with the death of another owner,

find the past self already its own as soon as it found it at all, and the past self would thus never be wild, but

always owned, by a title that never lapsed. We can imagine a long succession of herdsmen coming rapidly

into possession of the same cattle by transmission of an original title by bequest. May not the 'title' of a

It is a patent fact of consciousness that a transmission like this actually occurs. Each pulse of cognitive

consciousness, each Thought, dies away and is replaced by another. The other, among the things it knows,

knows its own predecessor, and finding it 'warm,' in the way we have described, greets it, saying: "Thou art

mine, and part of the same self with me." Each later Thought, knowing and including thus the Thoughts

which went before, is the final receptacle and appropriating them is the final owner of all that they

contain and own. Each Thought is thus born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as

its Self to its own later proprietor. As Kant says, it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motion but

knowledge of it, and a first ball were to transmit both its motion and its consciousness to a second, which

took both up into its consciousness and passed them to a third, until the last ball held all that the other balls

had held, and realized it as its own. It is this trick which the nascent thought has of immediately taking up the

expiring thought and 'adopting' it, which is the foundation of the appropriation of most of the remoter

constituents of the self. Who owns the last self owns the self before the last, for what possesses the possessor

It is impossible to discover any verifiable features in personal identity, which this sketch does not contain,

impossible to imagine how any transcendent nonphenomenal sort of an ArchEgo, were he there, could

shape matters to any other result, or be known in time by any other fruit, than just this production of a stream

of consciousness each 'section' of which should know, and knowing, hug to itself and adopt, all those that

went before, thus standing as the representative of the entire past stream; and which should similarly adopt

the objects already adopted by any portion of this spiritual stream. Such standingasrepresentative, and such

adopting, are perfectly clear phenomenal relations. The Thought which, whilst it knows another Thought and

the Object of that Other, appropriates the Other and the Object which the Other appropriated, is still a

perfectly distinct phenomenon form that Other; it may hardly resemble it; it may be far removed from it in

The only point that is obscure is the act of appropriation itself. Already in enumerating the constituents of the

self and their rivalry, I had to use the word appropriate. And the quickwitted reader probably noticed at the

time, in hearing how one constituent was let drop and disowned and another one held fast to and espoused,

that the phrase was meaningless unless the constituents were objects in the hands of something else. A thing

cannot appropriate itself; it is itself; and still less can it disown itself. There must be an agent of the

appropriating and disowning; but that agent we have already named. It is the Thought to whom the various

'constituents' are known. That Thought is a vehicle of choice as well as of cognition; and among the choices it

makes are these appropriations, or repudiations, of its 'own.' But the Thought never is an object in its own

hands, it never appropriates or disowns itself. It appropriates to itself, it is the actual focus of accretion, the

hook from which the chain of past selves dangles, planted firmly in the Present, which alone passes for real,

and thus keeping the chain from being a purely ideal thing. Anon the hook itself will drop into the past with

all it carries, and then be treated as an object and appropriated by a new Thought in the new present which

will serve as living hook in turn. The present moment of consciousness is thus, as Mr. Hodgson says, the

darkest in the whole series. It may feel its own immediate existence we have all along admitted the

possibility of this, hard as it is by direct introspection to ascertain the fact but nothing can be known about

it till it be dead and gone. Its appropriations are therefore less to itself than to the most intimately felt part of

its present Object, the body, and the central adjustments, which accompany the act of thinking, in the head.

These are the real nucleus of our personal identity, and it is their actual existence, realized as a solid present

fact, which makes us say 'as sure as I exist, those past facts were part of myself.' They are the kernel to which

the represented parts of the Self are assimilated, accreted, and knit on; and even were Thought entirely

unconscious of itself in the act of thinking, these 'warm' parts of its present object would be a firm basis on

which the consciousness of personal identity would rest.[18] Such consciousness, then, as a psychologic fact,

can be fully described without supposing any other agent than a succession of perishing thoughts, endowed

with the functions of appropriation and rejection, and of which some can know and appropriate or reject

To illustrate by diagram, let A, B, and C stand for three successive thoughts, each with its object inside of it.

If B's object be A, and C's object be B; then A, B, and C would stand for three pulses in a consciousness of

personal identity. Each pulse would be something different from the others; but B would know and adopt A,

and C would know and adopt A and B. Three successive states of the same brain, on which each experience

in passing leaves its mark, might very well engender thoughts differing from each other in just such a way as

The passing Thought then seems to be the Thinker; and though there may be another nonphenomenal

Thinker behind that, so far we do not seem to need him to express the facts. But we cannot definitively make

up our mind about him until we have heard the reasons that have historically been used to prove his reality.

The Pure Self or Inner Principle of Personal Unity. To a brief survey of the theories of the Ego let us then

1) The Spiritualist theory; 2) The Associationist theory; 3) The Transcendentalist theory.

The Theory of the Soul. In Chapter VI we were led ourselves to the spiritualist theory of the 'Soul,' as a

means of escape from the unintelligibilities of mindstuff 'integrating' with itself, and from the physiological

improbability of a material monad, with thought attached to it, in the brain. But at the end of the chapter we

said we should examine the 'Soul' critically in a later place, to see whether it had any other advantages as a

theory over the simple phenomenal notion of a stream of thought accompanying a stream of cerebral activity,

The theory of the Soul is the theory of popular philosophy and of scholasticism, which is only popular

philosophy made systematic. It declares that the principle of individuality within us must be substantial, for

psychic phenomena are activities, and there can be no activity without a concrete agent. This substantial

agent cannot be the brain but must be something immaterial; for its activity, thought, is both immaterial, and

takes cognizance of immaterial things, and of material things in general and intelligible, as well as in

particular and sensible ways, all which powers are incompatible with the nature of matter, of which the

brain is composed. Thought moreover is simple, whilst the activities of the brain are compounded of the

elementary activities of each of its parts. Furthermore, thought is spontaneous or free, whilst all material

activity is determined ab extra; and the will can turn itself against all corporeal goods and appetites, which

would be impossible were it a corporeal function. For these objective reasons the principle of psychic life

must be both immaterial and simple as well as substantial, must be what is called a Soul. The same

consequence follows from subjective reasons. Our consciousness of personal identity assures us of our

essential simplicity: the owner of the various constituents of the self, as we have seen them, the hypothetical

ArchEgo whom we provisionally conceived as possible, is a real entity of whose existence

selfconsciousness makes us directly aware. No material agent could thus turn round and grasp itself

material activities always grasp something else than the agent. And if a brain could grasp itself and be

selfconscious, it would be conscious of itself as a brain and not as something of an altogether different kind.

The Soul then exists as a simple spiritual substance in which the various psychic faculties, operations, and

If we ask what a Substance is, the only answer is that it is a selfexistent being, or one which needs no other

subject in which to inhere. At bottom its only positive determination is Being, and this is something whose

meaning we all realize even though we find it hard to explain. The Soul is moreover an individual being, and

if we ask what that is, we are told to look in upon our Self, and we shall learn by direct intuition better than

through any abstract reply. Our direct perception of our own inward being is in fact by many deemed to be

the original prototype out of which our notion of simple active substance in general is fashioned. The

consequences of the simplicity and substantiality of the Soul are its incorruptibility and natural immortality

nothing but God's direct fiat can annihilate it and its responsibility at all times for whatever it may have

This substantialist view of the soul was essentially the view of Plato and of Aristotle. It received its

completely formal elaboration in the middle ages. It was believed in by Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz,

Wolf, Berkeley, and is no defended by the entire modern dualistic or spiritualistic or commonsense school.

Kant held to it while denying its fruitfulness as a premise for deducing consequences verifiable here below.

Kant's successors, the absolute idealists, profess to have discarded it, how that may be we shall inquire ere

It is at all events needless for expressing the actual subjective phenomena of consciousness as they appear.

We have formulated them all without its aid, by the supposition of a stream of thoughts, each substantially

different from the rest, but cognitive of the rest and 'appropriative' of each other's content. At least, if I have

not already succeeded in making this plausible to the reader, I am hopeless of convincing him by anything I

could add now. The unity, the identity, the individuality, and the immateriality that appear in the psychic life

are thus accounted for as phenomenal and temporal facts exclusively, and with no need of reference to any

more simple or substantial agent than the present Thought or 'section' of the stream. We have seen it to be

single and unique in the sense of having no separable parts (above, p. 239 ff.) perhaps that is the only kind

of simplicity meant to be predicated of the soul. The present Thought also has being, at least all believers in

the Soul believe so and if there be no other Being in which it 'inheres,' it ought itself to be a 'substance'. If

this kind of simplicity and substantiality were all that is predicated of the Soul, then it might appear that we

had been talking of the soul all along, without knowing it, when we treated the present Thought as an agent,

an owner, and the like. But the Thought is a perishing and not an immortal or incorruptible thing. Its

successors may continuously succeed to it, resemble it, and appropriate it, but they are not it, whereas the

SoulSubstance is supposed to be a fixed unchanging thing. By the Soul is always meant something behind

the present Thought, another kind of substance, existing on a nonphenomenal plane.

When we brought in the Soul at the end of the Chapter VI, as an entity which the various brainprocesses

were supposed to affect simultaneously, and which responded to their combined influence by single pulses of

its thought, it was to escape integrated mindstuff on the one hand, and an improbable cerebral monad on the

other. But when (as now, after all we have been through since that earlier passage) we take the two

formulations, first of a brain to whose processes pulses of thought simply correspond, and second, of one to

whose processes pulses of thought in a Soul correspond, and compare them together, we see that at bottom

the second formulation is only a more roundabout way than the first, of expressing the same bald fact. That

bald fact is that when the brain acts, a thought occurs. The spiritualistic formulation says that the

brainprocesses knock the thought, so to speak, out of a Soul which stands there to receive their influence.

The simpler formulation says that the thought simply comes. But what positive meaning has the Soul, when

scrutinized, but the ground of possibility of the thought? And what is the 'knocking' but the determining of

the possibility to actuality? And what is this after all but giving a sort of concreted form to one's belief that

the coming of the thought, when the brainprocesses occur, has some sort of ground in the nature of things?

If the world Soul be understood merely to express that claim, it is a good word to use. But if it be held to do

more, to gratify the claim, for instance, to connect rationally the thought which comes, with the processes

which occur, and to mediate intelligibly between their two disparate natures, then it is an illusory term. It is,

in fact, with the word Soul as with the word Substance in general. To say that phenomena inhere in a

Substance is at bottom only to record one's protest against the notion that the bare existence of the

phenomena is the total truth. A phenomenon would not itself be, we insist, unless there were something more

than the phenomenon. To the more we give the provisional name of Substance. So, in the present instance,

we ought certainly to admit that there is more than the bare fact of coexistence of a passing thought with a

passing brainstate. But we do not answer the question 'What is that more?' when we say that it is a 'Soul'

which the brainstate affects. This kind of more explains nothing; and when we are once trying metaphysical

explanations we are foolish not to go as far as we can. For my own part I confess that the moment I become

metaphysical and try to define the more, I find the notion of some sort of an anima mundi thinking in all of us

to be a more promising hypothesis, in spite of all its difficulties, than that of a lot of absolutely individual

souls. Meanwhile, as psychologists, we need not be metaphysical at all. The phenomena are enough, the

passing Thought itself is the only verifiable thinker, and its empirical connection with the brainprocess is

To the other arguments which would prove the need of a soul, we may also turn a deaf ear. The argument

from freewill can convince only those who believe in freewill; and even they will have to admit that

spontaneity is just as possible, to say the least, in a temporary spiritual agent like our 'Thought' as in a

permanent one like the supposed Soul. The same is true of the argument from the kinds of things cognized.

Even if the brain could not cognize universals, immaterials, or its 'Self,' still the 'Thought' which we have

relied upon in our account is not the brain, closely as it seems connected with it; and after all, if the brain

could cognize at all, one does not well see why it might not cognize one sort of thing as well as another. The

great difficulty is in seeing how a thing can cognize anything. This difficulty is not in the least removed by

giving to the thing that cognizes the name of Soul. The Spiritualists do not deduce any of the properties of the

mental life from otherwise known properties of the soul. They simply find various characters readymade in

the mental life, and these they clap into the Soul, saying, "Lo! behold the source from whence they flow!"

The merely verbal character of this 'explanation' is obvious. The Soul invoked, far from making the

phenomena more intelligible, can only be made intelligible itself by borrowing their form, it must be

represented, if at all, as a transcendent stream of consciousness duplicating the one we know.

Altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of philosophizing whose great maxim, according to Dr.

Hodgson, is: "Whatever you are totally ignorant of, assert to be the explanation of everything else."

Locke and Kant, whilst still believing in the soul, began the work of undermining the notion that we know

anything about it. Most modern writers of the mitigated, spiritualistic, or dualistic philosophy the Scotch

school, as it is often called among us are forward to proclaim this ignorance, and to attend exclusively to

the verifiable phenomena of selfconsciousness, as we have laid them down. Dr. Wayland, for example,

begins his Elements of Intellectual Philosophy with the phrase "Of the essence of Mind we know nothing,"

and goes on: "All that we are able to affirm of it is that it is something which perceives, reflects, remembers,

imagines, and wills; but what that something is which exerts these energies we know not. It is only as we are

conscious of the action of these energies that we are conscious of the existence of mind. It is only by the

exertion of its own powers that the mind becomes cognizant of their existence. The cognizance of its powers,

however, gives us no knowledge of that essence of which they are predicated. In these respects our

knowledge of mind is precisely analogous to our knowledge of matter." This analogy of our two ignorances is

a favorite remark in the Scotch school. It is but a step to lump them together into a single ignorance, that of

the 'Unknowable' to which any one fond of superfluities in philosophy may accord the hospitality of his

belief, if it so please him, but which any one else may as freely ignore and reject.

The Soultheory is, then, a complete superfluity, so far as accounting for the actually verified facts of

conscious experience goes. So far, no one can be compelled to subscribe to it for definite scientific reasons.

The case would rest here, and the reader be left free to make his choice, were it not for other demands of a

The first of these is Immortality, for which the simplicity and substantiality of the Soul seem to offer a solid

guarantee. A 'stream' of thought, for aught that we see to be contained in its essence, may come to a full stop

at any moment; but a simple substance is incorruptible and will, by its own inertia, persist in Being so long as

the Creator does not by a direct miracle snuff it out. Unquestionably this is the stronghold of the spiritualistic

belief, as indeed the popular touchstone for all philosophies is the question, "What is their bearing on a

The Soul, however, when closely scrutinized, guarantees no immortality of a sort we care for. The enjoyment

of the atomlike simplicity of their substance in soecula soeculorum would not to most people seem a

consummation devoutly to be wished. The substance must give rise to a stream of consciousness continuous

with the present stream, in order to arouse our hope, but of this the mere persistence of the substance per se

offers no guarantee. Moreover, in the general advance of our moral ideas, there has come to be something

ridiculous in the way our forefathers had of grounding their hopes of immortality on the simplicity of their

substance. The demand for immortality is nowadays essentially teleological. We believe ourselves immortal

because we believe ourselves fit for immortality. A 'substance, ought surely to perish, we think, if not worthy

to survive, and an insubstantial 'stream' to prolong itself, provided it be worthy, if the nature of Things is

organized in the rational way in which we trust it is. Substance or no substance, soul or 'stream,' what Lotze

"We have no other principle for deciding it than this general idealistic belief: that every created thing will

continue whose continuance belongs to the meaning of the world, and so long as it does so belong; whilst

every one will pass away whose reality is justified only in a transitory phase of the world's course. That this

principle admits of no further application in human hands need hardly be said. We surely know not the merits

which may give to one being a claim on eternity, nor the defects which would cut others off."[19]

A second alleged necessity for a soulsubstance is our forensic responsibility before God. Locke caused an

uproar when he said that the unity of consciousness made a man the same person, whether supported by the

same substance or no, and that God would not, in the great day, make a person answer for what he

remembered nothing of. It was supposed scandalous that our forgetfulness might thus deprive God of the

chance of certain retributions, which otherwise would have enhanced his 'glory.' This is certainly a good

speculative ground for retaining the Soul at least for those who demand a plenitude of retribution. The mere

stream of consciousness, with its lapses of memory, cannot possibly be as 'responsible' as a soul which is at

the judgment day all that it ever was. To modern readers, however, who are less insatiate for retribution than

their grandfathers, this argument will hardly be as convincing as it seems once to have been.

One great use of the Soul has always been to account for, and at the same time to guarantee, the closed

individuality of each personal consciousness. The thoughts of one soul must unite into one self, it was

supposed, and must be eternally insulated from those of every other soul. But we have already begun to see

that, although unity is the rule of each man's consciousness, yet in some individuals, at least, thoughts may

split away from the others and form sepa rate selves. As for insulation, it would be rash, in view of the

phenomena of thoughttransference, mesmeric influence and spiritcontrol, which are being alleged

nowadays on better authority than ever before, to be too sure about that point either. The definitively closed

nature of our personal consciousness is probably an average statistical resultant of many conditions, but not

an elementary force or fact; so that, if one wishes to preserve the Soul, the less he draws his arguments from

that quarter the better. So long as our self, on the whole, makes itself good and practically maintains itself as

a closed individual, why, as Lotze says, is not that enough? And why is the beinganindividual in some

My final conclusion, then, about the substantial Soul is that it explains nothing and guarantees nothing. Its

successive thoughts are the only intelligible and verifiable things about it, and definitely to ascertain the

correlations of these with brainprocesses is as much as psychology can empirically do. From the

metaphysical point of view, it is true that one may claim that the correlations have a rational ground; and if

the word Soul could be taken to mean merely some such vague problematic ground, it would be

unobjectionable. But the trouble is that it professes to give the ground in positive terms of a very dubiously

credible sort. I therefore feel entirely free to discard the word Soul from the rest of this book. If I ever use it,

it will be in the vaguest and most popular way. The reader who finds any comfort in the idea of the Soul, is,

however, perfectly free to continue to believe in it; for our reasonings have not established the nonexistence

The Associationist Theory. Locke paved the way for it by the hypothesis he suggested of the same substance

having two successive con sciousnesses, or of the same consciousness being supported by more than one

substance. He made his readers feel that the important unity of the Self was its verifiable and felt unity, and

that a metaphysical or absolute unity would be insignificant, so long as a consciousness of diversity might be

Hume showed how great the consciousness of diversity actually was. In the famous chapter on Personal

"There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our

SELF; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence, and are certain, beyond the evidence of a

demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity.... Unluckily all these positive assertions are

contrary to that very experience which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of Self, after the manner it

is here explained.... It must be some one impression that gives rise to every real idea.... If any impression

gives rise to the idea of Self, that impression must continue invariably the same through the whole course of

our lives, since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable.

Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same

time.... For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular

perception or other of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at

any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are

removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.

And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate

after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to

make me a perfect nonentity. If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different

notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in

the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive

something simple and continued which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me.

"But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind that they

are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeeded each other with an

inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perceptual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets

without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and

faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul which remains unalterably the

same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make

their appearance; pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is

properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to

imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the

successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where

But Hume, after doing this good piece of introspective work, proceeds to pour out the child with the bath, and

to fly to as great an extreme as the substantialist philosophers. As they say the Self is nothing but Unity, unity

abstract and absolute, so Hume says it is nothing but Diversity, diversity abstract and absolute; whereas in

truth it is that mixture of unity and diversity which we ourselves have already found so easy to pick apart. We

found among the objects of the stream certain feelings that hardly changed, that stood out warm and vivid in

the past just as the present feeling does now; and we found the present feeling to be the centre of accretion to

which, de proche en proche, these other feelings are, by the judging Thought, felt to cling. Hume says nothing

of the judging Thought; and he denies this thread of resemblance, this core of sameness running through the

ingredients of the Self, to exist even as a phenomenal thing. To him there is no tertium quid between pure

unity and pure separateness. A succession of ideas "connected by a close relation affords to an accurate view

"All our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and the mind never perceives any real connection among

distinct existences. Did our perceptions either inhere in something simple or individual, or did the mind

perceive some real connection among them, there would be no difficulty in the case. For my part, I must

plead the privilege of a sceptic and confess that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding. I pretend not,

however, to pronounce it insuperable. Others, perhaps,... may discover some hypothesis that will reconcile

Hume is at bottom as much of a metaphysician as Thomas Aquinas. No wonder he can discover no

'hypothesis.' The unity of the parts of the stream is just as 'real' a connection as their diversity is a real

separation; both connection and separation are ways in which the past thoughts appear to the present

Thought; unlike each other in respect of date and certain qualities this is the separation; alike in other

qualities, and continuous in time this is the connection. In demanding a more 'real' connection than this

obvious and verifiable likeness and continuity, Hume seeks 'the world behind the lookingglass,' and gives a

striking example of that Absolutism which is the great disease of philosophic Thought.

The chain of distinct existences into which Hume thus chopped up our 'stream' was adopted by all of his

successors as a complete inventory of the facts. The associationist Philosophy was founded. Somehow, out of

'ideas,' each separate, each ignorant of its mates, but sticking together and calling each other up according to

certain laws, all the higher forms of consciousness were to be explained, and among them the consciousness

of our personal identity. The task was a hard one, in which what we called the psychologist's fallacy (p. 196

ff.) bore the brunt of the work. Two ideas, one of 'A,' succeeded by another of 'B,' were transmuted into a

third idea of 'A after B.' An idea from last year returning now was taken to be an idea of last year; two similar

ideas stood for an idea of similarity, and the like; palpable confusions, in which certain facts about the ideas,

possible only to an outside knower of them, were put into the place of the ideas' own proper and limited

deliverance and content. Out of such recurrences and resemblances in a series of discrete ideas and feelings a

knowledge was somehow supposed to be engendered in each feeling that it was recurrent and resembling, and

that it helped to form a series to whose unity the name I came to be joined. In the same way, substantially,

Herbart,[22] in Germany, tried to show how a conflict of ideas would fuse into a manner of representing itself

The defect of all these attempts is that the conclusion pretended to follow from certain premises is by no

means rationally involved in the premises. A feeling of any kind, if it simply returns, ought to be nothing else

than what it was at first. If memory of previous existence and all sorts of other cognitive functions are

attributed to it when it returns, it is no longer the same, but a wholly different feeling, and ought to be so

described. We have so described it with the greatest explicitness. We have said that feelings never do return.

We have not pretended to explain this; we have recorded it as an empirically ascertained law, analogous to

certain laws of brainphysiology; and, seeking to define the way in which new feelings do differ from the

old, we have found them to be cognizant and appropriative of the old, whereas the old were always cognizant

and appropriative of something else. Once more, this account pretended to be nothing more than a complete

description of the facts. It explained them no more than the associationist account explains them. But the

latter both assumes to explain them and in the same breath falsifies them, and for each reason stands

It is but just to say that the associationist writers as a rule seem to have a lurking bad conscience about the

Self; and that although they are explicit enough about what it is, namely, a train of feelings or thoughts, they

are very shy about openly tackling the problem of how it comes to be aware of itself. Neither Bain nor

Spencer, for example, directly touch this problem. As a rule, associationist writers keep talking about 'the

mind' and about what 'we' do; and so, smuggling in surreptitiously what they ought avowedly to have

postulated in the form of a present 'judging Thought,' they either trade upon their reader's lack of discernment

Mr. D. G. Thompson is the only associationist writer I know who perfectly escapes this confusion, and

postulates openly what he needs. "All states of consciousness," he says, "imply and postulate a subject Ego,

whose substance is unknown and unknowable, to which [why not say by which?] states of consciousness are

referred as attributes, but which in the process of reference becomes objectified and becomes itself an

attribute of a subject Ego which lies still beyond, and which ever eludes cognition though ever postulated for

cognition.'[24] This is exactly our judging and remembering present 'Thought,' described in less simple terms.

After Mr. Thompson, M. Taine and the two Mills deserve credit for seeking to be as clear as they can. Taine

tells us in the first volume of his 'Intelligence' what the Ego is, a continuous web of conscious events no

more really distinct from each other[25] than rhomboids, triangles, and squares marked with chalk on a plank

are really distinct, for the plank itself is one. In the second volume he says all these parts have a common

character embedded in them, that of being internal [this is our character of 'warmness,' otherwise named].

This character is abstracted and isolated by a mental fiction, and is what we are conscious of as our self 'this

stable within is what each of us calls I or me.' Obviously M. Taine forgets to tell us what this 'each of us' is,

which suddenly starts up and performs the abstraction and 'calls' its product I or me. The character does not

abstract itself. Taine means by 'each of us' merely the present 'judging Thought' with its memory and

tendency to appropriate, but he does not name it distinctly enough, and lapses into the fiction that the entire

James Mill, after defining Memory as a train of associated ideas beginning with that of my past self and

ending with that of my present self, defines my Self as a train of ideas of which Memory declares the first to

be continuously connected with the last. The successive associated ideas 'run, as it were, into a single point of

"The phenomenon of Self and that of Memory are merely two sides of the same fact, or two different modes

of viewing the same fact. We may, as psychologists, set out from either of them, and refer the other to it....

But it is hardly allowable to do both. At least it must be said that by doing so we explain neither. We only

show that the two things are essentially the same; that my memory of having ascended Skiddaw on a given

day, and my consciousness of being the same person who ascended Skiddaw on that day, are two modes of

stating the same fact: a fact which psychology has as yet failed to resolve into anything more elementary. In

analyzing the complex phenomena of consciousness, we must come to something ultimate; and we seem to

have reached two elements which have a good prima facie claim to that title. There is, first,... the difference

between a fact and the Thought of that fact: a distinction which we are able to cognize in the past, and which

then constitutes Memory, and in the future, when it constitutes Expectation; but in neither case can we give

any account of it except that it exists.... Secondly, in addition to this, and setting out from the belief... that the

idea I now have was derived from a previous sensation... there is the further conviction that this sensation...

was my own; that it happened to my self. In other words, I am aware of a long and uninterrupted succession

of past feelings, going back as far as memory reaches, and terminating with the sensations I have at the

present moment, all of which are connected by an inexplicable tie, that distinguishes them not only from any

succession or combination in mere thought, but also from the parallel succession of feelings which I believe,

on satisfactory evidence, to have happened to each of the other beings, shaped like myself, whom I perceive

around me. This succession of feelings, which I call my memory of the past, is that by which I distinguish my

Self. Myself is the person who had that series of feelings, and I know nothing of myself, by direct knowledge,

except that I had them. But there is a bond of some sort among all the parts of the series, which makes me say

that they were feelings of a person who was the same person throughout [according to us this is their 'warmth'

and resemblance to the 'central spiritual self' now actually felt] and a different person from those who had any

of the parallel successions of feelings; and this bond, to me, constitutes my Ego. Here I think the question

must rest, until some psychologist succeeds better than anyone else has done, in showing a mode in which the

The reader must judge of our own success in carrying the analysis farther. The various distinctions we have

made are all part of an endeavor so to do. John Mill himself, in a laterwritten passage, so far from advancing

in the line of analysis, seems to fall back upon something perilously near to the Soul. He says:

"The fact of recognizing a sensation,... remembering that it has been felt before, is the simplest and most

elementary fact of memory: and the inexplicable tie... which connects the present consciousness with the past

one of which it reminds me, is as near as I think we can get to a positive conception of Self. That there is

something real in this tie, real as the sensations themselves, and not a mere product of the laws of thought

without any fact corresponding to it, I hold to be indubitable... This original element,... to which we cannot

give any name but its own peculiar one, without implying some false or ungrounded theory, is the Ego, or

Self. As such I ascribe a reality to the Ego to my own mind different from that real existence as a

Permanent Possibility, which is the only reality I acknowledge in Matter.... We are forced to apprehend every

part of the series as linked with the other parts by something in common which is not the feelings themselves,

any more than the succession of the feelings is the feelings themselves; and as that which is the same in the

first as in the second, in the second as in the third, in the third as in the fourth, and so on, must be the same in

the first and in the fiftieth, this common element is a permanent element. But beyond this we can affirm

nothing of it except the states of consciousness themselves. The feelings or consciousnesses which belong or

have belonged to it, and its possibilities of having more, are the only facts there are to be asserted of Self

the only positive attributes, except permanence, which we can ascribe to it."[28]

Mr. Mill's habitual method of philosophizing was to affirm boldly some general doctrine derived from his

father, and then make so many concessions of detail to its enemies as practically to abandon it altogether.[29]

In this place the concessions amount, so far as they are intelligible, to the admission of something very like

the Soul. This 'inexplicable tie' which connects the feelings, this 'something in common' by which they are

linked and which is not the passing feelings themselves, but something 'permanent,' of which we can 'affirm

nothing' save its attributes and its permanence, what is it but metaphysical Substance come again to life?

Much as one must respect the fairness of Mill's temper, quite as much must one regret his failure of acumen

at this point. At bottom he makes the same blunder as Hume: the sensations per se, he thinks, have no 'tie.'

The tie of resemblance and continuity which the remembering Thought finds among them is not a 'real tie' but

'a mere product of the laws of thought;' and the fact that the present Thought 'appropriates' them is also no

real tie. But whereas Hume was contended to say that there might after all be no 'real tie,' Mill, unwilling to

admit this possibility, is driven, like any scholastic, to place it in a nonphenomenal world.

John Mill's concessions may be regarded as the definitive bankruptcy of the associationist description of the

consciousness of self, starting, as it does, with the best intentions, and dimly conscious of the path, but

'perplexed in the extreme' at last with the inadequacy of those 'simple feelings,' noncognitive,

nontranscendent of themselves, which were the only baggage it was willing to take along. One must beg

memory, knowledge on the part of the feelings of something outside themselves. That granted, every other

true thing follows naturally, and it is hard to go astray. The knowledge the present feeling has of the past ones

is a real tie between them, so is their resemblance; so is their continuity; so is the one's 'appropriation' of the

other: all are real ties, realized in the judging Thought of every moment, the only place where disconnections

could be realized, did they exist. Hume and Mill both imply that a disconnection can be realized there, whilst

a tie cannot. But the ties and the disconnections are exactly on a par, in this matter of selfconsciousness. The

way in which the present Thought appropriates the past is a real way, so long as no other owner appropriates

it in a more real way, and so long as the Thought has no grounds for repudiating it stronger than those which

lead to its appropriation. But no other owner ever does in point of fact present himself for my past; and the

grounds which I perceive for appropriating it viz., continuity and resemblance with the present

outweigh those I perceive for disowning it viz., distance in time. My present Thought stands thus in the

plenitude of ownership of the train of my past selves, is owner not only de facto, but de jure, the most real

owner there can be, and all without the supposition of any 'inexplicable tie,' but in a perfectly verifiable and

The Transcendentalist Theory. which owes its origin to Kant. Kant's own statements are too lengthy and

obscure for verbatim quotation here, so I must give their substance only. Kant starts, as I understand him,

from a view of the Object essentially like our own description of it on p. 275 ff., that is, it is a system of

things, qualities or facts in relation. "Object is that in the knowledge (Begriff) of which the Manifold of a

given Perception is connected."[30] But whereas we simple begged the vehicle of this connected knowledge

in the shape of what we call the present Thought, or section of the Stream of Consciousness (which we

declared to be the ultimate fact for psychology), Kant denies this to be an ultimate fact and insists on

analyzing it into a large number of distinct, though equally essential, elements. The 'Manifoldness' of the

Object is due to Sensibility, which per se is chaotic, and the unity is due to the synthetic handling which this

Manifold receives from the higher faculties of Intuition, Apprehension, Imagination, Understanding, and

Apperception. It is the one essential spontaneity of the Understanding which, under these different names,

"The Understanding is, in fact, nothing more than the faculty of binding together a priori, and of bringing the

Manifold of given ideas under the unity of Apperception, which consequently is the supreme principle of all

The material connected must be given by lower faculties to the Understanding, for the latter is not an intuitive

faculty, but by nature 'empty.' And the bringing of this material 'under the unity of Apperception' is explained

by Kant to mean the thinking it always so that, whatever its other determinations be, it may be known as

thought by me.[31] Though this consciousness, that I think it, need not be at every moment explicitly

realized, it is always capable of being realized. For if an object incapable of being combined with the idea of

a thinker were there, how could it be known, how related to other objects, how form part of 'experience' at

The awareness that I think is therefore implied in all experience. No connected consciousness of anything

without that of Self as its presupposition and 'transcendental' condition! All things, then, so far as they are

intelligible at all, are so through combination with pure consciousness of Self, and apart from this, at least

But this self, whose consciousness Kant thus established deductively as a conditio sine qu� non of

experience, is in the same breath denied by him to have any positive attributes. Although Kant's name for it

the 'original transcendental synthetic Unity of Apperception' is so long, our consciousness about it is,

according to him, short enough. Selfconsciousness of this 'transcendental' sort tells us, 'not how we appear,

not how we inwardly are, but only that we are' ( � 25). At the basis of our knowledge of our selves there lies

only "the simple and utterly empty idea: I; of which we cannot even say we have a notion, but only a

consciousness which accompanies all notions. In this I, or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing more is

represented than the bare transcendental Subject of the knowledge = x, which is only recognized by the

thoughts which are its predicates, and of which, taken by itself, we cannot form the least conception" (ibid.

'Paralogisms'). The pure Ego of all apperception is thus for Kant not the soul, but only that 'Subject' which is

the necessary correlate of the Object in all knowledge. There is a soul, Kant thinks, but this mere egoform of

our consciousness tells us nothing about it, neither whether it be substantial, nor whether it be immaterial, nor

whether it be simple, nor whether it be permanent. These declarations on Kant's part of the utter barrenness of

the consciousness of the pure Self, and of the consequent impossibility of any deductive or 'rational'

psychology, are what, more than anything else, earned for him the title of the 'alldestroyer.' The only self we

know anything positive about, he thinks, is the empirical me, not the pure I; the self which is an object among

other objects and the 'constituents' of which we ourselves have seen, and recognized to be phenomenal things

Those purposes go no farther than to ascertain whether anything in Kant's conception ought to make us give

up our own, of a remembering and appropriating Thought inces santly renewed. In many respects Kant's

meaning is obscure, but it will not be necessary for us to squeeze the texts in order to make sure what it

actually and historically was. If we can define clearly two or three things which it may possibly have been,

On the whole, a defensible interpretation of Kant's view would take somewhat the following shape. Like

ourselves he believes in a Reality outside the mind of which he writes, but the critic who vouches for that

reality does so on grounds of faith, for it is not a verifiable phenomenal thing. Neither is it manifold. The

'Manifold' which the intellectual functions combine is a mental manifold altogether, which thus stands

between the Ego of Apperception and the outer Reality, but still stands inside the mind. In the function of

knowing there is a multiplicity to be connected, and Kant brings this multiplicity inside the mind. The Reality

becomes a mere empty locus, or unknowable, the socalled Noumenon; the manifold phenomenon is in the

mind. We, on the contrary, put the Multiplicity with the Reality outside, and leave the mind simple. Both of

us deal with the same elements thought and object the only question is in which of them the multiplicity

shall be lodged. Wherever it is lodged it must be 'synthetized' when it comes to be thought. And that

particular way of lodging it will be the better, which, in addition to describing the facts naturally, makes the

Well, Kant's way of describing the facts is mythological. The notion of our thought being this sort of an

elaborate internal machineshop stands condemned by all we said in favor of its simplicity on pages 276 ff.

Our Thought is not composed of parts, however so composed its objects may be. There is no originally

chaotic manifold in it to be reduced to order. There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a

function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb. If we are to have a dualism of Thought and Reality at

all, the multiplicity should be lodged in the latter and not in the former member of the couple of related terms.

The parts and the relations surely belong less to the knower than to what is known.

But even were all the mythology true, the process of synthesis would in no whit be explained by calling the

inside of the mind its seat. No mystery would be made lighter by such means. It is just as much a puzzle how

the 'Ego' can employ the productive Imagination to make the Understanding use the categories to combine the

data which Recognition, Association, and Apprehension receive from sensible Intuition, as how the Thought

can combine the objective facts. Phrase it as one may, the difficulty is always the same: the Many known by

the One. Or does one seriously think he understands better how the knower 'connects' its objects, when one

calls the former a transcendental Ego and the latter a 'Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls them

Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought,

Psychosis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feeling, what you like it must know. The

best grammatical subject for the verb know would, if possible, be one from whose other properties the

knowing could be deduced. And if there be no such subject, the best one would be that with the fewest

ambiguities and the least pretentious name. By Kant's confession, the transcendental Ego has no properties,

and from it nothing can be deduced. Its name is pretentious, and, as we shall presently see, has its meaning

ambiguously mixed up with that of the substantial soul. So on every possible account we are excused from

using it instead of our own term of the present passing 'Thought,' as the principle by which the Many is

The ambiguity referred to in the meaning of the transcendental Ego is as to whether Kant signified by it an

Agent, and by the Experience it helps to constitute, an operation; or whether the experience is an event

produced in an unassigned way, and the Ego a mere indwelling element therein contained. If an operation be

meant, then Ego and Manifold must both be existent prior to that collision which results in the experience of

one by the other. If a mere analysis is meant, there is no such prior existence, and the elements only are in so

far as they are in union. Now Kant's tone and language are everywhere the very words of one who is talking

of operations and the agents by which they are performed.[32] And yet there is reason to think that at bottom

he may have had nothing of the sort in mind.[33] In this uncertainty we need again do no more than decide

Well, if it be so, Transcendentalism is only Substantialism grown shamefaced, and the Ego only a 'cheap

and nasty' edition of the soul. All our reasons for preferring the 'Thought' to the 'Soul' apply with redoubled

force when the Soul is shrunk to this estate. The Soul truly explained nothing; the 'syntheses,' which she

performed, were simply taken readymade and clapped on to her as expressions of her nature taken after the

fact; but at least she had some semblance of nobility and outlook. She was called active; might select; was

responsible, and permanent in her way. The Ego is simply nothing: as ineffectual and windy an abortion as

Philosophy can show. It would indeed by one of Reason's tragedies if the good Kant, with all his honesty and

strenuous pains, should have deemed this conception an important outbirth of his thought.

But we have seen that Kant deemed it of next to no importance at all. It was reserved for his Fichtean and

Hegelian successors to call it the first Principle of Philosophy, to spell its name in capitals and pronounce it

with adoration, to act, in short, as if they were going up in a balloon, whenever the notion of it crossed their

mind. Here again, however, I am uncertain of the facts of history, and know that I may not read my authors

aright. The whole lesson of Kantian and postKantian speculation is, it seems to me, the lesson of simplicity.

With Kant, complication both of thought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced by the musty

academicism of his K�nigsberg existence. With Hegel is was a raging fever. Terribly, therefore, do the sour

grapes which these fathers of philosophy have eaten set our teeth on edge. We have in England and America,

however, a contemporary continuation of Hegelism from which, fortunately, somewhat simpler deliverances

come; and, unable to find any definite psychology in what Hegel, Rosenkranz, or Erdmann tells us of the

The great difference, practically, between these authors and Kant is their complete abstraction from the

onlooking Psychologist and from the Reality he thinks he knows; or rather it is the absorption of both of these

outlying terms into the proper topic of Psychology, viz., the mental experience of the mind under observation.

The Reality coalesces with the connected Manifold, the Psychologist with the Ego, knowing becomes

'connecting,' and there results no longer a finite or criticisable, but an 'absolute' Experience, of which the

Object and the Subject are always the same. Our finite 'Thought' is virtually and potentially this eternal (or

rather this 'timeless'), absolute Ego, and only provisionally and speciously the limited thing which it seems

prim� facie to be. The later 'sections' of our 'Stream,' which come and appropriate the earlier ones, are those

earlier ones, just as in substantialism the Soul is throughout all time the same.[34] This 'solipsistic' char

acter of an Experience conceived as absolute really annihilates psychology as a distinct body of science.

Psychology is a natural science, an account of particularly finite streams of thought, coexisting and

succeeding in time. It is of course conceivable (though far from clearly so) that in the last metaphysical resort

all these streams of thought may be thought by one universal Allthinker. But in this metaphysical notion

there is no profit for psychology; for grant that one Thinker does think in all of us, still what He thinks in me

and what in you can never be deduced from the bare idea of Him. The idea of Him seems even to exert a

positively paralyzing effect on the mind. The existence of finite thoughts is suppressed altogether. Thought's

"not to be sought in the incidents of individual lives which last but for a day.... No knowledge, nor any mental

act involved in knowledge, can properly be called a 'phenomenon of consciousness.'... For a phenomenon is a

sensible event, related in the way of antecedence or consequence to other sensible events, but the

consciousness which constitutes a knowledge... is not an event so related nor made up of such events."

"we examine the constituents of any perceived object,... we shall find alike that it is only for consciousness

that they can exist, and that the consciousness for which they thus exist cannot be merely a series of

phenomena or a succession of states.... It then becomes clear that there is a function of consciousness, as

exercised in the most rudimentary experience [namely, the function of synthesis] which is incompatible with

the definition of consciousness as any sort of succession of any sort of phenomena."[35]

Were we to follow these remarks, we should have to abandon our notion of the 'Thought' (perennially

renewed in time, but always cognitive thereof), and to espouse instead of it an entity copied from thought in

all essential respects, but differing from it in being 'out of time.' What psychology can gain by this barter

would be hard to divine. Moreover this resemblance of the timeless Ego to the Soul is completed by other

resemblances still. The monism of the postKantian idealists seems always lapsing into a regular

oldfashioned spiritualistic dualism. They incessantly talk as if, like the Soul, their Allthinker were an

Agent, operating on detached materials of sense. This may come from the accidental fact that the English

writings of the school have been more polemic than constructive, and that a reader may often take for a

positive profession a statement ad hominem meant as part of a reduction to the absurd, or mistake the analysis

of a bit of knowledge into elements for a dramatic myth about its creation. But I think the matter has

profounder roots. Professor Green constantly talks of the 'activity' of Self as a 'condition' of knowledge taking

place. Facts are said to become incorporated with other facts only through the 'action of a combining

"Every object we perceive... requires, in order to its presentation, the action of a principle of consciousness,

not itself subject to conditions of time, upon successive appearances, such action as may hold the appearances

It is needless to repeat that the connection of things in our knowledge is in no whit explained by making it the

deed of an agent whose essence is selfidentity and who is out of time. The agency of phenomenal thought

coming and going in time is just as easy to understand. And when it is furthermore said that the agent that

combines is the same 'selfdistinguishing subject' which 'in another mode of its activity' presents the

manifold object to itself, the unintelligibilities become quite paroxysmal, and we are forced to confess that

the entire school of thought in question, in spite of occasional glimpses of something more refined, still

dwells habitually in that mythological stage of thought where phenomena are explained as results of dramas

enacted by entities which but reduplicate the characters of the phenomena themselves. The self must not only

know its object, that is too bald and dead a relation to be written down and left in its static state. The

knowing must be painted as a 'famous victory' in which the object's distinctness is in some way 'overcome.'

"The self exists as one self only as it opposes itself, as object, to itself as subject, and immediately denies and

transcends that opposition. Only because it is such a concrete unity, which has in itself a resolved

contradiction, can the intelligence cope with all the manifoldness and division of the mighty universe, and

hope to master its secrets. As the lightning sleeps in the dewdrop, so in the simple and transparent unity of

selfconsciousness there is held in equilibrium that vital antagonism of opposites which... seems to rend the

world asunder. The intelligence is able to understand the world, or, in other words, to break down the barrier

itself and things and find itself in them, just because its own existence is implicitly the solution of all the

This dynamic (I had almost written dynamitic) way of representing knowledge has the merit of not being

tame. To turn from it to our own psychological formulation is like turning from the fireworks, trapdoors,

"ghastly through the drizzling rain, On the bald street breaks the blank day!"[38] And yet turn we must, with

the confession that our 'Thought' a cognitive phenomenal event in time is, if it exist at all, itself the only

Thinker which the facts require. The only service that transcendental egoism has done to psychology has been

by its protests against Hume's 'bundle' theory of mind. But this service has been illperformed; for the

Egoists themselves, let them say what they will, believe in the bundle, and in their own system merely tie it

up, with their special transcendental string, invented for that use alone. Besides, they talk as if, with this

miraculous tying or 'relating,' the Ego's duties were done. Of its far more important duty of choosing some of

the things it ties and appropriating them, to the exclusion of the rest, they tell us never a word. To sum up,

then, my own opinion of the transcendentalist school, it is (whatever ulterior metaphysical truth it may

divine) a school in which psychology at least has naught to learn, and whose deliverances about the Ego in

particular in no wise oblige us to revise our own formulation of the Stream of Thought.[39]

With this, all possible rival formulations have been discussed. The literature of the Self is large, but all its

authors may be classed as radical or mitigated representatives of the three schools we have named,

substantialism, associationism, or transcendentalism. Our own opinion must be classed apart, although it

incorporates essential elements from all three schools. There need never have been a quarrel between

associationism and its rivals if the former had admitted the indecomposable unity of every pulse of thought,

and the latter been willing to allow that 'perishing' pulses of thought might recollect and know.

We may sum up by saying that personality implies the incessant presence of two elements, and objective

person, known by a passing subjective Thought and recognized as continuing in time. Hereafter let us see the

In the first place, although its changes are gradual, they become in time great. The central part of the me is

the feeling of the body and of the adjustments in the head; and in the feeling of the body should be included

that of the general emotional tones and tendencies, for at bottom these are but the habits in which organic

activities and sensibilities run. Well, from infancy to old age, this assemblage of feelings, most constant of

all, is yet a prey to slow mutation. Our powers, bodily and mental, change at least as fast.[40] Our

The identity which the I discovers, as it surveys this long procession, can only be a relative identity, that of a

slow shifting in which there is always some common ingredient retained.[41] The commonest element of all,

the most uniform, is the possession of the same memories. However different the man may be from the youth,

Thus the identity found by the I in its me is only a loosely construed thing, an identity 'on the whole,' just like

that which any outside observer might find in the same assemblage of facts. We often say of a man 'he is so

changed one would not know him'; and so does a man, less often, speak of himself. These changes in the me,

recognized by the I, or by outside observers, may be grave or slight. They deserve some notice here.

1. Alterations of memory; and 2. Alterations in the present bodily and spiritual selves.

1. Alterations of memory are either losses or false recollections. In either case the me is changed. Should a

man be punished for what he did in his childhood and no longer remembers? Should he be punished for

crimes enacted in postepileptic unconsciousness, somnambulism, or in any involuntarily induced state of

which no recollection is retained? Law, in accord with commonsense, says: "No; he is not the same person

forensically now which he was then." These losses of memory are a normal incident of extreme old age, and

In dreams we forget our waking experiences; they are as if they were not. And the converse is also true. As a

rule, no memory is retained during the waking state of what has happened during mesmeric trance, although

when again entranced the person may remember it distinctly, and may then forget facts belonging to the

waking state. We thus have, within the bounds of healthy mental life, an approach to an alteration of me's.

False memories are by no means rare occurrences in most of us, and, whenever they occur, they distort the

consciousness of the me. Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past.

They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they

did so. The content of a dream will oftentimes insert itself into the stream of real life in a most perplexing

way. The most frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experiences. Such

accounts we almost al ways make both more simple and more interesting than the truth. We quote what we

should have said or done, rather than what we really said or did; and in the first telling we may be fully aware

of the distinction. But ere long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns in its stead alone. This is

one great source of the fallibility of testimony meant to be quite honest. Especially where the marvellous is

concerned, the story takes a tilt that way, and the memory follows the story. Dr. Carpenter quotes from Miss

"It happened once to the Writer to hear a most scrupulously conscientious friend narrate an incident of

tableturning, to which she appended an assurance that the table rapped when nobody was within a yard of it.

The writer being confounded by this latter fact, the lady, though fully satisfied of the accuracy of her

statement, promised to look at the note she had made ten years previously of the transaction. The note was

examined, and was found to contain the distinct statement that the table rapped when the hands of six persons

rested on it! The lady's memory as to all other points proved to be strictly correct; and in this point she had

It is next to impossible to get a story of this sort accurate in all its details, although it is the inessential details

that suffer most change.[43] Dickens and Balzac were said to have constantly mingled their fictions with their

real experiences. Every one must have known some specimen of our mortal dust so intoxicated with the

thought of his own person and the sound of his own voice as never to be able even to think the truth when his

autobiography was in question. Amiable, harmless, radiant J. V.! mayst thou ne'er wake to the difference

2. When we pass beyond alterations of memory to abnormal alterations in the present self we have still graver

disturbances. These alterations are of three main types, from the descriptive point of view. But certain cases

unite features of two or more types; and our knowledge of the elements and causes of these changes of

personality is so slight that the division into types must not be regarded as having any profound significance.

1) In insanity we often have delusions projected into the past, which are melancholic or sanguine according to

the character of the disease. But the worst alterations of the self come from present perversions of sensibility

and impulse which leave the past undisturbed, but induce the patient to think that the present me is an

altogether new personage. Something of this sort happens normally in the rapid expansion of the whole

character, intellectual as well as volitional, which takes place after the time of puberty. The pathological cases

The basis of our personality, as M. Ribot says, is that feeling of our vitality which, because it is so perpetually

"It is the basis because, always present, always acting, without peace or rest, it knows neither sleep nor

fainting, and lasts as long as life itself, of which it is one form. It serves as a support to that selfconscious

me which memory constitutes, it is the medium of association among its other parts.... Suppose now that it

were possible at once to change our body and put another into its place: skeleton, vessels, viscera, muscles,

skin, everything made new, except the nervous system with its storedup memory of the past. There can be

no doubt that in such a case the afflux of unaccustomed vital sensations would produce the gravest disorders.

Between the old sense of existence engraved on the nervous system, and the new one acting with all the

intensity of its reality and novelty, there would be irreconcilable contradiction."[45]

With the beginnings of cerebral disease there often happens something quite comparable to this:

"Masses of new sensation, hitherto foreign to the individual, impulses and ideas of the same inexperienced

kind, for example terrors, representations of enacted crime, of enemies pursuing one, etc. At the outset, these

stand in contrast with the old familiar me, as a strange, often astonishing and abhorrent thou.[46] Often their

invasion into the former circle of feelings is felt as if the old self were being taken possession of by a dark

overpowering might, and the fact of such 'possession' is described in fantastic images. Always this

doubleness, this struggle of the old self against the new discordant forms of experience, is accompanied with

painful mental conflict, with passion, with violent emotional excitement. This is in great part the reason for

the common experience, that the first stage in the immense majority of cases of mental disease is an

emotional alteration particularly of a melancholic sort. If now the brainaffection, which is the immediate

cause of the new abnormal train of ideas, be not relieved, the latter becomes confirmed. It may gradually

contract associations with the trains of ideas which characterized the old self, or portions of the latter may be

extinguished and lost in the progress of the cerebral malady, so that little by little the opposition of the two

conscious me's abates, and the emotional storms are calmed. But by that time the old me itself has been

falsified and turned into another by those associations, by that reception into itself of the abnormal elements

of feeling and of will. The patient may again be quiet, and his thought sometimes logically correct, but in it

the morbid erroneous ideas are always present, with the adhesions they have contracted, as uncontrollable

premises, and the man is no longer the same, but a really new person, his old self transformed."[47]

But the patient himself rarely continues to describe the change in just these terms unless new bodily

sensations in him or the loss of old ones play a predominant part. Mere perversions of sight and hearing, or

even of impulse, soon cease to be felt as contradictions of the unity of the me.

What the particular perversions of the bodily sensibility may be, which give rise to there contradictions, is for

the most part impossible for a soundminded person to conceive. One patient has another self that repeats all

his thoughts for him. Others, among whom are some of the first characters in history, have familiar daemons

who speak with them, and are replied to. In another someone 'makes' his thoughts for him. Another has two

bodies, lying in different beds. Some patients feel as if they had lost parts of their bodies, teeth, brain,

stomach, etc. In some it is made of wood, glass, butter, etc. In some it does not exist any longer, or is dead, or

is a foreign object quite separate from the speaker's self. Occasionally, parts of the body lose their connection

for consciousness with the rest, and are treated as belonging to another person and moved by a hostile will.

Thus the right hand may fight with the left as with an enemy.[48] Or the cries of the patient himself are

assigned to another person with whom the patient expresses sympathy. The literature of insanity is filled with

narratives of such illusions as these. M. Taine quotes from a patient of Dr. Krishaber an account of sufferings,

from which it will be seen how completely aloof from what is normal a man's experience may suddenly

"After the first or second day it was for some weeks impossible to observe or analyze myself. The suffering

angina pectoris was too overwhelming. It was not till the first days of January that I could give an account

to myself of what I experienced.... Here is the first thing of which I retain a clear rememberance. I was alone,

and already a prey to permanent visual trouble, when I was suddenly seized with a visual trouble infinitely

more pronounced. Objects grew small and receded to infinite distances men and things together. I was

myself im measurably far away. I looked about me with terror and astonishment; the world was escaping

from me.... I remarked at the same time that my voice was extremely far away from me, that it sounded no

longer as if mine. I struck the ground with my foot, and perceived its resistance; but this resistance seemed

illusory not that the soil was soft, but that the weight of my body was reduced to almost nothing.... I had the

feeling of being without weight.. " In addition to being so distant, "objects appeared to me flat. When I spoke

with anyone, I saw him like an image cut out of paper with no relief.... This sensation lasted intermittently for

two years.... Constantly it seemed as if my legs did not belong to me. It was almost as bad with my arms. As

for my head, it seemed no longer to exist.... I appeared to myself to act automatically, by an impulsion foreign

to myself.... There was inside of me a new being, and another part of myself, the old being, which took no

interest in the newcomer. I distinctly remember saying to myself that the sufferings of this new being were

to me indifferent. I was never really dupe of these illusions, but my mind grew often tired of incessantly

correcting the new impressions, and I let myself go an lived the unhappy life of this new entity. I had an

ardent desire to see my old world again, to get back to my old self. This desire kept me from killing myself....

I was another, and I hated, I despised this other; he was perfectly odious to me; it was certainly another who

In cases similar to this, it is as certain that the I is unaltered as that the me is changed. That is to say, the

present Thought of the patient is cognitive of both the old me and the new, so long as its memory holds good.

Only, within that objective sphere which formerly lent itself so simply to the judgment of recognition and of

egoistic appropriation, strange perplexities have arisen. The present and the past both seen therein will not

unite. Where is my old me? What is this new one? Are they the same? Or have I two? Such questions,

answered by whatever theory the patient is able to conjure up as plausible, form the beginning of his insane

A case with which I am acquainted through Dr. C. J. Fisher of Tewksbury has possibly its origin in this way.

"has been many years insane, and always speaks of her supposed self as 'the rat,' asking me to 'bury the little

rat,' etc. Her real self she speaks of in the third person as 'the good woman,' saying, 'The good woman knew

Dr. F. and used to work for him,' etc. Sometimes she sadly asks: 'Do you think the good woman will ever

come back?' She works at needlework, knitting, laundry, etc., and shows her work, saying, 'Isn't that good for

only a rat?' She has, during periods of depression, hid herself under buildings, and crawled into holes and

under boxes. 'She was only a rat, and wants to die,' she would say when we found her."

2. The phenomenon of altering personality in its simplest phases seems based on lapses of memory. Any man

becomes, as we say, inconsistent with himself if he forgets his engagements, pledges, knowledges, and

habits; and it is merely a question of degree at what point we shall say that his personality is changed. In the

pathological cases known as those of double or alternate personality the lapse of memory is abrupt, and is

usually preceded by a period of unconsciousness or syncope lasting a variable length of time. In the hypnotic

trance we can easily produce an alteration of the personality, either by telling the subject to forget all that has

happened to him since such or such a date, in which case he becomes (it may be) a child again, or by telling

him he is another altogether imaginary personage, in which case all facts about himself seem for the time

being to lapse from out his mind, and he throws himself into the new character with a vivacity proportionate

to the amount of histrionic imagination which he possesses.[51] But in the pathological cases the

transformation is spontaneous. The most famous case, perhaps, on record is that of F�lida X., reported by Dr.

Azam of Bordeaux.[52] At the age of fourteen this woman began to pass into a 'secondary' state characterized

by a change in her general disposition and character, as if certain 'inhibitions,' previously existing, were

suddenly removed. During the secondary state she remembered the first state, but on emerging from it into

the first state she remembered nothing of the second. At the age of fortyfour the duration of the secondary

state (which was on the whole superior in quality to the original state) had gained upon the latter so much as

to occupy most of her time. During it she remembers the events belonging to the original state, but her

complete oblivion of the secondary state when the original state recurs is often very distressing to her, as, for

example, when the transition takes place in a carriage on her way to a funeral, and she hasn't the least idea

which one of her friends may be dead. She actually became pregnant during one of her early secondary states,

and during her first state had no knowledge of how it had come to pass. Her distress at these blanks of

To take another example, Dr. Rieger gives an account[53] of an epileptic man who for seventeen years had

passed his life alternately free, in prisons, or in asylums, his character being orderly enough in the normal

state, but alternating with periods, during which he would leave his home for several weeks, leading the life

of a thief and vagabond, being sent to jail, having epileptic fits and excitement, being accused of malingering,

etc., etc., and with never a memory of the abnormal conditions which were to blame for all his wretchedness.

"I have never got from anyone," says Dr. Rieger, "so singular an impression as from this man, of whom it

could not be said that he had any properly conscious past at all.... It is really impossible to think one's self

into such a state of mind. His last larceny had been performed in N�rnberg, he knew nothing of it, and saw

himself before the court and then in the hospital, but without in the least understanding the reason why. That

he had epileptic attacks, he knew. But it was impossible to convince him that for hours together he raved and

Another remarkable case is that of Mary Reynolds, lately republished again by Dr. Weir Mitchell.[54] This

dull and melancholy young woman, inhabiting the Pennsylvania wilderness in 1811,

"was found one morning, long after her habitual time for rising, in a profound sleep from which it was

impossible to arouse her. After eighteen or twenty hours of sleeping she awakened, but in a state of unnatural

consciousness. Memory had fled. To all intents and purposes she was as a being for the first time ushered into

the world. 'All of the past that remained to her was the faculty of pronouncing a few words, and this seems to

have been as purely instinctive as the wailings of an infant; for at first the words which she uttered were

connected with no ideas in her mind.' Until she was taught their significance they were unmeaning sounds.

"'Her eyes were virtually for the first time opened upon the world. Old things had passed away; all things had

become new.' Her parents, brothers, sisters, friends, were not recognized or acknowledged as such by her.

She had never seen them before, never known them, was not aware that such persons had been. Now for

the first time she was introduced to their company and acquaintance. To the scenes by which she was

surrounded she was a perfect stranger. The house, the fields, the forest, the hills, the vales, the streams, all

"She had not the slightest consciousness that she had ever existed previous to the moment in which she

awoke from that mysterious slumber. 'In a word, she was an infant, just born, yet born in a state of maturity,

with a capacity for relishing the rich, sublime, luxuriant wonders of created nature.'

"The first lesson in her education was to teach her by what ties she was bound to those by whom she was

surrounded, and the duties devolving upon her accordingly. This she was very slow to learn, and, 'indeed,

never did learn, or, at least, never would acknowledge the ties of consanguinity, or scarcely those of

friendship. She considered those she had once known as for the most part strangers and enemies, among

whom she was, by some remarkable and unaccountable means, transplanted, though from what region or

"The next lesson was to reteach her the arts of reading and writing. She was apt enough, and made such

rapid progress in both that in a few weeks she had readily relearned to read and write. In copying her name

which her brother had written for her as a first lesson, she took her pen in a very awkward manner and began

to copy from right to left in the Hebrew mode, as though she had been transplanted from an Eastern soil....

"The next thing that is noteworthy is the change which took place in her disposition. Instead of being

melancholy she was now cheerful to extremity. Instead of being melancholy she was now cheerful to

extremity. Instead of being reserved she was buoyant and social. Formerly taciturn and retiring, she was now

merry and jocose. Her disposition was totally and absolutely changed. While she was, in this second state,

extravagantly found of company, she was much more enamoured of nature's works, as exhibited in the

forests, hills, vales, and watercourses. She used to start in the morning, either on foot or horseback, and

ramble until nightfall over the whole country; nor was she at all particular whether she were on a path or in

the trackless forest. Her predilection for this manner of life may have been occasioned by the restraint

necessarily imposed upon her by her friends, which caused her to consider them her enemies and not

"She knew no fear, and as bears and panthers were numerous in the woods, and rattlesnakes and copperheads

abounded everywhere, her friends told her of the danger to which she exposed herself, but it produced no

other effect than to draw forth a contemptuous laugh, as she said, 'I know you only want to frighten me and

keep me at home, but you miss it, for I often see your bears and I am perfectly convinced that they are

"One evening, after her return from her daily excursion, she told the following incident: 'As I was riding

today along a narrow path a great black hog came out of the woods and stopped before me. I never saw such

an impudent black hog before. It stood up on its hind feet and grinned and gnashed its teeth at me. I could not

make the horse go on. I told him he was a fool to be frightened at a hog, and tried to whip him past, but he

would not go an wanted to turn back. I told the hog to get out of the way, but he did not mind me. "Well,"

said I, "if you won't for words, I'll try blows;" so I got off and took a stick, and walked up toward it. When I

got pretty close by, it got down on all fours and walked away slowly and sullenly, stopping every few steps

and looking back and grinning and growling. Then I got on my horse and rode on.'...

"Thus it continued for five weeks, when one morning, after a protracted sleep, she awoke and was herself

again. She recognized the parental, the brotherly, and sisterly ties as though nothing had happened, and

immediately went about the performance of duties incumbent upon her, and which she had planned five

weeks previously. Great was her surprise at the change which one night (as she supposed) had produced.

Nature bore a different aspect. Not a trace was left in her mind of the giddy scenes through which she had

passed. Her ram blings through the forest, her tricks and humor, all were faded from her memory, and not a

shadow left behind. Her parents saw their child; her brothers and sisters saw their sister. She now had all the

knowledge that she had possessed in her first state previous to the change, still fresh and in as vigorous

exercise as though no change had been. But any new acquisitions she had made, and any new ideas she had

obtained, were lost to her now yet not lost, but laid up out of sight in safekeeping for future use. Of course

her natural disposition returned; her melancholy was deepened by the information of what had occurred. All

went on in the oldfashioned way, and it was fondly hoped that the mysterious occurrences of those five

weeks would never be repeated, but these anticipations were not to be realized. After the lapse of a few weeks

she fell into a profound sleep, and awoke in her second state, taking up her new life again precisely where she

had left it when she before passed from that state. She was not now a daughter or a sister. All the knowledge

she possessed was that acquired during the few weeks of her former period of second consciousness. She

knew nothing of the intervening time. Two periods widely separated were brought into contact. She thought it

"In this state she came to understand perfectly the facts of her case, not from memory, but from information.

Yet her buoyancy of spirits was so great that no depression was produced. On the contrary, it added to her

"These alternations from one state to another continued at intervals of varying length for fifteen or sixteen

years, but finally ceased when she attained the age of thirtyfive or thirtysix, leaving her permanently in her

second state. In this she remained without change for the last quarter of a century of her life."

The emotional opposition of the two states seems, however, to have become gradually effaced in Mary

"The change from a gay, hysterical, mischievous woman, fond of jests and subject to absurd beliefs or

delusive convictions, to one retaining the joyousness and love of society, but sobered down to levels of

practical usefulness, was gradual. The most of the twentyfive years which followed she was as different

from her melancholy, morbid self as from the hilarious condition of the early years of her second state. Some

of her family spoke of it as her third state. She is described as becoming rational, industrious, and very

cheerful, yet reasonably serious; possessed of a wellbalanced temperament, and not having the slightest

indication of an injured or disturbed mind. For some years she taught school, and in that capacity was both

"During these last twentyfive years she lived in the same house with the Rev. Dr. John Reynolds, her

nephew, part of that time keeping house for him, showing a sound judgment and a thorough acquaintance

"Dr. Reynolds, who is still living in Meadville," says Dr. Mitchell, "and who has most kindly placed the facts

at my disposal, states in his letter to me of January 4, 1888, that at a later period of her life she said she did

sometimes seem to have a dim, dreamy idea of a shadowy past, which she could not fully grasp, and could

not be certain whether it originated in a partially restored memory or in the statements of the events by others

"Miss Reynolds died in January, 1854, at the age of sixtyone. On the morning of the day of her death she

rose in her usual health, at her breakfast, and superintended household duties. While thus employed she

suddenly raised her hands to her head and exclaimed: 'Oh! I wonder what is the matter with my head!' and

immediately fell to the floor. When carried to a sofa she gasped once or twice and died."

In such cases as the preceding, in which the secondary character is superior to the first, there seems reason to

think that the first one is the morbid one. The word inhibition describes its dulness and melancholy. F�lida

X.'s original character was dull and melancholy in comparison with that which she later acquired, and the

change may be regarded as the removal of inhibitions which had maintained themselves from earlier years.

Such inhibitions we all know temporarily, when we can not recollect or in some other way command our

mental resources. The systematized amnesias (losses of memory) of hypnotic subjects ordered to forget all

nouns, or all verbs, or a particular letter of the alphabet, or all that is relative to a certain person, are

inhibitions of the sort on a more extensive scale. They sometimes occur spontaneously as symptoms of

disease.[55] Now M. Pierre Janet has shown that such inhibitions when they bear on a certain class of

sensations (making the subject anaesthetic thereto) and also on the memory of such sensations, are the basis

of changes of personality. The anaesthetic and 'amnesic' hysteric is one person; but when you restore her

inhibited sensibilities and memories by plunging her into the hypnotic trance in other words, when you

rescue them from their 'dissociated' and splitoff condition, and make them rejoin the other sensibilities and

memories she is a different person. As said above (p. 203), the hypnotic trance is one method of restoring

sensibility in hysterics. But one day when the hysteric anaesthetic named Lucie was already in the hypnotic

trance, M. Janet for a certain reason continued to make passes over her for a full halfhour as if she were not

already asleep. The result was to throw her into a sort of syncope from which, after half an hour, she revived

in a second somnambulic condition entirely unlike that which had characterized her thitherto different

sensibilities, a different memory, a different person, in short. In the waking state the poor young woman was

anaesthetic all over, nearly deaf, and with a badly contracted field of vision. Bad as it was, however, sight

was her best sense, and she used it as a guide in all her movements. With her eyes bandaged she became

entirely helpless, and like other persons of a similar sort whose cases have been recorded, she almost

immediately fell asleep in consequence of the withdrawal of her last sensorial stimulus. M. Janet calls this

waking or primary (one can hardly in such a connection say 'normal') state by the name of Lucie 1. In Lucie

2, her first sort of hypnotic trance, the anaesthesias were diminished but not removed. In the deeper trance,

'Lucie 3,' brought about as just described, no trace of them remained. Her sensibility became perfect, and

instead of being an extreme example of the 'visual' type, she was transformed into what in Prof. Charcot's

terminology is known as a motor. That is to say, that whereas when awake she had thought in visual terms

exclusively, and could imagine things only by remembering how they looked, now in this deeper trance her

thoughts and memories seemed to M. Janet to be largely composed of images of movement and of touch.

Having discovered this deeper trance and change of personality in Lucie, M. Janet naturally became eager to

find it in his other subjects. He found it in Rose, in Marie, and in L�onie; and his brother, Dr. Jules Janet, who

was interne at the Salp�tri�re Hospital, found it in the celebrated subject Wit.... whose trances had been

studied for years by the various doctors of that institution without any of them having happened to awaken

With the return of all the sensibilities in the deeper trance, these subjects turned, as it were, into normal

persons. Their memories in particular grew more extensive, and hereupon M. Janet spins a theoretic

generalization. When a certain kind of sensation, he says, is abolished in an hysteric patient, there is also

abolished along with it all recollection of past sensations of that kind. If, for example, hearing be the

anaesthetic sense, the patient becomes unable even to imagine sounds and voices, and has to speak (when

speech is till possible) by means of motor or articulatory cues. If the motor sense be abolished, the patient

must will the movements of his limbs by first defining them to his mind in visual terms, and must innervate

his voice by premonitory ideas of the way in which the words are going to sound. The practical consequences

of this law would be great, for all experiences belonging to a sphere of sensibility which afterwards became

anaesthetic, as, for example, touch, would have been stored away and remembered in tactile terms, and be

incontinently forgotten as soon as the cutaneous and muscular sensibility should come to be cut out in the

course of disease. Memory of them would be restored again, on the other hand, as soon as the sense of touch

came back. Now, in the hysteric subjects on whom M. Janet experimented, touch did come back in the state

of trance. The result was that all sorts of memories, absent in the ordinary condition, came back too, and they

could then go back and explain the origin of many otherwise inexplicable things in their life. One stage in the

great convulsive crisis of hysteroepilepsy, for example, is what French writers call the phase des attitudes

passionelles, in which the patient, without speaking or giving any account of herself, will go through the

outward movements of fear, anger, or some other emotional state of mind. Usually this phase is, with each

patient, a thing so stereotyped as to seem automatic, and doubts have even been expressed as to whether any

consciousness exists whilst it lasts. When, however, the patient Lucie's tactile sensibility came back in the

deeper trance, she explained the origin of her hysteric crisis in a great fright which she had had when a child,

on a day when certain men, hid behind the curtains, had jumped out upon her; she told how she went through

this scene again in all her crises; she told of her sleepwalking fits through the house when a child, and how

for several months she had been shut in a dark room because of a disorder of the eyes. All these were things

of which she recollected nothing when awake, because they were records of experiences mainly of motion

But M. Janet's subject L�onie is interesting, and shows best how with the sensibilities and motor impulses the

"This woman, whose life sounds more like an improbable romance than a genuine history, has had attacks of

natural somnambulism since the age of three years. She has been hypnotized constantly by all sorts of

persons from the age of sixteen upwards, and she is now fortyfive. Whilst her normal life developed in one

way in the midst of her poor country surroundings, her second life was passed in drawingrooms and doctors'

offices, and naturally took an entirely different direction. Today, when in her normal state, this poor peasant

woman is a serious and rather sad person, calm and slow, very mild with every one, and extremely timid: to

look at her one would never suspect the personage which she contains. But hardly is she put to sleep

hypnotically when a metamorphosis occurs. Her face is no longer the same. She keeps her eyes closed, it is

true, but the acuteness of her other senses supplies their place. She is gay, noisy, restless, sometimes

insupportably so. She remains goodnatured, but has acquired a singular tendency to irony and sharp jesting.

Nothing is more curious than to hear her after a sitting when she has received a visit from strangers who

wished to see her asleep. She gives a wordportrait of them, apes their manners, pretends to know their little

ridiculous aspects and passions, and for each invents a romance. To this character must be added the

possession of an enormous number of recollections, whose existence she does not even suspect when awake,

for her amnesia is then complete.... She refuses the name of L�onie and takes that of L�ontine (L�onie 2) to

which her first magnetizers had accustomed her. 'That good woman is not myself,' she says, 'she is too

stupid!' To herself, L�ontine or L�onie 2, she attributes all the sensations and all the actions, is a word all the

conscious experiences which she has undergone in somnambulism, and knits them together to make the

history of her already long life. To L�onie 1 (as M. Janet calls the waking woman] on the other hand, she

exclusively ascribes the events lived through in waking hours. I was at first struck by an important exception

to the rule, and was disposed to think that there might be something arbitrary in this partition of her

recollections. In the normal state L�onie has a husband and children; but L�onie 2, the somnambulist, whilst

acknowledging the children as her own, attributes the husband to 'the other.' This choice, was perhaps

explicable, but it followed no rule. It was not till later that I learned that her magnetizers in early days, as

audacious as certain hypnotizers of recent date, had somnambulized her for her first accouchements, and that

she had lapsed into that state spontaneously in the later ones. L�onie 2 was thus quite right in ascribing to

herself the children it was she who had had them, and the rule that her first trancestate forms a different

personality was not broken. But it is the same with her second or deepest state of trance. When after the

renewed passes, syncope, etc., she reaches the condition which I have called L�onie 3, she is another person

still. Serious and grave, instead of being a restless child, she speaks slowly and moves but little. Again she

separates herself from the waking L�onie 1. 'A good but rather stupid woman,' she says, 'and not me.' And she

also separates herself from L�onie 2: 'How can you see anything of me in that crazy creature?' she says.

L�onie 1 knows only of herself; L�onie 2 of herself and of L�onie 1; L�onie 3 knows of herself and of both

the others. L�onie 1 has a visual consciousness; L�onie 2 has one both visual and auditory; in L�onie 3 it is at

once visual, auditory, and tactile. Prof. Janet thought at first that he was L�onie 3's discoverer. But she told

him that she had been frequently in that condition before. A former magnetizer had hit upon her just as M.

"This resurrection of a somnambulic personage who had been extinct for twenty years is curious enough; and

in speaking to L�onie 3, I naturally now adopt the name of L�onore which was given her by her first master."

The most carefully studies case of multiple personality is that of the hysteric youth Louis V. about whom

MM. Bourru and Burot have written a book.[57] The symptoms are too intricate to be reproduced here with

detail. Suffice it that Louis V. had led an irregular life, in the army, in hospitals, and in houses of correction,

and had had numerous hysteric anaesthesias, paralyses, and contractures attacking him differently at different

times and when he lived at different places. At eighteen, at an agricultural House of Correction he was bitten

by a viper, which brought on a convulsive crisis and left both of his legs paralyzed for three years. During

this condition he was gentle, moral, and industrious. But suddenly at last, after a long convulsive seizure, his

paralysis disappeared, and with it his memory for all the time during which it had endured. His character also

changed: he became quarrelsome, gluttonous, impolite, stealing his comrades' wine, and money from an

attendant, and finally escaped from the establishment and fought furiously when he was overtaken and

caught. Later, when he first fell under the observation of the authors, his right side was half paralyzed and

insensible, and his character intolerable; the application of metals transferred the paralysis to the left side,

abolished his recollections of the other condition, and carried him psychically back to the hospital of Bic�tre

where he had been treated for a similar physical condition. His character, opinions, education, all underwent a

concomitant transformation. He was no longer the personage of the moment before. It appeared ere long that

any present nervous disorder in him could be temporarily removed by metals, magnets, electric or other

baths, etc.; and that any past disorder could be brought back by hypnotic suggestion. He also went through a

rapid spontaneous repetition of his series of past disorders after each of the convulsive attacks which occurred

in him at intervals. It was observed that each physical state in which he found himself, excluded certain

"The law of these changes," say the authors, "is quite clear. There exist precise, constant, and necessary

relations between the bodily and the mental state, such that it is impossible to modify the one without

The case of this proteiform individual would seem, then, nicely to corroborate M. P. Janet's law that

anaesthesias and gaps in memory go together. Coupling Janet's law with Locke's that changes of memory

bring changes of personality, we should have an apparent explanation of some cases at least of alternate

personality. But mere anaesthesia does not sufficiently explain the changes of disposition, which are probably

due to modifications in the perviousness of motor and associative paths, coordinate with those of the

sensorial paths rather than consecutive upon them. And indeed a glance at other cases than M. Janet's own,

suffices to show us that sensibility and memory are not coupled in any invariable way.[59] M. Janet's law,

Of course it is mere guesswork to speculate on what may be the cause of the amnesias which lie at the bottom

of changes in the Self. Changes of bloodsupply have naturally been invoked. Alternate action of the two

hemispheres was long ago proposed by Dr. Wigan in his book on the Duality of the Mind. I shall revert to

this explanation after considering the third class of alterations of the Self, those, namely, which I have called

I have myself become quite recently acquainted with the subject of a case of alternate personality of the

'ambu latory' sort, who has given me permission to name him in these pages.[60] The Rev. Ansel Bourne, of

Greene, R. I., was brought up to the trade of a carpenter; but, in consequence of a sudden temporary loss of

sight and hearing under very peculiar circumstances, he became converted from Atheism to Christianity just

before his thirtieth year, and has since that time for the most part lived the life of an itinerant preacher. He has

been subject to headaches and temporary fits of depression of spirits during most of his life, and has had a

few fits of unconsciousness lasting an hour or less. He also has a region of somewhat diminished cutaneous

sensibility on the left thigh. Otherwise his health is good, and his muscular strength and endurance excellent.

He is of a firm and selfreliant disposition, a man whose yea is yea and his nay, nay; and his character for

uprightness is such in the community that no person who knows him will for a moment admit the possibility

On January 17, 1887, he drew 551 dollars from a bank in Providence with which to pay for a certain lot of

land in Greene, paid certain bills, and got into a Pawtucket horsecar. This is the last incident which he

remembers. He did not return home that day, and nothing was heard of him for two months. He was

published in the papers as missing, and foul play being suspected, the police sought in vain his whereabouts.

On the morning of March 14th, however, at Norristown, Pennsylvania, a man calling himself A. J. Brown,

who had rented a small shop six weeks previously stocked it with stationery, confectionery, fruit and small

articles, and carried on his quiet trade without seeming to any one unnatural or eccentric, woke up in a fright

and called in the people of the house to tell him where he was. He said that his name was Ansel Bourne, that

he was entirely ignorant of Norristown, that he knew nothing of shopkeeping, and that the last thing he

remembered it seemed only yesterday was drawing the money from the bank, etc., in Providence. He

would not believe that two months had elapsed. The people of the house thought him insane; and so, at first,

did Dr. Louis H. Read, whom they called in to see him. But on telegraphing to Providence, confirmatory

messages came, and presently his nephew, Mr. Andrew Harris, arrived upon the scene, made everything

straight, and took him home. He was very weak, having lost apparently over twenty pounds of flesh during

his escapade, and had such a horror of the idea of the candystore that he refused to set foot in it again.

The first two weeks of the period remained unaccounted for, as he had no memory, after he had once resumed

his normal personality, of any part of the time, and no one who knew him seems to have seen him after he left

home. The remarkable part of the change is, of course, the peculiar occupation which the socalled Brown

indulged in. Mr. Bourne has never in his life had the slightest contract with trade. 'Brown' was described by

the neighbors as taciturn, orderly in his habits, and in no way queer. He went to Philadelphia several times;

replenished his stock; cooked for himself in the back shop, where he also slept; went regularly to church; and

once at a prayermeeting made what was considered by the hearers a good address, in the course of which he

This was all that was known of the case up to June 1890, when I induced Mr. Bourne to submit to hypnotism,

so as to see whether, in the hypnotic trance, his 'Brown' memory would not come back. It did so with

surprising readiness; so much so indeed that it proved quite impossible to make him whilst in the hypnosis

remember any of the facts of his normal life. He had heard of Ansel Bourne, but "didn't know as he had ever

met the man." When confronted with Mrs. Bourne he said that he had "never seen the woman before," etc. On

the other hand, he told of his peregrinations during the lost fortnight,[61] and gave all sorts of details about

the Norristown episode. The whole thing was prosaic enough; and the Brownpersonality seems to be

nothing but a rather shrunken, dejected, and amnesic extract of Mr. Bourne himself. He gives no motive for

the wandering except that there was 'trouble back there' and he 'wanted rest.' During the trance he looks old,

the corners of his mouth are drawn down, his voice is slow and weak, and he sits screening his eyes and

trying vainly to remember what lay before and after the two months of the Brown experience. "I'm all hedged

in," he says: "I can't get out at either end. I don't know what set me down in that Pawtucket horsecar, and I

don't know how I ever left that store, or what became of it." His eyes are practically normal, and all his

sensibilities (save for tardier response) about the same in hypnosis as in waking. I had hoped by suggestion,

etc., to run the two personalities into one, and make the memories continuous, but no artifice would avail to

accomplish this, and Mr. Bourne's skull today still covers two distinct personal selves.

The case (whether it contain an epileptic element or not) should apparently be classed as one of spontaneous

hypnotic trance, persisting for two months. The peculiarity of it is that nothing else like it ever occurred in the

man's life, and that no eccentricity of character came out. In most similar cases, the attacks recur, and the

3. In 'mediumships' or 'possessions' the invasion and the passing away of the secondary state are both

relatively abrupt, and the duration of the state is usually short i.e., from a few minutes to a few hours.

Whenever the secondary state is well developed no memory for aught that happened during it remains after

the primary consciousness comes back. The subject during the secondary consciousness speaks, writes, or

acts as if animated by a foreign person, and often names this foreign person and gives his history. In old times

the foreign 'control' was usually a demon, and is so now in communities which favor that belief. With us he

gives himself out at the worst for an Indian or other grotesquely speaking but harmless personage. Usually he

purports to be the spirit of a dead person known or unknown to those present, and the subject is then what we

call a 'medium.' Mediumistic possession in all its grades seems to form a perfectly natural special type of

alternate personality, and the susceptibility to it in some form is by no means an uncommon gift, in persons

who have no other obvious nervous anomaly. The phenomena are very intricate, and are only just beginning

to be studied in a proper scientific way. The lowest phase of mediumship is automatic writing, and the lowest

grade of that is where the Subject knows what words are coming, but feels impelled to write them as if from

without. Then comes writing unconsciously, even whilst engaged in reading or talk. Inspirational speaking,

playing on musical instruments, etc., also belong to the relatively lower phases of possession, in which the

normal self is not excluded from conscious participation in the performance, though their initiative seems to

come from elsewhere. In the highest phase the trance is complete, the voice, language, and everything are

changed, and there is no aftermemory whatever until the next trance comes. One curious thing about

tranceutterances is their generic similarity in different individuals. The 'control' here in America is either a

grotesque, slangy, and flippant personage ('Indian' controls, calling the ladies 'squaws,' the men 'braves,' the

house a 'wigwam,' etc., etc., are excessively common); or, if he ventures on higher intellectual flights, he

abounds in a curiously vague optimistic philosophyandwater, in which phrases about spirit, harmony,

beauty, law, progression, development, etc., keep recurring. It seems exactly as if one author composed more

than half of the trancemessages, no matter by whom they are uttered. Whether all subconscious selves are

peculiarly susceptible to a certain stratum of the Zeitgeist, and get their inspiration from it, I know not; but

this is obviously the case with the secondary selves which become 'developed' in spiritualist circles. There the

beginnings of the medium trance are indistinguishable from effects of hypnotic suggestion. The subject

assumes the role of a medium simply because opinion expects it of him under the conditions which are

present; and carries it out with a feebleness or a vivacity proportionate to his histrionic gifts. But the odd

thing is that persons unexposed to spiritualist traditions will so often act in the same way when they become

entranced, speak in the name of the departed, go through the motions of their several deathagonies, send

messages about their happy home in the summerland, and describe the ailments of those present. I have no

As an example of the automatic writing performances I will quote from an account of his own case kindly

furnished me by Mr. Sidney Dean of Warren, R. I., member of Congress from Connecticut from 1855 to

1859, who has been all his life a robust and active journalist, author, and man of affairs. He has for many

years been a writing subject, and has a large collection of manuscript automatically produced.

"Some of it," he writes us, "is in hieroglyph, or strange compounded arbitrary characters; each series

possessing a seeming unity in general design or character, followed by what purports to be a translation or

rendering into mother English. I never attempted the seemingly impossible feat of copying the characters.

They were cut with the precision of a graver's tool, and generally with a single rapid stroke of the pencil.

Many languages, some obsolete and passed from history, and professedly given. To see them would satisfy

"These, however, are but a small part of the phenomena. The 'automatic' has given place to the impressional,

and when the work is in progress I am in the normal condition, and seemingly two minds, intelligences,

persons, are practically engaged. The writing is in my own hand but the dictation not of my own mind and

will, but that of another, upon subjects of which I can have no knowledge and hardly a theory; and I, myself,

consciously criticise the thought, fact, mode of expressing it, etc., while the hand is recording the

subjectmatter and even the words impressed to be written. If I refuse to write the sentence, or even the word,

the impression instantly ceases, and my willingness must be mentally expressed before the work is resumed,

and it is resumed at the point of cessation, even if it should be in the middle of a sentence. Sentences are

commenced without knowledge of mine as to their subject or ending. In fact, I have never known in advance

"There is in progress now, at uncertain times, not subject to my will, a series of twentyfour chapters upon

the scientific features of life, moral, spiritual, eternal. Seven have already been written in the manner

indicated. These were preceded by twentyfour chapters relating generally to the life beyond material death,

its characteristics, etc. Each chapter is signed by the name of some person who has lived on earth, some

with whom I have been personally acquainted, others known in history.... I know nothing of the alleged

authorship of any chapter until it is completed and the name impressed and appended.... I am interested not

only in the reputed authorship, of which I have nothing corroborative, but in the philosophy taught, of

which I was in ignorance until these chapters appeared. From my standpoint of life which has been that of

biblical orthodoxy the philosophy is new, seems to be reasonable, and is logically put. I confess to an

"It is an intelligent ego who writes, or else the influence assumes individuality, which practically makes of

the influence a personality. It is not myself; of that I am conscious at every step of the process. I have also

traversed the whole field of the claims of 'unconscious cerebration,' so called, so far as I am competent to

critically examine it, and it fails, as a theory, in numberless points, when applied to this strange work through

me. It would be far more reasonable and satisfactory for me to accept the silly hypothesis of reincarnation,

the old doctrine of metempsychosis, as taught by some spiritualists today, and to believe that I lived a

former life here, and that once in a while it dominates my intellectual powers, and writes chapters upon the

philosophy of life, or opens a postoffice for spirits to drop their effusions, and have them put into English

script. No; the easiest and most natural solution to me is to admit the claim made, i.e., that it is a decarnated

intelligence who writes. But who? that is the question. The names of scholars and thinkers who once lived are

"It seems reasonable to me upon the hypothesis that it is a person using another's mind or brain that there

must be more or less of that other's style or tone incorporated in the message, and that to the unseen

personality, i.e., the power which impresses, the thought, the fact, or the philosophy, and not the style or tone,

belongs. For instance, while the influence is impressing my brain with the greatest force and rapidity, so that

my pencil fairly flies over the paper to record the thoughts, I am conscious that, in many cases, the vehicle of

the thought, i.e., the language, is very natural and familiar to me, as if, somehow, my personality as a writer

was getting mixed up with the message. And, again, the style, language, everything, is entirely foreign to my

I am myself persuaded by abundant acquaintance with the trances of one medium that the 'control' may be

altogether different from any possible waking self of the person. In the case I have in mind, if professes to be

a certain departed French doctor; and is, I am convinced, acquainted with facts about the circumstances, and

the living and dead relatives and acquaintances, of numberless sitters whom the medium never met before,

and of whom she has never heard the names. I record my bare opinion here unsupported by the evidence, not,

of course, in order to convert anyone to my view, but because I am persuaded that a serious study of these

trancephenomena is one of the greatest needs of psychology, and think that my personal confession may

possibly draw a reader or two into a field which the soidisant 'scientist' usually refuses to explore.

Many persons have found evidence conclusive to their minds that in some cases the control is really the

departed spirit whom it pretends to be. The phenomena shade off so gradually into cases where this is

obviously absurd, that the presumption (quite apart from a priori 'scientific' prejudice) is great against its

being true. The case of Lurancy Vennum is perhaps as extreme a case of 'pos session' of the modern sort as

one can find.[63] Lurancy was a young girl of fourteen, living with her parents at Watseka, Ill., who (after

various distressing hysterical disorders and spontaneous trances, during which she was possessed by departed

spirits of a more or less grotesque sort) finally declared herself to be animated by the spirit of Mary Roff (a

neighbor's daughter, who had died in an insane asylum twelve years before) and insisted on being sent 'home'

to Mr. Roff's house. After a week of 'homesickness' and importunity on her part, her parents agreed, and the

Roffs, who pitied her, and who were spiritualists into the bargain, took her in. Once there, she seems to have

convinced the family that their dead Mary had exchanged habitations with Lurancy. Lurancy was said to be

temporarily in heaven, and Mary's spirit now controlled her organism, and lived again in her former earthly

"The girl, now in her new home, seemed perfectly happy and content, knowing every person and everything

that Mary knew when in her original body, twelve to twentyfive years ago, recognizing and calling by name

those who were friends and neighbors of the family from 1852 to 1865, when Mary died, calling attention to

scores, yes, hundreds of incidents that transpired during her natural life. During all the period of her sojourn

at Mr. Roff's she had no knowledge of, and did not recognize, any of Mr. Vennum's family, their friends or

neighbors, yet Mr. and Mrs. Vennum and their children visited her and Mr. Roff's people, she being

introduced to them as to any strangers. After frequent visits, and hearing them often and favorably spoken of,

she learned to love them as acquaintances, and visited them with Mrs. Roff three times. From day to day she

appeared natural, easy, affable, and industrious, attending diligently and faithfully to her household duties,

assisting in the general work of the family as a faithful, prudent daughter might be supposed to do, singing,

reading, or conversing as opportunity offered, upon all matters of private or general interest to the family."

The socalled Mary whilst at the Roffs' would sometimes 'go back to heaven,' and leave the body in a 'quiet

trance,' i.e., without the original personality of Lurancy returning. After eight or nine weeks however, the

memory and manner of Lurancy would sometimes partially, but not entirely, return for a few minutes. Once

Lurancy seems to have taken full possession for a short time. At last, after some fourteen weeks,

comformably to the prophecy which 'Mary' had made when she first assumed 'control,' she departed

"She wanted me to take her home, which I did. She called me Mr. Roff, and talked with me as a young girl

would, not being acquainted. I asked her how things appeared to her if they seemed natural. She said it

seemed like a dream to her. She met her parents and brothers in a very affectionate manner, hugging and

kissing each one in tears of gladness. She clasped her arms around her father's neck a long time, fairly

smothering him with kisses. I saw her father just now (eleven o'clock). He says she has been perfectly

"perfectly and entirely well and natural. For two or three weeks after her return home, she seemed a little

strange to what she had been before she was taken sick last summer, but only, perhaps, the natural change

that had taken place with the girl, and except it seemed to her as though she had been dreaming or sleeping,

etc. Lurancy has been smarter, more intelligent, more industrious, more womanly, and more polite than

before. We give the credit of her complete cure and restoration to her family, to Dr. E. W. Stevens, and Mr.

and Mrs. Roff, by their obtaining her removal to Mr. Roff's, where her cure was perfected. We firmly believe

that, had she remained at home, she would have died, or we would have been obliged to send her to the

insane asylum; and if so, that she would have died there; and further, that I could not have lived a short time

with the care and trouble devolving on me. Several of the relatives of Lurancy, including ourselves, now

Eight years later, Lurancy was reported to be married and a mother, and in good health. She had apparently

On the condition of the sensibility during these invasions, few observations have been made. I have found the

hands of two automatic writers anaesthetic during the act. In two others I have found this not to be the case.

Automatic writing is usually preceded by shooting pains along the armnerves and irregular contractions of

the armmuscles. I have found one medium's tongue and lips apparently insensible to pinpricks during her

If we speculate on the braincondition during all these different perversions of personality, we see that it

must be supposed capable of successively changing all its modes of action, and abandoning the use for the

time being of whole sets of well organized associationpaths. In no other way can we explain the loss of

memory in passing from one alternating condition to another. And not only this, but we must admit that

organized systems of paths can be thrown out of gear with others, so that the processes in one system give

rise to one consciousness, and those of another system to another simultaneously existing consciousness.

Thus only can we understand the facts of automatic writing, etc., whilst the patient is out of trance, and the

false anaesthesias and amnesias of the hysteric type. But just what sort of dissociation the phrase 'thrown out

of gear' may stand for, we cannot even conjecture; only I think we ought not to talk of the doubling of the self

as if it consisted in the failure to combine on the part of certain systems of ideas which usually do so. It is

better to talk of objects usually combined, and which are now divided between the two 'selves,' in the hysteric

and automatic cases in question. Each of the selves is due to a system of cerebral paths acting by itself. If the

brain acted normally, and the dissociated systems came together again, we should get a new affection of

consciousness in the form of a third 'Self' different from the other two, but knowing their objects together, as

the result. After all I have said in the last chapter, this hardly needs further remark.

Some peculiarities in the lower automatic performances suggest that the systems thrown out of gear with each

other are contained one in the right and the other in the left hemisphere. The subjects, e.g., often write

backwards, or they transpose letters, or they write mirrorscript. All these are symptoms of agraphic disease.

The left hand, if left to its natural impulse, will in most people write mirrorscript more easily than natural

script. Mr. F. W. H. Myers has laid stress on these analogies.[65] He has also called attention to the usual

inferior moral tone of ordinary planchette writing. On Hughlings Jackson's principles, the left hemisphere,

being the more evolved organ, at ordinary times inhibits the activity of the right one; but Mr. Myers suggests

that during the automatic performances the usual inhibition may be removed and the right hemisphere set free

to act all by itself. This is very likely to some extent to be the case. But the crude explanation of 'two' selves

by 'two' hemispheres is of course far from Mr. Myers's thought. The selves may be more than two, and the

brainsystems severally used for each must be conceived as interpenetrating each other in very minute ways.

Summary. To sum up now this long chapter. The consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought, each

part of which as 'I' can 1) remember those which went before, and know the things they knew; and 2)

emphasize and care paramountly for certain ones among them as 'me,' and appropriate to these the rest. The

nucleus of the 'me' is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time. Whatever

rememberedpastfeelings resemble this present feeling are deemed to belong to the same me with it.

Whatever other things are perceived to be associated with this feeling are deemed to form part of that me's

experience; and of them certain ones (which fluctuate more or less) are reckoned to be themselves

constituents of the me in a larger sense, such are the clothes, the material possessions, the friends, the

honors and esteem which the person receives or may receive. This me is an empirical aggregate of things

objectively known. The I which knows them cannot itself be an aggregate, neither for psychological purposes

need it be considered to be an unchanging metaphysical entity like the Soul, or a principle like the pure Ego,

viewed as 'out of time.' It is a Thought, at each moment different from that of the last moment, but

appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own. All the experiential facts find their

place in this description, unencumbered with any hypothesis save that of the existence of passing thoughts or

states of mind. The same brain may subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexisting; but by

what modifications in its action, or whether ultracerebral conditions may intervene, are questions which

If anyone urge that I assign no reason why the successive passing thoughts should inherit each other's

possessions, or why they and the brainstates should be functions (in the mathematical sense) of each other, I

reply that the reason, if there be any, must lie where all real reasons lie, in the total sense or meaning of the

world. If there be such a meaning, or any approach to it (as we are bound to trust there is), it alone can make

clear to us why such finite human streams of thought are called into existence in such functional dependence

upon brains. This is as much as to say that the special natural science of psychology must stop with the mere

functional formula. If the passing thought be the directly verifiable existent which no school has hitherto

doubted it to be, then that thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond. The only

pathway that I can discover for bringing in a more transcendental thinker would be to deny that we have any

direct knowledge of the thought as such. The latter's existence would then be reduced to a postulate, an

assertion that there must be a knower correlative to all this known; and the problem who that knower is would

have become a metaphysical problem. With the question once stated in these terms, the spiritualist and

transcendentalist solutions must be considered as prima facie on a par with our own psychological one, and

discussed impartially. But that carries us beyond the psychological or naturalistic point of view.

Footnotes [1] See, for a charming passage on the Philosophy of Dress, H. Lotze's Microcosmus, Eug. tr. vol.

[3] "He who imagines commendation and disgrace not to be strong motives on men... seems little skilled in

the nature and history of mankind; the greatest part whereof he shall find to govern themselves chiefly, if not

solely, by this law of fashion; and so they do that which keeps them in reputation with their company, little

regard the laws of God or the magistrate. The penalties that attend the breach of God's laws some, nay, most,

men seldom seriously reflect on; and amongst those that do, many, whilst they break the laws, entertain

thoughts of future reconciliation, and making their peace for such breaches: and as to the punishments due

from the laws of the commonwealth, they frequently flatter themselves with the hope of impunity. But no

man escapes the punishment of their censure and dislike who offends against the fashion and opinion of the

company he keeps, and would recommend himself to. Nor is there one in ten thousand who is stiff and

insensible enough to bear up under the constant dislike and condemnation of his own club. He must be of a

strange and unusual constitution who can content himself to live in constant disgrace and disrepute with his

own particular society. Solitude many men have sought and been reconciled to; but nobody that has the least

thought or sense of a man about him can live in society under the constant dislike and ill opinion of his

familiars and those he converses with. This is a burden too heavy for human sufferance: and he must be made

up of irreconcilable contradictions who can take pleasure in company and yet be insensible of contempt and

[4] For some farther remarks on these feelings of movement see the next chapter.

[5] Wundt's account of Selfconsciousness deserves to be compared with this. What I have called

'adjustments' he calls processes of 'Apperception.' "In this development (of consciousness) one particular

group of percepts claims a prominent significance, namely, those of which the spring lies in ourselves. The

images of feelings we get from our own body, and the representations of our own movements distinguish

themselves from all others by forming a permanent group. As there are always some muscles in a state either

of tension or of activity it follows that we never lack a sense, either dim or clear, of the positions or

movements of our body.... This permanent sense, moreover, has this particularity, that we are aware of our

power at any moment voluntarily to arouse any one of its ingredients. We excite the sensations of movement

immediately by such impulses of the will as shall arouse the movements themselves; and we excite the visual

and tactile feelings of our body by the voluntary movement of our organs of sense. So we come to conceive

this permanent mass of feeling as immediately or remotely subject to our will, and call it the consciousness of

ourself. This selfconsciousness is, at the outset, thoroughly sensational,... only gradually the secondnamed

of its characters, its subjection to our will, attains predominance. In proportion as the apperception of all our

mental objects appears to us as an inward exercise of will, does our selfconsciousness begin both to widen

itself and to narrow itself at the same time. It widens itself in that every mental act, whatever comes to stand

in relation to our will; and it narrows itself in that it concentrates itself more and more upon the inner activity

of apperception, over against which our own body and all the representations connected with it appear as

external objects, different from our proper self. This consciousness, contracted down to the process of

apperception, we call our Ego; and the apperception of mental objects in general, may thus, after Leibnitz, be

designated as the raising of them into our selfconsciousness. Thus the natural development of

selfconsciousness implicitly involves the most abstract forms in which this faculty has been described in

philosophy; only philosophy is fond of placing the abstract ego at the outset, and so reversing the process of

development. Nor should we overlook the fact that the completely abstract ego [as pure activity], although

suggested by the natural development of our consciousness, is never actually found therein. The most

speculative of philosophers is incapable of disjoining his ego form those bodily feelings and images which

form the incessant background of his awareness of himself. The notion of his ego as such is, like every

notion, derived from sensibility, for the process of apperception itself comes to our knowledge chiefly

through those feelings of tension [what I have above called inward adjustments] which accompany it."

[6] The only exception I know of is M. J. Souriau, in his important article in the Revue Philosophique, vol.

XXII. p. 449. M. Souriau's conclusion is 'que la conscience n'existe pas' (p. 472).

[7] See the excellent remarks by Prof. Bain on the 'Emotion of Power' in his 'Emotions and the Will.'

[8] Cf. Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, 'The Everlasting Yea.' "I tell thee, blockhead, it all comes of thy vanity; of

what thou fanciest those same deserts of thine to be. Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most

likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair halter, it

will be luxury to die in hemp.... What act of legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy? A little while

[10] "The usual mode of lessening the shock of disappointment or disesteem is to contract, if possible, a low

estimate of the persons that inflict it. This is our remedy for the unjust censures of party spirit, as well as of

[11] It must be observed that the qualities of the Self thus ideally constituted are all qualities approved by my

actual fellows in the first instance; and that my reason for now appealing from their verdict to that of the ideal

judge lies in some outward peculiarity of the immediate case. What once was admired in me as courage has

now become in the eyes of men 'impertinence'; what was fortitude is obstinacy; what was fidelity is now

fanaticism. The ideal judge alone, I now believe, can read my qualities, my willingnesses, my powers, or

what they truly are. My fellows, misled by interest and prejudice, have gone astray.

[12] The kind of selfishness varies with the self that is sought. If it be the mere bodily self; if a man grabs the

best food the warm corner, the vacant seat; if he makes room for no one, spits about, and belches in our faces,

we call it hoggishness. If it be the social self, in the form of popularity or influence, for which he is greedy,

he may in material ways subordinate himself to others as the best means to his end; and in this case he is very

apt to pass for a disinterested man. If it be the 'otherworldly' self which he seeks, and if he seeks it

ascetically, even though he would rather see all mankind damned eternally than lose his individual soul,

'saintliness' will probably be the name by which his selfishness will be called.

[14] Psychologische Analyzen auf Physiologischer Grundlage. Theil II. IIte H�lfte, � 11. The whole section

[15] Professor Bain, in his chapter on 'Emotions of Self,' does scant justice to the primitive nature of a large

part of our selffeeling, and seems to reduce it to reflective selfestimation of this sober intellectual sort,

which certainly most of it is not. He says that when the attention is turned inward upon self as a Personality,

"we are putting forth towards ourselves the kind of exercise that properly accompanies our contemplation of

other persons. We are accustomed to scrutinize the actions and conduct of those about us, to set a higher

value upon one man than upon another, by comparing the two; to pity one in distress; to feel complacency

towards a particular individual; to congratulate a man on some good fortune that it pleases us to see him gain;

to admire greatness or excellence as displayed by any of our fellows. All these exercises are intrinsically

social, like Love and Resentment; an isolated individual could never attain to them, nor exercise them. By

what means, then, through what fiction [!] can we turn round and play them off upon self? Or how comes it

that we obtain any satisfaction by putting self in the place of the other party? Perhaps the simplest form of the

reflected act is that expressed by Selfworth and Selfestimation, based and begun upon observation of the

ways and conduct of our fellowbeings. We soon make comparisons among the individuals about us; we see

that one is stronger and does more work than another, and, in consequence perhaps, receives more pay. We

see one putting forth perhaps more kindness than another, and in consequence receiving more love. We see

some individuals surpassing the rest in astonishing feats, and drawing after them the gaze and admiration of a

crowd. We acquire a series of fixed associations towards persons so situated; favorable in the case of the

superior, and unfavorable to the inferior. To the strong and laborious man we attach an estimate of greater

reward, and feel that to be in his place would be a happier lot than falls to others. Desiring, as we do, from the

primary motives of our being, to possess good things, and observing these to come by a man's superior

exertions, we feel a respect for such exertion and a wish that it might be ours. We know that we also put forth

exertions for our share of good things; and on witnessing others, we are apt to be reminded of ourselves and

to make comparisons with ourselves, which comparisons derive their interest from the substantial

consequences. Having thus once learned to look at other persons as performing labors, greater or less, and as

realizing fruits to accord; being, moreover, in all respects like our fellows, we find it an exercise neither

difficult nor unmeaning to contemplate self as doing work and receiving the reward.... As we decide between

one man and another, which is worthier,... so we decide between self and all other men; being, however, in

this decision under the bias of our own desires." A couple of pages farther on we read: "By the terms

Selfcomplacency, Selfgratulation, is indicated a positive enjoyment in dwelling upon our own merits and

belongings. As in other modes, so here, the starting point is the contemplation of excellence or pleasing

qualities in another person, accompanied more or less with fondness or love." Selfpity is also regarded by

Professor Bain, in this place, as an emotion diverted to ourselves from a more immediate object, "in a manner

that we may term fictitious and unreal. Still, as we can view self in the light of another person, we can feel

This account of Professor Bain's is, it will be observed a good specimen of the oldfashioned mode of

explaining the several emotions as rapid calculations of results, and the transfer of feeling from one object to

another, associated by contiguity or similarity with the first. Zoological evolutionism, which came up since

Professor Bain first wrote, has made us see, on the contrary, that many emotions must be primitively aroused

by special objects. None are more worthy of being ranked primitive than the selfgratulation and humiliation

attendant on our own successes and failures in the main functions of life. We need no borrowed reflection for

these feelings. Professor Bain's account applied to but that small fraction of our selffeeling which reflective

criticism can add to, or subtract from, the total mass. Lotze has some pages on the modifications of our

[16] "Also nur dadurch, dass ich ein Mannigfaltiges gegebener Vorstellungen in einem Bewusstsein

verbinden kann, ist es m�glich dass ich die Identit�t des Bewusstseins in diesen Vorstellungen selbst

vorstelle, d. h. die analytische Einheit der Apperception ist nur unter der Voraussetzung irgend einer

synthetischen m�glich." In this passage (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2te Aufl. � 16) Kant calls by the names

of analytic and synthetic apperception what we here mean by objective and subjective synthesis respectively.

It were much to be desired that some one might invent a good pair of terms in which to record the distinction

those used in the text are certainly very bad, but Kant's seem to me still worse. 'Categorical unity' and

'transcendental synthesis' would also be good Kantian, but hardly good human, speech.

[17] So that we might say, by a sort of bad pun, "only a connected world can be known as disconnected." I

say bad pun, because the point of view shifts between the connectedness and the disconnectedness. The

disconnectedness is of the realities known; the connectedness is of the knowledge of them; and reality and

knowledge of it are, from the psychological point of view held fast to in these pages, two different facts.

[18] Some subtle reader will object that the Thought cannot call any part of its Object 'I' and knit other parts

on to it, without first knitting that part on to Itself; and that it cannot knit it on to Itself without knowing

Itself; so that our supposition (above, p. 304) that the Thought may conceivably have no immediate

knowledge of Itself is thus overthrown. To which the reply is that we must take care not to be duped by

words. The words I and me signify nothing mysterious and unexampled they are at bottom only names of

emphasis; and Thought is always emphasizing something. Within a tract of space which it cognizes, it

contrasts a here with a there; within a tract of time a now with a then; of a pair of things it calls one this, the

other that. I and thou, I and it, are distinctions exactly on a par with these, distinctions possible in an

exclusively objective field of knowledge, the 'I' meaning for the Thought nothing but the bodily life which it

momentarily feels. The sense of my bodily existence, however obscurely recognized as such, may then be the

absolute original of my conscious selfhood, the fundamental perception that I am. All appropriations may be

made to it, by a Thought not at the moment immediately cognized by itself. Whether these are not only

logical possibilities but actual facts is something not yet dogmatically decided in the text.

[19] Metaphysik, � 245fin. This writer, who in his early work, the Medizinische Psychologie, was (to my

reading) a strong defender of the SoulSubstance theory, has written in �� 2435 of his Metaphysik the most

[20] On the empirical and transcendental conceptions of the self's unity, see Lotze, Metaphysic, � 244.

[22] Herbart believed in the Soul, too; but for him the 'Self' of which we are 'conscious' is the empirical Self

[25] 'Distinct only to observation,' he adds. To whose observation? the outside psychologist's, the Ego's, their

[26] Analysis, etc., J. S. Mill's Edition, vol. I. p. 331. The 'as it were' is delightfully characteristic of the

[29] His chapter on the Psychological Theory of Mind is a beautiful case in point, and his concessions there

have become so celebrated that they must be quoted for the reader's benefit. He ends the chapter with these

words (loc. cit. p. 247): "The theory, therefore, which resolves Mind into a series of feelings, with a

background of possibilities of feeling, can effectually withstand the most invidious of the arguments directed

against it. But groundless as are the extrinsic objections, the theory has intrinsic difficulties which we have

not set forth, and which it seems to me beyond the power of metaphysical analysis to remove....

"The thread of consciousness which composes the mind's phenomenal life consist not only of present

sensations, but likewise, in part, of memories and expectations. Now what are these? In themselves, they are

present feelings, states of present consciousness, and in that respect not distinguished from sensations. They

all, moreover, resemble some given sensations or feelings, of which we have previously had experience. But

they are attended with the peculiarity that each of them involves a belief in more than its own present

existence. A sensation involves only this; but a remembrance of sensation, even if not referred to any

particular date, involves the suggestion and belief that a sensation, of which it is a copy or representation,

actually existed in the past; and an expectation involves the belief, more or less positive, that a sensation or

other feeling to which it directly refers will exist in the future. Nor can the phenomena involved in these two

states of consciousness be adequately expressed, without saying that the belief they include is, that I myself

formerly had, or that I myself, and no other, shall hereafter have, the sensations remembered or expected. The

fact believed is, that the sensations did actually form, or will hereafter form, part of the selfsame series of

states, or thread of consciousness, of which the remembrance or expectation of those sensations is the part

now present. If, therefore, we speak of the mind as a series of feelings we are obliged to complete the

statement by calling it a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and future; and we are reduced to

the alternative of believing that the mind, or Ego, is something different from any series of feelings, or

possibilities of them, or of accepting the paradox that something which ex hypothesi is but a series of

"The truth is, that we are here face to face with that final inexplicability, at which, as Sir W. Hamilton

observes, we inevitably arrive when we reach ultimate facts; and in general, one mode of stating it only

appears more incomprehensible than another, because the whole of human language is accommodated to the

one, and is so incongruous with the other that it cannot be expressed in any terms which do not deny its truth.

The real stumblingblock is perhaps not in any theory of the fact, but in the fact itself. The true

incomprehensibility perhaps is, that something which has ceased, or is not yet in existence, can still be, in a

manner, present; that a series of feelings, the infinitely greater part of which is past or future, can be gathered

up, as it were, into a simple present conception, accompanied by a belief or reality. I think by far the wisest

thing we can do is to accept the inexplicable fact, without any theory of how it takes place; and when we are

obliged to speak of it in terms which assume a theory, to use them with a reservation as to their meaning."

In a later place in the same book (p. 561) Mill, speaking of what may rightly be demanded of a theorist, says:

"He is not entitled to frame a theory from one class of phenomena, extend it to another class which it does not

fit, and excuse himself by saying that if we cannot make it fit, it is because ultimate facts are inexplicable."

The class of phenomena which the associationist school takes to frame its theory of the Ego are feelings

unaware of each other. The class of phenomena the Ego presents are feelings of which the later ones are

intensely aware of those that went before. The two classes do not 'fit,' and no exercise of ingenuity can ever

make them fit. No shuffling of unaware feelings can make them aware. To get the awareness we must openly

beg it by postulating a new feeling which has it. This new feeling is no 'Theory' of the phenomena, but a

simple statement of them; and as such I postulate in the text the present passing Thought as a psychic integer,

[31] It must be noticed, in justice to what was said above on page 274 ff., that neither Kant nor his successors

anywhere discriminate between the presence of the apperceiving Ego to the combined object, and the

awareness by that Ego of its own presence and of its distinctness from what it apperceives. That the Object

must be known to something which thinks, and that it must be known to something which thinks that it

thinks, are treated by them as identical necessities, by what logic, does not appear. Kant tries to soften the

jump in the reasoning by saying the thought of itself on the part of the Ego need only be potential "the 'I

think' must be capable of accompanying all other knowledge" but a thought which is only potential is

[32] "As regards the soul, now, or the 'I,' the 'thinker,' the whole drift of Kant's advance upon Hume and

sensational psychology is towards the demonstration that the subject of knowledge is an Agent." (G. S.

[33] "In Kant's Prolegomena," says II. Cohen, I do not myself find the passage, "it is expressly said that

the problem is not to show how experience arises (ensteht), but of what it consists (besteht)." (Kant's Theorie

[34] The contrast between the Monism thus reached and our own psychological point of view can be

exhibited schematically thus, the terms in squares standing for what, for us, are the ultimate irreducible data

of psychological science, and the vincula above it symbolizing the reductions which postKantian idealism

These reductions account for the ubiquitousness of the 'psychologist's fallacy' (bk. II. ch. I. p. 32) in the

modern monistic writings. For us it is an unpardonable logical sin, when talking of a thought's knowledge

(either of an object or of itself), to change the terms without warning, and, substituting the psychologist's

knowledge therefor, [sic] still make as if we were continuing to talk of the same thing. For monistic idealism,

this is the very enfranchisement of philosophy, and of course cannot be too much indulged in.

[38] One is almost tempted to believe that the pantomimestate of mind and that of the Hegelian dialectics

are, emotionally considered, one and the same thing. In the pantomime all common things are represented to

happen in impossible ways, people jump down each other's throats, houses turn inside out, old women

become young men, everything 'passes into its opposite' with inconceivable celerity and skill; and this, so far

from producing perplexity, brings rapture to the beholder's mind. And so in the Hegelian logic, relations

elsewhere recognized under the insipid name of distinctions (such as that between knower and object, many

and one) must first be translated into impossibilities and contradictions, then 'transcended' and identified by

miracle, ere the proper temper is induced for thoroughly enjoying the spectacle they show.

[39] The reader will please understand that I am quite willing to leave the hypothesis of the transcendental

Ego as a substitute for the passing Thought open to discussion on general speculative grounds. Only in this

book I prefer to stick by the commonsense assumption that we have successive conscious states, because all

psychologists make it, and because one does not see how there can be a Psychology written which does not

postulate such thoughts as its ultimate data. The data of all natural sciences become in turn subjects of a

critical treatment more refined than that which the sciences themselves accord; and so it may fare in the end

with our passing Thought. We have ourselves seen (pp. 299305) that the sensible certainty of its existence is

less strong than is usually assumed. My quarrel with the transcendental Egoists is mainly about their grounds

for their belief. Did they consistently propose it as a substitute for the passing Thought, did they consistently

deny the latter's existence, I should respect their position more. But so far as I can understand them, they

habitually believe in the passing Thought also. They seem even to believe in the Lockian stream of separate

ideas, for the chief glory of the Ego in their pages is always its power to 'overcome' this separateness and

unite the naturally disunited, 'synthetizing,' 'connecting,' or 'relating' the ideas together being used as

synonyms, by transcendentalist writers, for knowing various objects at once. Not the being conscious at all,

but the being conscious of many things together is held to be the difficult thing, in our psychic life, which

only the wonderworking Ego can perform. But on what slippery ground does one get the moment one

changes the definite notion of knowing an object into the altogether vague one of uniting or synthetizing the

ideas of its various parts! In the chapters on Sensation we shall come upon all this again.

[40] "When we compare the listeless inactivity of the infant, slumbering from the moment at which he takes

his milky food to the moment at which he wakes to require it again, with the restless energies of that mighty

being which he is to become in his maturer years, pouring truth after truth, in rapid and dazzling profusion,

upon the world, or grasping in his single hand the destiny of empires, how few are the circumstances of

resemblance which we can trace, of all that intelligence which is afterwards to be displayed; how little more

is seen than what serves to give feeble motion to the mere machinery of life!... Every age, if we may speak of

many ages in the few years of human life, seems to be marked with a distinct character. Each has its peculiar

objects which excite lively affections; and in each, exertion is excited by affections, which in other periods

terminate without inducing active desire. The boy finds a world in less space than that which bounds his

visible horizon; he wanders over his range of field and exhausts his strength in the pursuit of objects which,

in the years that follow, are seen only to be neglected; while to him the objects that are afterwards to absorb

his whole soul are as indifferent as the objects of his present passions are destined then to appear.... How

many opportunities must every one have had of witnessing the progress of intellectual decay, and the

coldness that steals upon the once benevolent heart! We quit our country, perhaps at an early period of life,

and after an absence of many years we return with all the rememberances of past pleasure which grow more

tender as they approach their objects. We eagerly seek him to whose paternal voice we have been accustomed

to listen with the same reverence as if its predictions had possessed oracular certainty, who first led us into

knowledge, and whose image has been constantly joined in our mind with all that veneration which does not

forbid love. We find him sunk, perhaps, in the imbecility of idiotism, unable to recognize us, ignorant alike

of the past and of the future, and living only in the sensibility of animal gratification. We seek the favorite

companion of our childhood, whose tenderness of heart, etc.... We find him hardened into a man, meeting us

scarcely with the cold hypocrisy of dissembled friendship in his general relations to the world careless of

the misery he is not to feel. ... When we observe all this,... do we use only a metaphor of little meaning when

we say of him that he is become a different person, and that his mind and character are changed? In what

does the identity consist? ... The supposed test of identity, when applied to the mind in these cases,

completely fails. It neither affects, nor is affected, in the same manner in the same circumstances. It therefore,

if the test be a just one, is not the same identical mind." (T. Brown: Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human

[41] "Sir John Cutler had a pair of black worsted stockings, which his maid darned so often with silk that they

became at last a pair of silk stockings. Now, supposing these stockings of Sir John's endued with some degree

of consciousness at every particular darning, they would have been sensible that they were the same

individual pair of stockings both before and after the darning; and this sensation would have continued in

them through all the succession of darnings; and yet after the last of all, there was not perhaps one thread left

of the first pair of stockings: but they were grown to be silk stockings, as was said before." (Pope's Martinus

[43] For a careful study of the errors in narratives, see E. Gurney: Phantasms of the Living, vol. I. pp.

126158. In the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research for May 1887 Mr. Richard Hodgson

shows by an extraordinary array of instances how utterly inaccurate everyone's description from memory of a

[44] See Josiah Royce (Mind, vol. 13, p. 244, and Proceedings of Am. Soc. of Psych. Research, vol. I. p.

366), for evidence that a certain sort of hallucination of memory which he calls 'pseudopresentiment' is no

[45] Maladies de la M�moire, p. 85. The little that would be left of personal consciousness if all our senses

stopped their work is ingenuously shown in the remark of the extraordinary anaesthetic youth whose case

Professor Str�mpell reports (in the Deutsches Archiv f. klin. Med., XXII. 347, 1878). This boy, whom we

shall later find instructive in many connections, was totally anaesthetic without and (so far as could be tested)

within, save for the sight of one eye and the hearing of one ear. When his eye was closed, he said: "Wenn ich

[46] "One can compare the state of the patient to nothing so well as to that of a caterpillar, which, keeping all

its caterpillar's ideas and remembrances, should suddenly become a butterfly with a butterfly's sense and

sensations. Between the old and the new state, between the first self, that of the caterpillar, and second self,

that of the butterfly, there is a deep scission, a complete rupture. The new feelings find no anterior series to

which they can knit themselves on; the patient can neither interpret nor use them; he does not recognize them;

they are unknown. Hence two conclusions, the first which consists in his saying, I no longer am; the second,

somewhat later, which consists in his saying, I am another person." (H. Taine: de l'Intelligence, 3me �dition

[48] See the interesting case of 'old Stump' in the Proceedings of the Am. Soc. for Psych. Research, p. 552.

[49] De l'Intelligence, 3me �dition (1878), vol. II, note, p. 461. Krishaber's book (La N�vropathie

[50] Sudden alterations in outward fortune often produce such a change in the empirical me as almost to

amount to a pathological disturbance of selfconsciousness. When a poor man draws the big prize in a

lottery, or unexpectedly inherits an estate; when a man high in fame is publicly disgraced, a millionaire

becomes a pauper, or a loving husband and father sees his family perish at one fell swoop, there is

temporarily such a rupture between all past habits, whether of an active or a passive kind, and the exigencies

and possibilities of the new situation, that the individual may find no medium of continuity or association to

carry him over from the one phase to the other of his life. Under these conditions mental derangement is no

[51] The number of subjects who can do this with any fertility and exuberance is relatively quite small.

[52] First in the Revue Scientifique for May 26, 1876, then in his book, Hypnotisme, Double Conscience, et

[54] Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, April 4, 1888. Also, less complete, in Harper's

[55] Cf. Ribot's Diseases of Memory for cases. See also a large number of them in Forbes Winslow's Obscure

[56] See the interesting account by M. J. Janet in the Revue Scientifique, May 19, 1888.

[58] Op. cit. p. 84. In this work and in Dr. Azam's (cited on a previous page), as well as in Prof. Th. Ribot's

Maladies de la Personnalit� (1885), the reader will find information and references relative to the other

[59] His own brother's subject Wit.... , although in her anaesthetic waking state she recollected nothing of

either of her trances, yet remembered her deeper trance (in which her sensibilities became perfect see

above, p. 207) when she was in her lighter trance. Nevertheless in the latter she was as anaesthetic as when

awake. (Loc. cit. p. 619.) It does not appear that there was an important difference in the sensibility of

F�lida X. between her two states as far as one can judge from M. Azam's account she was to some degree

anaesthetic in both (op. cit. pp. 71, 96). In the case of double personality reported by M. Dufay (Revue

Scientifique, vol. XVIII. p. 69), the memory seems to have been best in the more anaesthetic condition.

Hypnotic subjects made blind do not necessarily lose their visual ideas. It appears, then, both that amnesias

may occur without anaesthesias, and anaesthesias without amnesias, though they may also occur in

combination. Hypnotic subjects made blind by suggestion will tell you that they clearly imagine the things

[60] A full account of the case, by Mr. R. Hodgson, will be found in the Proceedings of the Society for

[61] He had spent an afternoon in Boston, a night in New York, an afternoon in Newark, and ten days or

more in Philadelphia, first in a certain hotel and next in a certain boardinghouse, making no acquaintances,

'resting,' reading, and 'looking round.' I have unfortunately been unable to get independent corroboration of

these details, as the hotel registers are destroyed, and the boardinghouse named by him has been pulled

[62] The details of the case, it will be seen, are all compatible with simulation. I can only say of that, that no

one who has examined Mr. Bourne (including Dr. Read, Dr. Weir Mitchell, Dr. Guy Hindsdale, and Mr. R.

Hodgson) practically doubts his ingrained honesty, nor, so far as I can discover, do any of his personal

[63] The Watseka Wonder, by E. W. Stevens. Chicago, ReligioPhilosophical Publishing House, 1887.

[64] My friend Mr. R. Hodgson informs me that he visited Watseka in April 1889, and crossexamined the

principal witnesses of this case. His confidence in the original narrative was strengthened by what he learned;

and various unpublished facts were ascertained, which increased the plausibility of the spiritualistic

[65] See his highly important series of articles on Automatic Writing, etc., in the Proceedings of the Soc. for

Psych. Research, especially Article II (May 1885). Compare also Dr. Maudsley's instructive article in Mind,

vol. XIV. p. 161, and Luys's essay, 'Sur le D�doublement,' etc., in l'Enc�phale for 1889.

Strange to say, so patent a fact as the perpetual presence of selective attention has received hardly any notice

from psychologists of the English empiricist school. The Germans have explicitly treated of it, either as a

faculty or as a resultant, but in the pages of such writers as Locke, Hume, Hartley, the Mills, and Spencer the

word hardly occurs, or if it does so, it is parenthetically and as if by inadvertence.[1] The motive of this

ignoring of the phenomenon of attention is obvious enough. These writers are bent on showing how the

higher faculties of the mind are pure products of 'experience;' and experience is supposed to be of something

simply given. Attention, implying a degree of reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through the circle of

pure receptivity which constitutes 'experience,' and hence must not be spoken of under penalty of interfering

But the moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how false a notion of experience that is which would make

it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an outward order. Millions of items of the outward order

are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest

for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind without

selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade,

background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the

consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to

conceive. Such an empiricist writer as Mr. Spencer, for example, regards the creature as absolutely passive

clay, upon which 'experience' rains down. The clay will be impressed most deeply where the drops fall

thickest, and so the final shape of the mind is moulded. Give time enough, and all sentient things ought, at

this rate, to end by assuming an identical mental constitution for 'experience,' the sole shaper, is a constant

fact, and the order of its items must end by being exactly reflected by the passive mirror which we call the

sentient organism. If such an account were true, a race of dogs bred for generations, say in the Vatican, with

characters of visual shape, sculptured in marble, presented to their eyes, in every variety of form and

combination, ought to discriminate before long the finest shades of these peculiar characters. In a word, they

ought to become, if time were given, accomplished connoisseurs of sculpture. Anyone may judge of the

probability of this consummation. Surely an eternity of experience of the statues would leave the dog as

inartistic as he was at first, for the lack of an original interest to knit his discriminations on to. Meanwhile the

odors at the bases of the pedestals would have organized themselves in the consciousness of this breed of

dogs into a system of 'correspondences' to which the most heredity caste of custodi would never approximate,

merely because to them, as human beings, the dog's interest in those smells would for ever be an inscrutable

mystery. These writers have, then, utterly ignored the glaring fact that subjective interest may, by laying its

weighty indexfinger on particular items of experience, so accent them as to give to the least frequent

associations far more power to shape our thought than the most frequent ones possess. The interest itself,

though its genesis is doubtless perfectly natural, makes experience more than it is made by it.

Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out

of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of

consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with

others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in

We all know this latter state, even in its extreme degree. Most people probably fall several times a day into a

fit of something like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity,

the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of

consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In

the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing

ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But

somehow we cannot start; the pens�e de derri�re la t�te fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our

state about. Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it

does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until also without reason that we can discover an

energy is given, something we know not what enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes,

we shake our heads, the backgroundideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.

This curious state or inhibition can for a few moments be produced at will by fixing the eyes on vacancy.

Some persons can voluntarily empty their minds and 'think of nothing.' With many, as Professor Exner

remarks of himself, this is the most efficacious means of falling asleep. It is difficult not to suppose

something like this scattered condition of mind to be the usual state of brutes when not actively engaged in

some pursuit. Fatigue, monotonous mechanical occupations that end by being automatically carried on, tend

to reproduce it in men. It is not sleep; and yet when aroused from such a state, a person will often hardly be

able to say what he has been thinking about. Subjects of the hypnotic trance seem to lapse into it when left to

themselves; asked what they are thinking of, they reply, 'of nothing particular'![2]

The abolition of this condition is what we call the awakening of the attention. One principal object comes

then into the focus of consciousness, others are temporarily suppressed. The awakening may come about

either by reason of a stimulus from without, or in consequence of some unknown inner alteration; and the

change it brings with it amounts to a concentration upon one single object with exclusion of aught besides, or

TO HOW MANY THINGS CAN WE ATTEND AT ONCE? The question of the 'span' of consciousness has

often been asked and answered sometimes a priori, sometimes by experiment. This seems the proper place

for us to touch upon it; and our answer, according to the principles laid down in Chapter IX, will not be

difficult. The number of things we may attend to is altogether indefinite, depending on the power of the

individual intellect, on the form of the apprehension, and on what the things are. When apprehended

conceptually as a connected system, their number may be very large. But however numerous the things, they

can only be known in a single pulse of consciousness for which they form one complex 'object' (p. 276 ff.), so

that properly speaking there is before the mind at no time a plurality of ideas, properly so called.

The 'unity of the soul' has been supposed by many philosophers, who also believed in the distinct atomic

nature of 'ideas,' to preclude the presence to it of more than one objective fact, manifested in one idea, at a

"constitutes just as distinct an object of attention to the mind as if it were separated by an interval of empty

space from the rest.... It is impossible for the mind to attend to more than one of these points at once; and as

the perception of the figure implies a knowledge of the relative situation of the different points with respect to

each other, we must conclude that the perception of figure by the eye is the result of a number of different

acts of attention. These acts of attention, however, are performed with such rapidity, that the effect, with

Such glaringly artificial views can only come from fantastic metaphysics or from the ambiguity of the word

'idea,' which, standing sometimes for mental state and sometimes for things known, leads men to ascribe to

the thing, not only the unity which belongs to the mental state, but even the simplicity which is thought to

When the things are apprehended by the senses, the number of them that can be attended to at once is small,

"By Charles Bonnet the Mind is allowed to have a distinct notion of six objects at once; by Abraham Tucker

the number is limited to four; while Destutt Tracy again amplifies it to six. The opinion of the first and last of

these philosophers" [continues Sir Wm. Hamilton] "seems to me correct. You can easily make the

experiments for yourselves, but you must beware of grouping the objects into classes. If you throw a handful

of marbles on the floor, you will find it difficult to view at once more than six, or seven at most, without

confusion; but if you group them into twos, or threes, or fives, you can comprehend as many groups as you

can units; because the mind considers these groups only as units it views them as wholes, and throws their

Professor Jevons, repeating this observation, by counting instantaneously beans thrown into a box, found that

the number 6 was guessed correctly 120 times out of 147, 5 correctly 102 times out of 107, and 4 and 3

always right.[5] It is obvious that such observations decide nothing at all about our attention, properly so

called. They rather measure in part the distinctness of our vision especially of the

primarymemoryimage[6] in part the amount of association in the individual between seen arrangements

Each numbername is a way of grasping the beans as one total object. In such a total object, all the parts

converge harmoniously to the one resultant concept; no single bean has special discrepant associations of its

own; and so, with practice, they may grow quite numerous ere we fail to estimate them aright. But where the

'object' be fore us breaks into parts disconnected with each other, and forming each as it were a separate

object or system, not conceivable in union with the rest, it becomes harder to apprehend all these parts at

once, and the mind tends to let go of one whilst it attends to another. Still, within limits this can be done. M.

Paulhan has experimented carefully on the matter by declaiming one poem aloud whilst he repeated a

different one mentally, or by writing one sentence whilst speaking another, or by performing calculations on

"the most favorable condition for the doubling of the mind was its sinultaneous [sic] application to two easy

and heterogeneous operations. Two operations of the same sort, two multiplications, two recitations, or the

reciting one poem and writing another, render the process more uncertain and difficult."

The attention often, but not always, oscillates during these performances; and sometimes a word from one

part of the task slips into another. I myself find when I try to simultaneously recite one thing and write

another that the beginning of each word or segment of a phrase is what requires the attention. Once started,

my pen runs on for a word or two as if by its own momentum. M. Paulhan compared the time occupied by the

same two operations done simultaneously or in succession, and found that there was often a considerable gain

" I write the first four verses of Athalie, whilst reciting eleven of Musset. The whole performance occupies 40

seconds. But reciting alone takes 22 and writing alone takes 31, or 53 altogether, so that there is a difference

"I multiply 421 312 212 by 2; the operation takes 6 seconds; the recitation of 4 verses also takes 6 seconds.

But the two operations done at once only take 6 seconds, so that there is no loss of time from combining

Of course these timemeasurements lack precision. With three systems of objects (writing with each hand

If, then, by the original question, how many ideas or things can we attend to at once, be meant how many

entirely disconnected systems or processes of conception can go on simultaneously, the answer is, not easily

more than one, unless the processes are very habitual; but then two, or even three, without very much

oscillation of the attention. Where, however, the processes are less automatic, as in the story of Julius Caesar

dictating four letters whilst he writes a fifth,[9] there must be a rapid oscillation of the mind from one to the

next, and no consequent gain of time. Within any one of the systems the parts may be numberless, but we

When the things to be attended to are small sensations, and when the effort is to be exact in noting them, it is

found that attention to one interferes a good deal with the perception of the other. A good deal of fine work

It has long been noticed, when expectant attention is concentrated upon one of two sensations, that the other

one is apt to be displaced from consciousness for a moment and to appear subsequent; although in reality the

two may have been contemporaneous events. Thus, to use the stock example of the books, the surgeon would

sometimes see the blood flow from the arm of the patient whom he was bleeding, before he saw the

instrument penetrate the skin. Similarly the smith may see the sparks fly before he sees the hammer smite the

iron, etc. There is thus a certain difficulty in perceiving the exact date of two impressions when they do not

Professor Exner, whose experiments on the minimal perceptible succession in time of two sensations we shall

have to quote in another chapter, makes some noteworthy remarks about the way in which the attention must

be set to catch the interval and the right order of the sensations, when the time is exceeding small. The point

was to tell whether two signals were simultaneous or successive; and, if successive, which one of them came

The first way of attending which he found himself to fall into, was when the signals did not differ greatly

when, e.g., they were similar sounds heard each by a different ear. Here he lay in wait for the first signal,

whichever it might be, and identified it the next moment in memory. The second, which could then always be

known by default, was often not clearly distinguished in itself. When the time was too short, the first could

The second way was to accommodate the attention for a certain sort of signal, and the next moment to

"This way brings great uncertainty with it. The impression not prepared for comes to us in the memory more

weak than the other, obscure as it were, badly fixed in time. We tend to take the subjectively stronger

stimulus, that which we were intent upon, for the first, just as we are apt to take an objectively stronger

stimulus to be the first. Still, it may happen otherwise. In the experiments from touch to sight it often seemed

to me as if the impression for which the attention was not prepared were there already when the other came."

Exner found himself employing this method oftenest when the impressions differed strongly.[10]

In such observations (which must not be confounded with those where the two signals were identical and

their successiveness known as mere doubleness, without distinction of which came first), it is obvious that

each signal must combine stably in our perception with a different instant of time. It is the simplest possible

case of two discrepant concepts simultaneously occupying the mind. Now the case of the signals being

simultaneous seems of a different sort. We must turn to Wundt for observations fit to cast a nearer light

The reader will remember the reactiontime experiments of which we treated in Chapter III. It happened

occasionally in Wundt's experiments that the reactiontime was reduced to zero or even assumed a negative

value, which, being translated into common speech, means that the ob server was sometimes so intent upon

the signal that his reaction actually coincided in time with it, or even preceded it, instead of coming a fraction

of a second after it, as in the nature of things it should. More will be said of these results anon. Meanwhile

"In general we have a very exact feeling of the simultaneity of two stimuli, if they do not differ much in

strength. And in a series of experiments in which a warning precedes, at a fixed interval, the stimulus, we

involuntarily try to react, not only as promptly as possible, but also in such wise that our movement may

coincide with the stimulus itself. We seek to make our own feelings of touch and innervation [muscular

contraction] objectively contemporaneous with the signal which we hear; and experience shows that in many

cases we approximately succeed. In these cases we have a distinct consciousness of hearing the signal,

reacting upon it, and feeling our reaction take place, all at one and the same moment."[11]

"The difficulty of these observations and the comparative infrequency with which the reactiontime can be

made thus to disappear shows how hard it is, when our attention is intense, to keep it fixed even on two

different ideas at once. Note besides that when this happens, one always tries to bring the ideas into a certain

connection, to grasp them as components of a certain complex representation. Thus in the experiments in

question, it has often seemed to me that I produced by my own recording movement the sound which the ball

The 'difficulty,' in the cases of which Wundt speaks, is that of forcing two nonsimultaneous events into

apparent combination with the same instant of time. There is no difficulty, as he admits, in so dividing our

attention between two really simultaneous impressions as to feel them to be such. The cases he describes are

really cases of anachronistic perception, of subjective timedisplacement, to use his own term. Still more

curious cases of it have been most carefully studied by him. They carry us a step farther in our research, so I

"The conditions become more complicated when we receive a series of impressions separated by distinct

intervals, into the midst of which a heterogeneous impression is suddenly brought. Then comes the question,

with which member of the series do we perceive the additional impression to coincide? with that member

with whose presence it really coexists, or is there some aberration?... If the additional stimulus belongs to a

"The best way to experiment is with a number of visual impressions (which one can easily get from a moving

object) for the series, and with a sound as the disparate impression. Let, e.g., an indexhand move over a

circular scale with uniform and sufficiently slow velocity, so that the impressions it gives will not fuse, but

permit its position at any instant to be distinctly seen. Let the clockwork which turns it have an arrangement

which rings a bell once in every revolution, but at a point which can be varied, so that the observer need

never know in advance just when the bellstroke takes place. In such observations three cases are possible.

The bellstroke can be perceived either exactly at the moment to which the index points when it sounds in

this case there will be no timedisplacement; or we can combine it with a later position of the index ...

positive timedisplacement, as we shall call it; or finally we can combine it with a position of the index

earlier than that at which the sounds occurred and this we will call a negative displacement. The most

natural displacement would apparently be the positive, since for apperception a certain time is always

required.... But experience shows that the opposite is the case: it happens most frequently that the sound

appears earlier than its real date far less often coincident with it, or later. It should be observed that in all

these experiments it takes some time to get a distinctly perceived combination of the sound with a particular

position of the index, and that a single revolution of the latter is never enough for the purpose. The motion

must go on long enough for the sounds themselves to form a regular series the outcome being a

simultaneous perception of two distinct series of events, of which either may by changes in its rapidity

modify the result. The first thing one remarks is that the sound belongs in a certain region of the scale; only

gradually is it perceived to combine with a particular position of the index. But even a result gained by

observation of many revolutions may be deficient in certainty, for accidental combinations of attention have a

great influence upon it. If we deliberately try to combine the bellstroke with an arbitrarily chosen position of

the index, we succeed without difficulty, provided this position be not too remote from the true one. If, again,

we cover the whole scale, except a single division over which we may see the index pass, we have a strong

tendency to combine the bellstroke with this actually seen position; and in so doing may easily overlook

more than 1/4 of a second of time. Results, therefore, to be of any value, must be drawn from longcontinued

and very numerous observations, in which such irregular oscillations of the attention neutralize each other

according to the law of great numbers, and allow the true laws to appear. Although my own experiments

extend over many years (with interruption), they are not even yet numerous enough to exhaust the subject

still, they bring out the principal laws which the attention follows under such conditions."[l3]

Wundt accordingly distinguishes the direction from the amount of the apparent displacement in time of the

bellstroke. The direction depends on the rapidity of the movement of the index and (consequently) on that of

the succession of the bellstrokes. The moment at which the bell struck was estimated by him with the least

tendency to error, when the revolutions took place once in a second. Faster than this, positive errors began to

prevail; slower, negative ones almost always were present. On the other hand, if the rapidity went quickening,

errors became negative; if slowing, positive. The amount of error is, in general, the greater the slower the

speed and its alterations. Finally, individual differences prevail, as well as differences in the same individual

Wundt's pupil von Tschisch has carried out these experiments on a still more elaborate scale,[15] using, not

only the single bellstroke, but 2, 3, 4, or 5 simultaneous impressions, so that the attention had to note the

place of the index at the moment when a whole group of things was happening. The single bellstroke was

always heard too early by von Tschisch the displacement was invariably 'negative.' As the other

simultaneous impressions were added, the displacement first became zero and finally positive, i.e. the

impressions were connected with a position of the index that was too late. This retardation was greater when

the simultaneous impressions were disparate (electric tactile stimuli on different places, simple touchstimuli,

different sounds) than when they were all of the same sort. The increment of retardation became relatively

less with each additional impression, so that it is probable that six impressions would have given almost the

Wundt explains all these results by his previous observation that a reaction sometimes antedates the signal

(see above, p. 411). The mind, he supposes, is so intent upon the bellstrokes that its 'apperception' keeps

ripening periodically after each stroke in anticipation of the next. Its most natural rate of ripening may be

faster or slower than the rate at which the strokes come. If faster, then it hears the stroke too early; if slower,

it hears it too late. The position of the index on the scale, meanwhile, is noted at the moment, early or late, at

which the bellstroke is subjectively heard. Substituting several impressions for the single bellstroke makes

the ripening of the perception slower, and the index is seen too late. So, at least, do I understand the

This is all I have to say about the difficulty of having two discrepant concepts together, and about the number

THE VARIETIES OF ATTENTION. The things to which we attend are said to interest us. Our interest in

them is supposed to be the cause of our attending. What makes an object interesting we shall see presently;

a) Objects of sense (sensorial attention); or to b) Ideal or represented objects (intellectual attention).

c) Immediate; or d) Derived: immediate, when the topic or stimulus is interesting in itself, without relation to

anything else; derived, when it owes its interest to association with some other immediately interesting thing.

What I call derived attention has been named 'apperceptive' attention. Furthermore, Attention may be either

Voluntary attention is always derived; we never make an effort to attend to an object except for the sake of

some remote interest which the effort will serve. But both sensorial and intellectual attention may be either

In passive immediate sensorial attention the stimulus is a senseimpression, either very intense, voluminous,

or sudden, in which case it makes no difference what its nature may be, whether sight, sound, smell, blow,

or inner pain, or else it is an instinctive stimulus, a perception which, by reason of its nature rather than its

mere force, appeals to some one of our normal congenital impulses and has a directly exciting quality. In the

chapter on Instinct we shall see how these stimuli differ from one animal to another, and what most of them

are in man: strange things, moving things, wild animals, bright things, pretty things, metallic things, words,

Sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli characterizes the attention of childhood and youth. In

mature age we have generally selected those stimuli which are connected with one or more socalled

permanent interests, and our attention has grown irresponsive to the rest.[17] But childhood is characterized

by great active energy, and has few organized interests by which to meet new impressions and decide

whether they are worthy of notice or not, and the consequence is that extreme mobility of the attention with

which we are all familiar in children, and which makes their first lessons such rough affairs. Any strong

sensation whatever produces accommodation of the organs which perceive it, and absolute oblivion, for the

time being, of the task in hand. This reflex and passive character of the attention which, as a French writer

says, makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice, is

the first thing which the teacher must overcome. It never is overcome in some people, whose work, to the end

The passive sensorial attention is derived when the impression, without being either strong or of an

instinctively exciting nature, is connected by previous experience and education with things that are so. These

things may be called the motives of the attention. The impression draws an interest from them, or perhaps it

even fuses into a single complex object with them; the result is that it is brought into the focus of the mind. A

faint tap per se is not an interesting sound; it may well escape being discriminated from the general rumor of

the world. But when it is a signal, as that of a lover on the windowpane, it will hardly go unperceived.

"How a bit of bad grammar wounds the ear of the purist! How a false note hurts the musician! or an offence

against good manners the man of the world! How rapid is progress in a science when its first principles have

been so well impressed upon us that we reproduce them mentally with perfect distinctness and ease! How

slow and uncertain, on the other hand, is our learning of the principles themselves, when familiarity with the

still more elementary percepts connected with the subject has not given us an adequate predisposition!

Apperceptive attention may be plainly observed in very small children when, hearing the speech of their

elders, as yet unintelligible to them, they suddenly catch a single known word here and there, and repeat it to

themselves; yes! even in the dog who looks round at us when we speak of him and pronounce his name. Not

far removed is the talent which mindwandering schoolboys display during the hours of instruction, of

noticing every moment in which the teacher tells a story. I remember classes in which, instruction being

uninteresting, and discipline relaxed, a buzzing murmur was always to be heard, which invariably stopped for

as long a time as an anecdote lasted. How could the boys, since they seemed to hear nothing, notice when the

anecdote began? Doubtless most of them always heard something of the teacher's talk; but most of it had no

connection with their previous knowledge and occupations, and therefore the separate words no sooner

entered their consciousness than they fell out of it again; but, on the other hand, no sooner did the words

awaken old thoughts, forming stronglyconnected series with which the new impression easily combined,

than out of new and old together a total interest resulted which drove the vagrant ideas below the threshold of

Passive intellectual attention is immediate when we follow in thought a train of images exciting or interesting

per se; derived, when the images are interesting only as means to a remote end, or merely because they are

associated with something which makes them dear. Owing to the way in which immerse numbers of real

things become integrated into single objects of thought for us, there is no clear line to be drawn between

immediate and derived attention of an intellectual sort. When absorbed in intellectual attention we may

become so inattentive to outer things as to be 'absentminded,,' 'abstracted,' or 'distraits.' All revery or

"Archimedes, it is well known, was so absorbed in geometrical meditation that he was first aware of the

storming of Syracuse by his own deathwound, and his exclamation on the entrance of the Roman soldiers

was: Noli turbare circulos meos! In like manner Joseph Scaliger, the most learned of men, when a Protestant

student in Paris, was so engrossed in the study of Homer that he became aware of the massacre of St.

Bartholomew, and of his own escape, only on the day subsequent to the catastrophe. The philosopher

Carneades was habitually liable to fits of meditation so profound that, to prevent him sinking from inanition,

his maid found it necessary to feed him like a child. And it is reported of Newton that, while engaged in his

mathematical researches, he sometimes forgot to dine. Cardan, one of the most illustrious of philosophers and

mathematicians, was once, upon a journey, so lost in thought that he forgot both his way and the object of his

journey. To the questions of his driver whether he should proceed, he make no answer; and when he came to

himself at nightfall, he was surprised to find the carriage at a standstill, and directly under a gallows. The

mathematician Vieta was sometimes so buried in meditation that for hours he bore more resemblance to a

dead person than to a living, and was then wholly unconscious of everything going on around him. On the

day of his marriage the great Bud�us forgot everything in his philological speculations, and he was only

awakened to the affairs of the external world by a tardy embassy from the marriageparty, who found him

The absorption may be so deep as not only to banish ordinary sensations, but even the severest pain. Pascal,

Wesley, Robert Hall, are said to have had this capacity. Dr. Carpenter says of himself that

"he has frequently begun a lecture whilst suffering neuralgic pain so severe as to make him apprehend that he

would find it impossible to proceed; yet no sooner has he by a determined effort fairly launched himself into

the stream of thought, than he has found himself continuously borne along without the least distraction, until

the end has come, and the attention has been released; when the pain has recurred with a force that has

overmastered all resistance, making him wonder how he could have ever ceased to feel it."[20]

Dr. Carpenter speaks of launching himself by a determined effort. This effort characterizes what we called

ac tive or voluntary attention. It is a feeling which every one knows, but which most people would call quite

indescribable. We get it in the sensorial sphere whenever we seek to catch an impression of extreme

faintness, be it of sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch; we get it whenever we seek to discriminate a sensation

merged in a mass of others that are similar; we get it whenever we resist the attractions of more potent stimuli

and keep our mind occupied with some object that is naturally unimpressive. We get it in the intellectual

sphere under exactly similar conditions: as we strive to sharpen and make distinct an idea which we but

vaguely seem to have; or painfully discriminate a shade of meaning from its similars; or resolutely hold fast

to a thought so discordant with our impulses that, if left unaided, it would quickly yield place to images of an

exciting and impassioned kind. All forms of attentive effort would be exercised at once by one whom we

might suppose at a dinnerparty resolutely to listen to a neighbor giving him insipid and unwelcome advice

in a low voice, whilst all around the guests were loudly laughing and talking about exciting and interesting

There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time. What is called

sustained voluntary attention is a repetition of successive efforts which bring back the topic to the mind.[21]

The topic once brought back, if a congenial one, develops; and if its development is interesting it engages the

attention passively for a time. Dr. Carpenter, a moment back, described the stream of thought, once entered,

as 'bearing him along.' This passive interest may be short or long. As soon as it flags, the attention is diverted

by some irrelevant thing, and then a voluntary effort may bring it back to the topic again; and so on, under

favorable conditions, for hours together. During all this time, however, note that it is not an identical object in

the psychological sense (p. 275), but a succession of mutually related objects forming an identical topic only,

upon which the attention is fixed. No one can possibly attend continuously to an object that does not change.

Now there are always some objects that for the time being will not develop. They simply go out; and to keep

the mind upon anything related to them requires such incessantly renewed effort that the most resolute Will

ere long gives out and let its thoughts follow the more stimulating solicitations after it has withstood them for

what length of time it can. There are topics known to every man from which he shies like a frightened horse,

and which to get a glimpse of is to shun. Such are his ebbing assets to the spendthrift in full career. But why

single out the spendthrift when to every man actuated by passion the thought of interests which negate the

passion can hardly for more than a fleeting instant stay before the mind? It is like 'memento mori' in the

heyday of the pride of life. Nature rises at such suggestions, and excludes them from the view: How long,

O healthy reader, can you now continue thinking of your tomb? In milder instances the difficulty is as

great, especially when the brain is fagged. One snatches at any and every passing pretext, no matter how

trivial or external, to escape from the odiousness of the matter in hand. I know a person, for example, who

will poke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dustspecks from the floor, arrange his table, snatch up the

newspaper, take down any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste the morning anyhow, in short,

and all without premeditation, simply because the only thing he ought to attend to is the preparation of a

noonday lesson in formal logic which he detests. Anything but that! Once more, the object must change.

When it is one of sight, it will actually become invisible; when of hearing, inaudible, if we attend to it too

unmovingly. Helmholtz, who has put his sensorial attention to the severest tests, by using his eyes on objects

which in common life are expressly overlooked, makes some interesting remarks on this point in his chapter

on retinal rivalry.[22] The phe nomenon called by that name is this, that if we look with each eye upon a

different picture (as in the annexed stereoscopic slide), sometimes one picture, sometimes the other, or parts

"I find that I am able to attend voluntarily, now to one and now to the other system of lines; and that then this

system remains visible alone for a certain time, whilst the other completely vanishes. This happens, for

example, whenever I try to count the lines first of one and then of the other system.... But it is extremely hard

to chain the attention down to one of the systems for long, unless we associate with our looking some distinct

purpose which keeps the activity of the attention perpetually renewed. Such a one is counting the lines,

comparing their intervals, or the like. An equilibrium of the attention, persistent for any length of time, is

under no circumstances attainable. The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever

new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it

passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must

seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are

And again criticising an author who had treated of attention as an activity absolutely subject to the conscious

"This is only restrictedly true. We move our eyes by our will; but one without training cannot so easily

execute the intention of making them converge. At any moment, however, he can execute that of looking at a

near object, in which act convergence is involved. Now just as little can we carry out our purpose to keep our

attention steadily fixed upon a certain object, when our interest in the object is exhausted, and the purpose is

inwardly formulated in this abstract way. But we can set ourselves new questions about the object, so that a

new interest in it arises, and then the attention will remain riveted. The relation of attention to will is, then,

These words of Helmholtz are of fundamental importance. And if true of sensorial attention, how much more

true are they of the intellectual variety! The conditio sine qu� non of sustained attention to a given topic of

thought is that we should roll it over and over incessantly and consider different aspects and relations of it in

turn. Only in pathological states will a fixed and ever monotonously recurring idea possess the mind.

And now we can see why it is that what is called sustained attention is the easier, the richer in acquisitions

and the fresher and more original the mind. In such minds, subjects bud and sprout and grow At every

moment, they please by a new consequence and rivet the attention afresh. But an intellect unfurnished with

materials, stagnant, unoriginal, will hardly be likely to consider any subject long. A glance exhausts its

possibilities of interest. Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained

attention.[23] In most of them, it is to be feared, the socalled 'power' is of the passive sort. Their ideas

coruscate, every subject branches infinitely before their fertile minds, and so for hours they may be rapt. But

it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them. And, when we come

down to the root of the matter, we see that they differ from ordinary men less in the character of their

attention than in the nature of the objects upon which it is successively bestowed. In the genius, these form a

concatenated series, suggesting each other mutually by some rational law. Therefore we call the attention

'sustained' and the topic of meditation for hours 'the same.' In the common man the series is for the most part

incoherent, the objects have no rational bond, and we call the attention wandering and unfixed.

It is probable that genius tends actually to prevent a man from acquiring habits of voluntary attention, and

that moderate intellectual endowments are the soil in which we may best expect, here as elsewhere, the

virtues of the will, strictly so called, to thrive. But, whether the attention come by grace of genius or by dint

of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. And the faculty of voluntarily

bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.

No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the

education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it

about. The only general pedagogic maxim bearing on attention is that the more interest the child has in

advance in the subject, the better he will attend. Induct him therefore in such a way as to knit each new thing

on to some acquisition already there; and if possible awaken curiosity, so that the new thing shall seem to

THE EFFECTS OF ATTENTION. Its remote effects are too incalculable to be recorded. The practical and

theoretical life of whole species, as well as of individual beings, results from the selection which the habitual

direction of their attention involves. In Chapters XIV and XV some of these consequences will come to light.

Suffice it meanwhile that each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a

a) perceive b) conceive c) distinguish d) remember better than otherwise we could both more

e) shortens 'reactiontime.' a and b. Most people would say that a sensation attended to becomes stronger

than it otherwise would be. This point is, however, not quite plain, and has occasioned some discussion[24]

>From the strength or intensity of a sensation must be distinguished its clearness; and to increase this is, for

some psychologists, the utmost that attention can do. When the facts are surveyed, however, it must be

admitted that to some extent the relative intensity of two sensations may be changed when one of them is

attended to and the other not. Every artist knows how he can make a scene before his eyes appear warmer or

colder in color, according to the way he sets his attention. If for warm, he soon begins to see the red color

start out of everything; if for cold, the blue. Similarly in listening for certain notes in a chord, or overtones in

a musical sound, the one we attend to sounds probably a little more loud as well as more emphatic than it did

before. When we mentally break a series of monotonous strokes into a rhythm, by accentuating every second

or third one, etc., the stroke on which the stress of attention is laid seems to become stronger as well as more

emphatic. The increased visibility of optical afterimages and of double images, which close attention brings

about, can hardly be interpreted otherwise than as a real strengthening of the retinal sensations themselves.

And this view is rendered particularly probable by the fact that an imagined visual object may, if attention be

concentrated upon it long enough, acquire before the mind's eye almost the brilliancy of reality, and (in the

case of certain exceptionally gifted observers) leave a negative afterimage of itself when it passes away (see

Chapter XVIII). Confident expectation of a certain intensity or quality of impression will often make us

sensibly see or hear it in an object which really falls far short of it. In face of such facts it is rash to say that

But, on the other hand, the intensification which may be brought about seems never to lead the judgment

astray. As we rightly perceive and name the same color under various lights, the same sound at various

distances; so we seem to make an analogous sort of allowance for the varying amounts of attention with

which objects are viewed; and whatever changes of feeling the attention may bring we charge, as it were, to

the attention's account, and still perceive and conceive the object as the same.

"A gray paper appears to us no lighter, the pendulumbeat of a clock no louder, no matter how much we

increase the strain of our attention upon them. No one, by doing this, can make the gray paper look white, or

the stroke of the pendulum sound like the blow of a strong hammer, everyone, on the contrary, feels the

Were it otherwise, we should not be able to note intensities by attending to them. Weak impressions would,

"I should not be able to observe faint sounds at all, but only such as appeared to me of maximal strength, or at

least of a strength that increased with the amount of my observation. In reality, however, I can, with steadily

The subject is one which would well repay exact experiment, if methods could be devised. Meanwhile there

is no question whatever that attention augments the clearness of all that we perceive or conceive by its aid.

c. Clearness, so far as attention produces it, means distinction from other things and internal analysis or

subdivision. These are essentially products of intellectual discrimination, involving comparison, memory, and

perception of various relations. The attention per se does not distinguish and analyze and relate. The most we

can say is that it is a condition of our doing so. And as these processes are to be described later, the clearness

they produce had better not be farther discussed here. The important point to notice here is that it is not

d. Whatever future conclusion we may reach as to this, we cannot deny that an object once attended to will

remain in the memory, whilst one inattentively allowed to pass will leave no traces behind. Already in

Chapter VI (see pp. 163 ff.) we discussed whether certain states of mind were 'unconscious,' or whether they

were not rather states to which no attention had been paid, and of whose passage recollection could

afterwards find no vestiges. Dugald Stewart says:[28] "The connection between attention and memory has

been remarked by many authors." He quotes Quintilian, Locke, and Helvetius; and goes on at great length to

explain the phenomena of 'secondary automatism' (see above, p. 114 ff.) by the presence of a mental action

grown so inattentive as to preserve no memory of itself. In our chapter on Memory, later on, the point will

e) Under this head, the shortening of reactiontime, there is a good deal to be said of Attention's effects.

Since Wundt has probably worked over the subject more thoroughly than any other investigator and made it

peculiarly his own, what follows had better, as far as possible, be in his words. The reader will remember the

method and results of experimentation on 'reactiontime,' as given in Chapter III.

The facts I proceed to quote may also be taken as a supplement to that chapter. Wundt writes:

"When we wait with strained attention for a stimulus, it will often happen that instead of registering the

stimulus, we react upon some entirely different impression, and this not through confounding the one with

the other. On the contrary, we are perfectly well aware at the moment of making the movement that we

respond to the wrong stimulus. Sometimes even, though not so often, the latter may be an other kind of

sensation altogether, one may, for example, in experimenting with sound, register a flash of light, produced

either by accident or design. We cannot well explain these results otherwise than by assuming that the strain

of the attention towards the impression we expect coexists with a preparatory innervation of the motor centre

for the reaction, which innervation the slightest shock then suffices to turn into an actual discharge. This

shock may be given by any chance impression, even by one to which we never intended to respond. When the

preparatory innervation has once reached this pitch of intensity, the time that intervenes between the stimulus

and the contraction of the muscles which react, may become vanishingly small."[29]

"The perception of an impression is facillitated when the impression is preceded by a warning which

announces beforehand that it is about to occur. This case is realized whenever several stimuli follow each

other at equal intervals, when, e.g. we note pendulum movements by the eye, or pendulumstrokes by the

ear. Each single stroke forms here the signal for the next, which is thus met by a fully prepared attention. The

same thing happens when the stimulus to be perceived is preceded, at a certain interval, by a single warning:

the time is always notably shortened.... I have made comparative observations on reactiontime with and

without a warning signal. The impression to be reacted on was the sound made by the dropping of a ball on

the board of the 'drop apparatus.'.... In a first series no warning preceded the stroke of the ball; in the second,

the noise made by the apparatus in liberating the ball served as a signal.... Here are the averages of two series

"... In a long series of experiments, (the interval between warning and stimulus remaining the same) the

reactiontime grows less and less, and it is possible occasionally to reduce it to a vanishing quantity (a few

thousandths of a second), to zero, or even to a negative value.[30]... The only ground that we can assign for

this phenomenon is the preparation (vorbereitende Spannung) of the attention. It is easy to understand that the

reactiontime should be shortened by this means; but that is should sometimes sink to zero and even assume

negative values, may appear surprising. Nevertheless this latter case is also explained by what happens in the

simple reactiontime experiments" just referred to, in which, "when the strain of the attention has reached its

climax, the movement we stand ready to execute escapes from the control of our will, and we register a

wrong signal. In these other experiments, in which a warning foretells the moment of the stimulus, it is also

plain that attention accommodates itself so exactly to the latter's reception that no sooner is it objectively

given than it is fully apperceived, and with the apperception the motor discharge coincides."[31]

Usually, when the impression is fully anticipated, attention prepares the motor centres so completely for both

stimulus and reaction that the only time lost is that of the physiological conduction downwards. But even this

interval may disappear, i.e. the stimulus and reaction may become objectively contemporaneous; or more

remarkable still, the reaction may be discharged before the stimulus has actually occurred.[32] Wundt, as we

saw some pages back (p. 411), explains this by the effort of the mind so to react that we may feel our own

movement and the signal which prompts it, both at the same instant. As the execution of the movement must

precede our feeling of it, so it must also precede the stimulus, if that and our movement are to be felt at once.

The peculiar theoretic interest of these experiments lies in their showing expectant attention and sensation to

be continuous or identical processes, since they may have identical motor effects. Although other exceptional

observations show them likewise to be continuous subjectively. Wundt's experiments do not: he seems never,

at the moment of reacting prematurely, to have been misled into the belief that the real stimulus was there.

As concentrated attention accelerates perception, so, conversely, perception of a stimulus is retarded by

anything which either baffles or distracts the attention with which we await it.

"If, e.g., we make reactions on a sound in such a way that weak and strong stimuli irregularly alternate so that

the observer can never expect a determinate strength with any certainty, the reactiontime for all for various

signals is increased, and so is the average error. I append two examples.... In Series I a strong and a weak

sound alternated regularly, so that the intensity was each time known in advance. In II they came irregularly.

"Still greater is the increase of the time when, unexpectedly into a series of strong impressions, a weak one is

interpolated, or vice vers�. In this way I have seen the time of reaction upon a sound so weak as to be barely

perceived rise to 0.4" or 0.5", and for a strong sound to 0.25". It is also matter of general experience that a

stimulus expected in a general way, but for whose intensity attention cannot be adapted in advance, demands

a longer reactiontime. In such cases... the reason for the difference can only lie in the fact that wherever a

preparation of the attention is impossible, the time of both perception and volition is prolonged. Perhaps also

the conspicuously large reactiontimes which are got with stimuli so faint as to be just perceptible may be

explained by the attention tending always to adapt itself for something more than this minimal amount of

stimulus, so that a state ensues similar to that in the case of unexpected stimuli.... Still more than by

previously unknown stimuli is the reactiontime prolonged by wholly unexpected impressions. This is

sometimes accidentally brought about, when the observer's attention, instead of being concentrated on the

coming signal, is dispersed. It can be realized purposely by suddenly thrusting into a long series of

equidistant stimuli a much shorter interval which the observer does not expect. The mental effect here is like

that of being startled; often the startling is outwardly visible. The time of reaction may then easily be

lengthened to one quarter of a second with strong signals, or with weak ones to a halfsecond. Slighter, but

still very noticeable, is the retardation when the experiment is so arranged that the observer, ignorant whether

the stimulus is to be an impression of light, sound, or touch, cannot keep his attention turned to any particular

senseorgan in advance. One notices then at the same time a peculiar unrest, as the feeling of strain which

"Complications of another sort arise when what is registered is an impression anticipated both in point of

quality and strength, but accompanied by other stimuli which make the concentration of the attention

difficult. The reactiontime is here always more or less prolonged. The simplest case of the sort is where a

momentary impression is registered in the midst of another, and continuous, sensorialstimulation of

considerable strength. The continuous stimulus may belong to the same sense as the stimulus to be reacted

on, or to another. When it is of the same sense, the retardation it causes may be partly due to the distraction of

the attention by it, but partly also to the fact that the stimulus to be reacted on stands out less strongly than if

alone, and practically becomes a less intense sensation. But other factors in reality are present; for we find the

reactiontime more prolonged by the concomitant stimulation when the stimulus is weak than when it is

strong. I made experiments in which the principal impression, or signal for reaction, was a bellstroke whose

strength could be graduated by a spring against the hammer with a movable counterpoise. Each set of

observations comprised two series; in one of which the bellstroke was registered in the ordinary way, whilst

in the other a toothed wheel belonging to the chronometric apparatus made during the entire experiment a

steady noise against a metal spring. In one half of the latter series (A) the bellstroke was only moderately

strong, so that the accompanying noise diminished it considerably, without, however, making it

indistinguishable. In the other half (B) the bellsound was so loud as to be heard with perfect distinctness

"Since, in these experiments, the sound B even with noise made a considerably stronger impression than the

sound A without, we must see in the figures a direct influence of the disturbing noise on the process of

reaction. This influence is freed from mixture with other factors when the momentary stimulus and the

concomitant disturbance appeal to different senses. I chose, to test this, sight and hearing. The momentary

signal was an inductionspark leaping from one platinum point to another against a dark background. The

"When one reflects that in the experiments with one and the same sense the relative intensity of the signal is

always depressed [which by itself is a retarding condition] the amount of retardation in these last observations

makes it probable that the disturbing influence upon attention is greater when the stimuli are disparate than

when they belong to the same sense. One does not, in fact, find it particularly hard to register immediately,

when the bell rings in the midst of the noise; but when the spark is the signal one has a feeling of being

coerced, as one turns away from the noise towards it. This fact is immediately con nected with other

properties of our attention. The effort of the latter is accompanied by various corporeal sensations, according

to the sense which is engaged. The innervation which exists during the effort of attention is therefore

Wundt then, after some theoretical remarks which we need not quote now, gives a table of retardations, as

Retardation. 1. Unexpected strength of impression: a) Unexpectedly strong sound.......................................

0.073 b) Unexpectedly weak sound........................................ 0.171 2. Interference by like stimulus (sound by

sound)............................0.045[34] 3. Interference by unlike stimulus (light by sound)............................ 0.078

It seems probable, from these results obtained with elementary processes of mind, that all processes, even the

higher ones of reminiscence, reasoning, etc., whenever attention is concentrated upon them instead of being

Still more interesting reactiontime observations have been made by M�nsterberg. The reader will recollect

the fact noted in Chapter III (p. 93) that reactiontime is shorter when one concentrates his attention on the

expected movement than when one concentrates it on the expected signal. Herr M�nsterberg found that this is

equally the case when the reaction is no simple reflex, but can take place only after an intellectual operation.

In a series of experiments the five fingers were used to react with, and the reacter had to use a different finger

according as the signal was of one sort or another. Thus when a word in the nominative case was called out

he used the thumb, for the dative he used another finger; similarly adjectives, substantives, pronouns,

numerals, etc., or, again, towns, rivers, beasts, plants, elements; or poets, musicians, philosophers, etc., were

coordinated each with its finger, so that when a world belonging to either of these classes was mentioned, a

particular finger and no other had to perform the reaction. In a second series of experiments the reaction

consisted in the utterance of a word in answer to a question, such as "name an edible fish," etc.; or "name the

first drama of Schiller," etc.; or "which is greater, Hume or Kant?" etc.; or (first naming apples and cherries,

and several other fruits) "which do you prefer, apples or cherries?" etc.; or "which is Goethe's finest drama?"

etc.; or "which letter comes the later in the alphabet, the letter L or the first letter of the most beautiful tree?"

etc.; or "which is less, 15 or 20 minus 8?"[36] etc. etc. etc. Even in this series of reactions the time was much

quicker when the reacter turned his attention in advance towards the answer than when he turned it towards

the question. The shorter reactiontime was seldom more than one fifth of a second; the longer, from four to

To understand such results, one must bear in mind that in these experiments the reacter always knew in

advance in a general way the kind of question which he was to receive, and consequently the sphere within

which his possible answer lay.[37] In turning his attention, therefore, from the outset towards the answer,

those brainprocesses in him which were connected with this entire 'sphere' were kept subexcited, and the

question could then discharge with a minimum amount of lost time that particular answer out of the 'sphere'

which belonged especially to it. When, on the contrary, the attention was kept looking towards the question

exclusively and averted from the possible reply, all this preliminary subexcitement of motor tracts failed to

occur, and the entire process of answering had to be gone through with after the question was heard. No

wonder that the time was prolonged. It is a beautiful example of the summation of stimulations, and of the

way in which expectant attention, even when not very strongly focalized, will prepare the motor centres, and

shorten the work which a stimulus has to perform on them, in order to produce a given effect when it comes.

THE INTIMATE NATURE OF THE ATTENTIVE PROCESS. We have now a sufficient number of facts to

warrant our considering this more recondite question. And two physiological processes, of which we have got

a glimpse, immediately suggest themselves as possibly forming in combination a complete reply. I mean

1. The accommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs; and 2. The anticipatory preparation from within

of the ideational centres concerned with the object to which the attention is paid.

1. The senseorgan and the bodily muscles which favor their exercise are adjusted most energetically in

sensorial attention, whether immediate and reflex, or derived. But there are good grounds for believing that

even intellectual attention, attention to the idea of a sensible object, is also accompanied with some degree of

excitement of the senseorgans to which the object appeals. The preparation of the ideational centres exists,

on the other hand, wherever our interest in the object be it sensible or ideal is derived from, or in any way

connected with, other interests, or the presence of other objects, in the mind. It exists as well when the

attention thus derived is classed as passive as when it is classed as voluntary. So that on the whole we may

confidently conclude since in mature life we never attend to anything without our interest in it being in

some degree derived from its connection with other objects that the two processes of sensorial adjustment

The two points must now be proved in more detail. First, as respects the sensorial adjustment.

That it is present when we attend to sensible things is obvious. When we look or listen we accommodate our

eyes and ears involuntarily, and we turn our head and body as well; when we taste or smell we adjust the

tongue, lips and respiration to the object; in feeling a surface we move the palpatory organ in a suitable way;

in all these acts, besides making involuntary muscular contractions of a positive sort, we inhibit others which

might interfere with the result we close the eyes in tasting, suspend the respiration in listening, etc. The

result is a more or less massive organic feeling that attention is going on. This organic feeling comes, in the

way described on page 302, to be contrasted with that of the objects which it accompanies, and regarded as

peculiarly ours, whilst the objects form the notme. We treat it as a sense of our own activity, although it

comes in to us from our organs after they are accommodated, just as the feeling of any object does. Any

object, if immediately exciting, causes a reflex accommodation of the senseorgan, and this has two results

first, the object's increase in clearness; and second, the feeling of activity in question. Both are sensations of

But in intellectual attention, as we have already seen, (p. 300), similar feelings of activity occur. Fechner was

the first, I believe, to analyze these feelings, and discriminate them from the stronger ones just named. He

"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 sidewise 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; and we speak accordingly of straining the attention. The difference is most

plainly felt when the attention oscillates rapidly between eye and ear; and the feeling localizes itself with

most decided difference in regard to the various senseorgans, according as we wish to discriminate a thing

"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 apprehend a thing keenly by eye or ear; and this analogous feel ling

is very differently localized. While in sharpest possible attention to real objects (as well as to afterimages)

the strain is plainly forwards, and when the attention changes from one sense to another only alters its

direction between the several external senseorgans, 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 senseorgans, 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

In myself the 'backward retraction' which is felt during attention to ideas of memory, etc., seems to be

principally constituted by the feeling of an actual rolling outwards and upwards of the eyeballs, such as

occurs in sleep, and in the exact opposite of their behavior when we look at a physical thing. I have already

spoken of this feeling on page 300.[39] The reader who doubts the presence of these organic feelings is

It has been said, however, that we may attend to an object on the periphery of the visual field and yet not

accommodate the eye for it. Teachers thus notice the acts of children in the schoolroom at whom they

appear not to be looking. Women in general train their peripheral visual attention more than men. This would

be an objection to the invariable and universal presence of movements of adjustment as ingredients of the

attentive process. Usually, as is well known, no object lying in the marginal portions of the field of vision can

catch our attention without at the same time 'catching our eye' that is, fatally provoking such movements of

rotation and accommodation as will focus its image on the fovea, or point of greatest sensibility. Practice,

however, enables us, with effort, to attend to a marginal object whilst keeping the eyes immovable. The

object under these circumstances never becomes perfectly distinct the place of its image on the retina

makes distinctness impossible but (as anyone can satisfy himself by trying) we become more vividly

conscious of it than we were before the effort was made. Helmholtz states the fact so strikingly that I will

quote his observation in full. He was trying to combine in a single solid percept pairs of stereoscopic pictures

illuminated instantaneously by the electric spark. The pictures were in a dark box which the spark from time

to time lighted up; and, to keep the eyes from wandering betweenwhiles, a pinhole was pricked through the

middle of each picture, through which the light of the room came, so that each eye had presented to it during

the dark intervals a single bright point. With parallel optical axes the points combined into a single image;

and the slightest movement of the eyeballs was betrayed by this image at once becoming double. Helmholtz

now found that simple linear figures could, when the eyes were thus kept immovable, be perceived as solids

at a single flash of the spark. But when the figures were complicated photographs, many successive flashes

"Now it is interesting," he says, "to find that, although we keep steadily fixating the pinholes and never

allow their combined image to break into two, we can, nevertheless, before the spark comes, keep our

attention voluntarily turned to any particular portion we please of the dark field, so as then, when the spark

comes, to receive an impression only from such parts of the picture as lie in this region. In this respect, then,

our attention is quite independent of the position and accommodation of the eyes, and of any known

alteration in these organs; and free to direct itself by a conscious and voluntary effort upon any selected

portion of a dark and undifferentiated field of view. This is one of the most important observations for a

"Whilst attending to the marginal object we must always," he says, "attend at the same time to the object

directly fixated. If even for a single instant we let the latter slip out of our mind, our eye moves towards the

former, as may be easily recognized by the afterimages produced, or by the muscular sounds heard. The

case is then less properly to be called one of translocation, than one of unusually wide dispersion, of the

attention, in which dispersion the largest share still falls upon the thing directly looked at,"[41]

and consequently directly accommodated for. Accommodation exists here, then, as it does elsewhere, and

without it we should lose a part of our sense of attentive activity. In fact, the strain of that activity (which is

remarkably great in the experiment) is due in part to unusually strong contractions of the muscles needed to

keep the eyeballs still, which produce unwonted feelings of pressure in those organs.

2. But if the peripheral part of the picture in this experiment be not physically accommodated for, what is

meant by its sharing our attention? What happens when we 'distribute' or 'disperse' the latter upon a thing for

which we remain unwilling to 'adjust'? This leads us to that second feature in the process, the 'ideational

preparation' of which we spoke. The effort to attend to the marginal region of the picture consists in nothing

more nor less than the effort to form as clear an idea as is possible of what is there portrayed. The idea is to

come to the help of the sensation and make it more distinct. It comes with effort, and such a mode of coming

in the remaining part of what we know as our attention's 'strain' under the circumstances. Let us show how

universally present in our acts of attention this reinforcing imagination, this inward reproduction, this

It must as a matter of course be present when the attention is of the intellectual variety, for the thing attended

to then is nothing but an idea, an inward reproduction or conception. If then we prove ideal construction of

the object to be present in sensorial attention, it will be present everywhere. When, however, sensorial

attention is at its height, it is impossible to tell how much of the percept comes from without and how much

from within; but if we find that the preparation we make for it always partly consists of the creation of an

imaginary duplicate of the object in the mind, which shall stand ready to receive the outward impression as if

In Wundt's and Exner's experiments quoted above, the lying in wait for the impressions, and the preparation

to react, consist of nothing but the anticipatory imagination of what the impressions or the reactions are to be.

Where the stimulus is unknown and the reaction undetermined, time is lost, because no stable image can

under such circumstances be formed in advance. But where both nature and time of signal and reaction are

foretold, so completely does the expectant attention consist in premonitory imagination that, as we have seen

(pp. 341, note, 373, 377), it may mimic the intensity of reality, or at any rate produce reality's motor effects.

It is impossible to read Wundt's and Exner's pages of description and not to interpret the 'Apperception' and

'Spannung' and other terms as equivalents of imagination. With Wundt, in particular, the word Apperception

(which he sets great store by) is quite interchangeable with both imagination and attention. All three are

names for the excitement from within of ideational braincentres, for which Mr. Lewes's name of

Where the impression to be caught is very weak, the way not to miss it is to sharpen our attention for it by

"If we wish to begin to observe overtones, it is advisable, just before the sound which is to be analyzed, to

sound very softly the note of which we are in search.... The piano and harmonium are well fitted for this use,

as both give overtones that are strong. Strike upon the piano first the g' [of a certain musical example

previously given in the text]; then, when it vibrations have objectively ceased, strike powerfully the note c, in

whose sound g' is the third overtone, and keep your attention steadily bent upon the pitch of the just heard g';

you will now hear this tone sounding in the midst of the c.... If you place the resonator which corresponds to a

certain overtone, for example g' of the sound c, against your ear, and then make the note c sound, you will

hear g' much strengthened by the reasonator.... This strengthening by the resonator can be used to make the

naked ear attentive to the sound which it is to catch. For when the resonator is gradually removed, the g'

grows weaker; but the attention, once directed to it, holds it now more easily fast, and the observer hears the

tone g' now in the natural unaltered sound of the note with his unaided ear."[42]

"on carefully observing, one will always find that one tries first to recall the image in memory of the tone to

be heard, and that then one hears it in the total sound. The same thing is to be noticed in weak or fugitive

visual impressions. Illuminate a drawing by electric sparks separated by considerable intervals, and after the

first, and often after the second and third spark, hardly anything will be recognized. But the confused image is

held fast in memory; each successive illumination completes it; and so at last we attain to a clearer

perception. The primary motive to this inward activity proceeds usually from the outer impression itself. We

hear a sound in which, from certain associations, we suspect a certain overtone; the next thing is to recall the

overtone in memory; and finally we catch it in the sound we hear. Or perhaps we see some mineral substance

we have met before; the impression awakens the memoryimage, which again more or less completely melts

with the impression itself. In this way every idea takes a certain time to penetrate to the focus of

consciousness. And during this time we always find in ourselves the peculiar feeling of attention.... The

phenomena show that an adaptation of attention to the impression takes place. The surprise which unexpected

impressions give us is due essentially to the fact that our attention, at the moment when the impression

occurs, is not accommodated for it. The accommodation itself is of the double sort, relating as it does to the

intensity as well as to the quality of the stimulus. Different qualities of impression require disparate

adaptations. And we remark that our feeling of the strain of our inward attentiveness increases with every

increase in the strength of the impressions of whose perceptions we are intent."[43]

The natural way of conceiving all this is under the symbolic form of a braincell played upon from two

directions. Whilst the object excites it from without, other braincells, or perhaps spiritual forces, arouse it

from within. The latter influence is the 'adaptation of the attention.' The plenary energy of the braincell

demands the cooperation of both factors: not when merely present, but when both present and attended to, is

A few additional experiences will now be perfectly clear. Helmholtz, for instance, adds this observation to the

passage we quoted a while ago concerning the stereoscopic pictures lit by the electric spark.

"These experiments," he says, "are interesting as regards the part which attention plays in the matter of

double images.... For in pictures so simple that it is relatively difficult for me to see them double, I can

succeed in seeing them double, even when the illumination is only instantaneous, the moment I strive to

imagine in a lively way how they ought then to look. The influence of attention is here pure; for all eye

"When I have before my eyes a pair of stereoscopic drawings which are hard to combine, it is difficult to

bring the lines and points that correspond, to cover each other, and with every little motion of the eyes they

glide apart. But if I chance to gain a lively mental image (Anschauungsbild) of the represented solid form (a

thing that often occurs by lucky chance), I then move my two eyes with perfect certainty over the figure

"It is not a trial of strength between two sensations, but depends on our fixing or failing to fix the attention.

Indeed, there is scarcely any phenomenon so well fitted for the study of the causes which are capable of

determining the attention. It is not enough to form the conscious intention of seeing first with one eye then

with the other; we must form as clear a notion as possible of what we expect to see. Then it will actually

In figures 37 and 38, where the result is ambiguous, we can make the change from one apparent form to the

other by imagining strongly in advance the form we wish to see. Similarly in those puzzles where certain

lines in a picture form by their combination an object that has no connection with what the picture ostensibly

represents; or indeed in every case where an object is inconspicuous and hard to discern from the

background; we may not be able to see it for a long time; but, having once seen it, we can attend to it again

whenever we like, on account of the mental duplicate of it which our imagination now bears.

In the meaningless French words 'pas de lieu Rh�ne que nous,' who can recognize immediately the English

'paddle your own canoe'?[47] But who that has once noticed the identity can fail to have it arrest his attention

again? When watching for the distant clock to strike, our mind is so filled with its image that at every

moment we think we hear the longedfor dreaded sound. So of an awaited footstep. Every stir in the wood is

for the hunter his game; for the fugitive his pursuers. Every bonnet in the street is momentarily taken by the

lover to enshroud the head of his idol. The image in the mind is the attention; the preperception, as Mr. Lewes

It is for this reason that men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught

to discern. Any one of us can notice a phenomenon after it has once been pointed out, which not one in ten

thousand could ever have discovered for himself. Even in poetry and the arts, some one has to come and tell

us what aspects we may single out, and what effects we may admire, before our �sthetic nature can 'dilate' to

its full extent and never 'with the wrong emotion.' In kindergarten instruction one of the exercises is to make

the children see how many features they can point out in such an object as a flower or a stuffed bird. They

readily name the features they know already, such as leaves, tail, bill, feet. But they may look for hours

without distinguishing nostrils, claws, scales, etc., until their attention is called to these details; thereafter,

however, they see them every time. In short, the only things which we commonly see are those which we

preperceive, and the only things which we preperceive are those which have been labelled for us, and the

labels stamped into our mind. If we lost our stock of labels we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the

Organic adjustment, then, and ideational preparation or preperception are concerned in all attentive acts. An

interesting theory is defended by no less authorities than Professors Bain[49] and Ribot,[50] and still more

ably advocated by Mr. N. Lange,[51] who will have it that the ideational preparation itself is a consequence

of muscular adjustment, so that the latter may be called the essence of the attentive process throughout. This

at least is what the theory of these authors practically amounts to, though the former two do not state it in just

these terms. The proof consists in the exhibition of cases of intellectual attention which organic adjustment

accompanies, or of objects in thinking which we have to execute a movement. Thus Lange says that when he

tries to imagine a certain colored circle, he finds himself first making with his eyes the movement to which

the circle corresponds, and then imagining the color, etc., as a consequence of the movement.

"Let my reader," he adds, "close his eyes and think of an extended object, for instance a pencil. He will easily

notice that he first makes a slight movement [of the eyes] corresponding to the straight line, and that he often

gets a weak feeling of innervation of the hand as if touching the pencil's surface. So, in thinking of a certain

sound, we turn towards its direction or repeat muscularly its rhythm, or articulate an imitation of it."[52]

But it is one thing to point out the presence of muscular contractions as constant concomitants of our

thoughts, and another thing to say, with Herr Lange, that thought is made possible by muscular contraction

alone. It may well be that where the object of thought consists of two parts, one perceived by movement and

another not, the part perceived by movement is habitually called up first and fixed in the mind by the

movement's execution, whilst the other part comes secondarily as the movement's mere associate. But even

were this the rule with all men (which I doubt[53]), it would only be a practical habit, not an ultimate

necessity. In the chapter on the Will we shall learn that movements themselves are results of images coming

before the mind, images sometimes of feelings in the moving part, sometimes of the movement's effects on

eye and ear, and sometimes (if the movement be originally reflex or instinctive), of its natural stimulus or

exciting cause. It is, in truth, contrary to all wider and deeper analogies to deny that any quality of feeling

whatever can directly rise up in the form of an idea, and to assert that only ideas of movement can call other

So much for adjustment and preperception. The only third process I can think of as always present is the

inhibition of irrelevant movements and ideas. This seems, however, to be a feature incidental to voluntary

attention rather than the essential feature of attention at large,[54] and need not concern us particularly now.

Noting merely the intimate connection which our account so far establishes between attention, on the one

hand, and imagination, discrimination, and memory, on the other, let us draw a couple of practical inferences,

The practical inferences are pedagogic. First, to strengthen attention in children who care nothing for the

subject they are studying and let their wits go woolgathering. The interest here must be 'derived' from

something that the teacher associates with the task, a reward or a punishment if nothing less external comes to

"A child refuses to read; he is incapable of keeping his mind fixed on the letters, which have no attraction for

him; but he looks with avidity upon the pictures contained in a book. 'What do they mean?' he asks. The

father replies: 'When you can read, the book will tell you.' After several colloquies like this, the child resigns

himself and falls to work, first slackly, then the habit grows, and finally he shows an ardor which has to be

restrained. This is a case of the genesis of voluntary attention. An artificial and indirect desire has to be

grafted on a natural and direct one. Reading has no immediate attractiveness, but is has a borrowed one, and

"A child of six years, habitually prone to mindwandering, sat down one day to the piano of his own accord

to repeat an air by which his mother had been charmed. His exercises lasted an hour. The same child at the

age of seven, seeing his brother busy with tasks in vacation, went and sat at his father's desk. 'What are you

doing there?' his nurse said, surprised at so finding him. 'I am,' said the child, 'learning a page of German; it

Here, again, a birth of voluntary attention, grafted this time on a sympathetic instead of a selfish sentiment

like that of the first example. The piano, the German, awaken no spontaneous attention; but they arouse and

Second, take that mindwandering which at a later age may trouble us whilst reading or listening to a

discourse. If attention be the reproduction of the sensation from within, the habit of reading not merely with

the eye, and of listening not merely with the ear, but of articulating to one's self the words seen or heard,

ought to deepen one's attention to the latter. Experience shows that this is the case. I can keep my wandering

mind a great deal more closely upon a conversation or a lecture if I actively reecho to myself the words than

if I simply hear them; and I find a number of my students who report benefit from voluntarily adopting a

Second, a teacher who wishes to engage the attention of his class must knit his novelties on to things of

which they already have preperceptions. The old and familiar is readily attended to by the mind and helps to

hold in turn the new, forming, in Herbartian phraseology, an 'Apperceptionsmasse' for it. Of course it is in

every case a very delicate problem to know what 'Apperceptionsmasse' to use. Psychology can only lay down

IS VOLUNTARY ATTENTION A RESULTANT OR A FORCE? When, a few pages back, I symbolized the

'ideational preparation' element in attention by a braincell played upon from within, I added 'by other

braincells, or by some spiritual force,' without deciding which. The question 'which?' is one of those central

psychologic mysteries which part the schools. When we reflect that the turnings of our attention form the

nucleus of our inner self; when we see (as in the chapter on the Will we shall see) that volition is nothing but

attention; when we believe that our autonomy in the midst of nature depends on our not being pure effect, but

Principium quoddam quod fati f�dera rumpat, Ex infinito ne causam causa sequatur we must admit that the

question whether attention involve such a principle of spiritual activity or not is metaphysical as well as

psychological, and is well worthy of all the pains we can bestow on its solution. It is in fact the pivotal

question of metaphysics, the very hinge on which our picture of the world shall swing from materialism,

fatalism, monism, towards spiritualism, freedom, pluralism, or else the other way.

It goes back to the automatontheory. If feeling is an inert accompaniment, then of course the braincell can

be played upon only by other braincells, and the attention which we give at any time to any subject, whether

in the form of sensory adaptation or of 'preperception,' is the fatally predetermined effect of exclusively

material laws. If, on the other hand, the feeling which coexists with the braincells' activity reacts

dynamically upon that activity, furthering or checking it, then the attention is in part, at least, a cause. It does

not necessarily follow, of course, that this reactive feeling should be 'free' in the sense of having its amount

and direction undertermined in advance, for it might very well be predetermined in all these particulars. If it

were so, our attention would not be materially determined, nor yet would it be 'free' in the sense of being

spontaneous or unpredictable in advance. The question is of course a purely speculative one, for we have no

means of objectively ascertaining whether our feelings react on our nerveprocesses or not; and those who

answer the question in either way do so in consequence of general analogies and presumptions drawn from

other fields. As mere conceptions, the effecttheory and the causetheory of attention are equally clear; and

whoever affirms either conception to be true must do so on metaphysical or universal rather than on scientific

As regards immediate sensorial attention hardly any one is tempted to regard it as anything but an effect.[58]

We are 'evolved' so as to respond to special stimuli by special accommodative acts which produce clear

perceptions on the one hand in us, and on the other hand such feelings of inner activity as were above

described. The accommodation and the resultant feeling are the attention. We don't bestow it, the object

Derived attention, where there is no voluntary effort, seems also most plausibly to be a mere effect. The

object again takes the initiative and draws our attention to itself, not by reason of its own intrinsic interest,

but because it is connected with some other interesting thing. Its brainprocess is connected with another that

is either excited, or tending to be excited, and the liability to share the excitement and become aroused is the

liability to 'preperception' in which the attention consists. If I have received an insult, I may not be actively

thinking of it all the time, yet the thought of it is in such a state of heightened irritability, that the place where

I received it or the man who inflicted it cannot be mentioned in my hearing without my attention bounding, as

it were, in that direction, as the imagination of the whole transaction revives. Where such a stirringup

occurs, organic adjustment must exist as well, and the ideas must innervate to some degree the muscles. Thus

the whole process of involuntary derived attention is accounted for if we grant that there is something

interesting enough to arouse and fix the thought of whatever may be connected with it. This fixing is the

attention; and it carries with it a vague sense of activity going on, and of acquiescence, furtherance, and

This reinforcement of ideas and impressions by the preexisting contents of the mind was what Herbart had

in mind when he gave the name of apperceptive attention to the variety we describe. We easily see now why

the lover's tap should be heard it finds a nervecentre half ready in advance to explode. We see how we can

attend to a companion's voice in the midst of noises which pass unnoticd [sic] though objectively much

louder than the words we hear. Each word is doubly awakened; once from without by the lips of the talker,

but already before that from within by the premonitory processes irradiating from the previous words, and by

the dim arousal of all processes that are connected with the 'topic' of the talk. The irrelevant noises, on the

other hand, are awakened only once. They form an unconnected train. The boys at school, inattentive to the

teacher except when he begins an anecdote, and then all pricking up their ears, are as easily explained. The

words of the anecdote shoot into association with exciting objects which react and fix them; the other words

do not. Similarly with the gramma heard by the purist and Herbart's other examples quoted on page 418.

Even where the attention is voluntary, it is possible to conceive of it as an effect, and not a cause, a product

and not an agent, The things we attend to come to us by their own laws. Attention creates no idea; an idea

must already be there before we can attend to it. Attention only fixes and retains what the ordinary laws of

association bring 'before the footlights' of consciousness. But the moment we admit this we see that the

attention per se, the feeling of attending need no more fix and retain the ideas than it need bring them. The

associates which bring them also fix them by the interest which they lend. In short, voluntary and involuntary

attention may be essentially the same. It is true that where the ideas are intrinsically very unwelcome and the

effort to attend to them is great, it seems to us as if the frequent renewal of the effort were the very cause by

which they are held fast, and we naturally think of the effort of an original force. In fact it is only to the effort

to attend, not to the mere attending, that we are seriously tempted to ascribe spontaneous power. We think we

can make more of it if we will; and the amount which we make does not seem a fixed function of the ideas

themselves, as it would necessarily have to be if our effort were an effect and not a spiritual force. But even

here it is possible to conceive the facts mechanically and to regard the effort as a mere effect.

Effort is felt only where there is a conflict of interests in the mind. The idea A may be intrinsically exciting to

us. The idea Z may derive its interest from association with some remoter good. A may be our sweetheart, Z

may be some condition of our soul's salvation. Under these circumstances, if we succeed in attending to Z at

all it is always with expenditure of effort. The 'ideational prepararation,' the 'preperception' of A keeps going

on of its own accord, whilst that of Z need incessant pulses of voluntary reinforcement that is, we have the

feeling of voluntary reinforcement (or effort) at each successive moment in which the thought of Z flares

brightly up in our mind. Dynamically, however, that may mean only this: that the associative processes which

make Z triumph are really the stronger, and in A's absence would make us give a 'passive' and unimpeded

attention to Z; but, so long as A is present, some of their force is used to inhibit the processes concerned with

A. Such inhibition is a partial neutralization of the brainenergy which would otherwise be available for

fluent thought. But what is lost for thought is converted into feeling, in this case into the peculiar feeling of

The stream of our thought is like a river. On the whole easy simple flowing predominates in it, the drift of

things is with the pull of gravity, and effortless attention is the rule. But at intervals an obstruction, a

setback, a logjam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other

way. If a real river could feel, it would feel these eddies and setbacks as places of effort. "I am here

flowing," it would say, "in the direction of greatest resistance, instead of flowing, as usual, in the direction of

least. My effort is what enables me to perform this feat." Really, the effort would only be a passive index that

the feat was being performed. The agent would all the while be the total downward drift of the rest of the

water, forcing some of it upwards in this spot; and although, on the average, the direction of least resistance is

downwards, that would be no reason for its not being upwards now and then. Just so with our voluntary acts

of attention. They are momentary arrests, coupled with a peculiar feeling, or portions of the stream. But the

arresting force, instead of being this peculiar feeling itself, may be nothing but the processes by which the

collision is produced. The feeling of effort may be 'an accompaniment,' as Mr. Bradley says,' more or less

superfluous,' and no more contribute to the result than the pain in a man's finger, when a hammer falls on it,

contributes to the hammer's weight. Thus the notion that our effort in attending is an original faculty, a force

additional to the others of which brain and mind are the seat, may be an abject superstition. Attention may

have to go, like many a faculty once deemed essential, like many a verbal phantom, like many an idol of the

tribe. It may be an excrescence on Psychology. No need of it to drag ideas before consciousness or fix them,

I have stated the effecttheory as persuasively as I can.[59] It is a clear, strong, wellequiped conception, and

like all such, is fitted to carry conviction, where there is no contrary proof. The feeling of effort certainly may

be an inert accompaniment and not the active element which it seems. No measurements are as yet performed

(it is safe to say none ever will be performed) which can show that it contributes energy to the result. We may

then regard attention as a superfluity, or a 'Luxus,' and dogmatize against its causal function with no feeling

in our hearts but one of pride that we are applying Occam's razor to an entity that has multiplied itself 'beyond

But Occam's razor, though a very good rule of method, is certainly no law of nature. The laws of stimulation

and of association may well be indispensable actors in all attention's performances, and may even be a good

enough 'stockcompany' to carry on many performances without aid; and yet they may at times simply form

the background for a 'starperformer,' who is no more their 'inert accompaniment' or their 'incidental product'

than Hamlet is Horatio's and Ophelia's. Such a starperformer would be the voluntary effort to attend, if it

were an original psychic force. Nature may, I say, indulge in these complications; and the conception that she

has done so in this case is, I think, just as clear (if not as 'parsimonious' logically) as the conception that she

has not. To justify this assertion, let us ask just what the effort to attend would effect if it were an original

It would deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable ideas which else would fade more

quickly away. The delay thus gained might not be more than a second in duration but that second might be

critical; for in the constant rising and falling of considerations in the mind, where two associated systems of

them are nearly in equilibrium it is often a matter of but a second more or less of attention at the outset,

whether one system shall gain force to occupy the field and develop itself, and exclude the other, or be

excluded itself by the other. When developed, it may make us act; and that act may seal our doom. When we

come to the chapter on the Will, we shall see that the whole drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount

of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas may receive. But the whole feeling of

reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things are really

being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged

innumerable ages ago. This appearance, which makes life and history tingle with such a tragic zest, may not

be an illusion. As we grant to the advocate of the mechanical theory that it may be one, so he must grant to us

that it may not. And the result is two conceptions of possibility face to face with no facts definitely enough

Under these circumstances, one can leave the question open whilst waiting for light, or one can do what most

speculative minds do, that is, look to one's general philosophy to incline the beam. The believers in

mechanism do so without hesitation, and they ought not to refuse a similar privilege to the believers in a

spiritual force. I count myself among the latter, but as my reasons are ethical they are hardly suited for

introduction into a psychological work.[60] The last word of psychology here is ignorance, for the 'forces'

engaged are certainly too delicate and numerous to be followed in detail. Meanwhile, in view of the strange

arrogance with which the wildest materialistic speculations persist in calling themselves 'science,' it is well to

recall just what the reasoning is, by which the effecttheory of attention is confirmed. It is an argument from

analogy, drawn from rivers, reflex actions and other material phenomena where no consciousness appears

exist at all, and extended to cases where consciousness seems the phenomenon's essential feature. The

consciousness doesn't count, these reasoners say; it doesn't exist for science, it is nil; you mustn't think about

it at all. The intensely reckless character of all this needs no comment. It is making the mechanical theory true

per fas aut nefas. For the sake of that theory we make inductions from phenomena to others that are startingly

unlike them; and we assume that a complication which Nature has introduced (the presence of feeling and of

effort, namely) is not worthy of scientific recognition at all. Such conduct may conceivably be wise, though I

doubt it; but scientific, as contrasted with metaphysical, it cannot seriously be called.[61]

INATTENTION. Having spoken fully of attention, let me add a word about inattention.

We do not notice the ticking of the clock, the noise of the city streets, or the roaring of the brook near the

house; and even the din of a foundry or factory will not mingle with the thoughts of its workers, if they have

been there long enough. When we first put on spectacles, especially if they be of certain curvatures, the bright

reflections they give of the windows, etc., mixing with the field of view, are very disturbing. In a few days we

ignore them altogether. Various entoptic images, musc� volitantes, etc., although constantly present, are

hardly even known. The pressure of our clothes and shoes, the beating of our hearts and arteries, our

breathing, certain steadfast bodily pains, habitual odors, tastes in the mouth, etc., are examples from other

senses, of the same lapse into unconsciousness of any too unchanging content a lapse which Hobbes has

expressed in the wellknown phrase, "Semper idem sentire ac non sentire ad idem revertunt."

The cause of the unconciousness is certainly not the mere blunting of the senseorgans. Were the sensation

important, we should notice it well enough; and we can at any moment notice it by expressly throwing our

attention upon it,[62] provided it have not become so inveterate that inattention to it is ingrained in our very

constitution, as in the case of the musc� volitantes the double retinal images, etc. But even in these cases

artificial conditions of observation and patience soon give us command of the impression which we seek. The

inattentiveness must then be a habit grounded on higher conditions than mere sensorial fatigue.

Helmholtz has formulated a general law of inattention which we shall have to study in the next chapter but

one. Helmholtz's law is that we leave all impressions unnoticed which are valueless to us as signs by which to

discriminate things. At most such impressions fuse with their consorts into an aggregate effect. The upper

partial tones which make human voices differ make them differ as wholes only we cannot dissociate the

tones themselves. The odors which form integral parts of the characteristic taste of certain substances, meat,

fish, cheese, butter, wine, do not come as odors to our attention. The various muscular and tactile feelings that

make up the perception of the attributes 'wet,' 'elastic,' 'doughy,' etc., are not singled out separately for what

they are. And all this is due to an inveterate habit we have contracted, of passing from them immediately to

their import and letting their substantive nature alone. They have formed connections in the mind which it is

now difficult to break; they are constituents of processes which it is hard to arrest, and which differ altogether

from what the processes of catching the attention would be. In the cases Helmholtz has in mind, not only we

but our ancestors have formed these habits. In the cases we started from, however, of the millwheel, the

spectacles, the factory, din, the tights shoes, etc., the habits of inattention are more recent, and the manner of

How can impressions that are not needed by the intellect be thus shunted off from all relation to the rest of

consciousness? Professor G. E. M�ller has made a plausible reply to this question, and most of what follows

"When we first come out of a mill or factory, in which we have remained long enough to get wonted to the

noise, we feel as if something were lacking. Our total feeling of existence is different from what it was when

we were in the mill.... A friend writes to me: 'I have in my room a little clock which does not run quite

twentyfour hours without winding. In consequence of this, it often stops. So soon as this happens, I notice it,

whereas I naturally fail to notice it when going. When this first began to happen, there was this modification:

I suddenly felt an undefined uneasiness or sort of void, without being able to say what was the matter; and

only after some consideration did I find the cause in the stopping of the clock.'"

That the stopping of an unfelt stimulus may itself be felt is a wellknown fact: the sleeper in church who

wakes when the sermon ends; the miller who does the same when his wheel stands still, are stock examples.

Now (since every impression falling on the nervous system must propagate itself somewhither), M�ller

suggests that impressions which come to us when the thoughtcentres are preoccupied with other matters

may thereby be blocked or inhibited from invading these centres, and may then overflow into lower paths of

discharge. And he farther suggests that if this process recur often enough, the sidetrack thus created will

grow so permeable as to be used, no matter what may be going on in the centres above. In the acquired

inattention mentioned, the constant stimulus always caused disturbance at first; and consciousness of it was

extruded successfully only when the brain was strongly excited about other things. Gradually the extrusion

The sidetracks which thus learn to draft off the stimulations that interfere with thought cannot be assigned

with any precision. They probably terminate in organic processes, or insignificant muscular contractions

which, when stopped by the cessation of their instigating cause, immediately give us the feeling that

something is gone from our existence (as M�ller says), or (as his friend puts it) the feeling of a void.[64]

M�ller's suggestion awakens another. It is a wellknown fact that persons striving to keep their attention on a

difficult subject will resort to movements of various unmeaning kinds, such as pacing the room, drumming

with the fingers, playing with keys or watchchain, scratching head, pulling mustache, vibrating foot, or what

not, according to the individual. There is an anecdote of Sir W. Scott, when a boy, rising to the head of his

class by cutting off from the jacket of the usual headboy a button which the latter was in the habit of

twirling in his fingers during the lesson. The button gone, its owner's power of reciting also departed. Now

much of this activity is unquestionably due to the overflow of emotional excitement during anxious and

concentrated thought. It drains away nervecurrents which if pent up within the thoughtcentres would very

likely make the confusion there worse confounded. But may it not also be a means of drafting off all the

irrelevant sensations of the moment, and so keeping the attention more exclusively concentrated upon its

inner task? Each individual usually has his own peculiar habitual movement of this sort. A downward

nervepath is thus kept constantly open during concentrated thought; and as it seems to be a law of frequent

(if not of universal) application, that incidental stimuli tend to discharge through paths that are already

discharging rather than through others, the whole arrangement might protect the thoughtcentres from

interference from without. Were this the true rationale of these peculiar movements, we should have to

suppose that the sensations produced by each phase of the movement itself are also drafted off immediately

by the next phase and help to keep the circular process agoing. I offer the suggestion for what it is worth; the

connection of the movements themselves with the continued effort of attention is certainly a genuine and

Footnotes [1] Bain mentions attention in the Senses and the Intellect, p. 558, and even gives a theory of it on

[2] "The first and most important, but also the most difficult, task at the outset of an education is to overcome

gradually the inattentive dispersion of mind which shows itself wherever the organic life preponderates over

the intellectual. The training of animals... must be in the first instance based on the awakening of attention

(cf. Adrian Leonard, Essai sur l'Education des Animaux, Lille, 1842), that is to say, we must seek to make

them gradually perceive separately things which, if left to themselves, would not be attended to, because they

would fuse with a great sum of other sensorial stimuli to a confused total impression of which each separate

item only darkens and interferes with the rest. Similarly at first with the human child. The enormous

difficulties of deafmute and especially of idiotinstruction is principally due to the slow and painful

manner in which we succeed in bringing out from the general confusion of perception single items with

[6] If a lot of dots or strokes on a piece of paper be exhibited for a moment to a person in normal condition,

with the request that he say how many are there, he will find that they break into groups in his mind's eye,

and that whilst he is analyzing and counting one group in his memory the others dissolve. In short, the

impression made by the dots changes rapidly into something else. In the trancesubject, on the contrary, it

seems to stick; I find that persons in the hypnotic state easily count the dots in the mind's eye so long as they

[7] Mr. Cattell made Jevon's experiment in a much more precise way (Philosophische Studien, III. 121 ff.).

Cards were ruled with short lines, varying in number from four to fifteen, and exposed to the eye for a

hundredth of a second. When the number was but four or five, no mistakes as a rule were made. For higher

numbers the tendency was to underrather than overestimate. Similar experiments were tried with letters

and figures, and gave the same result. When the letters formed familiar words, three times as many of them

could be named as when their combination was meaningless. If the words formed a sentence, twice as many

of them could be caught as when they had no connection. "The sentence was then apprehended as a whole. If

not apprehended thus, almost nothing is apprehended of the several words; but if the sentence as a whole is

apprehended, then the words appear very difficult." Wundt and his pupil Dietze had tried similar

experiments on rapidly repeated strokes of sound. Wundt made them follow each other in groups, and found

that groups of twelve strokes at most could be recognized and identified when they succeeded each other at

the most favorable rate, namely, from three to five tenths of a second (Phys. Psych., II. 215). Dietze found

that by mentally subdividing the groups into subgroups as one listened, as many as forty strokes could be

identified as a whole. They were then grasped as eight subgroups of five, or as five of eight strokes each.

(Philosophische Studien, II. 362.) Later in Wundt's Laboratory, Bechterew made observations on two

simultaneously elapsing series of metronome strokes, of which one contained one stroke more than the other.

The most favorable rate of succession was 0.3 sec., and he then discriminated a group of 18 from one of 18 +

[9] Cf. Chr. Wolff: Psychologia Empirica, � 245. Wolff's account of the phenomena of attention is in general

[14] This was the original 'personal equation' observation of Bessel. An observer looked through his

equatorial telescope to note the moment at which a star crossed the meridian, the latter being marked in the

telescopic field of view by a visible thread, beside which other equidistant threads appear. "Before the star

reached the thread he looked at the clock, and then, with eye at telescope, counted the seconds by the beat of

Since the star seldom passed the meridian at the exact moment of a beat, the observer, in order to estimate

fractions, had to note its position at the stroke before and at the stroke after the passage, and to divide the time

as the meridianline seemed to divide the space. If, e.g., one had counted 20 seconds, and at the 21st the star

seemed removed by ac from the meridianthread c, whilst at the 22nd it was at the distance bc; then, if ac: bc

:: 1 : 2, the star would have passed at 21 1/3 seconds. The conditions resemble those in our experiment: the

star is the indexhand, the threads are the scale; and a timedisplacement is to be expected, which with high

rapidities may be positive, and negative with low. The astronomic observations do not permit us to measure

its absolute amount; but that it exists is made certain by the fact than after all other possible errors are

eliminated, there still remains between different observers a personal difference which is often much larger

than that between mere reactiontimes, amounting... sometimes to more than a second." (Op. cit. p. 270.)

[16] Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. II. 2734; 3d. II. 339; Philosophische Studien, II. 621 ff. I know that I am

stupid, but I confess I find these theoretical statements, especially Wundt's, a little hazy. Herr v. Tschisch

considers it impossible that the perception of the index's position should come in too late, and says it

demands no particular attention (p. 622). It seems, however, that this can hardly be the case. Both observers

speak of the difficulty of seeing the index at the right moment. The case is quite different from that of

distributing the attention impartially over simultaneous momentary sensations. The bell or other signal gives

a momentary sensation, the index a continuous one, of motion. To note any one position of the latter is to

interrupt this sensation of motion and to substitute an entirely different percept one, namely, of position

for it, during a time however brief. This involves a sudden change in the manner of attending to the

revolutions of the index; which change ought to take place neither sooner nor later than the momentary

impression, and fix the index as it is then and there visible. Now this is not a case of simply getting two

sensations at once and so feeling them which would be an harmonious act; but of stopping one and

changing it into another, whilst we simultaneously get a third. Two of these acts are discrepant, and the whole

three rather interfere with each other. It becomes hard to 'fix' the index at the very instant that we catch the

momentary impression; so we fall into a way of fixing it either at the last possible moment before, or at the

This at least seems to me the more probable state of affairs. If we fix the index before the impression really

comes, that means that we perceive it too late. But why do we fix it before when the impressions come slow

and simple, and after when they come rapid and complex? And why under certain conditions is there no

displacement at all? The answer which suggests itself is that when there is just enough leisure between the

impressions for the attention to adapt itself comfortably both to them and to the index (one second in W.'s

experiments), it carries on the two processes at once; when the leisure is excessive, the attention, following its

own laws of ripening, and being ready to note the index before the other impression comes, notes it then,

since that is the moment of easiest action, whilst the impression, which comes a moment later, interferes with

noting it again; and finally, that when the leisure is insufficient, the momentary impressions, being the more

fixed data, are attended to first, and the index is fixed a little later on. The noting of the index at too early a

moment would be the noting of a real fact, with its analogue in many other rhythmical experiences. In

reactiontime experiments, for example, when, in a regularly recurring series, the stimulus is once in a while

omitted, the observer sometimes reacts as if it came. Here, as Wundt somewhere observes, we catch

ourselves acting merely because our inward preparation is complete. The 'fixing' of the index is a sort of

action; so that my interpretation tallies with facts recognized elsewhere; but Wundt's explanation (if I

understand it) of the experiments requires us to believe that an observer like v. Tschisch shall steadily and

without exception get an hallucination of a bellstroke before the later occurs, and not hear the real

bellstroke afterwards. I doubt whether this is possible, and I can think of no analogue to it in the rest of our

experience. The whole subject deserves to be gone over again. To Wundt is due the highest credit for his

patience in working out the facts. His explanation of them in his earlier work (Vorlesungen �b. Menschen

und Thierseele, I. 3742, 365371) consisted merely in the appeal to the unity of consciousness, and may be

[17] Note that the permanent interests are themselves grounded in certain objects and relations in which our

[20] Mental Physiol., � 124. The oftcited case of soldiers not perceiving that they are wounded is of an

[21] Prof. J. M. Cattell made experiments to which we shall refer further on, on the degree to which

reactiontimes might be shortened by distracting or voluntarily concentrating the attention. He says of the

latter series that "the averages show that the attention can be kept strained, that is, the centres kept in a state

[23] "'Genius,' says Helvetius, ' is nothing but a continued attention (une attention suivie).' 'Genius,' says

Buffon, 'is only a protracted patience (une longue patience).' 'In the exact sciences, at least,' says Cuvier, 'it is

the patience of a sound intellect, when invincible, which truly constitutes genius.' And Chesterfield has also

observed that 'the power of applying an attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object, is the sure mark

[24] See, e.g., Ulrici: Leib u. Seele, II. 28; Lotze: Metaphysik, � 273; Fechner: Revision d. Psychophysik,

XIX; G. E. M�ller: Zur Theorie d. sinnl. Aufmerksamkeit, � 1; Stumpf: Tonpsychologie, I. 71.

[27] Compare, on clearness as the essential fruit of attention, Lotze's Metaphysic, � 273.

[30] By a negative value of the reactiontime Wundt means the case of the reactive movement occurring

[32] The reader must not suppose this phenomenon to be of frequent occurrence. Experienced observers, like

[34] It should be added that Mr. J. M. Cattell (Mind, XI. 33) found, on repeating Wundt's experiments with a

disturbing noise upon two practised observers, that the simple reactiontime either for light or sound was

hardly perceptibly increased. Making strong voluntary concentration of attention shortened it by about 0.013

seconds on an average (p. 240). Performing mental additions whilst waiting for the stimulus lengthened it

more than anything, apparently. For other, less careful, observations, compare Obersteiner, in Brain, I. 439.

Cattell's negative results show how far some persons can abstract their attention from stimuli by which others

would be disturbed. A. Bartels (Versuche �ber die Ablenkung d. Aufmerksamkeit, Dorpat, 1889) found that

a stimulus to one eye sometimes prevented, sometimes improved, the perception of a quickly ensuing very

[37] To say the very least, he always brought his articulatory innervation close to the discharging point. Herr

M. describes a tightening of the headmuscles as characteristic of the attitude of attention to the reply.

[39] I must say that I am wholly unconscious of the peculiar feelings in the scalp which Fechner goes on to

describe. "The feeling of strained attention in the different senseorgans seems to be only a muscular one

produced in using these various organs by setting in motion, by a sort of reflex action, the muscles which

belong to them. One can ask, then, with what particular muscular contraction the sense of strained attention in

the effort to recall something is associated? On this question my own feeling gives me a decided answer; it

comes to me distinctly, not as a sensation of tension in the inside of the head, but as a feeling of strain and

contraction in the scalp with a pressure from without inwards over the whole cranium, undoubtedly caused by

a contraction of the muscles of the scalp. The harmonizes very well with the German popular expression den

Kopf zusammennehmen, etc., etc. In a former illness, in which I could not endure the slightest effort of

continuous thought, and had no theoretical bias on this question, the muscles of the scalp, especially those of

the occiput, assumed a fairly morbid degree of sensibility whenever I tried to think." (Ibid. pp. 490491.) In

an early writing by Professor Mach, after speaking of the way in which by attention we decompose complex

musical sounds into their elements, this investigator continues: "It is more than a figure of speech when one

says that we 'search' among the sounds. This hearkening search is very observably a bodily activity, just like

attentive looking in the case of the eye. If, obeying the drift of physiology, we understand by attention

nothing mystical, but a bodily disposition, it is most natural to seek it in the variable tension of the muscles of

the ear. Just so, what common men call attentive looking reduces itself mainly to accommodating and setting

of the optic axes.... According to this, it seems to me a very plausible view that quite generally Attention has

its seat in the mechanism of the body. If nervous work is being done through certain channels, that by itself is

a mechanical ground for other channels being closed." (Wien. Sitzungsberichte, Math. Naturw., XLVIII. 2.

[42] Helmholtz: Tonempfindungen, 3d ed. 859 (Engl. tr., 2d ed. 50, 51; see also pp. 601).

[47] Similarly in the verses which some one tried to puzzle me with the other day: "Gui n'a beau dit, qui sabot

dit, nid a beau dit elle?" [48] I cannot refrain from referring in a note to an additional set of facts instanced by

Lotze in his Medizinische Psychologie, � 431, although I am not satisfied with the explanation, fatigue of the

senseorgan, which he gives. "In quietly lying and contemplating a wallpaper pattern, sometimes it is the

ground, sometimes the design, which is clearer and consequently comes nearer.... Arabesques of

monochromic manyconvoluted lines now strike us as composed of one, now of another connected linear

system, and all without any intention on our part. [This is beautifully seen in Moorish patterns; but a simple

diagram like Fig. 39 also shows it well. We see it sometimes as two large triangles superposed, sometimes as

a hexagon with angles spanning its sides, sometimes as six small triangles stuck together at their corners.]...

Often it happens in revery that when we stare at a picture, suddenly some one of its features will be lit up

with especial clearness, although neither its optical character nor its meaning discloses any motive for such an

arousal of the attention.... To one in process of becoming drowsy the surroundings alternately fade into

darkness and abruptly brighten up. The talk of the bystanders seems now to come from indefinite distances;

but at the next moment it startles us by its threatening loudness at our very ear," etc. These variations, which

everyone will have noticed, are, it seems to me, easily explicable by the very unstable equilibrium of our

ideational centres, of which constant change is the law. We conceive one set of lines as object, the other as

background, and forthwith the first set becomes the set we see. There need be no logical motive for the

conceptual change, the irradiations of braintracts by each other, according to accidents of nutrition, 'like

sparks in burntup paper,' suffice. The changes during drowsiness are still more obviously due to this cause.

[52] See Lange, loc. cit. p. 417, for another proof of his view, drawn from the phenomenon of retinal rivalry.

[53] Many of my students have at my request experimented with imagined letters of the alphabet and

syllables, and they tell me that they can see them inwardly as total colored pictures without following their

outlines with the eye. I am myself a bad visualizer, and make movements all the while. M. L. Marillier, in

an article of eminent introspective power which appeared after my text was written (Remarques sur le

M�canisme de l'Attention, in Revue Philosophique, vol. XXVII. p. 566), has contended against Ribot and

others for the nondependence of sensory upon motor images in their relations to attention. I am glad to cite

[54] Drs. Ferrier (Functions of the Brain, �� 1023) and Obersteiner (Brain, I, 439 ff.) treat it as the essential

feature. The author whose treatment of the subject is by far the most thorough and satisfactory is Prof. G. E.

M�ller, whose little work Zur Theorie der sinnlichen Aufmerksamkeit, Inauguraldissertation, Leipzig,

Edelmann (1874?), is for learning and acuteness a model of what a monograph should be. I should like to

have quoted from it, but the Germanism of its composition makes quotation quite impossible. See also G. H.

Lewes: Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series, Prob. 2, chap. 10, G. H. Schneider: Der menschliche Wille,

294 ff., 309 ff., C. Stumpf: Tonpsychologie, I. 6775; W. B. Carpenter: Mental Physiology. chap. 3; Cappie

[57] Repetition of this sort does not confer intelligence of what is said, it only keeps the mind from

wandering into other channels. The intelligence sometimes comes in beats, as it were, at the end of sentences,

[58] The reader will please observe that I am saying all that can possibly be said in favor of the effecttheory,

since, inclining as I do myself to the causetheory, I do not want to undervalue the enemy. As a matter of

fact, one might begin to take one's stand against the effecttheory at the outset, with the phenomenon of

immediate sensorial attention. One might say that attention causes the movements of adjustment of the eyes,

for example, and is not merely their effect. Hering writes most emphatically to this effect: "The movements

from one point of fixation to another are occasioned and regulated by the changes of place of the attention.

When an object, seen at first indirectly, draws our attention to itself, the corresponding movement of the eye

follows without further ado, as a consequence of the attention's migration and of our effort to make the object

distinct. The wandering of the attention entails that of the fixation point. Before its movement begins, its goal

is already in consciousness and grasped by the attention, and the location of this spot in the total space seen is

what determines the direction and amount of the movement of the eye." (Hermann's Handbuch, p. 534.) I do

not here insist on this, because it is hard to tell whether the attention or the movement comes first (Hering's

reasons, pp. 5356, also 5446, seem to me ambiguous), and because, even if the attention to the object does

come first, it may be a mere effect of stimulus and association. Mach's theory that the will to look is the

spacefeeling itself may be compared with Hering's in this place." See Mach's Beitr�ge zur Analyse der

[59] F. H. Bradley, "Is there a Special Activity of Attention?" in 'Mind,' XI. 305, and Lipps, Grundtatsachen,

[61] See, for a defence of the notion of inward activity, Mr. James Ward's searching articles in 'Mind,' XII. 45

[62] It must be admitted that some little time will often elapse before this effort succeeds. As a child, I slept

in a nursery with a very loudticking clock, and remember my astonishment more than once, on listening for

its tick, to find myself unable to catch it for what seemed a long space of time; then suddenly it would break

into my consciousness with an almost startling loudness. M. Delb�uf somewhere narrates how, sleeping in

the country near a milldam, he woke in the night and thought the water had ceased to flow, but on looking

[64] I have begun to inquire experimentally whether any of the measurable functions of the workmen change

after the din of machinery stops at a workshop. So far I have found no constant results as regards either pulse,

breathing, or strength of squeeze by the hand. I hope to prosecute the inquiry farther (May, 1890).

In Chapter VIII, p. 221, the distinction was drawn between two kinds of knowledge of things, bare

acquaintance with them and knowledge about them. The possibility of two such knowledges depends on a

fundamental psychical peculiarity which may be entitled "the principle of constancy in the mind's meanings,"

and which may be thus expressed: "The same matters can be thought of in successive portions of the mental

stream, and some of these portions can know that they mean the same matters which the other portions

meant." One might put it otherwise by saying that "the mind can always intend, and know when it intends, to

This sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking. We saw in Chapter X how the

consciousness of personal identity reposed on it, the present thought finding in its memories a warmth and

intimacy which it recognizes as the same warmth and intimacy it now feels. This sense of identity of the

knowing subject is held by some philosophers to be the only vehicle by which the world hangs together. It

seems hardly necessary to say that a sense of identity of the known object would perform exactly the same

unifying function, even if the sense of subjective identity were lost. And without the intention to think of the

same outer things over and over again, and the sense that we were doing so, our sense of our own personal

sameness would carry us but a little way towards making a universe of our experience.

Note, however, that we are in the first instance speaking of the sense of sameness from the point of view of

the mind's structure alone, and not from the point of view of the universe. We are psychologizing, not

philosophizing. That is, we do not care whether there be any real sameness in things or not, or whether the

mind be true or false in its assumptions of it. Our principle only lays it down that the mind makes continual

use of the notion of sameness, and if deprived of it, would have a different structure from what it has. In a

word, the principle that the mind can mean the Same is true of its meanings, but not necessarily of aught

besides.[1] The mind must conceive as possible that the Same should be before it, for our experience to be the

sort of thing it is. Without the psychological sense of identity, sameness might rain down upon us from the

outer world for ever and we be none the wiser. With the psychological sense, on the other hand, the outer

world might be an unbroken flux, and yet we should perceive a repeated experience. Even now, the world

may be a place in which the same thing never did and never will come twice. The thing we mean to point at

may change from top to bottom and we be ignorant of the fact. But in our meaning itself we are not deceived;

our intention is to think of the same. The name which I have given to the principle, in calling it the law of

constancy in our meanings, accentuates its subjective character, and justifies us in laying it down as the most

Not all psychic life need be assumed to have the sense of sameness developed in this way. In the

consciousness of worms and polyps, though the same realities may frequently impress it, the feeling of

sameness may seldom emerge. We, however, running back and forth, like spiders on the web they weave,

feel ourselves to be working over identical materials and thinking them in different ways. And the man who

CONCEPTION DEFINED. The function by which we thus identify a numerically distinct and permanent

subject of disclosure is called CONCEPTION; and the thoughts which are its vehicles are called concepts.

But the word 'concept' is often used as if it stood for the object of discourse itself; and this looseness feeds

such evasiveness in discussion that I shall avoid the use of the expression concept altogether, and speak of

'conceiving state of mind,' or something similar, instead. The word 'conception' is unambiguous. It properly

denotes neither the mental state nor what the mental state signifies, but the relation between the two, namely,

the function of the mental state in signifying just that particular thing. It is plain that one and the same mental

state can be the vehicle of many conceptions, can mean a particular thing, and a great deal more besides. If it

has such a multiple conceptual function, it may be called an act of compound conception.

We may conceive realities supposed to be extramental, as steamengine; fictions, as mermaid; or mere entia

rationis, like difference or nonentity. But whatever we do conceive, our conception is of that and nothing else

nothing else, that is, instead of that, though it may be of much else in addition to that. Each act of

conception results from our attention singling out some one part of the mass of matter for thought which the

world presents, and holding fast to it, without confusion.[2] Confusion occurs when we do not know whether

a certain object proposed to us is the same with one of our meanings or not; so that the conceptual function

requires, to be complete, that the thought should not only say 'I mean this,' but also say 'I don't mean that.'[3]

Each conception thus eternally remains what it is, and never can become another. The mind may change its

states, and its meanings, at different times; may drop one conception and take up another, but the dropped

conception can in no intelligible sense be said to change into its successor. The paper, a moment ago white, I

may now see to have been scorched black. But my conception 'white' does not change into my conception

'black.' On the contrary, it stays alongside of the objective blackness, as a different meaning in my mind, and

by so doing lets me judge the blackness as the paper's change. Unless it stayed, I should simply say

'blackness' and know no more. Thus, amid the flux of opinions and of physical things, the world of

conceptions, or things intended to be thought about, stands stiff and immutable, like Plato's Realm of

Some conceptions are of things, some of events, some of qualities. Any fact, be it thing, event, or quality,

may be conceived sufficiently for purposes of identification, if only it be singled out and marked so as to

separate it from other things. Simply calling it 'this' or 'that' will suffice. To speak in technical language, a

subject may be conceived by its denotation, with no connotation, or a very minimum of connotation,

attached. The essential point is that it should be reidentified by us as that which the talk is about; and no full

representation of it is necessary for this, even when it is a fully representable thing.

In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that

they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of

Most of the objects of our thought, however, are to some degree represented as well as merely pointed out.

Either they are things and events perceived or imagined, or they are qualities apprehended in a positive way.

Even where we have no intuitive acquaintance with the nature of a thing, if we know any of the relations of it

at all, anything about it, that is enough to individualize and distinguish it from all the other things which we

might mean. Many of our topics of discourse are thus problematical, or defined by their relations only. We

think of a thing about which certain facts must obtain, but we do not yet know how the thing will look when

it is realized. Thus we conceive of a perpetualmotion machine. It is a qu�situm of a perfectly definite kind,

we can always tell whether the actual machines offered us do or do not agree with what we mean by it. The

natural possibility or impossibility of the thing does not touch the question of its conceivability in this

problematic way. 'Round square,' 'blackwhitething,' are absolutely definite conceptions; it is a mere

accident, as far as conception goes, that they happen to stand for things which nature lets us sensibly

CONCEPTIONS ARE UNCHANGEABLE. The fact that the same real topic of discourse is at one time

conceived as a mere 'that' or 'that which, etc.,' and is at another time conceived with additional specifications,

has been treated by many authors as a proof that conceptions themselves are fertile and selfdeveloping. A

conception, according to the Hegelizers in philosophy, 'develops its own significance,' 'makes explicit what it

implicitly contained,' passes, on occasion, 'over into its opposite,' and in short loses altogether the blankly

selfidentical character we supposed it to maintain. The figure we viewed as a polygon appears to us now as

a sum of juxtaposed triangles; the number hitherto conceived as thirteen is at last noticed to be six plus seven,

or prime; the man thought honest is believed a rogue. Such changes of our opinion are viewed by these

The facts are unquestionable; our knowledge does grow and change by rational and inward processes, as well

as by empirical discoveries. Where the discoveries are empirical, no one pretends that the propulsive agency,

the force that makes the knowledge develop, is mere conception. All admit it to be our continued exposure to

the thing, with its power to impress our senses. Thus strychnin, which tastes bitter, we find will also kill, etc.

Now I say that where the new knowledge merely comes from thinking, the facts are essentially the same, and

that to talk of selfdevelopment on the part of our conceptions is a very bad way of stating the case. Not new

sensations, as in the em pirical instance, but new conceptions, are the indispensable conditions of advance.

For if the alleged cases of selfdevelopment be examined it will be found, I believe, that the new truth

affirms in every case a relation between the original subject of conception and some new subject conceived

later on. These new subjects of conception arise in various ways. Every one of our conceptions is of

something which our attention originally tore out of the continuum of felt experience, and provisionally

isolated so as to make of it an individual topic of discourse. Every one of them has a way, if the mind is left

alone with it, of suggesting other parts of the continuum from which it was torn, for conception to work upon

in a similar way. This 'suggestion' is often no more than what we shall later know as the association of ideas.

Often, however, it is a sort of invitation to the mind to play, add lines, break numbergroups, etc. Whatever it

is, it brings new conceptions into consciousness, which latter thereupon may or may not expressly attend to

the relation in which the new stands to the old. Thus I have a conception of equidistant lines. Suddenly, I

know not whence, there pops into my head the conception of their meeting. Suddenly again I think of the

meeting and the equidistance both together, and perceive them incompatible. "Those lines will never meet," I

say. Suddenly again the word 'parallel' pops into my head. 'They are parallels,' I continue; and so on. Original

conceptions to start with; adventitious conceptions pushed forward by multifarious psychologic causes;

comparisons and combinations of the two; resultant conceptions to end with; which latter may be of either

As regards these relations, they are conceptions of the second degree, as one might say, and their birthplace is

the mind itself. In Chapter XXVIII I shall at considerable length defend the mind's claim to originality and

fertility in bringing them forth. But no single one of the mind's conceptions is fertile of itself, as the opinion

which I criticise pretends. When the several notes of a chord are sounded together, we get a new feeling from

their combination. This feeling is due to the mind reacting upon that group of sounds in that determinate way,

and no one would think of saying of any single note of the chord that it 'developed' of itself into the other

notes or into the feeling of harmony. So of Conceptions. No one of them develops into any other. But if two

of them are thought at once, their relation may come to consciousness, and form matter for a third conception.

Take 'thirteen' for example, which is said to develop into 'prime.' What really happens is that we compare the

utterly changeless conception of thirteen with various other conceptions, those of the different multiples of

two, three, four, five, and six, and ascertain that it differs from them all. Such difference is a freshly

ascertained relation. It is only for mere brevity's sake that we call it a property of the original thirteen, the

property of being prime. We shall see in the next chapter that (if we count out �sthetic and moral relations

between things) the only important relations of which the mere inspection of conceptions makes us aware are

relations of comparison, that is, of difference and nodifference, between them. The judgment 6 + 7 = 13

expresses the relation of equality between two ideal objects, 13 on the one hand and 6 + 7 on the other,

successively conceived and compared. The judgments 6 + 7 > 12, or 6 + 7 14, express in like manner

relations of inequality between ideal objects. But if it be unfair to say that the conception of 6 + 7 generates

that of 12 or of 14, surely it is as unfair to say that it generates that of 13.

The conceptions of 12, 13, and 14 are each and all generated by individual acts of the mind, playing with its

materials. When, comparing two ideal objects, we find them equal, the conception of one of them may be that

of a whole and of the other that of all its parts. This particular case is, it seems to me, the only case which

makes the notion of one conception evolving into another sound plausible. But even in this case the

conception, as such, of the whole does not evolve into the conception, as such, of the parts. Let the

conception of some object as a whole be given first. To begin with, it points to and identifies for future

thought a certain that. The 'whole' in question might be one of those mechanical puzzles of which the

difficulty is to un lock the parts. In this case, nobody would pretend that the richer and more elaborate

conception which we gain of the puzzle after solving it came directly out of our first crude conception of it,

for it is notoriously the outcome of experimenting with our hands. It is true that, as they both mean that same

puzzle, our earlier thought and our later thought have one conceptual function, are vehicles of one

conception. But in addition to being the vehicle of this bald unchanging conception, 'that same puzzle,' the

later thought is the vehicle of all those other conceptions which it took the manual experimentation to

acquire. Now, it is just the same where the whole is mathematical instead of being mechanical. Let it be a

polygonal space, which we cut into triangles, and of which we then affirm that it is those triangles. Here the

experimentation (although usually done by a pencil in the hands) may be done by the unaided imagination.

We hold the space, first conceived as polygonal simply, in our mind's eye until our attention wandering to

and fro within it has carved it into the triangles. The triangles are a new conception, the result of this new

operation. Having once conceived them, however, and compared them with the old polygon which we

originally conceived and which we have never ceased conceiving, we judge them to fit exactly into its area.

The earlier and later conceptions, we say, are of one and the same space. But this relation between triangles

and polygon which the mind cannot help finding if it compares them at all, is very badly expressed by saying

that the old conception has developed into the new. New conceptions come from new sensations, new

movements, new emotions, new associations, new acts of attention, and new comparisons of old conceptions,

and not in other ways, Endogenous prolification is not a mode of growth to which conceptions can lay claim.

I hope, therefore, that I shall not be accused of huddling mysteries out of sight, when I insist that the

psychology of conception is not the place in which to treat of those of continuity and change. Conceptions

form the one class of entities that cannot under any circumstances change. They can cease to be, altogether;

or they can stay, as what they severally are; but there is for them no middle way. They form an essentially

discontinuous system, and translate the process of our perceptual experience, which is naturally a flux, into a

set of stagnant and petrified terms. The very conception of flux itself is an absolutely changeless meaning in

the mind: it signifies just that one thing, flux, immovably. And, with this, the doctrine of the flux of the

'ABSTRACT' IDEAS. We have now to pass to a less excusable mistake. There are philosophers who deny

that associated things can be broken asunder at all, even provisionally, by the conceiving mind. The opinion

known as Nominalism says that we really never frame any conception of the partial elements of an

experience, but are compelled, whenever we think it, to think it in its totality, just as it came.

I will be silent of medi�val Nominalism, and begin with Berkeley, who is supposed to have rediscovered the

doc trine for himself. His asseverations against 'abstract ideas' are among the oftenest quoted passages in

"It is agreed," he says, "on all hands that the qualities or modes of things do never really exist each of them

apart by itself, and separated from all others, but are mixed, as it were, and blended together, several in the

same object. But, we are told, the mind being able to consider each quality singly, or abstracted from those

other qualities with which it is united, does by that means frame to itself abstract ideas.... After this manner, it

is said, we come by the abstract idea of man, or, if you please, humanity, or human nature; wherein it is true

there is included color, because there is no man but has some color, but then it can be neither white, nor

black, nor any particular color, because there is no one particular color wherein all men partake. So likewise

there is included stature, but then it is neither tall stature nor low stature, nor yet middle stature, but

something abstracted from all these. And so of the rest.....Whether others have this wonderful faculty of

abstracting their ideas, they best can tell: for myself, I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining or

representing to myself the ideas of those particular things I have perceived and of variously compounding and

dividing them.... I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest

of the body. But then, whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and color.

Likewise the idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or

a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middlesized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea

above described. And it is equally impossible for me to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the

body moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear nor rectilinear; and the like may be said of all

other abstract general ideas whatsoever.... And there is ground to think most men will acknowledge

themselves to be in my case. The generality of men which are simple and illiterate never pretend to abstract

notions. It is said they are difficult, and not to be attained without pains and study.... Now I would fain know

at what time it is men are employed in surmounting that difficulty, and furnishing themselves with those

necessary helps for discourse. It cannot be when they are grown up, for then it seems they are not conscious

of any such painstaking; it remains therefore to be the business of their childhood. And surely the great and

multiplied labor of framing abstract notions will be found a hard task for that tender age. Is it not a hard thing

to imagine that a couple of children cannot prate together of their sugarplums and rattles and the rest of their

little trinkets, till they have first tacked together numberless inconsistencies, and so framed in their minds

abstract general ideas, and annexed them to every common name they make use of?"[7]

The note, so bravely struck by Berkeley, could not, however, be well sustained in face of the fact patent to

every human being that we can mean color without meaning any particular color, and stature without

meaning any particular height. James Mill, to be sure, chimes in heroically in the chapter on Classification of

his 'Analysis'; but in his son John the nominalistic voice has grown so weak that, although 'abstract ideas' are

repudiated as a matter of traditional form, the opinions uttered are really nothing but a conceptualism

ashamed to call itself by its own legitimate name.[8] Conceptualism says the mind can conceive any quality

or relation it pleases, and mean nothing but it, in isolation from everything else in the world. This is, of

"The formation of a Concept does not consist in separating the attributes which are said to compose it from

all other attributes of the same object, and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined from any others.

We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as

forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object. But, though

meaning them only as part of a larger agglomeration, we have the power of fixing out attention on them, to

the neglect of the other attributes with which we think them combined. While the concentration of attention

lasts, if it is sufficiently intense, we may be temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes, and may

really, for a brief interval, have nothing present to our mind but the attributes constituent of the concept....

General concepts, therefore, we have, properly speaking, none; we have only complex ideas of objects in the

concrete: but we are able to attend exclusively to certain parts of the concrete idea: and by that exclusive

attention we enable those parts to determine exclusively the course of our thoughts as subsequently called up

by association; and are in a condition to carry on a train of meditation or reasoning relating to those parts

This is a lovely example of Mill's way of holding piously to his general statements, but conceding in detail all

that their adversaries ask. If there be a better description extant, of a mind in possession of an 'abstract idea,'

than is contained in the words I have italicized, I am unacquainted with it. The Berkeleyan nominalism thus

It is easy to lay bare the false assumption which underlies the whole discussion of the question as hitherto

carried on. That assumption is that ideas, in order to know, must be cast in the exact likeness of whatever

things they know, and that the only things that can be known are those which ideas can resemble. The error

has not been confined to nominalists. Omnis cognito fit per assimilationem cognoscentis et cogniti has been

the maxim, more or less explicitly assumed, of writers of every school. Practically it amounts to saying that

an idea must be a duplicate edition of what it knows[10] in other words, that it can only know itself or,

more shortly still, that knowledge in any strict sense of the word, as a selftranscendent function, is

Now our own blunt statements about the ultimateness of the cognitive relation, and the difference between

the 'object' of the thought and its mere 'topic' or 'subject of discourse' (cf. pp. 275 ff.), are all at variance with

any such theory; and we shall find more and more occasion, as we advance in this book, to deny its general

truth. All that a state of mind need do, in order to take cognizance of a reality, intend it, or be 'about' it, is to

lead to a remoter state of mind which either acts upon the reality or resembles it. The only class of thoughts

which can with any show of plausibility be said to resemble their objects are sensations. The stuff of which

all our other thoughts are composed is symbolic, and a thought attests its pertinency to a topic by simply

But Mill and the rest believe that a thought must be what it means, and mean what it is, and that if it be a

picture of an entire individual, it cannot mean any part of him to the exclusion of the rest. I say nothing here

of the preposterously false descriptive psychology involved in the statement that the only things we can

mentally picture are individuals completely determinate in all regards. Chapter XVIII will have something to

say on that point, and we can ignore it here. For even if it were true that our images were always of concrete

individuals, it would not in the least follow that our meanings were of the same.

The sense of our meaning is an entirely peculiar element of the thought. It is one of those evanescent and

'transitive' facts of mind which introspection cannot turn round upon, and isolate and hold up for examination,

as an entomologist passes round an insect on a pin. In the (somewhat clumsy) terminology I have used, it

pertains to the 'fringe' of the subjective state, and is a 'feeling of tendency,' whose neural counterpart is

undoubtedly a lot of dawning and dying processes too faint and complex to be traced. The geometer, with his

one definite figure before him, knows perfectly that his thoughts apply to countless other figures as well, and

that although he sees lines of a certain special bigness, direction, color, etc., he means not one of these details.

When I use the word man in two different sentences, I may have both times exactly the same sound upon my

lips and the same picture in my mental eye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of uttering the word and

imagining the picture, know that I mean, two entirely different things. Thus when I say: "What a wonderful

man Jones is!" I am perfectly aware that I mean by man to exclude Napoleon Bonaparte or Smith. But when I

say: "What a wonderful thing Man is!" I am equally well aware that I mean to include not only Jones, but

Napoleon and Smith as well. This added consciousness is an absolutely positive sort of feeling, transforming

what would otherwise be mere noise or vision into something understood; and determining the sequel of my

thinking, the later words and images, in a perfectly definite way. We saw in Chapter IX that the image per se,

the nucleus, is functionally the least important part of the thought. Our doctrine, therefore, of the 'fringe' leads

to a perfectly satisfactory decision of the nominalistic and conceptualistic controversy, so far as it touches

psychology. We must decide in favor of the conceptualists, and affirm that the power to think things,

qualities, relations, or whatever other elements there may be, isolated and abstracted from the total experience

UNIVERSALS. After abstractions, universals! The 'fringe,' which lets us believe in the one, lets us believe in

the other too. An individual conception is of something restricted, in its application, to a single case. A

universal or general conception is of an entire class, or of something belonging to an entire class, of things.

The conception of an abstract quality is, taken by itself, neither universal nor particular.[11] If I abstract

white from the rest of the wintry landscape this morning, it is a perfectly definite conception, a selfidentical

quality which I may mean again; but, as I have not yet individualized it by expressly meaning to restrict it to

this particular snow, nor thought at all of the possibility of other things to which it may be applicable, it is so

far nothing but a 'that,' a 'floating adjective,' as Mr. Bradley calls it, or a topic broken out from the rest of the

world. Properly it is, in this state, a singular I have 'singled it out;' and when, later, I universalize or

individualize its application, and my thought turns to mean either this white or all possible whites, I am in

reality meaning two new things and forming two new conceptions.[12] Such an alteration of my meaning has

nothing to do with any change in the image I may have in my mental eye, but solely with the vague

consciousness that surrounds the image, of the sphere to which is is intended to apply. We can give no more

definite account of this vague conscious ness than has been given on pp. 249266. But that is no reason for

But the nominalists and traditional conceptualists find matter for an inveterate quarrel in these simple facts.

Full of their notion that an idea, feeling, or state of consciousness can at bottom only be aware of its own

quality; and agreeing, as they both do, that such an idea or state of consciousness is a perfectly determinate,

singular, and transitory thing; they find it impossible to conceive how it should become the vehicle of a

knowledge of anything permanent or universal. "To know a universal, it must be universal; for like can only

be known by like," etc. Unable to reconcile these incompatibles, the knower and the known, each side

immolates one of them to save the other. The nominalists 'settle the hash' of the thing known by denying it to

be ever a genuine universal; the conceptualists despatch the knower by denying it to be a state of mind, in the

sense of being a perishing segment of thoughts' stream, consubstantial with other facts of sensibility. They

invent, instead of it, as the vehicle of the knowledge of universals, an actus purus intellect�s, or an Ego,

whose function is treated as quasimiraculous and nothing if not aweinspiring, and which it is a sort of

blasphemy to approach with the intent to explain and make common, or reduce to lower terms. Invoked in the

first instance as a vehicle for the knowledge of universals, the higher principle presently is made the

indispensible vehicle of all thinking whatever, for, it is contended, "a universal element is present in every

thought." The nominalists meanwhile, who dislike actus puros and aweinspiring principles and despise the

reverential mood, content themselves with saying that we are mistaken in supposing we ever get sight of the

face of an universal; and that what deludes us is nothing but the swarm of 'individual ideas' which may at any

If we open the pages of either school, we find it impossible to tell, in all the whirl about universal and

particular, when the author is talking about universals in the mind, and when about objective universals, so

strangely are the two mixed together. James Ferrier, for example, is the most brilliant of antinominalist

writers. But who is nimblewitted enough to count, in the following sentences from him, the number of times

he steps from the known to the knower, and attributes to both whatever properties he finds in either one?

"To think is to pass from the singular or particular to the idea [concept] or universal.... Ideas are necessary

because no thinking can take place without them. They are universal, inasmuch as they are completely

divested of the particularity which characterizes all the phenomena of mere sensation. To grasp the nature of

this universality is not easy. Perhaps the best means by which this end may be compassed is by contrasting it

with the particular. It is not difficult to understand that a sensation, a phenomenon of sense, is never more

than the particular which it is. As such, that is, in its strict particularity, it is absolutely unthinkable. In the

very act of being thought, something more than it emerges, and this something more cannot be again the

particular.... Ten particulars per se cannot be thought of any more than one particular can be thought of;...

there always emerges in thought an additional something, which is the possibility of other particulars to an

indefinite extent.....The indefinite additional something which they are instances of is a universal.... The idea

or universal cannot possibly be pictured in the imagination, for this would at once reduce it to the particular....

This inability to form any sort of picture or representation of an idea does not proceed from any imperfection

or limitation of our faculties, but is a quality inherent in the very nature of intelligence. A contradiction is

involved in the supposition that an idea or a universal can become the object either of sense or of the

The nominalists, on their side, admit a quasiuniversal, something which we think as if it were universal,

though it is not; and in all that they say about this something, which they explain to be 'an indefinite number

of particular ideas,' the same vacillation between the subjective and the objective points of view appears. The

reader never can tell whether an 'idea' spoken of is supposed to be a knower or a known. The authors

themselves do not distinguish. They want to get something in the mind which shall resemble what is out of

the mind, however vaguely, and they think that when that fact is accomplished, no farther questions will be

"The word, man, we shall say, is first applied to an individual; it is first associated with the idea of that

individual, and acquires the power of calling up the idea of him; it is next applied to another individual and

acquires the power of calling up the idea of him; so of another and another, till it has become associated with

an indefinite number, and has acquired the power of calling up an indefinite number of those ideas

indifferently. What happens? It does call up an indefinite number of the ideas of individuals as often as it

occurs; and calling them in close connection, it forms a species of complex idea of them.... It is also a fact,

that when an idea becomes to a certain extent complex, from the multiplicity of the ideas it comprehends, it is

of necessity indistinct;... and this indistinctness has, doubtless, been a main cause of the mystery which has

appeared to belong to it.... It thus appears that the word man is not a word having a very simple idea, as was

the opinion of the realists; nor a word having no idea at all, as was that of the [earlier] nominalists; but a word

calling up an indefinite number of ideas, by the irresistible laws of association, and forming them into one

"A word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an abstract general idea, but of many several

particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind. An idea which, considered in itself, is

particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same

'Stand for,' not know; 'becomes general,' not becomes aware of something general; 'particular ideas,' not

particular things everywhere the same timidity about begging the fact of knowing, and the pitifully

impotent attempt to foist it in the shape of a mode of being of 'ideas.' If the fact to be conceived be the

indefinitely numerous actual and possible members of a class, then it is assumed that if we can only get

enough ideas to huddle together for a moment in the mind, the being of each several one of them there will be

an equivalent for the knowing, or meaning, of one member of the class in question; and their number will be

so large as to confuse our tally and leave it doubtful whether all the possible members of the class have thus

Of course this is nonsense. An idea neither is what it knows, nor knows what it is; nor will swarms of copies

of the same 'idea,' recurring in stereotyped form, or 'by the irresistible laws of association formed into one

idea,' ever be the same thing as a thought of 'all the possible members' of a class. We must mean that by an

altogether special bit of consciousness ad hoc. But it is easy to translate Berkeley's, Hume's, and Mill's notion

of a swarm of ideas into cerebral terms, and so to make them stand for something real; and, in this sense, I

think the doctrine of these authors less hollow than the opposite one which makes the vehicle of universal

conceptions to be an actus purus of the soul. If each 'idea' stand for some special nascent nerveprocess, then

the aggregate of these nascent processes might have for its conscious correlate a psychic 'fringe,' which

should be just that universal meaning, or intention that the name or mental picture employed should mean all

the possible individuals of the class. Every peculiar complication of brainprocesses must have some peculiar

correlate in the soul. To one set of processes will correspond the thought of an indefinite taking of the extent

of a word like man; to another set that of a particular taking; and to a third set that of a universal taking, of the

extent of the same word. The thought corresponding to either set of processes, is always itself a unique and

singular event, whose dependence on its peculiar nerveprocess I of course am far from professing to

Truly in comparison with the fact that every conception, whatever it be of, is one of the mind's immutable

posses sions, the question whether a single thing, or a whole class of things, or only an unassigned quality,

be meant by it, is an insignificant matter of detail. Our meanings are of singulars, particulars, indefinites, and

universals, mixed together in every way. A singular individual is as much conceived when he is isolated and

identified away from the rest of the world in my mind, as is the most rarefied and universally applicable

quality he may possess being, for example, when treated in the same way.[18] From every point of view,

the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Plato

and Aristotle downwards, philosophers should have vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the

particular, and in adoration of that of the general, is hard to understand, seeing that the more adorable

knowledge ought to be that of the more adorable things, and that the things of worth are all concretes and

singulars. The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, to know new truths about

individual things. The restriction of one's meaning, moreover, to an individual thing, probably requires even

more complicated brainprocesses than its extension to all the instances of a kind; and the mere mystery, as

such, of the knowledge, is equally great, whether generals or singulars be the things known. In sum,

therefore, the traditional universalworship can only be called a bit of perverse sentimentalism, a philosophic

It may seem hardly necessary to add (what follows as a matter of course from pp. 229237, and what has

been implied in our assertions all along) that nothing can be conceived twice over without being conceived in

entirely different states of mind. Thus, my armchair is one of the things of which I have a conception; I

knew it yesterday and recognized it when I looked at it. But if I think of it today as the same armchair

which I looked at yesterday, it is obvious that the very conception of it as the same is an additional

complication to the thought, whose inward constitution must alter in consequence. In short, it is logically

impossible that the same thing should be known as the same by two successive copies of the same thought.

As a matter of fact, the thoughts by which we know that we mean the same thing are apt to be very different

indeed from each other. We think the thing now in one context, now in another; now in a definite image, now

in a symbol. Sometimes our sense of its identity pertains to the mere fringe, sometimes it involves the

nucleus, of our thought. We never can break the thought asunder and tell just which one of its bits is the part

that lets us know which subject is referred to; but nevertheless we always do know which of all possible

subjects we have in mind. Introspective psychology must here throw up the sponge; the fluctuations of

subjective life are too exquisite to be arrested by its coarse means. It must confine itself to bearing witness to

the fact that all sorts of different subjective states do form the vehicle by which the same is known; and it

The ordinary Psychology of 'ideas' constantly talks as if the vehicle of the same thingknown must be the

same recurrent state of mind, and as if the having over again of the same 'idea' were not only a necessary but

a sufficient condition for meaning the same thing twice. But this recurrence of the same idea would utterly

defeat the existence of a repeated knowledge of anything. It would be a simple reversion into a preexistant

state, with nothing gained in the interval, and with complete unconsciousness of the state having existed

before. Such is not the way in which we think. As a rule we are fully aware that we have thought before of

the thing we think of now. The continuity and permanency of the topic is of the essence of our intellection.

We recognize the old problem, and the old solutions; and we go on to alter and improve and substitute one

This is what is meant when it is said that thinking consists in making judgments. A succession of judgments

may all be about the same thing. The general practical postulate which encourages us to keep thinking at all is

that by going on to do so we shall judge better of the same things than if we do not.[19] In the successive

judgments, all sorts of new operations are performed on the things, and all sorts of new results brought out,

without the sense of the main topic ever getting lost. At the outset, we merely have the topic; then we operate

on it; and finally we have it again in a richer and truer way. A compound conception has been substituted for

The distinction between having and operating is as natural in the mental as in the material world. As our

hands may hold a bit of wood and a knife, and yet do naught with either; so our mind may simply be aware of

a thing's existence, and yet neither attend to it nor discriminate it, neither locate nor count nor compare nor

like nor dislike nor deduce it, nor recognize it articulately as having been met with before. At the same time

we know that, instead of staring at it in this entranced and senseless way, we may rally our activity in a

moment, and locate, class, compare, count, and judge it. There is nothing involved in all this which we did

not postulate at the very outset of our introspective work: realities, namely, extra mentem, thoughts, and

possible relations of cognition between the two. The result of the thoughts' operating on the data given to

sense is to transform the order in which experience comes into an entirely different order, that of the

conceived world. There is no spot of light, for example, which I pick out and proceed to define as a pebble,

which is not thereby torn from its mere time and spaceneighbors, and thought in conjunction with things

physically parted from it by the width of nature. Compare the form in which facts appear in a textbook of

physics, as logically subordinated laws, with that in which we naturally make their acquaintance. The

conceptual scheme is a sort of sieve in which we try to gather up the world's contents. Most facts and

relations fall through its meshes, being either too subtle or insignificant to be fixed in any conception. But

whenever a physical reality is caught and identified as the same with something already conceived, it remains

on the sieve, and all the predicates and relations of the conception with which it is identified become its

predicates and relations too; it is subjected to the sieve's network, in other words. Thus comes to pass what

Mr. Hodgson calls the translation of the perceptual into the conceptual order of the world.[20]

In Chapter XXII we shall see how this translation always takes place for the sake of some subjective interest,

and how the conception with which we handle a bit of sensible experience is really nothing but a teleological

instrument. This whole function of conceiving, of fixing, and holding fast to meanings, has no significance

apart from the fact that the conceiver is a creature with partial purposes and private ends. There remains,

therefore, much more to be said about conception, but for the present this will suffice.

Footnotes [1] There are two other 'principles of identity' in philosophy. The ontological one asserts that every

real thing is what it is, that a is a, and b, b. The logical one says that what is once true of the subject of a

judgment is always true of that subject. The ontological law is a tautological truism; the logical principle is

already more, for it implies subjects unalterable by time. The psychological law also implies facts which

might not be realized: there might be no succession of thoughts; or if there were, the later ones might not

think of the earlier; or if they did, they might not recall the content thereof; or, recalling the content, they

[2] In later chapters we shall see that determinate relations exist between the various data thus fixed upon by

the mind. These are called a priori or axiomatic relations. Simple inspection of the data enables us to perceive

them; and one inspection is as effective as a million for engendering in us the conviction that between those

data that relation must always hold. To change the relation we should have to make the data different. 'The

guarantee for the uniformity and adequacy' of the data can only be the mind's own power to fix upon any

objective content, and to mean that content as often as it likes. This right of the mind to 'construct' permanent

ideal objects for itself out of the data of experience seems, singularly enough, to be a stumblingblock to

many. Professor Robertson in his clear and instructive article 'Axioms' in the Encyclopedia Britannica (9th

edition) suggests that it may only be where movements enter into the constitution of the ideal object (as they

do in geometrical figures) that we can "make the ultimate relations to be what for us they must be in all

circumstances." He makes, it is true, a concession in favor of conceptions of number abstracted from

"subjective occurrences succeeding each other in time" because these also are acts "of construction,

dependent on the power we have of voluntarily determining the flow of subjective consciousness." "The

content of passive sensation," on the other hand, "may indefinitely vary beyond any control of ours." What if

it do vary, so long as we can continue to think of and mean the qualities it varied from? We can 'make' ideal

objects for ourselves out of irrecoverable bits of passive experience quite as perfectly as out of easily

repeatable active experiences. And when we have got our objects together and compared them, we do not

[4] "For though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter taste, which at another time would produce a

sweet one, yet the idea of bitter in that man's mind would be as distinct as if he had tasted only gall." (Locke's

[5] Black round things, square white things, per contra, Nature gives us freely enough. But the combinations

which she refuses to realize may exist as distinctly, in the shape of postulates, as those which she gives may

exist in the shape of positive images, in our mind. As a matter of fact, she may realize a warm cold thing

whenever two points of the skin, so near together as not to be locally distinguished, are touched, the one with

a warm, the other with a cold, piece of metal. The warmth and the cold are then often felt as if in the same

objective place. Under similar conditions two objects, one sharp and the other blunt, may feel like one sharp

blunt thing. The same space may appear of two colors if, by optical artifice, one of the colors is made to

appear as if seen through the other Whether any two attributes whatever shall be compatible or not, in the

sense of appearing or not to occupy the same place and moment, depends simply on de facto peculiarities of

natural bodies of our senseorgans. Logically, any one combination of qualities is to the full as conceivable

as any other, and has as distinct a meaning for thought. What necessitates this remark is the confusion

deliberately kept up by certain authors (e.g., Spencer, Psychology, �� 4267) between the inconceivable and

the notdistinctlyimaginable. How do we know which things we cannot imagine unless by first conceiving

[6] Arguments seldom make converts in matters philosophical; and some readers, I know, who find that they

conceive a certain matter differently from what they did, will still prefer saying they have two different

editions of the same conception, one evolved from the other, to saying they have two different conceptions of

the same thing. It depends, after all, on how we define conception. We ourselves defined it as the function by

which a state of mind means to think the same whereof it thought on a former occasion. Two states of mind

will accordingly be two editions of the same conception just so far as either does mean to think what the other

thought; but no farther. If either mean to think what the other did not think, it is a different conception from

the other. And if either mean to think all that the other thought, and more, it is a different conception, so far

as the more goes. In this last case one state of mind has two conceptual functions. Each thought decides, by

its own authority, which, out of all the conceptive functions open to it, it shall now renew; with which other

thought it shall identify itself as a conceiver, and just how far. "The same A which I once meant," it says, "I

shall now mean again, and mean it with C as its predicate (or what not) instead of B, as before." In all this,

therefore, there is absolutely no changing, but only uncoupling and recoupling of conceptions. Compound

conceptions come, as functions of new states of mind. Some of these functions are the same with previous

ones, some not. Any changed opinion, then, partly contains new editions (absolutely identical with the old,

however) of former conceptions, partly absolutely new conceptions. The division is a perfectly easy one to

[9] Exam. of Hamilton, p. 393. Cf. also Logic, bk. II. chap. v � 1. and bk. IV. chap. II. � 1.

[10] E.g.: "The knowledge of things must mean that the mind finds itself in them, or that, in some way, the

difference between them and the mind is dissolved." (E. Caird, Philosophy of Kant, first edition, p. 553.)

[11] The traditional conceptualist doctrine is that an abstract must eo ipso be a universal. Even modern and

independent authors like Prof. Dewey (Psychology, 207) obey the tradition: "The mind seizes upon some one

aspect,... abstracts or prescinds it. This very seizure of some one element generalizes the one abstracted....

Attention, in drawing it forth, makes it a distinct content of consciousness and thus universalizes it; it is

considered no longer in its particular connection with the object, but on its own account; that is, as an idea, or

[12] C. F. Reid's Intellectual Powers, Essay v. chap. III. Whiteness is one thing, the whiteness of this sheet

[13] Mr. F. H. Bradley says the conception or the 'meaning' "consists of a part of the content, cut off, fixed by

the mind, and considered apart from the existence of the sign. It would not be correct to add, and referred

away to another real subject; for where we think without judging, and where we deny, that description would

not be applicable." This seems to be the same doctrine as ours; the application to one or to all subjects of the

abstract fact conceived (i.e. its individuality or its universality), constituting a new conception. I am,

however, not quite sure that Mr. Bradley steadily maintains this ground. Cf. the first chapter of his Principles

of Logic. The doctrine I defend is stoutly upheld in Rosmini's Philosophical System, Introduction by Thomas

[17] It may add to the effect of the text to quote a passage from the essay in 'Mind,' referred to on p. 224.

"Why may we not side with the conceptualists in saying that the universal sense of a word does correspond to

a mental fact of some kind, but at the same time, agreeing with the nominalists that all mental facts are

modifications of subjective sensibility, why may we not call that fact a 'feeling'? Man meant for mankind is in

short a different feeling from man as a mere noise, or from man meant for that man, to wit, John Smith alone.

Not that the difference consists simply in the fact that, when taken universally, the word has one of Mr.

Galton's 'blended' images of man associated with it. Many persons have seemed to think that these blended

or, as Prof. Huxley calls them, 'generic' images are equivalent to concepts. But, in itself, a blurred thing is just

as particular as a sharp thing; and the generic character of either sharp image or blurred image depends on its

being felt with its representative function. This function is the mysterious plus, the understood meaning. But

it is nothing applied to the image from above, no pure act of reason inhabiting a supersensible and

semisupernatural plane. It can be diagrammatized as continuous with all the other segments of the

subjective stream. It is just that staining, fringe, or halo of obscurely felt relation to masses of other imagery

about to come, but not yet distinctly in focus, which we have so absolutely set forth [in Chapter IX].

"If the image come unfringed, it reveals but a simple quality, thing, or event; if it come fringed, it may reveal

something expressly taken universally or in a scheme of relations. The difference between thought and

feeling thus reduces itself, in the last subjective analysis, to the presence or absence of 'fringe.' And this in

turn reduces itself, with much probability, in the last physiological analysis, to the absence or presence of

subexcitements in other convolutions of the brain than those whose discharges underlie the more definite

nucleus, the substantive ingredient, of the thought, in this instance, the word or image it may happen to

"The contrast is not, then, as the Platonists would have it, between certain subjective facts called images and

sensations, and others called acts of relating intelligence; the former being blind perishing things, knowing

not even their own existence as such, whilst the latter combine the poles in the mysterious synthesis of their

cognitive sweep. The contrast is really between two aspects, in which all mental facts without exception may

be taken; their structural aspect, as being subjective, and their functional aspect, as being cognitions. In the

former aspect, the highest as well as the lowest is a feeling, a peculiarly tinged segment of the stream. This

tingeing is its sensitive body, the wie ihm zu Muthe ist, the way it feels whilst passing. In the latter aspect, the

lowest mental fact as well as the highest may grasp some bit of truth as its content, even though that truth

were as relationless a matter as a bare unlocalized and undated quality of pain. From the cognitive point of

view, all mental facts are intellections. From the subjective point of view all are feelings. Once admit that the

passing and evanescent are as real parts of the stream as the distinct and comparatively abiding; once allow

that fringes and halos, inarticulate perceptions, whereof the objects are as yet unnamed, mere nascencies of

cognition, premonitions, awarenesses of direction, are thoughts sui generis, as much as articulate imaginings

and propositions are; once restore, I say, the vague to its psychological rights, and the matter presents no

"And then we see that the current opposition of Feeling to Knowledge is quite a false issue. If every feeling is

at the same time a bit of knowledge, we ought no longer to talk of mental states differing by having more or

less of the cognitive quality; they only differ in knowing more or less, in having much fact or little fact for

their object. The feeling of a broad scheme of relations is a feeling that knows much; the feeling of a simple

quality is a feeling that knows little. But the knowing itself, whether of much or of little, has the same

essence, and is as good knowing in the one case as in the other. Concept and image, thus discriminated

through their objects, are consubstantial in their inward nature, as modes of feeling. The one, as particular,

will no longer be held to be a relatively base sort of entity, to be taken as a matter of course, whilst the other,

as universal, is celebrated as a sort of standing miracle, to be adored but not explained. Both concept and

image, qu� subjective, are singular and particular. Both are moments of the stream, which come and in an

instant are no more. The word universality has no meaning as applied to their psychic body or structure,

which is always finite. It only has a meaning when applied to their use, import, or reference to the kind of

object they may reveal. The representation, as such, of the universal object is as particular as that of an object

about which we know so little that the interjection 'Ha!' is all it can evoke from us in the way of speech. Both

should be weighed in the same scales, and have the same measure meted out to them, whether of worship or

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It is a matter of popular observation that some men have sharper senses than others, and that some have

acuter minds and are able to 'split hairs' and see two shades of meaning where the majority see but one. Locke

long ago set apart the faculty of discrimination as one in which men differ individually. What he wrote is

"Another faculty we may take notice of in our minds is that of discerning and distinguishing between the

several ideas it has. It is not enough to have a confused perception of something in general: unless the mind

had a distinct perception of different objects and their qualities, it would be capable of very little knowledge;

though the bodies that affect us were as busy about us as they are now, and the mind were continually

employed in thinking. On this faculty of distinguishing one thing from another depends the evidence and

certainty of several even very general propositions, which have passed for innate truths; because men,

overlooking the true cause why those propositions find universal assent, impute it wholly to native uniform

impressions: whereas it in truth depends upon this clear discerning faculty of the mind, whereby it perceives

"How much the imperfection of accurately discriminating ideas one from another lies either in the dulness or

faults of the organs of sense, or want of acuteness, exercise, or attention in the understanding, or hastiness

and precipitancy natural to some tempers, I will not here examine: it suffices to take notice that this is one of

the operations that the mind may reflect on and observe in itself. It is of that consequence to its other

knowledge, that so far as this faculty is in itself dull, or not rightly made use of for the distinguishing one

thing from another, so far our notions are confused, and our reason and judgment disturbed or misled. If in

having our ideas in the memory ready at hand consists quickness of parts; in this of having them unconfused,

and being able nicely to distinguish one thing from another where there is but the least difference, consists in

a great measure the exactness of judgment and clearness of reason which is to be observed in one man above

another. And hence, perhaps, may be given some reason of that common observation, that men who have

a great deal of wit and prompt memories have not always the clearest judgment or deepest reason. For, wit

lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be

found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy;

judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another ideas wherein

can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude and by affinity to take one thing

for another. This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to metaphor and allusion, wherein for the most part

lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit which strikes so lively on the fancy, and therefore, so acceptable

to all people because its beauty appears at first sight, and there is required no labor of thought to examine

But Locke's descendants have been slow to enter into the path whose fruitfulness was thus pointed out by

their master, and have so neglected the study of discrimination that one might almost say that the classic

English psychologists have, as a school, hardly recognized it to exist. 'Association' has proved itself in their

hands the one allabsorbing power of the mind. Dr. Martineau, in his review of Bain, makes some very

weighty remarks on this onesidedness of the Lockian school. Our mental history, says he, is, in its view,

"a perpetual formation of new compounds: and the words 'association,' 'cohesion,' 'fusion,' 'indissoluble

connection,' all express the change from plurality of data to some unity of result. An explanation of the

process therefore requires two things: a true enumeration of the primary constituents, and a correct statement

of their laws of combination: just as, in chemistry, we are furnished with a list of the simple elements, and the

with then principles of their synthesis. Now the latter of these two conditions we find satisfied by the

associationpsychologists: but not the former. They are not agreed upon their catalogue of elements, or the

marks by which they may know the simple from the compound. The psychologic unit is not fixed; that which

is called one impression by Hartley is treated as halfadozen or more by Mill: and the tendency of the

modern teachers on this point is to recede more and more from the better chosen track of their master.

Hartley, for example, regarded the whole present effect upon us of any single object say, an orange as

a single sensation; and the whole vestige is left behind, as a single 'idea of sensation.' His modern disciples,

on the other hand, consider this same effect as an aggregate from a plurality of sensations, and the ideal trace

it leaves as highly compound. 'The idea of an object,' instead of being an elementary startingpoint with

them, is one of the elaborate results of repetition and experience; and is continually adduced as remarkably

illustrating the fusing power of habitual association. Thus James Mill observes:

"'It is to this great law of association that we trace the formation of our ideas of what we call external objects;

that is, the ideas of a certain number of sensations, received together so frequently that they coalesce as it

were, and are spoken of under the idea of unity. Hence, what we call the idea of a tree, the idea of a stone, the

idea of a horse, the idea of a man. In using the names, tree, horse, man, the names of what I call objects, I am

referring, and can be referring, only to my own sensations; in fact, therefore, only naming a certain number of

sensations regarded as in a particular state of combination, that is, concomitance. Particular sensations of

sight, of touch, of the muscles, are the sensations to the ideas of which, color, extension, roughness, hardness,

smoothness, taste, smell, so coalescing as to appear one idea, I give the name of the idea of a tree.'[2]

"External objects usually affect us through a plurality of senses. The pebble on the seashore is pictured on

the eye as form and color. We take it up in the hand and repeat the impression of form, with the additional

feeling of touch. Knock two together, and there is a characteristic sound. To preserve the impression of an

object of this kind, there must be an association of all these different effects. Such association, when matured

and firm, is our idea, our intellectual grasp of the pebble. Passing to the organic world, and plucking a rose,

we have the same effects of form to the eye and hand, color and touch, with new effects of odor and taste. A

certain time is requisite for the coherence of all these qualities in one aggregate, so as to give us for all

purposes the enduring image of the rose. When fully acquired, any one of the characteristic impressions will

revive the others; the odor, the sight, the feeling of the thorny stalk each of these by itself will hoist the

"Now, this order of derivation, making our objective knowledge begin with plurality of impression and arrive

at unity, we take to be a complete inversion of our psychological history. Hartley, we think, was perfectly

right in taking no notice of the number of inlets through which an object delivers its effects upon us, and, in

spite of this circumstance, treating the effect as one.... Even now, after life has read us so many analytic

lessons, in proportion as we can fix the attitude of our scene and ourselves, the sense of plurality in our

impressions retreats, and we lapse into an undivided consciousness; losing, for in stance, the separate notice

of any uniform hum in the ear, or light in the eye, or weight of clothes on the body, though not one of them is

inoperative on the complexion of our feeling. This law, once granted, must be carried far beyond Hartley's

point. Not only must each object present itself to us integrally before it shells off into its qualities, but the

whole scene around us must disengage for us object after object from its still background by emergence and

change; and even our selfdetachment from the world over against us must wait for the start of collision

between the force we issue and that which we receive. To confine ourselves to the simplest case: when a red

ivory ball, seen for the first time, has been withdrawn, it will leave a mental representation of itself, in which

all that it simultaneously gave us will indistinguishably coexist. Let a white ball succeed to it; now, and not

before, will an attribute detach itself, and the color, by force of contrast, be shaken out into the foreground.

Let the white ball be replaced by an egg: and this new difference will bring the form into notice from its

previous slumber. And thus, that which began by being simply an object, cut out from the surrounding scene,

becomes for us first a red object, and then a red round object; and so on. Instead, therefore, of the qualities, as

separately given, subscribing together and adding themselves up to present us with the object as their

aggregate, the object is beforehand with them, and from its integrity delivers them out to our knowledge, one

by one. In this disintegration, the primary nucleus never loses its substantive character or name; whilst the

difference which it throws off appears as a mere attribute, expressed by an adjective. Hence it is that we are

compelled to think of the object as having, not as being, its qualities; and can never heartily admit the belief

of any loose lot of attributes really fusing themselves into a thing. The unity of the original whole is not felt

to go to pieces and be resolved into the properties which it successively gives off; it retains a residuary

existence, which constitutes it a substance, as against the emerging quality, which is only its phenomenal

predicate. Were it not for this perpetual process of differentiation of self from the world, of object from its

scene, of attribute from object, no step of Abstraction could be taken; no qualities could fall under our notice;

and had we ten thousand senses, they would all converge and meet in but one consciousness. But if this be so,

it is an utter falsification of the order of nature to speak of sensations grouping themselves into aggregates,

and so composing for us the objects of which we think; and the whole language of the theory, in regard to the

field of synchronous existences, is a direct inversion of the truth. Experience proceeds and intellect is trained,

not by Association, but by Dissociation, not by reduction of pluralities of impression to one, but by the

opening out of one into many; and a true psychological history must expound itself in analytic rather than

synthetic terms. Precisely those ideas of Substance, of Mind, of Cause, of Space which this system

treats as infinitely complex, the last result of myriads of confluent ele ments, are in truth the residuary

simplicities of consciousness, whose stability the eddies and currents of phenomenal experience have left

The truth is that Experience is trained by both association and dissociation, and that psychology must be writ

both in synthetic and in analytic terms. Our original sensible totals are, on the one hand, subdivided by

discriminative attention, and, on the other, united with other totals, either through the agency of our own

movements, carrying our senses from one part of space to another, or because new objects come successively

and replace those by which we were at first impressed. The 'simple impression' of Hume, the 'simple idea' of

Locke are both abstractions, never realized in experience. Experience, from the very first, presents us with

concreted objects, vaguely continuous with the rest of the world which envelops them in space and time, and

potentially divisible into inward elements and parts. These objects we break asunder and reunite. We must

treat them in both ways for our knowledge of them to grow; and it is hard to say, on the whole, which way

preponderates. But since the elements with which the traditional associationism performs its constructions

'simple sensations,' namely are all products of discrimination carried to a high pitch, it seems as if we

The noticing of any part whatever of our object is an act of discrimination. Already on p. 404 I have

described the manner in which we often spontaneously lapse into the undiscriminating state, even with regard

to objects which we have already learned to distinguish. Such an�sthetics as chloroform, nitrous oxide, etc.,

sometimes bring about transient lapses even more total, in which numerical discrimination especially seems

gone; for one sees light and hears sound, but whether one or many lights and sounds is quite impossible to

tell. Where the parts of an object have already been discerned, and each made the object of a special

discriminative act, we can with difficulty feel the object again in its pristine unity; and so prominent may our

consciousness of its composition be, that we may hardly believe that it ever could have appeared undivided.

But this is an erroneous view, the undeniable fact being that any number of impressions, from any number of

sensory sources, falling simultaneously on a mind WHICH HAS NOT YET EXPERIENCED THEM

SEPARATELY, will fuse into a single undivided object for that mind. The law is that all things fuse that can

fuse, and nothing separates except what must. What makes impressions separate we have to study in this

chapter. Although they separate easier if they come in through distinct nerves, yet distinct nerves are not an

unconditional ground of their discrimination, as we shall presently see. The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose,

skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our

location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations

which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space. There is no other reason

than this why "the hand I touch and see coincides spatially with the hand I immediately feel."[5]

It is true that we may sometimes be tempted to exclaim, when once a lot of hitherto unnoticed details of the

object lie before us, "How could we ever have been ignorant of these things and yet have felt the object, or

drawn the conclusion, as if it were a continuum, a plenum? There would have been gaps but we felt no

gaps; wherefore we must have seen and heard these details, leaned upon these steps; they must have been

operative upon our minds, just as they are now, only unconsciously, or at least inattentively. Our first

unanalyzed sensation was really composed of these elementary sensations, our first rapid conclusion was

really based on these intermediate inferences, all the while, only we failed to note the fact." But this is

nothing but the fatal 'psychologists fallacy' (p. 196) of treating an inferior state of mind as if it must somehow

know implicitly all that is explicitly known about the same topic by superior states of mind. The thing

thought of is unquestionably the same, but it is thought twice over in two absolutely different psychoses,

once as an unbroken unit, and again as a sum of discriminated parts. It is not one thought in two editions, but

two entirely distinct thoughts of one thing. And each thought is within itself a continuum, a plenum, needing

no contributions from the other to fill up its gaps. As I sit here, I think objects, and I make inferences, which

the future is sure to analyze and articulate and riddle with discriminations, showing me many things wherever

I now notice one. Nevertheless, my thought feels quite sufficient unto itself for the time being; and ranges

from pole to pole, as free, and as unconscious of having overlooked anything, as if it possessed the greatest

discriminative enlightenment. We all cease analyzing the world at some point, and notice no more

differences. The last units with which we stop are our objective elements of being. Those of a dog are

different from those of a Humboldt; those of a practical man from those of a metaphysician. But the dog's and

the practical man's thoughts feel continuous, though to the Humboldt or the metaphysician they would appear

full of gaps and defects. And they are continuous, as thoughts. It is only as mirrors of things that the superior

minds find them full of omissions. And when the omitted things are discovered and the unnoticed differences

laid bare, it is not that the old thoughts split up, but that new thoughts supersede them, which make new

When we discriminate an element, we may contrast it with the case of its own absence, of its simply not

being there, without reference to what is there; or we may also take the latter into account. Let the first sort of

discrimination be called existential, the latter differential discrimination. A peculiarity of differential

discriminations is that they result in a perception of differences which are felt as greater or less one than the

other. Entire groups of differences may be ranged in series: the musical scale, the color scale, are examples.

Every department of our experience may have its data written down in an evenly gradated order, from a

lowest to a highest member. And any one datum may be a term in several such orders. A given note may have

a high place in the pitchseries, a low place in the loudnessseries, and a medium place in the series of

agreeableness. A given tint must, in order to be fully determined, have its place assigned in the series of

qualities, in the series of purities (freedom from white), and in the series of intensities or brightnesses. It may

be low in one of these respects, but high in another. In passing from term to term in any such series we are

conscious not only of each step of difference being equal to (or greater or less than) the last, but we are

conscious of proceeding in a uniform direction, different from other possible directions. This consciousness

of serial increase of differences is one of the fundamental facts of our intellectual life. More, more, MORE, of

the same kind of difference, we say, as we advance from term to term, and realize that the farther on we get

the larger grows the breach between the term we are at and the one from which we started. Between any two

terms of such a series the difference is greater than that between any intermediate terms, or than that between

an intermediate term and either of the extremes. The louder than the loud is louder than the less loud; the

farther than the far is farther than the less far; the earlier than the early is earlier than the late; the higher than

the high is higher than the low; the bigger than the big is bigger than the small; or, to put it briefly and

universally, the more than the more is more than the less; such is the great synthetic principle of mediate

comparison which is involved in the possession by the human mind of the sense of serial increase. In Chapter

XX we shall see the altogether overwhelming importance of this principle in the conduct of all our higher

Each of the differences in one of these uniform series feels like a definite sensible quantity, and each term

seems like the last term with this quantity added. In many concrete objects which differ from one another we

can plainly see that the difference does consist simply in the fact that one object is the same as the other plus

something else, or that they both have an identical part, to which each adds a distinct remainder. Thus two

pictures may be struck form the same block, but one of them may differ in having color added; or two carpets

may show an identical pattern which in each is woven in distinct hues. Similarly, two classes of sensation

may have the same emotional tone but negate each other in remaining respects a dark color and a deep

sound, for example; or two faces may have the same shape of nose but everything else unlike. The similarity

of the same note sounded by instruments of different timbre is explained by the coexistence of a fundamental

tone common to both, with overtones in one which the other lacks. Dipping my hand into water and anon

into a colder water, I may then observe certain additional feelings, broader and deeper irradiations of the cold,

so to speak, which were not in the earlier experience, though for aught I can tell, the feelings may be

otherwise the same. 'Hefting' first one weight, and then another, new feelings may start out in my

elbowjoint, wrist, and elsewhere, and make me call the second weight the heavier of the twain. In all these

cases each of the differing things may be represented by two parts, one that is common to it and the others,

and another that is peculiar to itself. If they form a series, A, B, C, D, etc., and the common part be called X,

whilst the lowest difference be called d, then the composition of the series would be as follows:

A = X + d; B = (X + d) + d, or x + 2d; C = X + 3d; D = X + 4d; . . . . . . .. If X itself were ultimately

composed of d's we should have the entire series explained as due to the varying combination and

recombination with itself of an unvarying element; and all the apparent differences of quality would be

translated into differences of quantity alone. This is the sort of reduction which the atomic theory in physics

and the mindstuff theory in psychology regard as their ideal. So that, following the analogy of our instances,

one might easily be tempted to generalize and to say that all difference is but addition and subtraction, and

that what we called 'differential' discrimination is only 'existential' discrimination in disguise; that is to say,

that where A and B differ, we merely discern something in the one which the other is without. Absolute

identity in things up to a certain point, then absolute nonidentity, would on this theory take the place of

those ultimate qualitative unlikenesses between them, in which we naturally believe; and the mental function

of discrimination, ceasing to be regarded as an ultimate one, would resolve itself into mere logical affirmation

and negation, or perception that a feature found in one thing, in another does not exist.

Theoretically, however, this theory is full of difficulty. If all the differences which we feel were in one

direction, so that all objects could be arranged in one series (however long), it might still work. But when we

consider the notorious fact that objects differ from each other in divergent directions, it grows well nigh

impossible to make it do so. For then, supposing that an object differed from things in one direction by the

increment d, it would have to differ from things in another direction by a different sort of increment, call it d';

so that, after getting rid of qualitative unlikeness between objects, we should have it back on our hands again

between their increments. We may of course reapply our method, and say that the difference between d and

d' is not a qualitative unlikeness, but a fact of composition, one of them being the same as the other plus an

increment of still higher order, d for example, added. But when we recollect that everything in the world can

be compared with everything else, and that the number of directions of difference is indefinitely great, then

we see that the complication of selfcompoundings of the ultimate differential increment by which, on this

theory, all the innumerable unlikenesses of the world are explained, in order to avoid writing any of them

down as ultimate differences of kind, would beggar all conception. It is the minddust theory, with all its

difficulties in a particularly uncompromising form; and all for the sake of the fantastic pleasure of being able

arbitrarily to say that there is between the things in the world and between the 'ideas' in the mind nothing but

absolute sameness and absolute notsameness of elements, the notsameness admitting no degrees.

To me it seems much wiser to turn away from such transcendental extravagances of speculation, and to abide

by the natural appearances. These would leave unlikeness as an indecomposable relation amongst things, and

a relation moreover of which there were all degrees. Absolute notsameness would be the maximal degree,

absolute sameness the minimal degree of this unlikeness, the discernment of which would be one of our

ultimate cognitive powers.[6] Certainly the natural appearances are dead against the notion that no qualitative

differences exist. With the same clearness with which, in certain objects, we do feel a difference to be a mere

matter of plus and minus, in other objects we feel that this is not the case. Contrast our feeling of the

difference between the length of two lines with our feeling of the difference between blue and yellow, or with

that between right and left. Is right equal to left with something added? Is blue yellow plus something? If so,

plus what?[7] So long as we stick to verifiable psychology, we are forced to admit that differences of simple

KIND form an irreducible sort of relation between some of the elements of our experience, and forced to

deny that differential discrimination can everywhere be reduced to the mere ascertainment that elements

present in one fact, in another fail to exist. The perception that an element exists in one thing and does not

exist in another and the perception of qualitative difference are, in short, entirely disconnected mental

But at the same time that we insist on this, we must also admit that differences of quality, however abundant,

are not the only distinctions with which our mind has to deal. Differences which seem of mere composition,

of number, of plus and minus, also abound.[9] But it will be best for the present to disregard all these

quantitative cases and, taking the others (which, by the least favorable calculation, will still be numerous

enough), to consider next the manner in which we come to cognize simple differences of kind. We cannot

explain the cognition; we can only ascertain the conditions by virtue of which it occurs.

What, then, are the conditions under which we discriminate things differing in a simple way?

First, the things must BE different, either in time, or place, or quality. If the difference in any of these regards

is sufficiently great, then we cannot overlook it, except by not noticing the things at all. No one can help

singling out a black stripe on a white ground, or feeling the contrast between a bass note and a high one

sounded immediately after it. Discrimination is here involuntary. But where the objective difference is less,

discrimination need not so inevitably occur, and may even require considerable effort of attention to be

Another condition which then favors it is that the sensations excited by the differing objects should not come

to us simultaneously but fall in immediate SUCCESSION upon the same organ. It is easier to compare

successive than simultaneous sounds, easier to compare two weights or two temperatures by testing one after

the other with the same hand, than by using both hands and comparing both at once. Similarly it is easier to

discriminate shades of light or color by moving the eye from one to the other, so that they successively

stimulate the same retinal tract. In testing the local discrimination of the skin, by applying compasspoints, it

is found that they are felt to touch different spots much more readily when set down one after the other than

when both are applied at once. In the latter case they may be two or three inches apart on the back, thighs,

etc., and still feel as if they were set down in one spot. Finally, in the case of smell and taste it is wellnigh

impossible to compare simultaneous impressions at all. The reason why successive impression so much

favors the result seems to be that there is a real sensation of difference, aroused by the shock of transition

from one perception to another which is unlike the first. This sensation of difference has its own peculiar

quality, as difference, which remains sensible, no matter of what sort the terms may be, between which it

obtains. It is, in short, one of those transitive feelings, or feelings of relation, of which I treated in a former

place (pp. 245 ff.); and, when once aroused, its object lingers in the memory along with the substantive terms

which precede and follow, and enables our judgments of comparison to be made. We shall soon see reason to

believe that no two terms can possibly be simultaneously perceived to differ, unless, in a preliminary

operation, we have successively attended to each, and, in so doing, had the transitional sensation of difference

between them aroused. A field of consciousness, however complex, is never analyzed unless some of its

ingredients have changed. We now discern, 'tis true, a multitude of coexisting things about us at every

moment: but this is because we have had a long education, and each thing we now see distinct has been

already differentiated from its neighbors by repeated appearances in successive order. To the infant, sounds,

sights, touches, and pains, form probably one unanalyzed bloom of confusion.[10]

Where the difference between the successive sensations is but slight, the transition between them must be

made as immediate as possible, and both must be compared in memory, in order to get the best results. One

cannot judge accurately of the difference between two similar wines, whilst the second is still in one's mouth.

So of sounds, warmths, etc. we must get the dying phases of both sensations of the pair we are comparing.

Where, however, the difference is strong, this condition is immaterial, and we can then compare a sensation

actually felt with another carried in memory only. The longer the interval of time between the sensations, the

The difference, thus immediately felt between two terms, is independent of our ability to identify either of the

terms by itself. I can feel two distinct spots to be touched on my skin, yet not know which is above and which

below. I can observe two neighboring musical tones to differ, and still not know which of the two is the

higher in pitch. Similarly I may discriminate two neighboring tints, whilst remaining uncertain which is the

With such direct perceptions of difference as this, we must not confound those entirely unlike cases in which

we infer that two things must differ because we know enough about each of them taken by itself to warrant

our classing them under distinct heads. It often happens, when the interval is long between two experiences,

that our judgments are guided, not so much by a positive image or copy of the earlier one, as by our

recollection of certain facts about it. Thus I know that the sunshine today is less bright than on a certain day

last week, because I then said it was quite dazzling, a remark I should not now care to make. Or I know

myself to feel better now than I was last summer, because I can now psychologize, and then I could not. We

are constantly busy comparing feelings with whose quality our imagination has no sort of acquaintance at the

time pleasures, or pains, for example. It is notoriously hard to conjure up in imagination a lively image of

either of these classes of feeling. The associationists may prate of an idea of pleasure being a pleasant idea, of

an idea of pain being a painful one, but the unsophisticated sense of mankind is against them, agreeing with

Homer that the memory of griefs when past may be a joy, and with Dante that there is no greater sorrow than,

Feelings remembered in this imperfect way must be compared with present or recent feelings by the aid of

what we know about them. We identify the remote experience in such a case by conceiving it. The most

perfect way of conceiving it is by defining it in terms of some standard scale. If I know the thermometer to

stand at zero today and to have stood at 32o last Sunday, I know today to be colder, and I know just how

much colder, than it was last Sunday. If I know that a certain note was c, and that this note is d, I know that

The inference that two things differ because their concomitants, effects, names, kinds, or to put it

generally their signs, differ, is of course susceptible of unlimited complication. The sciences furnish

examples, in the way in which men are led, by noticing differences in effects, to assume new hypothetical

causes, differing from any known heretofore. But no matter how many may be the steps by which such

inferential discriminations are made, they all end in a direct intuition of difference somewhere. The last

ground for inferring that A and B differ must be that, whilst A is an m, B is an n, and that m and n are seen to

differ. Let us then neglect the complex cases, the A's and the B's, and go back to the study of the

unanalyzable perception of difference between their signs, the m's and the n's, when these are seemingly

simple terms. I said that in their immediate succession the shock of their difference was felt. It is felt

repeatedly when we go back and forth from m to n; and we make a point of getting it thus repeatedly (by

alternating our attention at least) whenever the shock is so slight as to be with difficulty perceived. But in

addition to being felt at the brief instant of transition, the difference also feels as if incorporated and taken up

into the second term, which feels 'differentfromthefirst' even while it lasts. It is obvious that the 'second

term' of the mind in this case is not bald n, but a very complex object; and that the sequence is not simply first

'm,' then 'difference,' then 'n'; but first 'm,' then 'difference,' then 'ndifferentfromm.' The several thoughts,

however, to which these three several objects are revealed, are three ordinary 'segments' of the mental

As our brains and minds are actually made, it is impossible to get certain m's and n's in immediate sequence

and to keep them pure. If kept pure, it would mean that they remained uncompared. With us, inevitably, by a

mechanism which we as yet fail to understand, the shock of difference is felt between them, and the second

object is not n pure, but nasdifferentfromm.[12] It is no more a paradox that under these conditions this

cognition of m and n in mutual relation should occur, than that under other condtitions the cognition of m's or

n's simple quality should occur. But as it has been treated as a paradox, and as a spiritual agent, not itself a

portion of the stream, has been invoked to account for it, a word of further remark seems desirable.

My account, it will be noted, is merely a description of the facts as they occur: feelings (or thoughts) each

knowing something, but the later one knowing, if preceded by a certain earlier one, a more complicated

object than it would have known had the earlier one not been there. I offer no explanation of such a sequence

of cognitions. The explanation (I devoutly expect) will be found some day to depend on cerebral conditions.

Until it is forthcoming, we can only treat the sequence as a special case of the general law that every

experience undergone by the brain leaves in it a modification which is one factor in determining what manner

of experiences the following ones shall be (cf. pp. 232236). To anyone who denies the possibility of such a

The sentationalists and the spiritualists meanwhile (filled both of them with their notion that the mind must in

some fashion contain what it knows) begin by giving a cooked account of the facts. Both admit that for m and

n to be known in any way whatever, little rounded and finished off duplicates of each must be contained in

the mind as separate entities. These pure ideas, so called, of m and n respectively, succeed each other there.

And since they are distinct, say the sensationalists, they are eo ipso distinguished. "To have ideas different

and ideas distinguished, are synonymous expressions; different and distinguished meaning exactly the same

thing," says James Mill.[13] "Distinguished!" say the spiritualists, "distinguished by what, forsooth? Truly

the respective ideas of m and of n in the mind are distinct. But for that very reason neither can distinguish

itself from the other, for to do that it would have to be aware of the other, and thus for the time being become

the other, and that would be to get mixed up with the other and to lose its own distinctness. Distinctness of

ideas and idea of distinctness, are not one thing, but two. This last is a relation. Only a relating principle,

opposed in nature to all facts of feeling, an Ego, Soul, or Subject, is competent, by being present to both of

the ideas alike, to hold them together and at the same time to keep them distinct."

But if the plain facts be admitted that the pure idea of 'n' is never in the mind at all, when 'm' has once gone

before; and that the feeling 'ndifferentfromm' is itself an absolutely unique pulse of thought, the bottom

of this precious quarrel drops out and neither party is left with anything to fight about. Surely such a

consummation ought to be welcomed, especially when brought about, as here, by a formulation of the facts

We may, then, conclude our examination of the manner in which simple involuntary discrimination comes

about, by saying, 1) that its vehicle is a thought possessed of a knowledge of both terms compared and of

their difference; 2) that the necessary and sufficient condition (as the human mind goes) for arousing this

thought is that a thought or feeling of one of the terms discriminated should, as immediately as possible,

precede that in which the other term is known; and 3) and that the thought which knows the second term will

then also know the difference (or in more difficult cases will be continously succeeded by one which does

This last thought need, however, not be these terms with their difference, nor contain them. A man's thought

can know and mean all sorts of things without those things getting bodily into it the distant, for example,

the future, and the past.[15] The vanishing term in the case which occupies us vanishes; but because it is the

specific term it is and nothing else, it leaves a specific influence behind it when it vanishes, the effect of

which is to determine the succeeding pulse of thought in a perfectly characteristic way. Whatever

consciousness comes next must know the vanished term and call it different from the one now there.

Here we are at the end of our tether about involuntary discrimination of successively felt simple things; and

must drop the subject, hopeless of seeing any deeper into it for the present, and turn to discriminations of a

And first, of the discrimination of simultaneously felt impressions! Our first way of looking at a reality is

often to suppose it simple, but later we may learn to perceive it as compound. This new way of knowing the

same reality may conveniently be called by the name of Analysis. It is manifestly one of the most incessantly

performed of all our mental processes, so let us examine the conditions under which it occurs.

I think we may safely lay down at the outset this fundamental principle, that any total impression made on the

mind must be unanalyzable, whose elements are never experienced apart. The components of an absolutely

changeless group of notelsewhereoccurring attributes could never be discriminated. If all cold things were

wet and all wet things cold, if all hard things pricked our skin, and no other things did so; is it likely that we

should discriminate between coldness and wetness, and hardness and pungency respectively? If all liquids

were transparent and no nonliquid were transparent, it would be long before we had separate names for

liquidity and transparency. If heat were a function of position above the earth's surface, so that the higher a

thing was the hotter it became, one word would serve for hot and high. We have, in fact, a number of

sensations whose concomitants are almost invariably the same, and we find it, accordingly, almost impossible

to analyze them out from the totals in which they are found. The contraction of the diaphragm and the

expansion of the lungs, the shortening of certain muscles and the rotation of certain joints, are examples. The

converging of the eyeballs and the accommodation for near objects are, for each distance of the object (in the

common use of the eyes) inseparably linked, and neither can (without a sort of artificial training which shall

presently be mentioned) be felt by itself. We learn that the causes of such groups of feelings are multiple, and

therefore we frame theories about the composition of the feelings themselves, by 'fusion,' 'integration,'

'synthesis,' or what not. But by direct introspection no analysis of them is ever made. A conspicuous case will

come to view when we treat of the emotions. Every emotion has its 'expression,' of quick breathing,

palpitating heart, flushed face, or the like. The expression gives rise to bodily feelings; and the emotion is

thus necessarily and invariably accompanied by these bodily feelings. The consequence is that it is

impossible to apprehend it as a spiritual state by itself, or to analyze it away from the lower feelings in

question. It is in fact impossible to prove that it exists as a distinct psychic fact. The present writer strongly

doubts that it does so exist. But those who are most firmly persuaded of its existence must wait, to prove their

point, until they can quote some as yet unfound pathological case of an individual who shall have emotions in

a body in which either complete paralysis will have prevented their expression, or complete an�sthesia will

In general, then, if an object affects us simultaneously in a number of ways, abcd, we get a peculiar integral

impression, which thereafter characterizes to our mind the individuality of that object, and becomes the sign

of its presence; and which is only resolved into a, b, c, d, respectively by the aid of farther experiences. These

If any single quality or constituent, a, of such an object, have previously been known by us isolatedly, or have

in any other manner already become an object of separate acquaintance on our part, so that we have an image

of it, distinct or vague, in our mind, disconnected with bcd, then that constituent a may be analyzed out from

the total impression. Analysis of a thing means separate attention to each of its parts. In Chapter XI we saw

that one condition of attending to a thing was the formation from within of a separate image of that thing,

which should, as it were, go out to meet the impression received. Attention being the condition of analysis,

and separate imagination being the condition of attention, it follows also that separate imagination is the

condition of analysis. Only such elements as we are acquainted with, and can imagine, separately, can be

discriminated within a total senseimpression. The image seems to welcome its own mate from out of the

compound, and to heighten the feeling thereof; whereas it dampens and opposes the feeling of the other

constituents; and thus the compound becomes broken for our consciousness into parts.

All the facts cited in Chapter XI, to prove that attention involves inward reproduction, go to prove this point

as well. In looking for any object in a room, for a book in a library, for example, we detect it the more readily

if, in addition to merely knowing its name, etc., we carry in our mind a distinct image of its appearance. The

assaf�tida in 'Worcestershire sauce' is not obvious to anyone who has not tasted assaf�tida per se. In a 'cold'

color an artist would never be able to analyze out the pervasive presence of blue, unless he had previously

made acquaintance with the color blue by itself. All the colors we actually experience are mixtures. Even the

purest primaries always come to us with some white. Absolutely pure red or green or violet is never

experienced, and so we can never be discerned in the socalled primaries with which we have to deal: the

latter consequently pass for pure. The reader will remember how an overtone can only be attended to in

the midst of its consorts in the voice of a musical instrument, by sounding it previously alone. The

imagination, being then full of it, hears the like of it in the compound tone. Helmholtz, whose account of this

observation we formerly quoted, goes on to explain the difficulty of the case in a way which beautifully

"The ultimate simple elements of the sensation of tone, simple tones themselves, are rarely heard alone. Even

those instruments by which they can be produced (as tuningforks before resonancechambers), when

strongly excited, give rise to weak harmonic upper partials, partly within and partly without the ear.... Hence

the opportunities are very scanty for impressing on our memory an exact and sure image of these simple

elementary tones. But if the constituents are only indefinitely and vaguely known, the analysis of their sum

into them must be correspondingly uncertain. If we do not know with certainty how much of the musical tone

under consideration is to be attributed to its prime, we cannot but be uncertain as to what belongs to the

partials. Consequently we must begin by making the individual elements which have to be distinguished

individually audible, so as to obtain an entirely fresh recollection of the corresponding sensation, and the

whole business requires undisturbed and concentrated attention. We are even without the ease that can be

obtained by frequent repetitions of the experiment, such as we possess in the analysis of musical chords into

their individual notes. In that case we hear the individual notes sufficiently often by themselves, whereas we

rarely hear simple tones, and may almost be said never to hear the building up of a compound from its simple

Very few elements of reality are experienced by us in absolute isolation. The most that usually happens to a

constituent a, of a compound phenomenon abcd, is that its strength relatively to bcd varies from a maximum

to a minimum; or that it appears linked with other qualities, in other compounds, as aefg, or ahik. Either of

these vicissitudes in the mode of our experiencing a may, under favorable circumstances, lead us to feel the

difference between it and its concomitants, and to single it out not absolutely, it is true, but approximately

and so to analyze the compound of which it is a part. The act of singling out is then called abstraction, and

Consider the case of fluctuations of relative strength or intensity first. Let there be three grades of the

compound, as Abcd, abcd, and abcD. In passing between these compounds, the mind will feel shocks of

difference. The differences, moreover, will serially increase, and their direction will be felt as of a distinct

sort. The increase from abcd to Abcd is on the a side; that to abcD is on the d side. And these two differences

of direction are differently felt. I do not say that this discernment of the adirection from the ddirection will

give us an actual intuition either of a or of d in the abstract. But it leads us to conceive or postulate each of

these qualities, and to define it as the extreme of a certain direction. 'Dry' wines and 'sweet' wines, for

example, differ, and form a series. It happens that we have an experience of sweetness pure and simple in the

taste of sugar; and this we can analyze out of this winetaste. But no one knows what 'dryness' tastes like, all

by itself. It must, however, be something extreme in the dry direction; and we should probably not fail to

recognize it as the original of our abstract conception, in case we ever did come across it. In some such way

we get to form notions of the flavor of meats, apart from their feeling to the tongue, or of that of fruits apart

from their acidity, etc., and we abstract the touch of bodies as distinct from their temperature. We may even

apprehend the quality of muscle's contraction as distinguished from its extent, or one muscle's contraction

from another's, as when, by practising with prismatic glasses, and varying our eyes' convergence whilst our

accommodation remains the same, we learn the direction in which our feeling of the convergence differs from

But the fluctuation in a quality's intensity is a less efficient aid to our abstracting of it than the diversity of the

other qualities in whose company it may appear. What is associated now with one thing and now with another

tends to become dissociated from either, and to grow into an object of abstract contemplation by the mind.

One might call this the law of dissociation by varying concomitants. The practical result of it will be to allow

the mind which has thus dissociated and abstracted a character to analyze it out of a total, whenever it meets

with it again. The law has been frequently recognized by psychologists, though I know of none who has

given it the emphatic prominence in our mental history which it deserves. Mr. Spencer says:

"If the property A occurs here along with the properties B, C, D, there along with C, F, H, and again with E,

G, B,... it must happen that by multiplication of experiences the impressions produced by these properties on

the organism will be disconnected and rendered so far independent in the organism as the properties are in the

environment, whence must eventually result a power to recognize attributes in themselves, apart from

And still more to the point Dr. Martineau, in the passage I have already quoted, writes:

"When a red ivory ball, seen for the first time, has been withdrawn, it will leave a mental representation of

itself, in which all that it simultaneously gave us will indistinguishably coexist. Let a white ball succeed to it;

now, and not before, will an attribute detach itself, and the color, by force of contrast, be shaken out into the

foreground. Let the white ball be replaced by an egg, and this new difference will bring the form into notice

from its previous slumber, and thus that which began by being simply an object cut out from the surrounding

Why the repetition of the character in combination with different wholes will cause it thus to break up its

adhesion with any one of them, and roll out, as it were, alone upon the table of consciousness, is a little of a

mystery. One might suppose the nerveprocesses of the various concomitants to neutralize or inhibit each

other more or less and to leave the process of the common term alone distinctly active. Mr. Spencer appears

to think that the mere fact that the common term is repeated more often than any one of its associates will, of

itself, give it such a degree of intensity that its abstraction must needs ensue.

This has a plausible sound, but breaks down when examined closely. For it is not always the oftenrepeated

character which is first noticed when its concomitants have varied a certain number of times; it is even more

likely to be the most novel of all the concomitants, which will arrest the attention. If a boy has seen nothing

all his life but sloops and schooners, he will probably never distinctly have singled out in his notion of 'sail'

the character of being hung lengthwise. When for the first time he sees a squarerigged ship, the opportunity

of extracting the lengthwise mode of hanging as a special accident, and of dissociating it from the general

notion of sail, is offered. But there are twenty chances to one that that will not be the form of the boy's

consciousness. What he notices will be the new and exceptional character of being hung crosswise. He will

go home and speak of that, and perhaps never consciously formulate what the more familiar peculiarity

This mode of abstraction is realized on a very wide scale, because the elements of the world in which we find

ourselves appear, as a matter of fact, here, there, and everywhere, and are changing their concomitants all the

while. But on the other hand the abstraction is, so to speak, never complete, the analysis of a compound never

perfect, because no element is ever given to us absolutely alone, and we can never therefore approach a

compound with the image in our mind of any one of its components in a perfectly pure form. Colors, sounds,

smells, are just as much entangled with other matter as are more formal elements of experience, such as

extension, intensity, effort, pleasure, difference, likeness, harmony, badness, strength, and even

consciousness itself. All are embedded in one world. But by the fluctuations and permutations of which we

have spoken, we come to form a pretty good notion of the direction in which each element differs from the

rest, and so we frame the notion of it as a terminus, and continue to mean it as an individual thing. In the case

of many elements, the simple sensibles, like heat, cold, the colors, smells, etc., the extremes of the directions

are almost touched, and in these instances we have a comparatively exact perception of what it is we mean to

abstract. But even this is only an approximation; and in literal mathematical strictness all our abstracts must

be confessed to be but imperfectly imaginable things. At bottom the process is one of conception, and is

everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensible qualities, the same as that by which we are usually

understood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness, perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like; the

direct perception of a difference between compounds, and the imaginary prolongation of the direction of the

difference to an ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keep as one of our permanent subjects of

This is all that I can say usefully about abstraction, or about analysis, to which it leads.

In all the cases considered hitherto I have supposed the differences involved to be so large as to be flagrant,

and the discrimination, where successive, was treated as involuntary. But, so far from being always

involuntary, discriminations are often difficult in the extreme, and by most men never performed. Professor

de Morgan, thinking, it is true, rather of conceptual than of perceptive discrimination, wrote, wittily enough:

"The great bulk of the illogical part of the educated community whether majority or minority I know not;

perhaps six of one and half a dozen of the other have not power to make a distinction, and of course

cannot be made to take a distinction, and of course never attempt to shake a distinction. With them all such

things are evasions, subterfuges, comeoffs, loopholes, etc. They would hang a man for horsestealing

under a statute against sheepstealing; and would laugh at you if you quibbled about the distinction between

Any personal or practical interest, however, in the results to be obtained by distinguishing, makes one's wits

amazingly sharp to detect differences. The culprit himself is not likely to overlook the difference between a

horse and a sheep. And long training and practice in distinguishing has the same effect as personal interest.

Both of these agencies give to small amounts of objective difference the same effectiveness upon the mind

that, under other circumstances, only large ones would have. Let us seek to penetrate the modus operandi of

That 'practice makes perfect' is notorious in the field of motor accomplishments. But motor accomplishments

depend in part on sensory discrimination. Billiardplaying, rifleshooting, tightropedancing, demand the

most delicate appreciation of minute disparities of sensation, as well as the power to make accurately

graduated muscular response thereto. In the purely sensorial field we have the wellknown virtuosity

displayed by the professional buyers and testers of various kinds of goods. One man will distinguish by taste

between the upper and the lower half of a bottle of old Madeira. Another will recognize, by feeling the flour

in a barrel, whether the wheat was grown in Iowa or Tennessee. The blind deafmute, Laura Bridgman, has

so improved her touch as to recognize, after a year's interval, the hand of a person who once has shaken hers;

and her sister in misfortune, Julia Brace, is said to have been employed in the Hartford Asylum to sort the

linen of its multitudinous inmates, after it came from the wash, by her wonderfully educated sense of smell.

The fact is so familiar that few, if any, psychologists have even recognized it as needing explanation. They

have seemed to think that practice must, in the nature of things, improve the delicacy of discernment, and

have let the matter rest. At most they have said: "Attention accounts for it; we attend more to habitual things,

and what we attend to we perceive more minutely." This answer is true, but too general; it seems to me that

There are at least two distinct causes which we can see at work whenever experience improves

First, the terms whose difference comes to be felt contract disparate associates and these help to drag them

Second, the difference reminds us of larger differences of the same sort, and these help us to notice it.

Let us study the first cause first, and begin by supposing two compounds, of ten elements apiece. Suppose no

one element of either compound to differ from the corresponding element of the other compound enough to

be distinguished from it if the two are compared alone, and let the amount of this imperceptible difference be

called equal to 1. The compounds will differ from each other, however, in ten different ways; and, although

each difference by itself might pass unperceived, the total difference, equal to 10, may very well be sufficient

to strike the sense. In a word, increasing the number of 'points' involved in a difference may excite our

discrimination as effectually as increasing the amount of difference at any one point. Two men whose mouth,

nose, eyes, cheeks, chin, and hair, all differ slightly, will be as little confounded by us, as two appearances of

the same man one with, and the other without, a false nose. The only contrast in the cases is that we can

Two things, then, B and C, indistinguishable when compared together alone, may each contract adhesions

with different associates, and the compounds thus formed may, as wholes, be judged very distinct. The effect

of practice in increasing discrimination must then, in part, be due to the reinforcing effect, upon an original

slight difference between the terms, of additional differences between the diverse associates which they

severally affect. Let B and C be the terms: If A contract adhesions with B, and C with D, AB may appear

To illustrate, how does one learn to distinguish claret from burgundy? Probably they have been drunk on

different occasions. When we first drank claret we heard it called by that name, we were eating such and such

a dinner, etc. Next time we drink it, a dim reminder of all those things chimes through us as we get the taste

of the wine. When we try burgundy our first impression is that it is a kind of claret; but something falls short

of full identification, and presently we hear it called burgundy. During the next few experiences, the

discrimination may still be uncertain "which," we ask ourselves, "of the two wines is this present

specimen?" But at last the claretflavor recalls pretty distinctly its own name, 'claret,' "that wine I drank at

Soandso's table," etc.; and the burgundyflavor recalls the name burgundy and some one else's table. And

only when this different SETTING has come to each is our discrimination between the two flavors solid and

stable. After a while the tables and other parts of the setting, besides the name, grow so multifarious as not to

come up distinctly into consciousness; but pari passu with this, the adhesion of each wine with its own name

becomes more and more inveterate, and at last each flavor suggests instantly and certainly its own name and

nothing else. The names differ far more than the flavors, and help to stretch these latter farther apart. Some

such process as this must go on in all our experience. Beef and mutton, strawberries and raspberries, odor of

rose and odor of violet, contract different adhesions which reinforce the differences already felt in the terms.

The reader may say that this has nothing to do with making us feel the difference between the two terms. It is

merely fixing, identifying, and so to speak substantializing, the terms. But what we feel as their difference,

we should feel, even though we were unable to name or otherwise identify the terms.

To which I reply that I believe that the difference is always concreted and made to seem more substantial by

recognizing the terms. I went out for instance the other day and found that the snow just fallen had a very odd

look, different from the common appearance of snow. I presently called it a 'micaceous' look; and it seemed

to me as if, the moment I did so, the difference grew more distinct and fixed than it was before. The other

connotations of the word 'micaceous' dragged the snow farther away from ordinary snow and seemed even to

aggravate the peculiar look in question. I think some such effect as this on our way of feeling a difference

will be very generally admitted to follow from naming the terms between which it obtains; although I admit

myself that it is difficult to show coercively that naming or otherwise identifying any given pair of hardly

distinguishable terms is essential to their being felt as different at first.[19]

I offer the explanation only as a partial one: it certainly is not complete. Take the way in which practice

refines our local discrimination on the skin, for example. Two compasspoints touching the palm of the hand

must be kept, say, half an inch asunder in order not to be mistaken for one point. But at the end of an hour or

so of practice with them we can distinguish them as two, even when less than a quarter of an inch apart. If the

same two regions of the skin were constantly touched, in this experience, the explanation we have been

considering would perfectly apply. Suppose a line a b c d e f of points upon the skin. Suppose the local

difference of feeling between a and f to be so strong as to be instantly recognized when the points are

simultaneously touched, but suppose that between c and d to be at first too small for this purpose. If we began

by putting the compasses on a and f and gradually contracted their opening, the strong doubleness recognized

at first would still be suggested, as the compasspoints approached the positions c and d; for the point e

would be so near f, and so like it, as not to be aroused without f also coming to mind. Similarly d would recall

e and, more remotely, f. In such wise c d would no longer be bare c d, but something more like abc def,

palpably differing impressions. But in actual experience the education can take place in a much less

methodical way, and we learn at last to discriminate c and d without any constant adhesion being contracted

between one of these spots and ab, and the other and ef. Volkmann's experiments show this. He and Fechner,

prompted by Czermak's observation that the skin of the blind was twice as discriminative as that of seeing

folks, sought by experiment to show the effects of practice upon themselves. They discovered that even

within the limits of a single sitting the distances at which points were felt double might fall at the end to

considerably less than half of their magnitude at the beginning; and that some, though not all, of this

improved sensibility was retained next day. But they also found that exercising one part of the skin in this

way improved the discrimination not only of the corresponding part of the opposite side of the body, but of

the neighboring parts as well. Thus, at the beginning of an experimental sitting, the compasspoints had to be

a Paris line asunder, in order to be distinguished by the littlefingertip. But after exercising the other

fingers, it was found that the littlefingertip could discriminate points only half a line apart.[20] The same

Here it is clear that the cause which I first suggested fails to apply, and that we must invoke another.

What are the exact experimental phenomena? The spots, as such, are not distinctly located, and the

difference, as such, between their feelings, is not distinctly felt, until the interval is greater than the minimum

required for the mere perception of their doubleness. What we first feel is a bluntness, then a suspicion of

doubleness, which presently becomes a distinct doubleness, and at last two differentfeeling and differently

placed spots with a definite tract of space between them. Some of the places we try give us this latest stage of

the perception immediately; some only give us the earliest; and between them are intermediary places. But as

soon as the image of the doubleness as it is felt in the more discriminative places gets lodged in our memory,

it helps us to find its like in places where otherwise we might have missed it, much as the recent hearing of an

'overtone' helps us to detect the latter in a compound sound (supra, pp. 43940). A dim doubleness grows

clearer by being assimilated to the image of a distincter doubleness felt a moment before. It is interpreted by

means of the latter. And so is any difference, like any other sort of impression, more easily perceived when

we carry in our mind to meet it a distinct image of what sort of a thing we are to look for, of what its nature is

These two processes, the reinforcement of the terms by disparate associates, and the filling of the memory

with past differences, of similar direction with the present one, but of more conspicuous amount, are the only

explanations I can offer of the effects of education in this line. What is accomplished by both processes is

essentially the same thing: they make small differences affect us as if they were large ones that large

differences should affect us as they do remains an inexplicable fact. In principle these two processes ought to

be sufficient to account for all possible cases. Whether in fact they are sufficient, whether there be no residual

factor which we have failed to detect and analyze out, I will not presume to decide.

It will be remembered that on page 509 personal interest was named as a sharpener of discrimination

alongside of practice. But personal interest probably acts through attention and not in any immediate or

specific way. A distinction in which we have a practical stake in one which we concentrate our minds upon

and which we are on the lookout for. We draw it frequently, and we get all the benefits of so doing, benefits

which have just been explained. Where, on the other hand, a distinction has no practical interest, where we

gain nothing by analyzing a feature from out of the compound total of which it forms a part, we contract a

habit of leaving it unnoticed, and at last grow callous to its presence. Helmholtz was the first psychologist

who dwelt on these facts as emphatically as they deserve, and I can do no better than quote his very words.

"We are accustomed," he says, "in a large number of cases where sensations of different kinds, or in different

parts of the body, exist simultaneously, to recognize that they are distinct as soon as they are perceived, and

to direct our attention at will to any one of them separately. Thus at any moment we can be separately

conscious of what we see, of what we hear, of what we feel; and distinguish what we feel in a finger or in the

great toe, whether pressure, gentle touch, or warmth. So also in the field of vision. Indeed, as I shall endeavor

to show in what follows, we readily distinguish our sensations from one another when we have a precise

knowledge that they are composite, as, for example, when we have become certain, by frequently repeated

and invariable experience, that our present sensation arises from the simultaneous action of many

independent stimuli, each of which usually excites an equally wellknown individual sensation."

This, it will be observed, is only another statement of our law, that the only individual components which we

can pick out of compounds are those of which we have independent knowledge in a separate form.

"This induces us to think that nothing can be easier, when a number of different sensations are simultaneously

excited, than to distinguish them individually from each other, and that this is an innate faculty of our minds.

"Thus we find, among other things, that it is quite a matter of course to hear separately the different musical

tones which come to our sense collectively; and we expect that in every case when two of them occur

"The matter becomes very different when we set to work to investigate the more unusual cases of perception,

and seek more completely to understand the conditions under which the abovementioned distinction can or

cannot be made, as is the case in the physiology of the senses. We then become aware that two different kinds

or grades must be distinguished in our becoming conscious of a sensation. The lower grade of this

consciousness is that in which the influence of the sensation in question makes itself felt only in the

conceptions we form of external things and processes, and assists in determining them. This can take place

without our needing, or indeed being able, to ascertain to what particular part of our sensations we owe this or

that circumstance in our perceptions. In this case we will say that the impression of the sensation in question

is perceived synthetically. The second higher grade is when we immediately distinguish the sensation in

question as an existing part of the sum of the sensations excited in us. We will say, then, that the sensation is

perceived analytically. The two cases must be carefully distinguished from each other."[23]

By the sensation being perceived synthetically, Helmholtz means that it is not discriminated at all, but only

felt in a mass with other simultaneous sensations. That it is felt there he thinks is proved by the fact that our

judgment of the total will change if anything occurs to alter the outer cause of the sensation.[24] The

following pages from an earlier edition show what the concrete cases of synthetic perception and what those

"In the use of our senses, practice and experience play a much larger part than we ordinarily suppose. Our

sensations are in the first instance important only in so far as they enable us to judge rightly of the world

about us; and our practice in discriminating between them usually goes only just far enough to meet this end.

We are, however, too much disposed to think that we must be immediately conscious of every ingredient of

our sensations. This natural prejudice is due to the fact that we are indeed conscious, immediately and

without effort, of everything in our sensations which has a bearing upon those practical purposes, for the sake

of which we wish to know the outer world. Daily and hourly, during our whole life, we keep our senses in

training for this end exclusively, and for its sake our experiences are accumulated. But even within the sphere

of these sensations, which do correspond to outer things, training and practice make themselves felt. It is well

known how much finer and quicker the painter is in discriminating colors and illuminations than one whose

eye is not trained in these matters; how the musician and the musicalinstrument maker perceive with ease

and certainty differences of pitch and tone which for the ear of the layman do not exist; and how even in the

inferior realms of cookery and winejudging it takes a long habit of comparing to make a master. But more

strikingly still is seen the effect of practice when we pass to sensations which depend only on inner

conditions of our organs, and which, not corresponding at all to outer things or to their effects upon us, are

therefore of no value in giving us information about the outer world. The physiology of the senseorgans has,

in recent times, made us acquainted with a number of such phenomena, discovered partly in consequence of

theoretic speculations and questionings, partly by individuals, like Goethe and Purkinje, specially endowed

by nature with talent for this sort of observation. These socalled subjec tive phenomena are extraordinarily

hard to find; and when they are once found, special aids for the attention are almost always required to

observe them. It is usually hard to notice the phenomenon again even when one knows already the

description of the first observer. The reason is that we are not only unpractised in singling out these

subjective sensations, but that we are, on the contrary, most thoroughly trained in abstracting our attention

from them, because they would only hinder us in observing the outer world. Only when their intensity is so

strong as actually to hinder us in observing the outer world do we begin to notice them; or they may

"Let me give a few wellknown cases, taken from physiological optics, as examples. Every eye probably

contains musc� volitantes, so called; these are fibres, granules, etc., floating in the vitreous humor, throwing

their shadows on the retina, and appearing in the field of vision as little dark moving spots. They are most

easily detected by looking attentively at a broad, bright, blank surface like the sky. Most persons who have

not had their attention expressly called to the existence of these figures are apt to notice them for the first

time when some ailment befalls their eyes and attracts their attention to the subjective state of these organs.

The usual complaint then is that the musc� volitantes came in with the malady; and this often makes the

patients very anxious about these harmless things, and attentive to all their peculiarities. It is then hard work

to make them believe that these figures have existed throughout all their previous life, and that all healthy

eyes contain them. I knew an old gentleman who once had occasion to cover one of his eyes which had

accidentally become diseased, and who was then in no small degree shocked at finding that his other eye was

totally blind; with a sort of blindness, moreover, which must have lasted years, and yet he never was aware of

"Who, besides, would believe without performing the appropriate experiments, that when one of his eyes is

closed there is a great gap, the socalled 'blind spot,' not far from the middle of the field of the open eye, in

which he sees nothing at all, but which he fills out with his imagination? Mariotte, who was led by theoretic

speculations to discover this phenomenon, awakened no small surprise when he showed it at the court of

Charles II. of England. The experiment was at that time repeated with many variations, and became a

fashionable amusement. The gap is, in fact, so large that seven full moons alongside of each other would not

cover its diameter, and that a man's face 6 or 7 feet off disappears within it. In our ordinary use of vision this

great hole in the field fails utterly to be noticed; because our eyes are constantly wandering, and the moment

an object interests us we turn them full upon it. So it follows that the object which at any actual moment

excites our attention never happens to fall upon this gap, and thus it is that we never grow conscious of the

blind spot in the field. In order to notice it, we must first purposely rivet our gaze upon one object and then

move about a second object in the neighborhood of the blind spot, striving meanwhile to attend to this latter

without moving the direction of our gaze from the first object. This runs counter to all our habits, and is

therefore a difficult thing to accomplish. With some people it is even an impossibility. But only when it is

accomplished do we see the second object vanish and convince ourselves of the existence of this gap.

"Finally, let me refer to the double images of ordinary binocular vision. Whenever we look at a point with

both eyes, all objects on this side of it or beyond appear double. It takes but a moderate effort of observation

to ascertain this fact; and from this we may conclude that we have been seeing the far greater part of the

external world double all our lives, although numbers of persons are unaware of it, and are in the highest

degree astonished when it is brought to their attention. As a matter of fact, we never have seen in this double

fashion any particular object upon which our attention was directed at the time; for upon such objects we

always converge both eyes. In the habitual use of our eyes, our attention is always withdrawn from such

objects as give us double images at the time; this is the reason why we so seldom learn that these images

exist. In order to find them we must set our attention a new and unusual task; we must make it explore the

lateral parts of the field of vision, not, as usual, to find what objects are there, but to analyze our sensations.

"The same difficulty which is found in the observation of subjective sensations to which no external object

corresponds is found also in the analysis of compound sensations which correspond to a single object. Of this

sort are many of our sensations of sound. When the sound of a violin, no matter how often we hear it, excites

over and over again in our ear the same sum of partial tones, the result is that our feeling of this sum of tones

ends by becoming for our mind a mere sign for the voice of the violin. Another combination of partial tones

becomes the sensible sign of the voice of a clarionet, etc. And the oftener any such combination is heard, the

more accustomed we grow to perceiving it as an integral total, and the harder it becomes to analyze it by

immediate observation. I believe that this is one of the principal reasons why the analysis of the notes of the

human voice in singing is relatively so difficult. Such fusions of many sensations into what, to conscious

"Physiological optics affords other interesting examples. The perception of the bodily form of a near object

comes about through the combination of two diverse pictures which the eyes severally receive from it, and

whose diversity is due to the different position of each eye, altering the perspective view of what is before it.

Before the invention of the stereoscope this explanation could only be assumed hypothetically; but it can now

be proved at any moment by the use of the instrument. Into the stereoscope we insert two flat drawings,

representing the two perspective views of the two eyes, in such a manner that each eye sees its own view in

the proper place; and we obtain, in consequence, the perception of a single extended solid, as complete and

"Now we can, it is true, by shutting one eye after the other and attending to the point, recognize the difference

in the pictures at least when it is not too small. But, for the stereoscopic perception of solidity, pictures

suffice whose difference is so extraordinarily slight as hardly to be recognized by the most careful

comparison; and it is certain that, in our ordinary careless observing of bodily objects, we never dream that

the perception is due to two perspective views fused into one, because it is an entirely different kind of

perception from that of either flat perspective view by itself. It is certain, therefore, that two different

sensations of our two eyes fuse into a third perception entirely different from either. Just as partial tones fuse

into the perception of a certain instrument's voice; and just as we learn to separate the partial tones of a

vibrating string by pinching a nodal point and letting them sound in isolation; so we learn to separate the

"There are other much more complex instances of the way in which many sensations may combine to serve

as the basis of a quite simple perception. When, for example we perceive an object in a certain direction, we

must somehow be impressed by the fact that certain of our optic nervefibres, and no others, are impressed

by its light. Furthermore, we must rightly judge the position of our eyes in our head, and of our head upon our

body, by means of feelings in our eyemuscles and our neckmuscles respectively. If any of these processes

is disturbed we get a false perception of the object's position. The nervefibers can be changed by a prism

before the eye; or the eyeball's position changed by pressing the organ towards one side; and such

experiments show that, for the simple seeing of the position of an object, sensations of these two sorts must

concur. But it would be quite impossible to gather this directly from the sensible impression which the object

makes. Even when we have made experiments and convinced ourselves in every possible manner that such

must be the fact, it still remains hidden from our immediate introspective observation.

"These examples" [of synthetic perception,' perception in which each contributory sensation is felt in the

whole, and is a codeterminant of what the whole shall be, but does not attract the attention to its separate

self] "may suffice to show the vital part which the direction of attention and practice in observing play in

senseperception. To apply this now to the ear. The ordinary task which our ear has to solve when many

sounds assail it at once is to discern the voices of the several sounding bodies or instruments engaged; beyond

this it has no objective interest in analyzing. We wish to know, when many men are speaking together, what

each one says, when many instruments and voices combine, which melody is executed by each. Any deeper

analysis, such as that of each separate note into its partial tones (although it might be performed by the same

means and faculty of hearing as the first analysis) would tell us nothing new about the sources of sound

actually present, but might lead us astray as to their number. For this reason we confine our attention in

analyzing a mass of sound to the several instruments' voices, and expressly abstain, as it were, from

discriminating the elementary components of the latter. In this last sort of discrimination we are as

After all we have said, no comment seems called for upon these interesting and important facts and

The time required for discrimination has been made a subject of experimental measurement. Wundt calls it

Unterscheidungszeit. His subjects (whose simple reactiontime see p. 85 ff. had previously been

determined) were required to make a movement, always the same, the instant they discerned which of two or

more signals they received. The exact time of the signal and that of the movement were automatically

registered by a galvanic chronoscope. The particular signal to be received was unknown in advance, and the

excess of time occupied by those reactions in which its character had first to be discerned, over the simple

reactiontime, measured, according to Wundt, the time required for the act of discrimination. It was found

longer when four different signals were irregularly used than when only two were used. In the former case it

averaged, for three observers respectively (the signals being the sudden appearance of a black or of a white

In the latter case, a red and a green signal being added to the former ones, it became, for the same observers,

Later, in Wundt's Laboratory, Herr Tischer made many careful experiments after the same method, where the

facts to be discriminated were the different degrees of loudness in the sound which served as a signal. I

subjoin Herr Tischer's table of results, explaining that each vertical column after the first gives the average

results obtained from a distinct individual, and that the figure in the first column stands for the number of

possible loudnesses that might be expected in the particular series of reactions made. The times are expressed

The interesting points here are the great individual variations, and the rapid way in which the time for

discrimination increases with the number of possible terms to discriminate. The individual variations are

largely due to want of practice in the particular task set, but partly also to discrepancies in the psychic

process. One gentleman said, for example, that in the experiments with three sounds, he kept the image of the

middle one ready in his mind, and compared what he heard as either louder, lower, or the same. His

discrimination among three possibilities became thus very similar to a discrimination between two.[29]

Mr. J. M. Cattell found he could get no results by this method,[30] and reverted to one used by observers

previous to Wundt and which Wundt had rejected. This is the einfache Wahlmethode, as Wundt calls it. The

reacter awaits the signal and reacts if it is of one sort, but omits to act if it is of another sort. The reaction thus

occurs after discrimination; the motor impulse cannot be sent to the hand until the subject knows what the

signal is. The nervous impulse, as Mr. Cattell says, must probably travel to the cortex and excite changes

there, causing in consciousness the perception of the signal. These changes occupy the time of discrimination

(or perceptiontime, as it is called by Mr. C.) But then a nervous impulse must descend from the cortex to the

lower motor centre which stands primed and ready to discharge; and this, as Mr. C. says, gives a willtime as

well. The total reactiontime thus includes both 'willtime' and 'discriminationtime.' But as the centrifugal

and centripetal processes occupying these two times respectively are probably about the same, and the time

used in the cortex is about equally divided between the perception of the signal and the preparation of the

motor discharge, if we divide it equally between perception (discrimination) and volition, the error cannot be

great.[31] We can moreover change the nature of the perception without altering the willtime, and thus

Guided by these principles, Prof. Cattell found the time required for distinguishing a white signal from no

that for distinguishing a given letter from all the rest of the alphabet (not reacting until that letter appeared)

The difference depending on the length of the words and the familiarity of the language to which they

Prof. Cattell calls attention to the fact that the time for distinguishing a word is often but little more than that

"We do not, therefore, distinguish separately the letters of which a word is composed, but the word as a

He also finds a great difference in the time with which various letters are distinguished, E being particularly

I have, in describing these experiments, followed the example of previous writers and spoken as if the process

by which the nature of the signal determines the reaction were identical with the ordinary conscious process

of discriminative perception and volition. I am convinced, however, that this is not the case; and that although

the results are the same, the form of consciousness is quite different. The reader will remember my contention

(supra, p. 90 ff.) that the simple reactiontime (usually supposed to include a conscious process of

perceiving) really measures nothing but a reflex act. Anyone who will perform reactions with discrimination

will easily convince himself that the process here also is far more like a reflex, than like a deliberate,

operation. I have made, with myself and students, a large number of measurements where the signal expected

was in one series a touch somewhere on the skin of the back and head, and in another series a spark

somewhere in the field of view. The hand had to move as quickly as possible towards the place of the touch

or the spark. It did so infallibly, and sensibly instantly; whilst both place and movement seemed to be

perceived only a moment later, in memory. These experiments were undertaken for the express purpose of

ascertaining whether the movement at the sight of the spark was discharged immediately by the visual

perception, or whether a 'motoridea' had to intervene between the perception of the spark and the

reaction.[33] The first thing that was manifest to introspection was that no perception or idea of any sort

preceded the reaction. It jumped of itself, whenever the signal came; and perception was retrospective. We

must suppose, then, that the state of eager expectancy of a certain definite range of possible discharges,

innervates a whole set of paths in advance, so that when a particular sensation comes it is drafted into its

appropriate motor outlet too quickly for the perspective process to be aroused. In the experiments I describe,

the conditions were most favorable for rapidity, for the connection between the signals and their movements

might almost be called innate. It is instinctive to move the hand towards a thing seen or a skinspot touched.

But where the movement is conventionally attached to the signal, there would be more chance for delay, and

the amount of practice would then determine the speed. This is well shown in Tischer's results, quoted on p.

524, where the most practised observer, Tischer himself, reacted in one eighth of the time needed by one of

the others.[34] But what all investigators have aimed to determine in these experiments is the minimum time.

I trust I have said enough to convince the student that this minimum time by no means measures what we

consciously know as discrimination. It only measures something which, under the experimental conditions,

leads to a similar result. But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes

must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the

diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semicircumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same

The perception of likeness is practically very much bound up with that of difference. That is to say, the only

differences we note as differences, and estimate quantitatively, and arrange along a scale, are those

comparatively limited differences which we find between members of a common genus. The force of gravity

and the color of this ink are things it never occurred to me to compare until now that I am casting about for

examples of the incomparable. Similarly the elastic quality of this indiarubber band, the comfort of last

night's sleep, the good that can be done with a legacy, these are things too discrepant to have ever been

compared ere now. Their relation to each other is less that of difference than of mere logical negativity. To be

found different, things must as a rule have some commensurability, some aspect in common, which suggests

the possibility of their being treated in the same way. This is of course not a theoretic necessity for any

distinction may be called a 'difference,' if one likes but a practical and linguistic remark.

The same things, then, which arouse the perception of difference usually arouse that of resemblance also.

And the analysis of them, so as to define wherein the difference and wherein the resemblance respectively

consists, is called comparison. If we start to deal with the things as simply the same or alike, we are liable to

be surprised by the difference. If we start to treat them as merely different, we are apt to discover how much

they are alike. Difference, commonly so called, is thus between species of a genus. And the faculty by which

we perceive the resemblance upon which the genus is based, is just as ultimate and inexplicable a mental

endowment as that by which we perceive the differences upon which the species depend. There is a shock of

likeness when we pass from one thing to another which in the first instance we merely discriminate

numerically, but, at the moment of bringing our attention to bear, perceive to be similar to the first; just as

there is a shock of difference when we pass between two dissimilars.[36] The objective extent of the likeness,

just like that of the difference, determines the magnitude of the shock. The likeness may be so evanescent, or

the basis of it so habitual and little liable to be attended to, that it will escape observation altogether. Where,

however, we find it, there we make a genus of the things compared; and their discrepancies and

incommensurabilities in other respects can then figure as the differenti� of so many species. As 'thinkables'

or 'existents' even the smoke of a cigarette and the worth of a dollarbill are comparable still more so as

'perishables,' or as 'enjoyables.' Much, then, of what I have said of difference in the course of this chapter will

apply, with a simple change of language, to resemblance as well. We go through the world, carrying on the

two functions abreast, discovering differences in the like, and likenesses in the different. To abstract the

ground of either difference or likeness (where it is not ultimate) demands and analysis of the given objects

into their parts. So that all that was said of the dependence of analysis upon a preliminary separate

acquaintance with the character to be abstracted, and upon its having varied concomitants, finds a place in the

But when all is said and done about the conditions which favor our perception of resemblance and our

abstraction of its ground, the crude fact remains, that some people are far more sensitive to resemblances, and

far more ready to point out wherein they consist, than others are. They are the wits, the poets, the inventors,

the scientific men, the practical geniuses. A native talent for perceiving analogies is reckoned by Prof. Bain,

and by others before and after him, as the leading fact in genius of every order. But as this chapter is already

long, and as the question of genius had better wait till Chapter XXII, where its practical consequences can be

discussed at the same time, I will say nothing more at present either about it or about the faculty of noting

resemblances. If the reader feels that this faculty is having small justice done it at my hands, and that it ought

to be wondered at and made much more of than has been done in these last few pages, he will perhaps find

some compensation when that later chapter is reached. I think I emphasize it enough when I call it one of the

ultimate foundationpillars of the intellectual life, the others being Discrimination, Retentiveness, and

On page 489 I spoke of differences being greater or less, and of certain groups of them being susceptible of a

linear arrangement exhibiting serial increase. A series whose terms grow more and more different from the

starting point is one whose terms grow less and less like it. They grow more and more like it if you read them

the other way. So that likeness and unlikeness to the starting point are functions inverse to each other, of the

Professor Stumpf introduces the word distance to denote the position of a term in any such series. The less

like is the term, the more distant it is from the starting point. The ideally regular series of this sort would be

one in which the distances the steps of resemblance or difference between all pairs of adjacent terms

were equal. This would be an evenly gradated series. And it is an interesting fact in psychology that we are

able, in many departments of our sensibility, to arrange the terms without difficulty in this evenly gradated

way. Dif ferences, in other words, between diverse pairs of terms, a and b, for example, on the one hand,

and c and d on the other,[37] can be judged equal or diverse in amount. The distances from one term to

another in the series are equal. Linear magnitudes and musical notes are perhaps the impressions which we

easiest arrange in this way. Next come shades of light or color, which we have little difficulty in arranging by

steps of difference of sensibly equal value. Messrs. Plateau and Delb�uf have found it fairly easy to

determine what shade of gray will be judged by every one to hit the exact middle between a darker and a

How now do we so readily recognize the equality of two differences between different pairs of terms? or,

more briefly, how do we recognize the magnitude of a difference at all? Prof. Stumpf discusses this question

in an interesting way;[39] and comes to the conclusion that our feeling for the size of a difference, and our

perception that the terms of two diverse pairs are equally or unequally distant from each other, can be

explained by no simpler mental process, but, like the shock of difference itself, must be regarded as for the

present an unanalyzable endowment of the mind. This acute author rejects in particular the notion which

would make our judgment of the distance between two sensations depend upon our mentally traversing the

intermediary steps. We may of course do so, and may often find it useful to do so, as in musical intervals, or

figured lines. But we need not do so; and nothing more is really required for a comparative judgment of the

amount of a 'distance' than three or four impressions belonging to a common kind.

The vanishing of all perceptible difference between two numerically distinct things makes them qualitatively

the same or equal. Equality, or qualitative (as distinguished from numerical) identity, is thus nothing but the

We saw above (p. 492) that some persons consider that the difference between two objects is constituted of

two things, viz., their absolute identity in certain respects, plus their absolute nonidentity in others. We saw

that this theory would not apply to all cases (p. 493). So here any theory which would base likeness on

identity, and not rather identity on likeness, must fail. It is supposed perhaps, by most people, that two

resembling things owe their resemblance to their absolute identity in respect of some attribute or attributes,

combined with the absolute nonidentity of the rest of their being. This, which may be true of compound

"When we compare a deep, middle, and a high note, e.g., C, f sharp, a'", we remark immediately that the first

is less like the third than the second is. The same would be true of c d e in the same region of the scale. Our

very calling one of the notes a 'middle' note is the expression of a judgment of this sort. But where here is the

identical and where the nonidentical part? We cannot think of the overtones; for the firstnamed three notes

have none in common, at least not on musical instruments. Moreover, we might take simple tones, and still

our judgment would be unhesitatingly the same, provided the tones were not chosen too close together....

Neither can it be said that the identity consists in their all being sounds, and not a sound, a smell, and a color,

respectively. For this identical attribute comes to each of them in equal measure, whereas the first, being less

like the third than the second is, ought, on the terms of the theory we are criticising, to have less of the

identical quality.... It thus appears impracticable to define all possible cases of likeness as partial identity plus

partial disparity; and it is vain to seek in all cases for identical elements."[41]

And as all compound resemblances are based on simple ones like these, it follows that likeness �berhaupt

must not be conceived as a special complication of identity, but rather that identity must be conceived as a

special degree of likeness, according to the proposition expressed at the outset of the paragraph that precedes.

Likeness and difference are ultimate relations perceived. As a matter of fact, no two sensations, no two

objects of all those we know, are in scientific rigor identical. We call those of them identical whose

difference is unperceived. Over and above this we have a conception of absolute sameness, it is true, but this,

like so many of our conceptions (cf. p. 508), is an ideal construction got by following a certain direction of

serial increase to its maximum supposable extreme. It plays an important part, among other permanent

meanings possessed by us, in our ideal intellectual constructions. But it plays no part whatever in explaining

In 1860, Professor G. T. Fechner of Leipzig, a man of great learning and subtlety of mind, published two

volumes entitled 'Psychophysik,' devoted to establishing and explaining a law called by him the psychophysic

law, which he considered to express the deepest and most elementary relation between the mental and the

physical worlds. It is a formula for the connection between the amount of our sensations and the amount of

their outward causes. Its simplest expression is, that when we pass from one sensation to a stronger one of the

same kind, the sensations increase proportionally to the logarithms of their exciting causes. Fechner's book

was the starting point of a new department of literature, which it would be perhaps impossible to match for

the qualities of thoroughness and subtlety, but of which, in the humble opinion of the present writer, the

proper psychological outcome is just nothing. The psychophysic law controversy has prompted a good many

series of observations on sensediscrimination, and has made discussion of them very rigorous. It has also

cleared up our ideas about the best methods for getting average results, when particular observations vary;

and beyond this it has done nothing; but as it is a chapter in the history of our science, some account of it is

Fechner's train of thought has been popularly expounded a great many times. As I have nothing new to add, it

is but just that I should quote an existing account. I choose the one given by Wundt in his Vorlesungen �ber

"How much stronger or weaker one sensation is than another, we are never able to say. Whether the sun be a

hundred or a thousand times brighter than the moon, a cannon a hundred or a thousand times louder than a

pistol, is beyond our power to estimate. The natural measure of sensation which we possess enables us to

judge of the equality, of the 'more' and of the 'less,' but not of 'how many times more or less.' This natural

measure is, therefore, as good as no measure at all, whenever it becomes a question of accurately ascertaining

intensities in the sensational sphere. Even though it may teach us in a general way that with the strength of

the outward physical stimulus the strength of the concomitant sensation waxes or wanes, still it leaves us

without the slightest knowledge of whether the sensation varies in exactly the same proportion as the stimulus

itself, or at a slower or a more rapid rate. In a word, we know by our natural sensibility nothing of the law

that connects the sensation and its outward cause together. To find this law we must first find an exact

measure for the sensation itself; we must be able to say: A stimulus of strength one begets a sensation of

strength one; a stimulus of strength two begets a sensation of strength two, or three, or four, etc. But to do

this we must first know what a sensation two, three, or four times greater than another, signifies....

"Space magnitudes we soon learn to determine exactly, because we only measure one space against another.

The measure of mental magnitudes is far more difficult.... But the problem of measuring the magnitude of

sensations is the first step in the bold enterprise of making mental magnitudes altogether subject to exact

measurement.... Were our whole knowledge limited to the fact that the sensation rises when the stimulus

rises, and falls when the latter falls, much would not be gained. But even immediate unaided observation

teaches us certain facts which, at least in a general way, suggest the law according to which the sensations

"Every one knows that in the stilly night we hear things unnoticed in the noise of day. The gentle ticking of

the clock, the air circulating through the chimney, the cracking of the chairs in the room, and a thousand other

slight noises, impress themselves upon our ear. It is equally well known that in the confused hubbub of the

streets, or the clamor of a railway, we may lose not only what our neighbor says to us, but even not hear the

sound of our own voice. The stars which are brightest at night are invisible by day; and although we see the

moon then, she is far paler than at night. Everyone who has had to deal with weights knows that if to a pound

in the hand a second pound be added, the difference is immediately felt; whilst if it be added to a

"The sound of the clock, the light of the stars, the pressure of the pound, these are all stimuli to our senses,

and stimuli whose outward amount remains the same. What then do these experiences teach? Evidently

nothing but this, that one and the same stimulus, according to the circumstances under which it operates, will

be felt either more or less intensely, or not felt at all. Of what sort now is the alteration in the circumstances,

upon which this alteration in the feeling may depend? On considering the matter closely we see that it is

everywhere of one and the same kind. The tick of the clock is a feeble stimulus for our auditory nerve, which

we hear plainly when it is alone, but not when it is added to the strong stimulus of the carriagewheels and

other noises of the day. The light of the stars is a stimulus to the eye. But if the stimulation which this light

exerts be added to the strong stimulus of daylight, we feel nothing of it, although we feel it distinctly when it

unites itself with the feebler stimulation of the twilight. The poundweight is a stimulus to our skin, which

we feel when it joins itself to a preceding stimulus of equal strength, but which vanishes when it is combined

"We may therefore lay it down as a general rule that a stimulus, in order to be felt, may be so much the

smaller if the already preexisting stimulation of the organ is small, but must be so much the larger, the

greater the preexisting stimulation is. From this in a general way we can perceive the connection between

the stimulus and the feeling it excites. At least thus much appears, that the law of dependence is not as simple

a one as might have been expected beforehand. The simplest relation would obviously be that the sensation

should increase in identically the same ratio as the stimulus, thus that if a stimulus of strength one occasioned

a sensation one, a stimulus of two should occasion sensation two, stimulus three, sensation three, etc. But if

this simplest of all relations prevailed, a stimulus added to a preexisting strong stimulus ought to provoke as

great an increase of feeling as if it were added to a preexisting weak stimulus; the light of the stars e.g.,

ought to make as great an addition to the daylight as it does to the darkness of the nocturnal sky. This we

know not to be the case: the stars are invisible by day, the addition they make to our sensation then is

unnoticable, whereas the same addition to our feeling of the twilight is very considerable indeed. So it is clear

that the strength of the sensations does not increase in proportion to the amount of the stimuli, but more

slowly. And now comes the question, in what proportion does the increase of the sensation grow less as the

increase of the stimulus grows greater. To answer this question, everyday experiences do not suffice. We

need exact measurements both of the amounts of the various stimuli, and of the intensity of the sensations

"How to execute these measurements, however, is something which daily experience suggests. To measure

the strength of sensations is, as we saw, impossible; we can only measure the difference of sensations.

Experience showed us what very unequal differences of sensation might come from equal differences of

outward stimulus. But all these experiences expressed themselves in one kind of fact, that the same difference

of stimulus could in one case be felt, and in another case not felt at all a pound felt if added to another

pound, but not if added to a hundredweight.... We can quickest reach a result with our observations if we

start with an arbitrary strength of stimulus, notice what sensation it gives us, and then see how much we can

increase the stimulus without making the sensation seem to change. If we carry out such observations with

stimuli of varying absolute amounts, we shall be forced to choose in an equally varying way the amounts of

addition to the stimulus which are capable of giving us a just barely perceptible feeling of more. A light, to be

just perceptible in the twilight need not be near as bright as the starlight; it must be far brighter to be just

perceived during the day. If now we institute such observations for all possible strengths of the various

stimuli, and note for each strength the amount of addition of the latter required to produce a barely

perceptible alteration of sensation, we shall have a series of figures in which is immediately expressed the

law according to which the sensation alters when the stimulation is increased...."

Observations according to this method are particularly easy to make in the spheres of light, sound, and

"We find a surprisingly simple result. The barely sensible addition to the original weight must stand exactly

in the same proportion to it, be the same fraction of it, no matter what the absolute value may be of the

weights on which the experiment is made.... As the average of a number of experiments, this fraction is found

to be about 1/3; that is, no matter what pressure there may already be made upon the skin, an increase or a

diminution of the pressure will be felt, as soon as the added or subtracted weight amounts to one third of the

Wundt then describes how differences may be observed in the muscular feelings, in the feelings of heat, in

those of light, and in those of sound; and he concludes his seventh lecture (from which our extracts have been

"So we have found that all the senses whose stimuli we are enabled to measure accurately, obey a uniform

law. However various may be their several delicacies of discrimination, this holds true of all, that the increase

of the stimulus necessary to produce an increase of the sensation bears a constant ratio to the total stimulus.

The figures which express this ratio in the several senses may be shown thus in tabular form:

"These figures are far from giving as accurate a measure as might be desired. But at least they are fit to

convey a general notion of the relative discriminative susceptibility of the different senses.... The important

law which gives in so simple a form the relation of the sensation to the stimulus that calls it forth was first

discovered by the physiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber to obtain in special cases. Gustav Theodor Fechner first

proved it to be a law for all departments of sensation. Psychology owes to him the first comprehensive

investigation of sensations from a physical point of view, the first basis of an exact Theory of Sensibility."

So much for a general account of what Fechner calls Weber's law. The 'exactness' of the theory of sensibility

to which it leads consists in the supposed fact that it gives the means of representing sensations by numbers.

The unit of any kind of sensation will be that increment which, when the stimulus is increased, we can just

barely perceive to be added. The total number of units which any given sensation contains will consist of the

total number of such increments which may be perceived in passing from no sensation of the kind to a

sensation of the present amount. We cannot get at this number directly, but we can, now that we know

Weber's law, get at it by means of the physical stimulus of which it is a function. For if we know how much

of the stimulus it will take to give a barely perceptible sensation, and then what percentage of addition to the

stimulus will constantly give a barely perceptible increment to the sensation, it is at bottom only a question of

compound interest to compute, out of the total amount of stimulus which we may be employing at any

moment, the number of such increments, or, in other words, of sensational units to which it may give rise.

This number bears the same relation to the total stimulus which the time elapsed bears to the capital plus the

To take an example: If stimulus A just falls short of producing a sensation, and if r be the percentage of itself

which must be added to it to get a sensation which is barely perceptible call this sensation 1 then we

should have the series of sensationnumbers corresponding to their several stimuli as follows:

Sensation 0 = stimulus A; " 1 = " A (1 + r); " 2 = " A (1 + r)2; " 3 = " A (1 + r)3; .................... " n = " A (1 +

The sensations here form an arithmetical series, and the stimuli a geometrical series, and the two series

correspond term for term. Now, of two series corresponding in this way, the terms of the arithmetical one are

called the logarithms of the terms corresponding in rank to them in the geometrical series. A conventional

arithmetical series beginning with zero has been formed in the ordinary logarithmic tables, so that we may

truly say (assuming our facts to be correct so far) that the sensations vary in the same proportion as the

logarithms of their respective stimuli. And we can thereupon proceed to compute the number of units in any

given sensation (considering the unit of sensation to be equal to the just perceptible increment above zero,

and the unit of stimulus to be equal to the increment of stimulus r, which brings this about) by multiplying the

logarithm of the stimulus by a constant factor which must vary with the particular kind of sensation in

question. If we call the stimulus R, and the constant factor C, we get the formula

which is what Fechner calls the psychophysischer Maasformel. This, in brief, is Fechner's reasoning, as I

The Maasformel admits of mathematical development in various directions, and has given rise to arduous

discussions into which I am glad to be exempted from entering here, since their interest is mathematical and

metaphysical and not primarily psychological at all.[42] I must say a word about them metaphysically a few

pages later on. Meanwhile it should be understood that no human being, in any investigation into which

sensations entered, has ever used the numbers computed in this or any other way in order to test a theory or to

reach a new result. The whole notion of measuring sensations numerically, remains in short a mere

mathematical speculation about possibilities, which has never been applied to practice. Incidentally to the

discussion of it, however, a great many particular facts have been discovered about discrimination which

In the first place it is found, when the difference of two sensations approaches the limit of discernibility, that

at one moment we discern it and at the next we do not. There are accidental fluctuations in our inner

sensibility which make it impossible to tell just what the least discernable increment of the sensation is

without taking the average of a large number of appreciations. These accidental errors are as likely to

increase as to diminish our sensibility, and are eliminated in such an average, for those above and those

below the line then neutralize each other in the sum, and the normal sensibility, if there be one (that is, the

sensibility due to constant causes as distinguished from these accidental ones), stands revealed. The best way

of getting at the average sensibility has been very minutely worked over. Fechner discussed three methods, as

(1) The Method of justdiscernible Differences. Take a standard sensation S, and add to it until you distinctly

feel the addition d; then subtract from S + d until you distinctly feel the effect of the subtraction;[43] call the

difference here d'. The least discernible difference sought is d + d' / 2; and the ratio of this quantity to the

original S (or rather to S + d d') is what Fechner calls the differencethreshold. This differencethreshold

should be a constant fraction (no matter what is the size of S) if Weber's law holds universally true. The

difficulty in applying this method is that we are so often in doubt whether anything has been added to S or

not. Furthermore, if we simply take the smallest d about which we are never in doubt or in error, we certainly

get our least discernible difference larger than it ought theoretically to be.[44]

Of course the sensibility is small when the least discernible is large, and vice vers�; in other words, it and the

(2) The Method of True and False Cases. A sensation which is barely greater than another will, on account of

accidental errors in a long series of experiments, sometimes be judged equal, and sometimes smaller; i.e., we

shall make a certain number of false and a certain number of true judgments about the difference between the

"But the larger this difference is, the more the number of the true judgments will increase at the expense of

the false ones; or, otherwise expressed, the nearer to unity will be the fraction whose denominator represents

the whole number of judgments, and whose numerator represents those which are true. If m is a ratio of this

nature, obtained by comparison of two stimuli, A and B, we may seek another couple of stimuli, a and b,

If this were done, and the ratio of a to b then proved to be equal to that of A to B, that would prove that pairs

of small stimuli and pairs of large stimuli may affect our discriminative sensibility similarly so long as the

ratio of the components to each other within each pair is the same. In other words, it would in so forth prove

the Weberian law. Fechner made use of this method to ascertain his own power of discriminating differences

of weight, recording no less than 24, 576 separate judgments, and computing as a result that his

discrimination for the same relative increase of weight was less good in the neighborhood of 500 than of 300

grams, but that after 500 grams it improved up to 3000, which was the highest weight he experimented with.

(3) The Method of Average Errors consists in taking a standard stimulus and then trying to make another one

of the same sort exactly equal to it. There will in general be an error whose amount is large when the

discriminative sensibility called in play is small, and vice vers�. The sum of the errors, no matter whether

they be positive or negative, divided by their number, gives the average error. This, when certain corrections

are made, is assumed by Fechner to be the 'reciprocal' of the discriminative sensibility in question. It should

bear a constant proportion to the stimulus, no matter what the absolute size of the latter may be, if Weber's

These methods deal with just perceptible differences. Delboeuf and Wundt have experimented with larger

differ ences by means of what Wundt calls the Methode der mittleren Abstufungen, and what we may call

(4) The Method of Equalappearing Intervals. This consists in so arranging three stimuli in a series that the

intervals between the first and the second shall appear equal to that between the second and the third. At first

sight there seems to be no direct logical connection between this method and the preceding ones. By them we

compare equally perceptible increments of stimulus in different regions of the latter's scale; but by the fourth

method we compare increments which strike us as equally big. But what we can but just notice as an

increment need not appear always of the same bigness after it is noticed. On the contrary, it will appear much

(5) The method of doubling the stimulus has been employed by Wundt's collaborator, Merkel, who tried to

make one stimulus seem just double the other, and then measured the objective relation of the two. The

So much for the methods. The results differ in the hands of different observers. I will add a few of them, and

By the first method, Volkmann, Aubert, Masson, Helmholtz, and Kr�pelin find figures varying from 1/3 or

1/4 to 1/195 of the original stimulus. The smaller fractional increments are discriminated when the light is

already fairly strong, the larger ones when it is weak or intense. That is, the discriminative sensibility is low

when weak or overstrong lights are compared, and at its best with a certain medium illumination. It is thus a

function of the light's intensity; but throughout a certain range of the latter it keeps constant, and in so far

forth Weber's law is verified for light. Absolute figures cannot be given, but Merkel, by method 1, found that

Weber's law held good for stimuli (measured by his arbitrary unit) between 96 and 4096, beyond which

intensity no experiments were made.[46] K�nig and Brodhun have given measurements by method 1 which

cover the most extensive series, and moreover apply to six different colors of light. These experiments

(performed in Helmholtz's laboratory, apparently,) ran from an intensity called 1 to one which was 100,000

times as great. From intensity 2000 to 20,000 Weber's law held good; below and above this range

discriminative sensibility declined. The increment discriminated here was the same for all colors of light, and

lay (according to the tables) between 1 and 2 per cent of the stimulus.[47] Delb�uf had verified Weber's law

for a certain range of luminous intensities by method 4; that is, he had found that the objective intensity of a

light which appeared midway between two others was really the geometrical mean of the latter's intensities.

But A. Lehmann and afterwards Neiglick, in Wundt's laboratory, found that effects of contrast played so

large a part in experiments performed in this way that Delb�uf's results could not be held conclusive. Merkel,

repeating the experiments still later, found that the objective intensity of the light which we judge to stand

midway between two others stands neither midway nor is a geometric mean. The discrepancy from both

figures is enormous, but is least large from the midway figure or arithmetical mean of the two extreme

intensities.[48] Finally, the stars have from time immemorial been arranged in 'magnitudes' supposed to differ

by equalseeming intervals. Lately their intensities have been gauged photometrically, and the comparison of

the subjective with the objective series has been made. Prof. J. Jastrow is the latest worker in this field. He

finds, taking Pickering's Harvard photometric tables as a basis, that the ratio of the average intensity of each

'magnitude' to that below it decreases as we pass from lower to higher magnitudes, showing a uniform

departure from Weber's law, if the method of equalappearing intervals be held to have any direct relevance

Sounds are less delicately discriminated in intensity than lights. A certain difficulty has come from disputes

as to the measurement of the objective intensity of the stimulus. Earlier inquiries made the perceptible

increase of the stimulus to be about 1/3 of the latter. Merkel's latest results of the method of just perceptible

differences make it about 3/10 for that part of the scale of intensities during which Weber's law holds good,

which is from 20 to 5000 of M.'s arbitrary unit.[50] Below this the fractional increment must be larger.

For pressure and muscular sense we have rather divergent results. Weber found by the method of

justperceptible differences that persons could distinguish an increase of weight of 1/40 when the two

weights were successively lifted by the same hand. It took a much larger fraction to be discerned when the

weights were laid on a hand which rested on the table. He seems to have verified his results for only two pairs

of differing weights,[51] and on this founded his 'law.' Experiments in Hering's laboratory on lifting 11

weights, running from 250 to 2750 grams showed that the least perceptible increment varied from 1/21 for

250 grams to 1/114 for 2500. For 2750 it rose to 1/98 again. Merkel's recent and very careful experiments, in

which the finger pressed down the beam of a balance counterweighted by from 25 to 8020 grams, showed

that between 200 and 2000 grams a constant fractional increase of about 1/13 was felt when there was no

movement of the finger, and of about 1/19 when there was movement. Above and below these limits the

discriminative power grew less. It was greater when the pressure was upon one square millimeter of surface

Warmth and taste have been made the subject of similar investigations with the result of verifying something

like Weber's law. The determination of the unit of stimulus is, however, so hard here that I will give no

figures. The results may be found in Wundt's Physiologische Psychologie, 3d Ed. I. 3702.

The discrimination of lengths by the eye has been found also to obey to a certain extent Weber's law. The

figures will all be found in G. E. M�ller, op. cit., part II, chap. X, to which the reader is referred. Professor

Jastrow has published some experiments, made by what may be called a modification of the method of

equalappearing differences, on our estimation of the length of sticks, by which it would seem that the

estimated intervals and the real ones are directly and not logarithmically proportionate to each other. This

resembles Merkel's results by that method for weights, lights, and sounds, and differs from Jastrow's own

If we look back over these facts as a whole, we see that it is not any fixed amount added to an impression that

makes us notice an increase in the latter, but that the amount depends on how large the impression already is.

The amount is expressible as a certain fraction of the entire impression to which it is added; and it is found

that the fraction is a wellnigh constant figure throughout an entire region of the scale of intensities of the

impression in question. Above and below this region the fraction increases in value. This is Weber's law,

which in so far forth expresses an empirical generalization of practical importance, without involving any

theory whatever or seeking any absolute measure of the sensations themselves. It is in the

that Fechner's originality exclusively consists, in his assumptions, namely, 1) that the justperceptible

increment is the sensationunit, and is in all parts of the scale the same (mathematically expressed, Ds =

const.); 2) that all our sensations consist of sums of these units; and finally, 3) that the reason why it takes a

constant fractional increase of the stimulus to awaken this unit lies in an ultimate law of the connection of

mind with matter, whereby the quantities of our feelings are related logarithmically to the quantities of their

objects. Fechner seems to find something inscrutably sublime in the existence of an ultimate 'psychophysic'

These assumptions are all peculiarly fragile. To begin with, the mental fact which in the experiments

corresponds to the increase of the stimulus is not an enlarged sensation, but a judgment that the sensation is

enlarged. What Fechner calls the 'sensation' is what appears to the mind as the objective phenomenon of light,

warmth, weight, sound, impressed part of the body, etc. Fechner tacitly if not openly assumes that such a

judgment of increase consists in the simple fact that an increased number of sensationunits are present to the

mind; and that the judgment is thus itself a quantitatively bigger mental thing when it judges large

differences, or differences between large terms, than when it judges small ones. But these ideas are really

absurd. The hardest sort of judgment, the judgment which strains the attention most (if that be any criterion of

the judgment's 'size'), is that about the smallest things and differences. But really it has no meaning to talk

about one judgment being bigger than another. And even if we leave out judgments and talk of sensations

only, we have already found ourselves (in Chapter VI) quite unable to read any clear meaning into the notion

that they are masses of units combined. To introspection, our feeling of pink is surely not a portion of our

feeling of scarlet; nor does the light of an electric arc seem to contain that of a tallowcandle in itself.

Compound things contain parts; and one such thing may have twice or three times as many parts as another.

But when we take a simple sensible quality like light or sound, and say that there is now twice or thrice as

much of it present as there was a moment ago, although we seem to mean the same thing as if we are talking

of compound objects, we really mean something different. We mean that if we were to arrange the various

possible degrees of the quality in a scale of serial increase, the distance, interval, or difference between the

stronger and the weaker specimen before us would seem about as great as that between the weaker one and

the beginning of the scale. It is these RELATIONS, these DISTANCES, which we are measuring and not the

composition of the qualities themselves, as Fechner thinks. Whilst if we turn to objects which are divisible,

surely a big object may be known in a little thought. Introspection shows moreover that in most sensations a

new kind of feeling invariably accompanies our judgment of an increased impression; and that is a fact which

But apart from these a priori difficulties, and even supposing that sensations did consist of added units,

Fechner's assumption that all equally perceptible additions are equally great additions is entirely arbitrary.

Why might not a small addition to a small sensation be as perceptible as a large addition to a large one? In

this case Weber's law would apply not to the additions themselves, but only to their perceptibility. Our

noticing of a difference of units in two sensations would depend on the latter being in a fixed ratio. But the

difference itself would depend directly on that between their respective stimuli. So many units added to the

stimulus, so many added to the sensation, and if the stimulus grew in a certain ratio, in exactly the same ratio

would the sensation also grow, though its perceptibility grew according to the logarithmic law.[55]

If Dstand for the smallest difference which we perceive, then we should have, instead of the formula Ds =

const., which is Fechner's, the formula Ds / s = const., a formula which interprets all the facts of Weber's law,

The entire superstructure which Fechner rears upon the facts is thus not only seen to be arbitrary and

subjective, but in the highest degree improbable as well. The departures from Weber's law in regions where it

does not obtain, he explains by the compounding with it of other unknown laws which mask its effects. As if

any law could not be found in any set of phenomena, provided one have the wit to invent enough other

coexisting laws to overlap and neutralize it! The whole outcome of the discussion, so far as Fechner's theories

are concerned, is indeed nil. Weber's law alone remains true as an empirical generalization of fair extent:

What we add to a large stimulus we notice less than what we add to a small one, unless it happen relatively to

One can express this state of things otherwise by saying that the whole of the stimulus does not seem to be

effective in giving us the perception of 'more,' and the simplest interpretation of such a state of things would

be physical. The loss of effect would take place in the nervous system. If our feelings resulted from a

condition of the nervemolecules which it grew ever more difficult for the stimulus to increase, our feelings

would naturally grow at a slower rate than the stimulus itself. An ever larger part of the latter's work would

go to overcoming the resistances, and an ever smaller part to the realization of the feelingbringing state.

Weber's law would thus be a sort of law of friction in the neural machine.[57] Just how these inner

resistances and frictions are to be conceived is a speculative question. Delb�uf has formulated them as

fatigue; Bernstein and Ward, as irradiations. The latest, and probably the most 'real,' hypothesis is that of

Ebbinghaus, who supposes that the intensity of sensation depends on the number of neural molecules which

are disintegrated in the unit of time. There are only a certain number at any time which are capable of

disintegrating; and whilst most of these are in an average condition of instability, some are almost stable and

some already near to decomposition. The smallest stimuli affect these latter molecules only; and as they are

but few, the sensational effect from adding a given quantity of stimulus at first is relatively small. Medium

stimuli affect the majority of the molecules, but affect fewer and fewer in proportion as they have already

diminished their number. The latest additions to the stimuli find all the medium molecules already

disintegrated, and only affect the small relatively indecomposable remainder, thus giving rise to increments

It is surely in some such way as this that Weber's law is to be interpreted, if it ever is. The Fechnerian

Maasformel and the conception of it as an ultimate 'psychophysic law' will remain an 'idol of the den,' if ever

there was one. Fechner himself indeed was a German Gelehrter of the ideal type, at once simple and shrewd,

a mystic and an experimentalist, homely and daring, and as loyal to facts as to his theories. But it would be

terrible if even such a dear old man as this could saddle our Science forever with his patient whimsies, and, in

a world so full of more nutritious objects of attention, compel all future students to plough through the

difficulties, not only of his own works, but of the still drier ones written in his refutation. Those who desire

this dreadful literature can find it; it has a 'disciplinary value;' but I will not even enumerate it in a footnote.

The only amusing part of it is that Fechner's critics should always feel bound, after smiting his theories hip

and thigh and leaving not a stick of them standing, to wind up by saying that nevertheless to him belongs the

imperishable glory of the first formulating them and thereby turning psychology into an exact science (!).

"'And everybody praised the duke Who this great fight did win.' 'But what good came of it at last?' Quoth

little Peterkin. Why, that I cannot tell, said he, 'But 'twas a famous victory!'"

[5] Montgomery in 'Mind,' x. 527. Cf. also Lipps: Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, p. 579 ff., and see below,

[6] Stumpf (Tonpsychologie, I. 116 ff.) tries to prove that the theory that all differences are differences of

composition leads necessarily to an infinite regression when we try to determine the unit. It seems to me that

in his particular reasoning he forgets the ultimate units of the mindstuff theory. I cannot find the completed

infinite to be one of the obstacles to belief in this theory, although I fully accept Stumpf's general reasoning,

and am only too happy to find myself on the same side with such an exceptionally clear thinker. The

strictures by Wahle in the Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil. seem to me to have no force, since the writer does not

discriminate between resemblance of things obviously compound and that of things sensibly simple.

[7] The belief that the causes of effects felt by us to differ qualitatively are facts which differ only in quantity

(e.g. that blue is caused by so many etherwaves, and yellow by a smaller number) must not be confounded

[8] Herr G. H. Schneider, in his youthful pamphlet (Die Unterscheidung, 1877) has tried to show that there

are no positively existent elements of sensibility, no substantive qualities between which differences obtain,

but that the terms we call such, the sensations, are but sums of differences, loci or starting points whence

many directions of difference proceed. 'Unterschiedsempfind�ngs Complexe' are what he calls them. This

absurd carrying out of that 'principle of relativity' which we shall have to mention in Chapter XVII may serve

as a counterpoise to the mindstuff theory, which says that there are nothing but substantive sensations, and

[10] The ordinary treatment of this is to call it the result of the fusion of a lot of sensations, in themselves

[11] "We often begin to be dimly aware of a difference in a sensation or group of sensations, before we can

assign any definite character to that which differs. Thus we detect a strange or foreign ingredient or flavor in

a familiar dish, or of tone in a familiar tune, and yet are wholly unable for a while to say what the intruder is

like. Hence perhaps discrimination may be regarded as the earliest and most primordial mode of intellectual

activity." (Sully: Outlines of Psychology, p. 142. Cf. also G. H. Schneider: Die Unterscheidung, pp. 910.)

[12] In cases where the difference is slight, we may need, as previously remarked, to get the dying phase of n

as well as of m before ndifferentfromm is distinctly felt. In that case the inevitably successive feelings (as

far as we can sever what is so continuous) would be four, m, difference, n, ndifferentfromm. This slight

[14] There is only one obstacle, and that is our inveterate tendency to believe that where two things or

qualities are compared, it must be that exact duplicates of both have got into the mind and have matched

themselves against each other there. To which the first reply is the empirical one of "Look into the mind and

see." When I recognize a weight which I now lift as inferior to the one I just lifted; when, with my tooth now

aching, I perceive the pain to be less intense than it was a minute ago; the two things in the mind which are

compared would, by the authors I criticise, be admitted to be an actual sensation and an image in the memory.

An image in the memory, by general consent of these same authors, is admitted to be a weaker thing than a

sensation. Nevertheless it is in these instances judged stronger; that is, an object supposed to be known only

in so far forth as this image represents it, is judged stronger. Ought not this to shake one's belief in the notion

of separate representative 'ideas' weighing themselves, or being weighed by the Ego, against each other in the

mind? And let it not be said that what makes us judge the felt pain to be weaker than the imagined one of a

moment since is our recollection of the downward nature of the shock of difference which we felt as we

passed to the present moment from the one before it. That shock does undoubtedly have a different character

according as it comes between terms of which the second diminishes or increases; and it may be admitted that

in cases where the past term is doubtfully remembered, the memory of the shock, as plus or minus, might

sometimes enable us to establish a relation which otherwise we should not perceive. But one could hardly

expect the memory of this shock to overpower our actual comparison of terms, both of which are present (as

are the image and the sensation in the case supposed), and make us judge the weaker one to be the stronger.

And hereupon comes the second reply: Suppose the mind does compare two realities by comparing two

ideas of its own which represent them what is gained? The same mystery is still there. The ideas must still

be known; and, as the attention in comparing oscillates from one to the other, past must be known with

present just as before. If you must end by simply saying that your 'Ego,' whilst being neither the idea of m nor

the idea of n, yet knows and compares both, why not allow your pulse of thought, which is neither the thing

m nor the thing n, to know and compare both directly? 'Tis but a question of how to name the facts least

artificially. The egoist explains them, by naming them as an Ego 'combining' or 'synthetizing' two ideas, no

[15] I fear that few will be converted by my words, so obstinately do thinkers of all schools refuse to admit

the unmediated function of knowing a thing, and so incorrigibly do they substitute being the thing for it. E.g.,

in the latest utterance of the spiritualistic philosophy (Bowne's Introduction to Psychological Theory, 1887,

published only three days before this writing) one of the first sentences which catch my eye is this: "What

remembers? The spiritualistic says, the soul remembers; it abides across the years and the flow of the body,

and gathering up its past, carries it with it" (p. 28). Why, for heaven's sake, O Bowne, can not you say 'knows

it'? If there is anything our soul does not do to its past, it is to carry it with it.

[19] The explanation I offer presupposes that a difference too faint to have any direct effect in the way of

making the mind notice it per se will nevertheless be strong enough to keep its 'terms' from calling up

identical associates. It seems probable from many observations that this is the case. All the facts of

'unconscious' inference are proofs of it. We say a painting 'looks' like the work of a certain artist, though we

cannot name the characteristic differenti�. We see by a man's face that he is sincere, though we can give no

definite reason for our faith. The facts of senseperception quoted from Helmholtz a few pages below will be

additional examples. Here is another good one, though it will perhaps be easier understood after reading the

chapter on Spaceperception than now. Take two stereoscopic slides and represent on each halfslide a pair

of spots, a and b, but make their distances such that the a's are equidistant on both slides, whilst the b's are

nearer together on slide 1 than on slide 2. Make moreover the distance ab = ab'" and the distance ab' = ab".

Then look successively at the two slides stereoscopically, so that the a's in both are directly fixated (that is,

fall on the two fove�, or centres of distinctest vision). The a's will then appear single, and so probably will

the b's. But the now singleseeming b on slide 1 will look nearer, whilst that on slide 2 will look farther than

the a. But, if the diagrams are rightly drawn, b and b'" must affect 'identical' spots, spots equally far to the

right of the fovea, b in the left eye and b'" in the right eye. The same is true of b' and b". Identical spots are

spots whose sensations cannot possibly be discriminated as such. Since in these two observations, however,

they give rise to such opposite perceptions of distance, and prompt such opposite tendencies to movement

(since in slide 1 we converge in looking from a to b, whilst in slide 2 we diverge), it follows that two

processes which occasion feelings quite indistinguishable to direct consciousness may nevertheless be each

allied with disparate associates both of a sensorial and of a motor kind. Cf. Donders, Archiv f.

Ophthalmologie, Bd. 13 (1867). The basis of his essay is that we cannot feel on which eye any particular

element of a compound picture falls, but its effects on our total perception differ in the two eyes.

[20] A. W. Volkmann: Ueber den Einfluss der Uebung, etc., Leipzig Berichte, Mathphys. Classe, x, 1858, p.

[22] Professor Lipps accounts for the tactile discrimination of the blind in a way which (divested of its

'mythological' assumptions) seems to me essentially to agree with this. Stronger ideas are supposed to raise

weaker ones over the threshold of consciousness by fusing with them, the tendency to fuse being proportional

to the similarity of the ideas. Cf. Grundtatsachen, etc., pp. 2323; also pp. 118, 492, 5267.

[25] When a person squints, double images are formed in the centre of the field. As a matter of fact, most

squinters are found blind of one eye, or almost so; and it has long been supposed amongst ophthalmologists

that the blindness is a secondary affection superinduced by the voluntary suppression of one of the sets of

double images, in other words by the positive and persistent refusal to use one of the eyes. This explanation

of the blindness has, however, been called in question of late years. See, for a brief account of the matter, O.

F. Wadsworth in Boston Med. and Surg. Journ., CXVI. 49 (Jan. 20, '87), and the replies by Derby and others

[26] Tonempfindungen, Dritte Auflage, pp. 102107. The reader who has assimilated the contents of our

Chapter V, above, will doubtless have remarked that the illustrious physiologist has fallen, in these

paragraphs, into that sort of interpretation of the facts which we there tried to prove erroneous. Helmholtz,

however, is no more careless than most psychologists in confounding together the object perceived. The

organic conditions of the perception, and the sensations which would be excited by the several parts of the

object, or by the several organic conditions, provided they came into action separately or were separately

attended to, and in assuming that what is true of any one of these sorts of fact must be true of the other sorts

also. If each organic condition or part of the object is there, its sensation, he thinks, must be there also, only

in a 'synthetic' which is indistinguishable from what the authors whom we formerly reviewed called an

'unconscious' state. I will not repeat arguments sufficiently detailed in the earlier chapter (see especially

pp. 170176), but simply say that what he calls the 'fusion of many sensations into one' is really the

production of one sensation by the cooperation of many organic conditions; and that what perception fails to

discriminate (when it is synthetic') is not sensations already existent but not singled out, but new objective

facts, judged truer than the facts already synthetically perceived two views of the solid body, many

harmonic tones, instead of one view and one tone, states of the eyeballmuscles thitherto unknown, and the

like. These new facts, when first discovered, are known is states of consciousness never till that moment

exactly realized before, states of consciousness which at the same time judge them to be determinations of the

same matter of fact which was previously realized. All that Helmholtz says of the conditions which hinder

and further analysis applies just as naturally to the analysis, through the advent of new feelings, of objects

into their elements, as to the analysis of aggregate feelings into elementary feelings supposed to have been

The reader can himself apply this criticism to the following passages from Lotze and Stumpf respectively,

which I quote because they are the ablest expressions of the view opposed to my own. Both authors, it seems

to me, commit the psychologist's fallacy, and allow their later knowledge of the things felt to be foisted into

Lotze says: "It is indubitable that the simultaneous assault of a variety of different stimuli on different senses,

or even on the same sense, puts us into a state of confused general feeling in which we are certainly not

conscious of clearly distinguishing the different impressions. Still it does not follow that in such a case we

have a positive perception of an actual unity of the contents of our ideas, arising from their mixture; our state

of mind seems rather to consist in (1) the consciousness of our inability to separate what really has remained

diverse, and (2) in the general feeling of the disturbance produced in the economy of our body by the

simultaneous assault of the stimuli.... Not that the sensations melt into one another, but simply that the act of

distinguishing them is absent; and this again certainly not so far that the fact of the difference remains

entirely unperceived, but only so far as to prevent us from determining the amount of the difference, and from

apprehending other relations between the different impressions. Anyone who is annoyed at one and the same

time by glowing heat, dazzling light, deafening noise, and an offensive smell, will certainly not fuse these

disparate sensations into a single one with a single content which could be sensuously perceived; they remain

for him in separation, and he merely finds it impossible to be conscious of one of them apart from the others.

But, further, he will have a feeling of discomfort what I mentioned above as the second constituent of his

whole state. For every stimulus which produces in consciousness a definite content of sensation is also a

definite degree of disturbance, and therefore makes a call upon the forces of the nerves; and the sum of these

little changes, which in their character as disturbances are not so diverse as the contents of consciousness they

give rise to, produce the general feeling which, added to the inability to distinguish, deludes us into the belief

in an actual absence of diversity in our sensations. It is only in some such way as this, again, that I can

imagine that state which is sometimes described as the beginning of our whole education, a state which in

itself is supposed to be simple, and to be afterwards divided into different sensations by an activity of

separation. No activity of separation in the world could establish differences where no real diversity existed;

for it would have nothing to guide it to the places where it was to establish them, or to indicate the width it

Stumpf writes as follows: "Of coexistent sensations there are always a large number undiscriminated in

consciousness, or (if one prefer to call what is undiscriminated unconscious) in the soul. They are, however,

no fused into a simple quality. When, on entering a room, we receive sensations of odor and warmth together,

without expressly attending to either, the two qualities of sensation are not, as it were, an entirely new simple

quality, which first at the moment in which attention analytically steps in changes into smell and warmth.... In

such cases we find ourselves in presence of an indefinable, unnamable total of feeling. And when, after

successfully analyzing this total, we call it back to memory, as it was in its unanalyzed state, and compare it

with the elements we have found, the latter (as it seems to me) may be recognized as real parts contained in

the former, and the former seen to be their sum. So, for example, when we clearly perceive that the content of

our sensation of oil of pepperment is partly a sensation of taste and partly one of temperature."

I should prefer to say that we perceive that objective fact, known to us as the peppermint taste, to contain

those other objective facts known as aromatic or sapid quality, and coldness, respectively. No ground to

suppose that the vehicle of this last very complex perception has any identity with the earlier psychosis

[30] Mind, XI. 377 ff. He says: "I apparently either distinguished the impression and made the motion

simultaneously, or if I tried to avoid this by waiting until I had formed a distinct impression before I began to

make the motion, I added to the simple reaction, not only a perception, but a volition." Which remark may

well confirm our doubts as to the strict psychologic worth of any of these measurements.

[32] For other determinations of discriminationtime by this method cf. v. Kries and Auerbach, Archiv f.

Physiologie, Bd. I. p. 297 ff. (these authors get much smaller figures); Friedrich, Psychologische Studien, I.

39. Chapter IX of Buccola's book, Le Legge del tempo, etc., gives a full account of the subject.

[33] If so, the reactions upon the spark would have to be slower than those upon the touch. The investigation

was abandoned because it was found impossible to narrow down the difference between the conditions of the

sightseries and those of the touchseries, to nothing more than the possible presence in the latter of the

[34] Tischer gives figures from quite unpractised individuals, which I have not quoted. The

discriminationtime of one of them is 22 times longer than Tischer's own! (Psychol. Studien, I. 527.)

[35] Compare Lipps's excellent passage to the same critical effect in his Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens,

pp. 390393. I leave my text just as it was written before the publication of Lange's and M�nsterberg's

results cited on pp. 92 and 432. Their 'shortened' or 'muscular' times, got when the expectant attention was

addressed to the possible reactions rather than to the stimulus, constitute the minimal reactiontime of which

I speak, and all that I say in the text falls beautifully into line with their results.

[37] The judgment becomes easier if the two couples of terms have one member in common, if a b and b

c, for example, are compared. This, as Stumpf says (Tonpsychologie, I. 131), is probably because the

introduction of the fourth term brings involuntary crosscomparisons with it, a and b with d, b with c, etc.,

which confuses us by withdrawing our attention from the relations we ought alone to be estimating.

[38] J. Delb�uf: �l�ments de Psychophysique (Paris, 1883), p. 64. Plateau in Stumpf, Tonpsych., I. 125. I

have noticed a curious enlargement of certain 'distances' of difference under the influence of chloroform. The

jingling of the bells on the horses of a horsecar passing the door, for example, and the rumbling of the

vehicle itself, which to our ordinary hearing merge together very readily into a quasicontinuous body of

sound, have seemed so far apart as to require a sort of mental facing in opposite directions to get from one to

the other, as if they belonged in different worlds. I am inclined to suspect, from certain data, that the ultimate

philosophy of difference and likeness will have to be built upon experiences of intoxication, especially by

nitrous oxide gas, which lets us into intuitions the subtlety whereof is denied to the waking state. Cf. B. P.

Blood: The An�sthetic Revelation, and the Gist of Philosophy (Amsterdam, N.Y., 1874). Cf. also Mind, VII.

[41] Stumpf, pp. 1167. I have omitted , so as not to make my text too intricate, an extremely acute and

conclusive paragraph, which I reproduce here: "We may generalize: Wherever a number of sensible

impressions are apprehended as a series, there in the last instance must perceptions of simple likeness be

found. Proof: Assume that all the terms of a series, e.g. the qualities of tone, c d e f g, have something in

common, no matter what it is, call it X; then I say that the differing parts of each of these terms must not

only be differently constituted in each, but must themselves form a series, whose existence is the ground for

our apprehending the original terms in serial form. We thus get instead of the original series a b c d e f... the

equivalent series Xa, Xb, Xg,... etc. What is gained? The question immediately arises: How is a b g known as

a series? According to the theory, these elements must themselves be made up of a part common to all, and of

parts differing in each, which latter parts form a new series, and so on ad infinitum, which is absurd."

[42] The most important ameliorations of Fechner's formula are Delb�uf's in his Recherches sur la Mesure

des Sensations (1873), p. 35, and Elsas's in his pamphlet �ber die Psychophysik (1886), p. 16.

[43] Reversing the order is for the sake of letting the opposite accidental errors due to 'contrast' neutralize

[44] Theoretically, it would seem that it ought to be equal to the sum of all the additions which we judge to

[47] Berlin Acad. Sitzungsberichte, 1888, p. 917. Other observers (Dobro. wolsky, Lamansky) found great

[49] American Journal of Psychology, I. 125. The rate of decrease is small but steady, and I cannot well

understand what Professor J. means by saying that his figures verify Weber's law.

[54] Cf. Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, pp. 3979. "One sensation cannot be a multiple of another. If it could, we

ought to be able to subtract the one from the other, and to feel the remainder by itself. Every sensation

presents itself as an indivisible unit." Professor von Kries, in the Vierteljahrschrift f�r wiss. Philosophie, VI.

257 ff., shows very clearly the absurdity of supposing that our stronger sensations contain our weaker ones as

parts. They differ as qualitative units. Compare also J. Tannery in Delb�uf's El�ments de Psychophysique

[55] F. Brentano, Psychologie, I. 9, 88 ff. Merkel thinks that his results with the method of

equalappearing intervals show that we compare considerable intervals with each other by a different law

from that by which we notice barely perceptible intervals. The stimuli form an arithmetical series (a pretty

wild one according to his figures) in the former case, a geometrical one in the latter at least so I

[56] This is the formula which Merkel thinks he has verified (if I understand him aright) by his experiments

[57] Elsas: Ueber die Psychophysik (1886), p. 41. When the pans of a balance are already loaded, but in

equilibrium, it takes a proportionally larger weight added to one of them to incline the beam.

An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario

After discrimination, association! Already in the last chapter I have had to invoke, in order to explain the

improvement of certain discriminations by practice, the 'association' of the objects to be distinguished, with

other more widely differing ones. It is obvious that the advance of our knowledge must consist of both

operations; for objects at first appearing as wholes are analyzed into parts, and objects appearing separately

are brought together and appear as new compound wholes to the mind. Analysis and synthesis are thus the

incessantly alternating mental activities, a stroke of the one preparing the way for a stroke of the other, much

as, in walking, a man's two legs are alternately brought into use, both being indispensable for any orderly

The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration follow each other through our thinking, the restless

flight of one idea before the next, the transitions our minds make between things wide as the poles asunder,

transitions which at first sight startle us by their abruptness, but which, when scrutinized closely, often reveal

intermediating links of perfect naturalness and propriety all this magical, imponderable streaming has

from time immemorial excited the admiration of all whose attention happened to be caught by its

omnipresent mystery. And it has furthermore challenged the race of philosophers to banish something of the

mystery by formulating the process in simpler terms. The problem which the philosophers have set

themselves is that of ascertaining principles of connection between the thoughts which thus appear to sprout

one out of the other, whereby their peculiar succession or coexistence may be explained.

But immediately an ambiguity arises: which sort of connection is meant? connection thoughtof, or

connection between thoughts? These are two entirely different things, and only in the case of one of them is

there any hope of finding 'principles.' The jungle of connections thought of can never be formulated simply.

Every conceivable connection may be thought of of coexistence, succession, resemblance, contrast,

contradiction, cause and effect, means and end, genus and species, part and whole, substance and property,

early and late, large and small, landlord and tenant, master and servant, Heaven knows what, for the list is

literally inexhaustible. The only simplification which could possibly be aimed at would be the reduction of

the relations to a smaller number of types, like those which such authors as Kant and Renouvier call the

'categories' of the understanding.[2] According as we followed one category or another we should sweep,

with our thought, through the world in this way or in that. And all the categories would be logical, would be

relations of reason. They would fuse the items into a continuum. Were this the sort of connection sought

between one moment of our thinking and another, our chapter might end here. For the only summary

description of these infinite possibilities of transition, is that they are all acts of reason, and that the mind

proceeds from one object to another by some rational path of connection. The trueness of this formula is only

equalled by its sterility, for psychological purposes. Practically it amounts to simply referring the inquirer to

the relations between facts or things, and to telling him that his thinking follows them.

But as a matter of fact, his thinking only sometimes follows them, and these socalled 'transitions of reason'

are far from being all alike reasonable. If pure thought runs all our trains, why should she run some so fast

and some so slow, some through dull flats and some through gorgeous scenery, some to mountainheights

and jewelled mines, others through dismal swamps and darkness? and run some off the track altogether,

and into the wilderness of lunacy? Why do we spend years straining after a certain scientific or practical

problem, but all in vain thought refusing to evoke the solution we desire? And why, some day, walking in

the street with our attention miles away from that quest, does the answer saunter into our minds as carelessly

as if it had never been called for suggested, possibly, by the flowers on the bonnet of the lady in front of

us, or possibly by nothing that we can discover? If reason can give us relief then, why did she not do so

The truth must be admitted that thought works under conditions imposed ab extra. The great law of habit

itself that twenty experiences make us recall a thing better than one, that long indulgence in error makes

right thinking almost impossible seems to have no essential foundation in reason. The business of thought

is with truth the number of experiences ought to have nothing to do with her hold of it; and she ought by

right to be able to hug it all the closer, after years wasted out of its presence. The contrary arrangements seem

quite fantastic and arbitrary, but nevertheless are part of the very bone and marrow of our minds. Reason is

only one out of a thousand possibilities in the thinking of each of us. Who can count all the silly fancies, the

grotesque suppositions, the utterly irrelevant reflections he makes in the course of a day? Who can swear that

his prejudices and irrational beliefs constitute a less bulky part of his mental furniture than his clarified

opinions? It is true that a presiding arbiter seems to sit aloft in the mind, and emphasize the better suggestions

into permanence, while it ends by droopping out and leaving unrecorded the confusion. But this is all the

difference. The mode of genesis of the worthy and the worthless seems the same. The laws of our actual

thinking, of the cogitatum, must account alike for the bad and the good materials on which the arbiter has to

decide, for wisdom and for folly. The laws of the arbiter, of the cogitandum, of what we ought to think, are to

the former as the laws of ethics are to those of history. Who but an hegelian historian ever pretended that

reason in action was per se a sufficient explanation of the political changes in Europe?

There are, then, mechanical conditions on which thought depends, and which, to say the least, determine the

order in which is presented the content or material for her comparisons, selections, and decisions. It is a

suggestive fact that Locke, and many more recent Continental psychologists, have found themselves obliged

to invoke a mechanical process to account for the aberrations of thought, the obstructive preprocessions, the

frustrations of reason. This they found in the law of habit, or what we now call Association by Contiguity.

But it never occurred to these writers that a process which could go the length of actually producing some

ideas and sequences in the mind might safely be trusted to produce others too; and that those habitual

associations which further thought may also come from the same mechanical source as those which hinder it.

Hartley accordingly suggested habit as a sufficient explanation of all connections of our thoughts, and in so

doing planted himself squarely upon the properly psychological aspect of the problem of connection, and

sought to treat both rational and irrational connections from a single point of view. The problem which he

essayed, however lamely, to answer, was that of the connection between our psychic states considered purely

as such, regardless of the objective connections of which they might take cognizance. How does a man come,

after thinking of A, to think of B the next moment? or how does he come to think A and B always together?

These were the phenomena which Hartley undertook to explain by cerebral physiology. I believe that he was,

in many essential respects, on the right track, and I propose simply to revise his conclusions by the aid of

But the whole historic doctrine of psychological association is tainted with one huge error that of the

construction of our thoughts out of the compounding of themselves together of immutable and incessantly

recurring 'simple ideas.' It is the cohesion of these which the 'principles of association' are considered to

account for. In Chapters VI and IX we saw abundant reasons for treating the doctrine of simple ideas or

psychic atoms as mythological; and, in all that follows, our problem will be to keep whatever truths the

associationist doctrine has caught sight of without weighing it down with the untenable incumbrance that the

Association, so far as the word stands for an effect, is between THINGS THOUGHT OF it is THINGS,

not ideas, which are associated in the mind. We ought to talk of the association of objects, not of the

association of ideas. And so far as association stands for a cause, it is between processes in the brain it is

these which, by being associated in certain ways, determine what successive objects shall be thought. Let us

proceed towards our final generalization by surveying first a few familiar facts.

The laws of motor habit in the lower centres of the nervous system are disputed by no one. A series of

movements repeated in a certain order tend to unroll themselves with peculiar ease in that order for ever

afterward. Number one awakens number two, and that awakens number three, and so on, till the last is

produced. A habit of this kind once become inveterate may go on automatically. And so it is with the objects

with which our thinking is concerned. With some persons each note of a melody, heard but once, will

accurately revive in its proper sequence. Small boys at school learn the inflections of many a Greek noun,

adjective, or verb, from the reiterated recitations of the upper classes falling on their ear as they sit at their

desks. All this happens with no voluntary effort on their part and with no thought of the spelling of the words.

used for 'counting out,' form another familiar example of things heard in sequence cohering in the same order

In touch we have a smaller number of instances, though probably every one who bathes himself in a certain

fixed manner is familiar with the fact that each part of his body over which the water is squeezed from the

sponge awakens a premonitory tingling consciousness in that portion of skin which is habitually the next to

be deluged. Tastes and smells form no very habitual series in our experience. But even if they did, it is

doubtful whether habit would fix the order of their reproduction quite so well as it does that of other

sensations. In vision, however, we have a sense in which the order of reproduced things is very nearly as

much influenced by habit as is the order of remembered sounds. Rooms, landscapes, buildings, pictures, or

persons with whose look we are very familiar, surge up before the mind's eye with all the details of their

appearance complete, so soon as we think of any one of their component parts. Some persons, in reciting

printed matter by heart, will seem to see each successive word, before they utter it, appear in its order on an

imaginary page. A certain chessplayer, one of those heroes who train themselves to play several games at

once blindfold, is reported to say that in bed at night after a match the games are played all over again before

his mental eye, each board being pictured as passing in turn through each of its successive stages. In this case,

of course, the intense previous voluntary strain of the power of visual representation is what facilitated the

Association occurs as amply between impressions of different senses as between homogeneous sensations.

Seen things and heard things cohere with each other, and with odors and tastes, in representation, in the same

order in which they cohered as impressions of the outer world. Feelings of contact reproduce similarly the

sights, sounds, and tastes with which experience has associated them. In fact, the 'objects' of our perception,

as trees, men, houses, microscopes, of which the real world seems composed, are nothing but clusters of

qualities which through simultaneous stimulation have so coalesced that the moment one is excited actually it

serves as a sign or cue for the idea of the others to arise. Let a person enter his room in the dark and grope

among the objects there. The touch of the matches will instantaneously recall their appearance. If his hand

comes in contact with an orange on the table, the golden yellow of the fruit, its savor and perfume will

forthwith shoot through his mind. In passing the hand over the sideboard or in jogging the coalscuttle with

the foot, the large glossy dark shape of the one and the irregular blackness of the other awaken like a flash

and constitute what we call the recognition of the objects. The voice of the violin faintly echoes through the

mind as the hand is laid upon it in the dark, and the feeling of the garments or draperies which may hang

about the room is not understood till the look correlative to the feeling has in each case been resuscitated.

Smells notoriously have the power of recalling the other experiences in whose company they were wont to be

felt, perhaps long years ago; and the voluminous emotional character assumed by the images which suddenly

pour into the mind at such a time forms one of the staple topics of popular psychologic wonder

"Lost and gone and lost and gone! A breath, a whisper some divine farewell Desolate sweetness far

We cannot hear the din of a railroad train or the yell of its whistle, without thinking of its long, jointed

appearance and its headlong speed, nor catch a familiar voice in a crowd without recalling, with the name of

the speaker, also his face. But the most notorious and important case of the mental combination of auditory

with optical impressions originally experienced together is furnished by language. The child is offered a new

and delicious fruit and is at the same time told that it is called a 'fig.' Or looking out of the window he

exclaims, "What a funny horse!" and is told that it is a 'piebald' horse. When learning his letters, the sound of

each is repeated to him whilst its shape is before his eye. Thenceforward, long as he may live, he will never

see a fig, a piebald horse, or a letter of the alphabet without the name which he first heard in conjunction with

each clinging to it in his mind; and inversely he will never hear the name without the faint arousal of the

Reading exemplifies this kind of cohesion even more beautifully. It is an uninterrupted and protracted recall

of sounds by sights which have always been coupled with them in the past. I find that I can name six hundred

letters in two minutes on a printed page. Five distinct acts of association between sight and sound (not to

speak of all the other processes concerned) must then have occurred in each second in my mind. In reading

entire words the speed is much more rapid. Valentin relates in his Physiology that the reading of a single page

of the proof, containing 2629 letters, took him 1 minute and 32 seconds. In this experiment each letter was

understood in 1/28 of a second, but owing to the integration of letters into entire words, forming each a single

aggregate impression directly associated with a single acoustic image, we need not suppose as many as 28

separate associations in a sound. The figures, however, suffice to show with what extreme rapidity an actual

sensation recalls its customary associates. Both in fact seem to our ordinary attention to come into the mind at

The timemeasuring psychologists of recent days have tried their hand at this problem by more elaborate

methods. Galton, using a very simple apparatus, found that the sight of an unforeseen word would awaken an

associated 'idea' in about 5/6 of a second.[4] Wundt next made determinations in which the 'cue' was given by

singlesyllabled words called out by an assistant. The person experimented on had to press a key as soon as

the sound of the word awakened an associated idea. Both word and reaction were chronographically

registered, and the total timeinterval between the two amounted, in four observers, to 1.009, 0.896, 1.037,

and 1.154 seconds respectively. From this the simple physiological reactiontime and the time of merely

identifying the word's sound (the 'apperceptiontime,' as Wundt calls it) must be subtracted, to get the exact

time required for the associated idea to arise. These times were separately determined and subtracted. The

difference, called by Wundt the associationtime, amounted, in the same four persons, to 706, 723, 752, and

874 thousandths of a second respectively.[5] The length of the last figure is due to the fact that the person

reacting (President G. S. Hall) was an American, whose associations with German words would naturally be

slower than those of natives. The shortest associationtime noted was when the word 'Sturm' suggested to

Prof. Wundt the word 'Wind' in 0.341 second.[6] Finally, Mr. Cattell made some interesting observations

upon the associationtime between the look of letters and their names. "I pasted letters," he says, "on a

revolving drum, and determined at what rate they could be read aloud as they passed by a slit in a screen." He

found it to vary according as one, or more than one letter, was visible at a time through the slit, and gives half

a second as about the time which it takes to see and name a single letter seen alone.

"When two or more letters are always in view, not only do the processes of seeing and naming overlap, but

while the subject is seeing one letter he begins to see the ones next following, and so can read them more

quickly. Of the nine persons experimented on, four could read the letters faster when five were in view at

once, but were not helped by a sixth letter; three were not helped by a fifth, and two not by a fourth letter.

This shows that while one idea is in the centre, two, three, or four additional ideas may be in the background

of consciousness. The second letter in view shortens the time about 1/40, the third 1/60, the fourth 1/100, the

"I find it takes about twice as long to read (aloud, as fast as possible) words which have no connection as

words which make sentences, and letters which have no connection as letters which make words. When the

words make sentences and the letters words, not only do the processes of seeing and naming overlap, but by

one mental effort the subject can recognize a whole group of words or letters, and by one willact choose the

motions to be made in naming, so that the rate at which the words and letters are read is really only limited by

the maximum rapidity at which the speechorgans can be moved. As the result of a large number of

experiments, the writer found that he had read words not making sentences at the rate of 1/4 sec., words

making sentences (a passage from Swift) at the rate of 1/8 sec., per word.... The rate at which a person reads a

foreign language is proportional to his familiarity with the language. For example, when reading as fast as

possible the writer's rate was, English 138, French 167, German 250, Italian 327, Latin 434, and Greek 484;

the figures giving the thousandths of a second taken to read each word. Experiments made on others

strikingly confirm these results. The subject does not know that he is reading the foreign language more

slowly than his own; this explains why foreigners seem to talk so fast. This simple method of determining a

"The time required to see and name colors and pictures of objects was determined in the same way. The time

was found to be about the same (over 1/2 sec.) for colors as for pictures, and about twice as long as for words

and letters. Other experiments I have made show that we can recognize a single color or picture in a slightly

shorter time than a word or letter, but take longer to name it. This is because, in the case or words and letters,

the association between the idea and name has taken place so often that the process has become automatic,

whereas in the case of colors and pictures we must by a voluntary effort choose the name.[7]

In later experiments Mr. Cattell studied the time for various associations to be performed, the termini (i.e.,

cue and answer) being words. A word in one language was to call up its equivalent in another, the name of an

author the tongue in which he wrote, that of a city the country in which it lay, that of a writer one of his

works, etc. The mean variation from the average is very great in all these experiments; and the interesting

feature which they show is the existence of certain constant differences between associations of different

From country to city, Mr. C.'s time was 0.340 sec. " season " month " " " 0.399 " language " author, " " "

0.523 " author " work, " " " 0.596 The average time of two observers, experimenting on eight different types

of association, was 0.420 and 0.436 sec. respectively.[8] The very wide range of variation is undoubtedly a

consequence of the fact that the words used as cues, and the different types of association studied, differ

"For example, B is a teacher of mathematics; C has busied himself more with literature. C knows quite as

well as B that 7 + 5 = 12, yet he needs 1/10 of a second longer to call it to mind; B knows quite as well as C

that Dante was a poet, but needs 1/20 of a second longer to think of it. Such experiments lay bare the mental

Timedeterminations apart, the facts we have run over can all be summed up in the simple statement that

objects once experienced together tend to become associated in the imagination, so that when any one of

them is thought of, the others are likely to be thought of also, in the same order of sequence or coexistence as

before. This statement we may name the law of mental association by contiguity.[10]

I preserve this name in order to depart as little as possible from tradition, although Mr. Ward's designation of

the process as that of association by continuity[11] or Wundt's as that of external association (to distinguish it

from the internal association which we shall presently learn to know under the name of association by

similarity)[12] are perhaps better terms. Whatever we name the law, since it expresses merely a phenomenon

of mental habit, the most natural way of accounting for it is to conceive it as a result of the laws of habit in

the nervous system; in other words, it is to ascribe it to a physiological cause. If it be truly a law of those

nervecentres which coordinate sensory and motor processes together that paths once used for coupling any

pair of them are thereby made more permeable, there appears no reason why the same law should not hold

good of ideational centres and their couplingpaths as well.[13] Parts of these centres which have once been

in action together will thus grow so linked that excitement at one point will irradiate through the system. The

chances of complete irradiation will be strong in proportion as the previous excitements have been frequent,

and as the present points excited afresh are numerous. If all points were originally excited together, the

irradiation may be sensibly simultaneous throughout the system, when any single point or group of points is

touched off. But where the original impressions were successive the conjugation of a Greek verb, for

example awakening nervetracts in a definite order, they will now, when one of them awakens, discharge

The reader will recollect all that has been said of increased tension in nervetracts and of the summation of

stimuli (p. 82 ff.). We must therefore suppose that in these ideational tracts as well as elsewhere, activity may

be awakened, in any particular locality, by the summation therein of a number of tensions, each incapable

alone of provoking an actual discharge. Suppose for example the locality M to be in functional continuity

with four other localities, K, L, N, and O. Suppose moreover that on four previous occasions it has been

separately combined with each of these localities in a common activity. M may then be indirectly awakened

by any cause which tends to awaken either K, L, N, or O. But if the cause which awakens K, for instance, be

so slight as only to increase its tension without arousing it to full discharge, K will only succeed in slightly

increasing the tension of M. But if at the same time the tensions of L, N, and O are similarly increased, the

combined effects of all four upon M may be so great as to awaken an actual discharge in this latter locality. In

like manner if the paths between M and the four other localities have been so slightly excavated by previous

experience as to require a very intense excitement in either of the localities before M can be awakened, a less

strong excitement than this in any one will fail to reach M. But if all four at once are mildly excited, their

The psychological law of association of objects thought of through their previous contiguity in thought or

experience would thus be an effect, within the mind, of the physical fact that nervecurrents propagate

themselves easiest through those tracts of conduction which have been already most in use. Descartes and

Locke hit upon this explanation, which modern science has not yet succeeded in improving.

"Custom," says Locke, "settles habits of thinking in the understanding, as well as of determining in the will,

and of motions in the body; all which seem to be but trains of motion in the animal spirits [by this Locke

meant identically what we understand by neural processes] which, once set agoing, continue in the same steps

they have been used to, which by often treading are worn into a smooth path, and the motion in it becomes

Hartley was more thorough in his grasp of the principle. The sensorial nervecurrents, produced when

objects are fully present, were for him 'vibrations,' and those which produce ideas of objects in their absence

were 'miniature vibrations.' And he sums up the cause of mental association in a single formula by saying:

"Any vibrations, A, B, C, etc., by being associated together a sufficient Number of Times, get such a Power

over a, b, c, etc., the corresponding Miniature Vibrations, that any of the Vibrations A, when impressed alone,

It is evident that if there be any law of neural habit similar to this, the contiguities, coexistences, and

successions, met with in outer experience, must inevitably be copied more or less perfectly in our thought. If

A B C D E be a sequence of outer impressions (they may be events or they may be successively experienced

properties of an object) which once gave rise to the successive 'ideas,' a b c d e, then no sooner will A impress

us again and awaken the a, than b c d e will arise as ideas even before B C D E have come in as impressions.

In other words, the order of impressions will the next time be anticipated; and the mental order will so far

forth copy the order of the outer world. Any object when met again will make us expect its former

concomitants, through the overflowing of its braintract into the paths which lead to theirs. And all these

Where the associations are, as here, of successively appearing things, the distinction I made at the outset of

the chapter, between a connection thought of and a connection of thoughts, is unimportant. For the

connection thought of is concomitance or succession; and the connection between the thoughts is just the

same. The 'objects' and the 'ideas' fit into parallel schemes, and may be described in identical language, as

contiguous things tending to be thought again together, or contiguous ideas tending to recur together.

Now were these cases fair samples of all association, the distinction I drew might well be termed a

Spitzfindigkeit or piece of pedantic hairsplitting, and be dropped. But as a matter of fact we cannot treat the

subject so simply. The same outer object may suggest either of many realities formerly associated with it

for in the vicissitudes of our outer experience we are constantly liable to meet the same thing in the midst of

differing companions and a philosophy of association that should merely say that it will suggest one of

these, or even of that one of them which it has oftenest accompanied, would go but a very short way into the

rationale of the subject. This, however, is about as far as most associationists have gone with their 'principle

of contiguity.' Granted an object, A, they never tell us beforehand which of its associates it will suggest; their

wisdom is limited to showing, after it has suggested a second object, that that object was once an associate.

They have had to supplement their principle of Contiguity by other princi ples, such as those of Similarity

and Contrast, before they could begin to do justice to the richness of the facts.

I shall try to show, in the pages which immediately follow, that there is no other elementary causal law of

association than the law of neural habit. All the materials of our thought are due to the way in which one

elementary process of the cerebral hemispheres tends to excite whatever other elementary process it may

have excited at some former time. The number of elementary processes at work, however, and the nature of

those which at any time are fully effective in rousing the others, determine the character of the total

brainaction, and, as a consequence of this, they determine the object thought of at the time. According as

this resultant object is one thing or another, we call it a product of association by contiguity or of association

by similarity, or contrast, or whatever other sorts we may have recognized as ultimate. Its production,

however, is, in each one of these cases, to be explained by a merely quantitative variation in the elementary

brainprocesses momentarily at work under the law of habit, so that psychic contiguity, similarity, etc., are

My thesis, stated thus briefly, will soon become more clear; and at the same time certain disturbing factors,

Let us then assume as the basis of all our subsequent reasoning this law: When two elementary

brainprocesses have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on reoccurring, tends to

But, as a matter of fact, every elementary process has found itself at different times excited in conjunction

with many other processes, and this by unavoidable outward causes. Which of these others it shall awaken

now becomes a problem. Shall b or c be aroused next by the present a? We must make a further postulate,

based, however, on the fact of tension in nervetissue, and on the fact of summation of excitements, each

incomplete or latent in itself, into an open resultant.[16] The process b, rather than c, will awake, if in

addition to the vibrating tract a some other tract d is in a state of subexcitement, and formerly was excited

The amount of activity at any given point in the braincortex is the sum of the tendencies of all other points

to discharge into it, such tendencies being proportionate (1) to the number of times the excitement of each

other point may have accompanied that of the point in question; (2) to the intensity of such excitements; and

(3) to the absence of any rival point functionally disconnected with the first point, into which the discharges

Expressing the fundamental law in this most complicated way leads to the greatest ultimate simplification.

Let us, for the present, only treat of spontaneous trains of thought and ideation, such as occur in revery or

musing. The case of voluntary thinking toward a certain end shall come up later.

Why is it that when we recite from memory one of these lines, and get as far as the ages, that portion of the

other lines which follows, and, so to speak, sprouts out of the ages, does not also sprout out of our memory,

and confuse the sense of our words? Simply because the word that follows the ages has its brainprocess

awakened not simply by the brainprocess of the ages alone, but by it plus the brainprocesses of all the

words preceding the ages. The word ages at its moment of strongest activity would, per se, indifferently

discharge into either 'in' or 'one.' So would the previous words (whose tension is momentarily much less

stronger than that of ages) each of them indifferently dis charge into either of a large number of other words

with which they have been at different times combined. But when the processes of 'I, the heir of all the ages,'

simultaneously vibrate in the brain, the last one of them in a maximal, the others in a fading phase of

excitement; then the strongest line of discharge will be that which they all alike tend to take. 'In' and not 'one'

or any other word will be the next to awaken, for its brainprocess has previously vibrated in unison not only

with that of ages, but with that of all those other words whose activity is dying away. It is a good case of the

But if some one of these preceding words 'heir,' for example had an intensely strong association with

some braintracts entirely disjoined in experience from the poem of 'Locksley Hall' if the reciter, for

instance, were tremulously awaiting the opening of a will which might make him a millionaire it is

probable that the path of discharge through the words of the poem would be suddenly interrupted at the word

'heir.' His emotional interest in that word would be such that its own special associations would prevail over

the combined ones of the other words. He would, as we say, be abruptly reminded of his personal situation,

The writer of these pages has every year to learn the names of a large number of students who sit in

alphabetical order in a lectureroom. He finally learns to call them by name, as they sit in their accustomed

places. On meeting one in the street, however early in the year, the face hardly ever recalls the name, but it

may recall the place of its owner in the lectureroom, his neighbors' faces, and consequently his general

alphabetical position; and then, usually as the common associate of all these combined data, the student's

A father wishes to show to some guests the progress of his rather dull child in Kindergarten instruction.

Holding the knife upright on the table, he says, "What do you call that, my boy?" "I calls it a knife, I does," is

the sturdy reply, from which the child cannot be induced to swerve by any alteration in the form of question,

until the father recollecting that in the Kindergarten a pencil was used, and not a knife, draws a long one from

his pocket, holds it in the same way, and then gets the wishedfor answer, "I calls it vertical." All the

concomitants of the Kindergarten experience had to recombine their effect before the word 'vertical' could be

Professor Bain, in his chapters on 'Compound Association,' has treated in a minute and exhaustive way of this

type of mental sequence, and what he has done so well need not be here repeated.[17]

The ideal working of the law of compound association, were it unmodified by any extraneous influence,

would be such as to keep the mind in a perpetual treadmill of concrete reminiscences from which no detail

could be omitted. Suppose, for example, we begin by thinking of a certain dinnerparty. The only thing

which all the components of the dinnerparty could combine to recall would be the first concrete occurrence

which ensued upon it. All the details of this occurrence could in turn only combine to awaken the next

following occurrence, and so on. If a, b, c, d, e, for instance, be the elementary nervetracts excited by the

last act of the dinnerparty, call this act A, and l, m, n, o, p be those of walking home through the frosty

night, which we may call B, then the thought of A must awaken that of B, because a, b, c, d, e, will each and

all discharge into l through the paths by which their original discharge took place. Similarly they will

discharge into m, n, o, and p; and these latter tracts will also each reinforce the other's action because, in the

experience B, they have already vibrated in unison. The lines in Fig. 40, p. 570, symbolize the summation of

discharges into each of the components of B, and the consequent strength of the combination of influences by

Hamilton first used the word 'redintegration' to designate all association. Such processes as we have just de

scribed might in an emphatic sense be termed redintegrations, for they would necessarily lead, if

unobstructed, to the reinstatement in thought of the entire content of large trains of past experience. From this

complete redintegration there could be no escape save through the irruption of some new and strong present

impression of the senses, or through the excessive tendency of some one of the elementary braintracts to

discharge independently into an aberrant quarter of the brain. Such was the tendency of the word 'heir' in the

How such tendencies are constituted we shall have soon to inquire with some care. Unless they are present,

the panorama of the past, once opened, must unroll itself with fatal literality to the end, unless some outward

Let us call this process impartial redintegration. Whether it ever occurs in an absolutely complete form is

doubtful. We all immediately recognize, however, that in some minds there is a much greater tendency than

in others for the flow of thought to take this form. Those insufferably garrulous old women, those dry and

fanciless beings who spare you no detail, however petty, of the facts they are recounting, and upon the thread

of whose narrative all the irrelevant items cluster as pertinaciously as the essential ones, the slaves of literal

fact, the stumblers over the smallest abrupt step in thought, are figures known to all of us. Comic literature

has made her profit out of them. Juliet's nurse is a classical example. George Eliot's village characters and

Perhaps as successful a rendering as any of this mental type is the character of Miss Bates in Miss Austen's

"'But where could you hear it?' cried Miss Bates. 'Where could you possibly hear it, Mr. Knightley? For it is

not five minutes since I received Mrs. Cole's note no, it cannot be more than five or at least ten for

I had got my bonnet and spencer on, just ready to come out I was only gone down to speak to Patty agian

about the pork Jane was standing in the passage were not you, Jane? for my mother was so afraid

that we had not any saltingpan large enough. So I said I would go down and see, and Jane said: "Shall I go

down instead? for I think you have a little cold, and Patty has been washing the kitchen." "Oh, my dear," said

I well, and just then came the note. A Miss Hawkins that's all I know a Miss Hawkins, of Bath.

But, Mr. Knightley, how could you possibly have heard it? for the very moment Mr. Cole told Mrs. Cole of

But in every one of us there are moments when this complete reproduction of all the items of a past

experience occurs. What are those moments? They are moments of emotional recall of the past as something

which once was, but is gone for ever moments, the interest of which consists in the feeling that our self

was once other than it now is. When this is the case, any detail, however minute, which will make the past

picture more complete, will also have its effect in swelling that total contrast between now and then which

This case helps us to understand why it is that the ordinary spontaneous flow of our ideas does not follow the

law of impartial redintegration. In no revival of a past experience are all the items of our thought equally

operative in determining what the next thought shall be. Always some ingredient is prepotent over the rest. Its

special suggestions or associations in this case will often be different from those which it has in common with

the whole group of items; and its tendency to awaken these outlying associates will deflect the path of our

revery. Just as in the original sensible experience our attention focalized itself upon a few of the impressions

of the scene before us, so here in the reproduction of those impressions an equal partiality is shown, and some

items are emphasized above the rest. What these items shall be is, in most cases of spontaneous revery, hard

to determine beforehand. In subjective terms we say that the prepotent items are those which appeal most to

Expressed in brainterms, the law of interest will be: some one brainprocess is always prepotent above its

"Two processes," says Mr. Hodgson,[18] "are constantly going on in redintegration. The one a process of

corrosion, melting, decay; the other a process of renewing, arising, becoming.... No object of representation

remains long before consciousness in the same state, but fades, decays, and becomes indistinct. Those parts

of the object, however, which possess an interest resist this tendency to gradual decay of the whole object....

This inequality in the object some parts, the uninteresting, submitting to decay; others, the interesting

parts, resisting it when it has continued for a certain time, ends in becoming a new object."

Only where the interest is diffused equally over all the parts (as in the emotional memory just referred to,

where, as all past, they all interest us alike) is this law departed from. It will be least obeyed by those minds

which have the smallest variety and intensity of interests those who, by the general flatness and poverty of

their �sthetic nature, are kept for ever rotating among the literal sequences of their local an personal history.

Most of us, however, are better organized than this, and our musings pursue and erratic course, swerving

continually into some new direction traced by the shifting play of interest as it ever falls on some partial item

in each complex representation that is evoked. Thus it so often comes about that we find ourselves thinking at

two nearly adjacent moments of things separated by the whole diameter of space and time. Not till we

carefully recall each step of our cogitation do we see how naturally we came by Hodgson's law to pass from

one to the other. Thus, for instance, after looking at my clock just now (1879), I found myself thinking of a

recent resolution in the Senate about our legaltender notes. The clock called up the image of the man who

had repaired its gong. He suggested the jeweller's shop where I had last seen him; that shop, some shirtstuds

which I had bought there; they, the value of gold and its recent decline; the latter, the equal value of

greenbacks, and this, naturally, the question of how long they were to last, and of the Bayard proposition.

Each of these images offered various points of interest. Those which formed the turningpoints of my

thought are easily assigned. The gong was momentarily the most interesting part of the clock, because, from

having begun with a beautiful tone, it had become discordant and aroused disappointment. But for this the

clock might have suggested the friend who gave it to me, or any one of a thousand circumstances connected

with clocks. The jeweller's shop suggested the studs, because they alone of all its contents were tinged with

the egoistic interest of possession. This interest in the studs, their value, made me single out the material as its

chief source, etc., to the end. Every reader who will arrest himself at any moment and say, "How came I to be

thinking of just this?" will be sure to trace a train of representations linked together by lines of contiguity and

points of interest inextricably combined. This is the ordinary process of the association of ideas as it

spontaneously goes on in average minds. We may call it ORDINARY, or MIXED, ASSOCIATION.

Another example of it is given by Hobbes in a passage which has been quoted so often as to be classical:

"In a discourse of our present civil war, what could seem more impertinent than to ask (as one did) what was

the value of a Roman penny? Yet the coherence to me was manifest enough. For the thought of the war

introduced the thought of the delivering up the King to his enemies; the thought of that brought in the thought

of the delivering up of Christ; and that again the thought of the thirty pence, which was the price of that

treason: and thence easily followed that malicious question; and all this in a moment of time; for thought is

Can we determine, now, when a certain portion of the going thought has, by dint of its interest, become so

prepotent as to make its own exclusive associates the dominant features of the coming thought can we, I

say, determine which of its own associates shall be evoked? For they are many. As Hodgson says:

"The interesting parts of the decaying object are free to combine again with any objects or parts of objects

with which at any time they have been combined before. All the former combinations of these parts may

"There can be but one answer: that which has been most habitually combined with them before. This new

object begins at once to form itself in consciousness, and to group its part round the part still remaining from

the former object; part after part comes out and arranges itself in its old position; but scarcely has the process

begun, when the original law of interest begins to operate on this new formation, seizes on the interesting

parts and impresses them on the attention to the exclusion of the rest, and the whole process is repeated again

with endless variety. I venture to propose this as a complete and true account of the whole process of

In restricting the discharge from the interesting item into that channel which is simply most habitual in the

sense of most frequent, Hodgson's account is assuredly imperfect. An image by no means always revives its

most frequent associate, although frequency is certainly one of the most potent determinants of revival. If I

abruptly utter the word swallow, the reader, if by habit an ornithologist, will think of a bird; if a physiologist

or a medical specialist in throat diseases, he will think of deglutition. If I say date, he will, if a fruitmerchant

or an Arabian traveller, think of the produce of the palm; if an habitual student of history, figures with A.D.

or B.C. before them will rise in his mind. If I say bed, bath, morning, his own daily toilet will be invincibly

suggested by the combined names of three of its habitual associates. But frequent lines of transition are often

set at naught. The sight of C. G�ring's 'System der kritischen Philosophie' has most frequently awakened in

me thoughts of the opinions therein propounded. The idea of suicide has never been connected with the

volumes. But a moment since, as my eye fell upon them, suicide was the thought that flashed into my mind.

Why? Because but yesterday I received a letter from Leipzig informing me that this philosopher's recent

death by drowning was an act of selfdestruction. Thoughts tend, then, to awaken their most recent as well as

their most habitual associates. This is a matter of notorious experience, too notorious, in fact, to need

illustration. If we have seen our friend this morning, the mention of his name now recalls the circumstances

of that interview, rather than any more remote details concerning him. If Shakespeare's plays are mentioned,

and we were last night reading 'Richard II.,' vestiges of that play rather than of 'Hamlet' or 'Othello' float

through our mind. Excitement of peculiar tracts, or peculiar modes of general excitement in the brain, leave a

sort of tenderness or exalted sensibility behind them which takes days to die away. As long as it lasts, those

tracts or those modes are liable to have their activities awakened by causes which at other times might leave

them in repose. Hence, recency in experience is a prime factor in determining revival in thought.[20]

Vividness in an original experience may also have the same effect as habit or recency in bringing about

likelihood of revival. If we have once witnessed an execution, any subsequent conversation or reading about

capital punishment will almost certainly suggest images of that particular scene. Thus it is that events lived

through only once, and in youth, may come in afteryears, by reason of their exciting quality or emotional

intensity, to serve as types or instances used by our mind to illustrate any and every occurring topic whose

interest is most remotely pertinent to theirs. If a man in his boyhood once talked with Napoleon, any mention

of great men or historical events, battles or thrones, or the whirligig of fortune, or islands in the ocean, will be

apt to draw to his lips the incidents of that one memorable interview. If the word tooth now suddenly appears

on the page before the reader's eye, there are fifty chances out of a hundred that, if he gives it time to awaken

any image, it will be an image of some operation of dentistry in which he has been the sufferer. Daily he has

touched his teeth and masticated with them; this very morning he brushed them, chewed his breakfast and

picked them; but the rarer and remoter associations arise more promptly because they were so much more

A fourth factor in tracing the course of reproduction is congruity in emotional tone between the reproduced

idea and our mood. The same objects do not recall the same associates when we are cheerful as when we are

melancholy. Nothing, in fact, is more striking than our utter inability to keep up trains of joyous imagery

when we are depressed in spirits. Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty, and perishing afflict

unremittingly the imaginations of melancholiacs. And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are

high, find it impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts. In an instant the

train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine, and images of spring and hope. The records of Arctic

or African travel perused in one mood awaken no thoughts but those of horror at the malignity of Nature;

read at another time they suggest only enthusiastic reflections on the indomitable power and pluck of man.

Few novels so overflow with joyous animal spirits as 'The Three Guardsmen' of Dumas. Yet it may awaken

in the mind of a reader depressed with seasickness (as the writer can personally testify) a most dismal and

woful consciousness of the cruelty and carnage of which heroes like Athos, Porthos, and Aramis make

Habit, recency, vividness, and emotional congruity are, then, all reasons why one representation rather than

another should be awakened by the interesting portion of a departing thought. We may say with truth that in

the majority of cases the coming representation will have been either habitual, recent, or vivid, and will be

congruous. If all these qualities unite in any one absent associate, we may predict almost infallibly that that

associate of the going thought will form an important ingredient in the coming thought. In spite of the fact,

however, that the succession of representations is thus redeemed from perfect indeterminism and limited to a

few classes whose characteristic quality is fixed by the nature of our past experience, it must still be

confessed that an immense number of terms in the linked chain of our representations fall outside of all

assignable rule. To take the instance of the clock given on page 586. Why did the jeweller's shop suggest the

shirtstuds rather than a chain which I had brought there more recently, which had cost more, and whose

sentimental associations were much more interesting? Both chain and studs had excited braintracts

simultaneously with the shop. The only reason why the nervestream from the shoptract switched off into

the studtract rather than into the chaintract must be that the studtract happened at that moment to lie more

open, either because of some accidental alteration in its nutrition or because the incipient subconscious

tensions of the brain as a whole had so distributed their equilibrium that it was more unstable here than in the

chaintract. Any reader's introspection will easily furnish similar instances. It thus remains true that to a

certain extent, even in those forms of ordinary mixed association which lie nearest to impartial redintegration,

which associate of the interesting item shall emerge must be called largely a matter of accident accident,

that is, for our intelligence. No doubt it is determined by cerebral causes, but they are too subtile and shifting

In partial or mixed associations we have all along supposed the interesting portion of the disappearing

thought to be of considerable extent, and to be sufficiently complex to constitute by itself a concrete object.

Sir William Hamilton relates, for instance, that after thinking of Ben Lomond he found himself thinking of

the Prussian system of education, and discovered that the links of association were a German gentleman

whom he had met on Ben Lomond, Germany, etc. The interesting part of Ben Lomond, as he had experienced

it, the part operative in determining the train of his ideas was the complex image of a particular man. But now

let us suppose that that selective agency of interested attention, which may thus convert impartial

redintegration into partial association let us suppose that it refines itself still further and accentuates a

portion of the passing thought, so small as to be no longer the image of a concrete thing, but only of an

abstract quality or property. Let us moreover suppose that the part thus accentuated persists in consciousness

(or, in cerebral terms, has its brainprocess continue) after the other portions of the thought have faded. This

small surviving portion will then surround itself with its own associates after the fashion we have already

seen, and the relation between the new thought's object and the object of the faded thought will be a relation

of similarity. The pair of thoughts will form an instance of what is called 'Association by Similarity.'[22]

The similars which are here associated, or of which the first is followed by the second in the mind, are seen to

be compounds. Experience proves that this is always the case. There is no tendency on the part of SIMPLE

'ideas,' attributes, or qualities to remind us of their like. The thought of one shade of blue does not remind us

of that of another shade of blue, etc., unless indeed we have in mind some general purpose like naming the

tint, when we should naturally think of other blues of the scale, through 'mixed association' of purpose,

names, and tints, together. But there is no elementary tendency of pure qualities to awaken their similars in

We saw in the chapter on Discrimination that two compound things are similar when some one quality or

group of qualities is shared alike by both, although as regards their other qualities they may have nothing in

common. The moon is similar to a gasjet, it is also similar to a football; but a gasjet and a football are not

similar to each other. When we affirm the similarity of two compound things, we should always say in what

respect it obtains. Moon and gasjet are similar in respect of luminosity, and nothing else; moon and

football in respect of rotundity, and nothing else. Football and gasjet are in no respect similar that is,

they possess no common point, no identical attribute. Similarity, in compounds, is partial identity. When the

same attribute appears in two phenomena, though it be their only common property, the two phenomena are

similar is so far forth. To return now to our associated representations. If the thought of the moon is

succeeded by the thought of a football, and that by the thought of one of Mr. X's railroads, it is because the

attribute rotundity in the moon broke away from all the rest and surrounded itself with an entirely new set of

companions elasticity, leathery integument, swift mobility in obedience to human caprice, etc.; and

because the lastnamed attribute in the football in turn broke away from its companions, and, itself

persisting, surrounded itself with such new attributes as make up the notions of a 'railroad king,' of a rising

The gradual passage from impartial redintegration to similar association through what we have called

ordinary mixed association may be symbolized by diagrams. Fig. 41 is impartial redintegration, Fig. 42 is

mixed, and Fig. 43 similar association. A in each is the passing, B the coming thought. In 'impartial,' all parts

In 'mixed,' most parts of A are inert. The part M alone breaks out and awakens B.

In 'similar,' the focalized part M is much smaller than in the previous case, and after awakening its new set of

associates, instead of fading out itself, it continues persistently active along with them, forming an identical

Why a single portion of the passing thought should break out from its concert with the rest and act, as we say,

on its own hook, why the other parts should become inert, are mysteries which we can ascertain but not

explain. Possibly a minuter insight into the laws of neural action will some day clear the matter up; possibly

neural laws will not suffice, and we shall need to invoke a dynamic reaction of the form of consciousness

To sum up, then, we see that the difference between the three kinds of association reduces itself to a simple

difference in the amount of that portion of the nervetract supporting the going thought which is operative in

calling up the thought which comes. But the modus operandi of this active part is the same, be it large or be it

small. The items constituting the coming object waken in every instance because their nervetracts once were

excited continuously with those of the going object or its operative part. This ultimate physiological law of

habit among the neural elements is what runs the train. The direction of its course and the form of its

transitions, whether redintegrative, associative, or similar, are due to unknown regulative or determinative

conditions which accomplish their effect by opening this switch and closing that, setting the engine

This last figure of speech, into which I have glided unwittingly, affords itself an excellent instance of

association by similarity. I was thinking of the deflections of the course of ideas. Now, from Hobbes's time

downward, English writers have been fond of speaking of the train of our representations. This word

happened to stand out in the midst of my complex thought with peculiarly sharp accentuation, and to

surround itself with numerous details of railroad imagery. Only such details became clear, however, as had

their nervetracts besieged by a double set of influences those from train on the one hand, and those from

the movement of thought on the other. It may possibly be that the prepotency of the suggestions of the word

train at this moment were due to the recent excitation of the railroad braintract by the instance chosen a few

It is apparent from such an example how inextricably complex are all the contributory factors whose resultant

is the line of our reverie. It would be folly in most cases to attempt to trace them out. From an instance like

the above, where the pivot of the Similar Association was formed by a definite concrete word, train, to those

where it is so subtile as utterly to elude our analysis, the passage is unbroken. We can form a series of

examples. When Mr. Bagehot says that the mind of the savage, so far from being in a state of nature, is

tattooed all over with monstrous superstitions, the case is very like the one we have just been considering.

When Sir James Stephen compares our belief in the uniformity of nature, the congruity of the future with the

past, to a man rowing one way and looking another, and steering his boat by keeping her stern in a line with

an object behind him, the operative link becomes harder to dissect out. It is subtler still in Dr. Holmes's

phrase, that stories in passing from mouth to mouth make a great deal of leeway in proportion to their

headway; or in Mr. Lowell's description of German sentences, that they have a way of yawing and going

sternforemost and not minding the helm for several minutes after it has been put down. And finally, it is a

real puzzle when the color paleblue is said to have feminine and bloodred masculine affinities. And if I

hear a friend describe a certain family as having blottingpaper voices, the image, though immediately felt to

be apposite, baffles the utmost powers of analysis. The higher poets all use abrupt epithets, which are alike

intimate and remote, and, as Emerson says, sweetly torment us with invitations to their inaccessible homes.

In these latter instances we must suppose that there is an identical portion in the similar objects, and that its

braintract is energetically operative, without, however, being sufficiently isolable in its activity as to stand

out per se, and form the condition of a distinctly discriminated 'abstract idea.' We cannot even by careful

search see the bridge over which we passed from the heart of one representation of that of the next. In some

brains, however, this mode of transition is extremely common. It would be one of the most important of

physiological discoveries could we assign the mechanical or chemical difference which makes the thoughts

of one brain cling close to impartial redintegration, while those of another shoot about in all the lawless

revelry of similarity. Why, in these latter brains, action should tend to focalize itself in small spots, while in

the others it fills patiently its broad bed, it seems impossible to guess. Whatever the difference may be, it is

what separates the man of genius from the prosaic creature of habit and routine thinking. In Chapter XXII we

Hitherto we have assumed the process of suggestion of one object by another to be spontaneous. The train of

imagery wanders at its own sweet will, now trudging in sober grooves of habit, now with a hop, skip, and

jump darting across the whole field of time and space. This is revery, or musing; but great segments of the

flux of our ideas consist of something very different from this. They are guided by a distinct purpose or

conscious interest. As the Germans say, we nachdenken, or think towards a certain end. It is now necessary to

examine what modification is made in the trains of our imagery by the having of an end in view. The course

Physiologically considered, we must suppose that a purpose means the persistent activity of certain rather

definite brainprocesses throughout the whole course of thought. Our most usual cogitations are not pure

reveries, absolute driftings, but revolve about some central interest or topic to which most of the images are

relevant, and towards which we return promptly after occasional digressions. This interest is subserved by the

persistently active braintracts we have supposed. In the mixed associations which we have hitherto studied,

the parts of each object which form the pivots on which our thoughts successively turn have their interest

largely determined by their connection with some general interest which for the time has seized upon the

mind. If we call Z the braintract of general interest, then, if the object abc turns up, and b has more

associations with Z than have either a or c, b will become the object's interesting, pivotal portion, and will

call up its own associates exclusively. For the energy of b's braintract will be augmented by Z's activity,

an activity which, from lack of previous connection between Z and a or c, does not influence a or c. If, for

instance, I think of Paris whilst I am hungry, I shall not improbably find that its restaurants have become the

But in the theoretic as well as in the practical life there are interests of a more acute sort, taking the form of

definite images of some achievement, be it action or acquisition, which we desire to effect. The train of ideas

arising under the influence of such an interest constitutes usually the thought of the means by which the end

shall be attained. If the end by its simple presence does not instantaneously suggest the means, the search for

the latter becomes an intellectual problem. The solution of problems is the most characteristic and peculiar

sort of voluntary thinking. Where the end thought of is some outward deed or gain, the solution is largely

composed of the actual motor processes, walking, speaking, writing, etc., which lead up to it. Where the end

is in the first instance only ideal, as in laying out a place of operations, the steps are purely imaginary. In both

of these cases the discovery of the means may form a new sort of end, of an entirely peculiar nature, an end,

namely, which we intensely desire before we have attained it, but of the nature of which, even whilst most

strongly craving it, we have no distinct imagination whatever. Such an end is a problem.

The same state of things occurs whenever we seek to recall something forgotten, or to state the reason for a

judgment which we have made intuitively. The desire strains and presses in a direction which it feels to be

right but towards a point which it is unable to see. In short, the absence of an item is a determinant of our

representations quite as positive as its presence can ever be. The gap becomes no mere void, but what is

called an aching void. If we try to explain in terms of brainaction how a thought which only potentially

exists can yet be effective, we seem driven to believe that the braintract thereof must actually be excited, but

only in a minimal and subconscious way. Try for instance, to symbolize what goes on in a man who is

racking his brains to remember a thought which occurred to him last week. The associates of the thought are

there, many of them at least, but they refuse to awaken the thought itself. We cannot suppose that they do not

irradiate at all into its braintract, because his mind quivers on the very edge of its recovery. Its actual rhythm

sounds in his ears; the words seem on the imminent point of following, but fail. What it is that blocks the

discharge and keeps the brainexcitement here from passing beyond the nascent into the vivid state cannot be

guessed. But we see in the philosophy of desire and pleasure, that such nascent excitements, spontaneously

tending to a crescendo, but inhibited or checked by other causes, may become potent mental stimuli and

determinants of desire. All questioning, wonder, emotion of curiosity, must be referred to cerebral causes of

some such form as this. The great difference between the effort to recall things forgotten and the search after

the means to a given end, is that the latter have not, whilst the former have, already formed a part of our

experience. If we first study the mode of recalling a thing forgotten, we can take up with better understanding

The forgotten thing is felt by us as a gap in the midst of certain other things. If it is a thought, we possess a

dim idea of where we were and what we were about when it occurred to us. We recollect the general subject

to which it relates. But all these details refuse to shoot together into a solid whole, for the lack of the vivid

traits of this missing thought, the relation whereof to each detail forms now the main interest of the latter. We

keep running over the details in our mind, dissatisfied, craving something more. From each detail there

radiate lines of association forming so many tentative guesses. Many of these are immediately seen to be

irrelevant, are therefore void of interest, and lapse immediately from consciousness. Others are associated

with the other details present, and with the missing thought as well. When these surge up, we have a peculiar

feeling that we are 'warm,' as the children say when they play hide and seek; and such associates as these we

clutch at and keep before the attention. Thus we recollect successively that when we had the thought in

question we were at the dinnertable; then that of our friend J. D. was there; then that the subject talked about

was so and so; finally, that the thought came � propos of a certain anecdote, and then that it had something to

do with a French quotation. Now all these added associations arise independently of the will, by the

spontaneous process we know so well. All that the will does is to emphasize and linger over those which

seem pertinent, and ignore the rest. Through this hovering of the attention in the neighborhood of the desired

object, the accumulation of associates becomes so great that the combined tensions of their neural processes

break through the bar, and the nervous wave pours into the tract which has so long been awaiting its advent.

And as the expectant, subconscious itching there, bursts into the fulness of vivid feeling, the mind finds an

The whole process can be rudely symbolized in a diagram. Call the forgotten thing Z, the first facts with

which we felt it was related, a, b, and c, and the details finally operative in calling it up, l, m, and n. Each

circle will then stand for the brainprocess underlying the thought of the object denoted by the letter

The activity in Z will at first be a mere tension; but as the activities in a, b, and c little by little irradiate into l,

m, and n, and as all these processes are somehow connected with Z, their combined irradiations upon Z,

represented by the centripetal arrows, succeed in helping the tension there to overcome the resistance, and in

The tension present from the first in Z, even though it keep below the threshold of discharge, is probably to

some degree cooperative with a, b, c in determining that l, m, n shall awake. Without Z's tension there might

be a slower accumulation of objects connected with it. But, as aforesaid, the objects come before us through

the brain's own laws, and the Ego of the thinker can only remain on hand, as it were, to recognize their

relative values and brood over some of them, whilst others are let drop. As when we have lost a material

object we cannot recover it by a direct effort, but only through moving about such neighborhoods wherein it

is likely to lie, and trusting that it will then strike our eye; so here, by not letting our attention leave the

neighborhood of what we seek, we trust that it will end by speaking to us of its own accord.[23]

Turn now to the case of finding the unknown means to a distinctly conceived end. The end here stands in the

place of a, b, c, in the diagram. It is the startingpoint of the irradiations of suggestion; and here, as in that

case, what the voluntary attention does is only to dismiss some of the suggestions as irrelevant, and hold fast

to others which are felt to be more pertinent let these be symbolized by l, m, n. These latter at last

accumulate sufficiently to discharge all together into Z, the excitement of which process is, in the mental

sphere, equivalent to the solution of our problem. The only difference between this case and the last, is that in

this one there need be no original subexcitement in Z, cooperating from the very first. When we seek a

forgotten name, we must suppose the name's centre to be in a state of active tension from the very outset,

because of that peculiar feeling of recognition which we get at the moment of recall. The plenitude of the

thought seems here but a maximum degree of something which our mind divined in advance. It

instantaneously fills a socket completely moulded to its shape; and it seems most natural to ascribe the

identity of quality in our feeling of the gaping socket and our feeling of what comes to fill it, to the sameness

of a nervetract excited in different degrees. In the solving of a problem, on the contrary, the recognition that

we have found the means is much less immediate. Here, what we are aware of in advance seems to be its

relations with the items we already know. It must bear a causal relation, or it must be an effect, or it must

contain an attribute common to two items, or it must be a uniform concomitant, or what not. We know, in

short, a lot about it, whilst as yet we have no knowledge of acquaintance with it (see p. 221), or in Mr.

Hodgson's language, "we know what we want to find beforehand, in a certain sense, in its second intention,

and do not know it, in another sense, in its first intention."[24] Our intuition that one of the ideas which turn

up is, at last, our qu�situm, is due to our recognition that its relations are identical with those we had in mind,

and this may be a rather slow act of judgment. In fact, every one knows that an object may be for some time

present to his mind before its relations to other matters are perceived. To quote Hodgson again:

"The mode of operation is common to voluntary memory and reason.... But reasoning adds to memory the

function of comparing or judging the images which arise.... Memory aims at filling the gap with an image

which has at some particular time filled it before, reasoning with one which bears certain timeand

or, to use perhaps clearer language, one which stands in determinate logical relations to those data round

about the gap which filled our mind at the start. This feeling of the blank form of relationship before we get

the material quality of the thing related will surprise no one who has read Chapter IX.

From the guessing of newspaper enigmas to the plotting of the policy of an empire there is no other process

than this. We trust to the laws of cerebral nature to present us spontaneously with the appropriate idea:

"Our only command over it is by the effort we make to keep the painful unfilled gap in consciousness.[25]...

Two circumstances are important to notice: the first is, that volition has no power of calling up images, but

only of rejecting and selecting from those offered by spontaneous redintegration.[26] But the rapidity with

which this selection is made, owing to the familiarity of the ways in which spontaneous redintegration runs,

gives the process of reasoning the appearance of evoking images that are foreseen to be conformable to the

purpose. There is no seeing them before they are offered; there is no summoning them before they are seen.

The other circumstance is, that every kind of reasoning is nothing, in its simplest form, but attention."[27]

It is foreign to our purpose here to enter into any detailed analysis of the different classes of mental pursuit. In

a scientific research we get perhaps as rich an example as can be found. The inquirer starts with a fact of

which he seeks the reason, or with an hypothesis of which he seeks the proof. In either case he keeps turning

the matter incessantly in his mind until, by the arousal of associate upon associate, some habitual, some

similar, one arises which he recognizes to suit his need. This, however, may take years. No rules can be given

by which the investigator may proceed straight to his result; but both here and in the case of reminiscence the

accumulation of helps in the way of associations may advance more rapidly by the use of certain routine

methods. In striving to recall a thought, for example, we may of set purpose run through the successive

classes of circumstances with which it may possibly have been connected, trusting that when the right

member of the class has turned up it will help the thought's revival. Thus we may run through all the places in

which we may have had it. We may run through the persons whom we remember to have conversed with, or

we may call up successively all the books we have lately been reading. If we are trying to remember a person

we may run through a list of streets or of professions. Some item out of the lists thus methodically gone over

will very likely be associated with the fact we are in need of, and may suggest it or help to do so. And yet the

item might never have arisen without such systematic procedure. In scientific research this accumulation of

associates has been methodized by Mill under the title of 'The Four Methods of Experimental Inquiry.' By the

'method of agreement,' by that of 'difference,' by those of 'residues' and 'concomitant variations' (which

cannot here be more nearly defined), we make certain lists of cases; and by ruminating these lists in our

minds the cause we seek will be more likely to emerge. But the final stroke of discovery is only prepared, not

effected, by them. The braintracts must, of their own accord, shoot the right way at last, or we shall still

grope in darkness. That in some brains the tracts do shoot the right way much oftener than in others, and that

we cannot tell why, these are ultimate facts to which we must never close our eyes. Even in forming our

lists of instances according to Mill's methods, we are at the mercy of the spontaneous workings of Similarity

in our brain. How are a number of facts, resembling the one whose cause we seek, to be brought together in a

list unless the one will rapidly suggest the other through association by similarity?

Such is the analysis I propose, first of the three main types of spontaneous association, and then of voluntary

association. It will be observed that the object called up may bear any logical relation whatever to the one

which suggested it. The law requires only that one condition should be fulfilled. The fading object must be

due to a brainprocess some of whose elements awaken through habit some of the elements of the

brainprocess of the object which comes to view. This awakening is the operative machinery, the causal

agency, throughout, quite as much so in the kind of association I have called by the name of Similarity, as in

any other sort. The similarity between the objects, or between the thoughts (if similarity there be between

these latter), has no causal agency in carrying us from one to the other. It is but a result the effect of the

usual causal agent when this happens to work in a certain particular and assignable way. But ordinary writers

talk as if the similarity of the objects were itself an agent, coordinate with habit, and independent of it, and

like it able to push objects before the mind. This is quite unintelligible. The similarity of two things does not

exist till both things are there it is meaningless to talk of it as an agent of production of anything, whether

in the physical or the psychical realms.[28] It is a relation which the mind perceives after the fact, just as it

may perceive the relations of superiority, of distance, of causality, of container and content, of substance and

accident, or of contrast, between an object and some second object which the associative machinery calls

There are, nevertheless, able writers who not only insist on preserving association by similarity as a distinct

elementary law, but who make it the most elementary law, and seek to derive contiguous association from it.

Their reasoning is as follows: When the present impression A awakens the idea b of its past contiguous

associate B, how can this occur except through first reviving an image a of its own past occurrence. This is

the term directly connected with b; so that the process instead of being simply A b is A a b. Now A

and a are similars; therefore no association by contiguity can occur except through a previous association by

similarity. The most important supposition here made is that every impression on entering the mind must

needs awaken an image of its past self, in the light of which it is 'apperceived' or understood, and through the

intermediation of which it enters into relation with the mind's other objects. This assumption is almost

universally made; and yet it is hard to find any good reason for it. It first came before us when we were

reviewing the facts of aphasia and mental blindness (see p. 50 ff.). But we then saw no need of optical and

auditory images to interpret optical and auditory sensations by. On the contrary, we agreed that auditory

sensations were understood by us only so far as they awakened nonauditory images, and optical sensations

only so far as they awakened nonoptical images. In the chapters on Memory, on Reasoning, and on

Perception the same assumption will meet us again, and again will have to be rejected as groundless. The

sensational process A and the ideational process a probably occupy essentially the same tracts. When the

outer stimulus comes and those tracts vibrate with the sensation A, they discharge as directly into the paths

which lead to B as when there is no outer stimulus and they only vibrate with the idea a. To say that the

process A can only reach these paths by the help of the weaker process a is like saying that we need a candle

to see the sun by. A replaces a, does all that a does and more; and there is no intelligible meaning, to my

mind, in saying that the weaker process coexists with the stronger. I therefore consider that these writers are

altogether wrong. The only plausible proof they give of the coexistence of a with A is when A gives us a

sense of familiarity but fails to awaken any distinct thought of past contiguous associates. In a later chapter I

shall consider this case. Here I content myself with saying that it does not seem conclusive as to the point at

issue; and that I still believe association of coexistent or sequent impressions to be the one elementary law.

CONTRAST has also been held to be an independent agent in association. But the reproduction of an object

contrasting with one already in the mind is easily explained on our principles. Recent writers, in fact, all

reduce it either to similarity or contiguity. Contrast always presupposes generic similarity; it is only the

extremes of a class which are contrasted, black and white, not black and sour, or white and prickly. A

machinery which reproduces a similar at all, may reproduce the opposite similar, as well as any intermediate

term. Moreover, the greater number of contrasts are habitually coupled in speech, young and old, life and

death, rich and poor, etc., and are, as Dr. Bain says, in everybody's memory.[30]

I trust that the student will now feel that the way to a deeper understanding of the order of our ideas lies in the

direction of cerebral physiology. The elementary process of revival can be nothing but the law of habit. Truly

the day is distant when physiologists shall actually trace from cellgroup to cellgroup the irradiations which

we have hypothetically invoked. Probably it will never arrive. The schematism we have used is, moreover,

taken immediately from the analysis of objects into their elementary parts, and only extended by analogy to

the brain. And yet it is only as incorporated in the brain that such a schematism can represent anything causal.

This is, to my mind, the conclusive reason for saying that the order of presentation of the mind's materials is

The law of accidental prepotency of certain processes over others falls also within the sphere of cerebral

probabilities. Granting such instability as the braintissue requires, certain points must always discharge

more quickly and strongly than others; and this prepotency would shift its place from moment to moment by

accidental causes, giving us a perfect mechanical diagram of the capricious play of similar association in the

most gifted mind. The study of dreams confirms this view. The usual abundance of paths of irradiation

seems, in the dormant brain, reduced. A few only are pervious, and the most fantastic sequences occur

because the currents run 'like sparks in burntup paper' wherever the nutrition of the moment creates

The effects of interested attention and volition remain. These activities seem to hold fast to certain elements,

and by emphasizing them and dwelling on them, to make their associates the only ones which are evoked.

This is the point at which an antimechanical psychology must, if anywhere, make it stand in dealing with

association. Everything else is pretty certainly due to cerebral laws. My own opinion on the question of active

attention and spiritual spontaneity is expressed elsewhere. But even though there be a mental spontaneity, it

can certainly not create ideas or summon them ex abrupto. Its power is limited to selecting amongst those

which the associative machinery has already introduced or tends to introduce. If it can emphasize, reinforce,

or protract for a second either one of these, it can do all that the most eager advocate of free will need

demand; for it then decides the direction of the next associations by making them hinge upon the emphasized

term; and determining in this wise the course of the man's thinking, it also determines his acts.

may be briefly glanced at ere we end the chapter.[31] Aristotle seems to have caught both the facts and the

principle of explanation; but he did not expand his views, and it was not till the time of Hobbes that the

matter was again touched on in a definite way. Hobbes first formulated the problem of the succession of our

"By consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called,

to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse. When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his

next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds

indifferently. But as we have no imagination, whereof we have not formerly had sense, in whole or in parts;

so we have no transition from one imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our senses.

The reason whereof is this. All fancies are motions within us, relics of those made in the sense: and those

motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense continue also together after sense: insomuch as

the former coming again to take place, and be predominant, the latter followeth, by coherence of the matter

moved, in such manner, as water upon a plane table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the

finger. But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes another

succeedeth, it comes to pass in time that, in the imagining of anything, there is no certainty what we shall

imagine next; only this is certain, it shall be something that succeeded the same before, at one time or

another. This train of thoughts, or mental discourse, is of two sorts. The first is unguided, without design, and

inconstant; wherein there is no passionate thought, to govern and direct those that follow, to itself, as the end

and scope of some desire, or other passion.... The second is more constant; as being regulated by some desire

and design. For the impression made by such things as we desire, or fear, is strong and permanent, or, if it

cease for a time, of quick return: so strong is it, sometimes, as to hinder and break our sleep. From desire

ariseth the thought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which we aim at; and from the

thought of that, the thought of means to that mean; and so continually, till we come to some beginning within

our own power. And because the end, by the greatness of the impression, comes often to mind, in case our

thoughts begin to wander, they are quickly again reduced into the way: which observed by one of the seven

wise men, made him give men this precept, which is now worn out, Respice finem; that is to say, in all your

actions, look often upon what you would have, as the thing that directs all your thoughts in the way to attain

"The train of regulated thoughts is of two kinds; one, when of an effect imagined we seek the causes, or

means that produce it: and this is common to man and beast. The other is, when imagining anything

whatsoever, we seek all the possible effects that can by it be produced; that is to say, we imagine what we can

do with it, when we have it. Of which I have not at any time seen any sign, but in man only; for this is a

curiosity hardly incident to the nature of any living creature that has no other passion but sensual, such as are

hunger, thirst, lust, and anger. In sum, the discourse of the mind, when it is governed by design, is nothing

but seeking, or the faculty of invention, which the Latins called sagacitas, and sollertia; a hunting out of the

causes, of some effect, present or past; or of the effects, of some present or past cause."

"As all simple ideas may be separated by the imagination, and may be united again in what form it pleases,

nothing would be more unaccountable than the operations of that faculty, were it not guided by some

universal principles, which render it, in some measure, uniform with itself in all times and places. Were ideas

entirely loose and unconnected, chance alone would join them; and 'tis impossible the same simple ideas

should fall regularly into complex ones (as they commonly do) without some bond of union among them,

some associating quality, by which one idea naturally introduces another. This uniting principle among ideas

is not to be considered as an inseparable connection; for that has been already excluded from the imagination.

Nor yet are we to conclude that without it the mind cannot join two ideas; for nothing is more free than that

faculty: but we are only to regard it as a gentle force, which commonly prevails, and is the cause why, among

other things, languages so nearly correspond to each other; nature in a manner pointing to every one those

simple ideas which are most proper to be united in a complex one. The qualities from which this association

arises, and by which the mind is after this manner conveyed from one idea to another, are three, viz.,

"I believe it will not be very necessary to prove that these qualities produce an association among ideas, and

upon the appearance of one idea naturally introduce another. 'Tis plain that in the course of our thinking, and

in the constant revolution of our ideas, our imagination runs easily from one idea to any other that resembles

it, and that this quality alone is to the fancy a sufficient bond and association. 'Tis likewise evident, that as the

senses, in changing their objects, are necessitated to change them regularly, and take them as they lie

contiguous to each other, the imagination must by long custom acquire the same method of thinking, and run

along the parts of space and time in conceiving its objects. As to the connection that is made by the relation

of cause and effect, we shall have occasion afterwards to examine it to the bottom, and therefore shall not at

present insist upon it. 'Tis sufficient to observe that there is no relation which produces a stronger connection

in the fancy, and makes one idea more readily recall another, that the relation of cause and effect betwixt their

objects.... These are therefore the principles of union or cohesion among our simple ideas, and in the

imagination supply the place of that inseparable connection by which they are united in our memory. Here is

a kind of ATTRACTION, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the

natural, and to show itself in as many and as various forms. Its effects are everywhere conspicuous; but as to

its causes, they are mostly unknown, and must be resolved into original qualities of human nature, which I

Hume did not, however, any more than Hobbes, follow out the effects of which he speaks, and the task of

popularizing the notion of association and making an effective school based on association of ideas alone was

reserved for Hartley[33] and James Mill.[34] These authors traced minutely the presence of association in all

the cardinal notions and operations of the mind. The several 'faculties' of the Mind were dispossessed; the one

"Nothing is requisite to make any man whatever he is, but a sentient principle with this single law.... Not only

all our intellectual pleasures and pains but all the phenomena of memory, imagination, volition, reasoning

and every other mental affection and operation, are but different modes or cases of the association of

An eminent French psychologist, M. Ribot, repeats Hume's comparison of the law of association with that of

"It is remarkable that this discovery was made so late. Nothing is simpler, apparently, than to notice that this

law of association is the truly fundamental, irreducible phenomenon of our mental life; that it is at the bottom

of all our acts; that is permits of no exception; that neither dream, revery, mystic ecstasy, nor the most

abstract reasoning can exist without it; that its suppression would be equivalent to that of thought itself.

Nevertheless no ancient author understood it, for one cannot seriously maintain that a few scattered lines in

Aristotle and the Stoics constitute a theory and clear view of the subject. It is to Hobbes, Hume, and Hartley

that we must attribute the origin of these studies on the connection of our ideas. The discovery of the ultimate

law of our psychologic acts has this, then, in common with many other discoveries: it came late and seems so

"Perhaps it is not superfluous to ask in what this manner of explanation is superior to the current theory of

Faculties.[36] The most extended usage consists, as we know, in dividing intellectual phenomena into

classes, in separating those which differ, in grouping together those of the same nature and in giving to these

a common name and in attributing them to the same cause; it is thus that we have come to distinguish those

diverse aspects of intelligence which are called judgment, reasoning, abstraction, perception, etc. This

method is precisely the one followed in Physics, where the words caloric, electricity, gravity, designate the

unknown causes of certain groups of phenomena. If one thus never forgets that the diverse faculties are only

the unknown causes of known phenomena, that they are simply a convenient means of classifying the facts

and speaking of them, if one does not fall into the common fault of making out of them substantial entities,

creations which now agree, now disagree, so forming in the intelligence a little republic; then, we can see

nothing reprehensible in this distribution into faculties, conformable as it is to the rules of a sound method

and of a good natural classification. In what then is Mr. Bain's procedure superior to the method of the

faculties? It is that the latter is simply a classification while his is an explanation. Between the psychology

which traces intellectual facts back to certain faculties, and that which reduces them to the single law of

association, there is, according to our way of thinking, the same difference that we find in Physics between

those who attribute its phenomena to five or six causes, and those who derive gravity caloric, light, etc., from

motion. The system of the faculties explains nothing because each one of them is only a flatus vocis which is

of value merely through the phenomena which it contains, and signifies nothing more than these phenomena.

The new theory, on the contrary, shows that the different processes of intelligence are only diverse cases of a

single law; that imagination, deduction, induction, perception, etc., are but so many determinate ways in

which ideas may combine with each other; and that the differences of faculties are only differences of

association. It explains all intellectual facts, certainly not after the manner of Metaphysics which demands the

ultimate and absolute reason of things; but after the manner of Physics which seeks only their secondary and

The inexperienced reader may be glad of a brief indication of the manner in which all the different mental

operations may be conceived to consist of images of sensation associated together.

Memory is the association of a present image with others known to belong to the past. Expectation the same,

with future substituted for past. Fancy, the association of images without temporal order.

Belief in anything not present to sense is the very lively, strong, and steadfast association of the image of that

thing with some present sensation, so that as long as the sensation persists the image cannot be excluded from

Judgment is 'transferring the idea of truth by association from one proposition to another that resembles

Reasoning is the perception that "whatever has any mark has that which it is a mark of"; in the concrete case

the mark or middle term being always associated with each of the other terms and so serving as a link by

which they are themselves indirectly associated together. This same kind of transfer of a sensible experience

associated with another to a third also associated with that other, serves to explain emotional facts. When we

are pleased or hurt we express it, and the expression associates itself with the feeling. Hearing the same

expression from another revives the associated feeling, and we sympathize, i.e. grieve or are glad with him.

The other social affections, Benevolence, Conscientiousness, Ambition, etc., arise in like manner by the

transfer of the bodily pleasure experienced as a reward for social service, and hence associated with it, to the

act of service itself, the link of reward being dropped out. Just so Avarice when the miser transfers the bodily

pleasures associated with the spending of money to the money itself, dropping the link of spending.

Fear is a transfer of the bodily hurt associated by experience with the thing feared, to the thought of the thing,

with the precise features of the hurt left out. Thus we fear a dog without distinctly imagining his bite.

Love is the association of the agreeableness of certain sensible experiences with the idea of the object capable

of affording them. The experiences themselves may cease to be distinctly imagined after the notion of their

Volition is the association of ideas of muscular motion with the ideas of those pleasures which the motion

produces. The motion at first occurs automatically and results in a pleasure unforeseen. The latter becomes so

associated with the motion that whenever we think of it the idea of the motion arises; and the idea of the

Nothing is easier than for a philosopher of this school to explain from experience such a notion as that of

"He sees in it an ordinary manifestation of one of the laws of the association of ideas, the law that the idea

of a thing irresistibly suggests the idea of any other thing which has been often experienced in close

conjunction with it, and not otherwise. As we have never had experience of any point of space without other

points beyond it, nor of any point of time without others following it, the law of indissoluble association

makes it impossible for us to think of any point of space or time, however distant, without having the idea

irresistibly realized, in imagination, of other points still more remote. And thus the supposed original and

inherent property of these two ideas is completely explained and accounted for by the law of association; and

we are enabled to see that if Space or Time were really susceptible of termination, we should be just as

These examples of the Associationist Psychology are with the exception of the last, very crudely expressed,

but they suffice for our temporary need. Hartley and James Mill[40] improved upon Hume so far as to

employ but a single principle of association, that of contiguity or habit. Hartley ignores resemblance, James

Mill expressly repudiates it in a passage which is assuredly one of the curiosities of literature:

"I believe it will be found that we are accustomed to see like things together. When we see a tree, we

generally see more trees than one; a sheep, more sheep than one; a man, more men than one. From this

observation, I think, we may refer resemblance to the law of frequency [i.e., contiguity], of which it seems to

Mr. Herbert Spencer has still more recently tried to construct a Psychology which ignores Association by

Similarity,[41] and in a chapter, which also is a curiosity, he tries to explain the association of two ideas by a

conscious reference of the first to the point of time when its sensation was experienced, which point of time is

no sooner thought of than its content, namely, the second idea, arises. Messrs. Bain and Mill, however, and

the immense majority of contemporary psychologists retain both Resemblance and Contiguity as irreducible

Professor Bain's exposition of association is by common consent looked upon as the best expression of the

English school. Perception of agreement and difference, retentiveness, and the two sorts of association,

contiguity and similarity, are by him regarded as constituting all that is meant by intellect proper. His pages

are painstaking and instructive from a descriptive point of view; though, after my own attempt to deal with

the subject causally, I can hardly award to them any profound explanatory value. Association by Similarity,

too much neglected by the British school before Bain, receives from him the most generous exemplification.

As an instructive passage, the following, out of many equally good, may be chosen to quote:

"We may have similarity in form with diversity of use, and similarity of use with diversity of form. A rope

suggests other ropes and cords, if we look to the appearance; but looking to the use, it may suggest an iron

cable, a wooden prop, an iron girding, a leather band, or bevelled gear. In spite of diversity of appearance, the

suggestion turns on what answers a common end. If we are very much attracted by sensible appearances,

there will be the more difficulty in recalling things that agree only in the use; if, on the other hand, we are

profoundly sensitive to the one point of practical efficiency as a tool, the peculiarities not essential to this will

be little noticed, and we shall be ever ready to revive past objects corresponding in use to some one present,

although diverse in all other circumstances. We become oblivious to the difference between a horse, a

steamengine, and a waterfall, when our minds are engrossed with the one circumstance of moving power.

The diversity in these had no doubt for a long time the effect of keeping back their first identification; and to

obtuse intellects, this identification might have been for ever impossible. A strong concentration of mind

upon the single peculiarity of mechanical force, and a degree of indifference to the general aspect of the

things themselves, must conspire with the intellectual energy of resuscitation by similars, in order to summon

together in the view three structures so different. We can see, by an instance like this, how new adaptations of

existing machinery might arise in the mind of a mechanical inventor. When it first occurred to a reflecting

mind that moving water had a property identical with human or brute force, namely, the property of setting

other masses in motion, overcoming inertia and resistance, when the sight of the stream suggested through

this point of likeness the power of the animal, a new addition was made to the class of prime movers, and

when circumstances permitted, this power could become a substitute for the others. It may seem to the

modern understanding, familiar with waterwheels and drifting rafts, that the similarity here was an

extremely obvious one. But if we put ourselves back into an early state of mind, when running water affected

the mind by its brilliancy, its roar, and irregular devastation, we may easily suppose that to identify this with

animal muscular energy was by no means an obvious effect. Doubtless when a mind arose, insensible by

natural constitution to the superficial aspects of things, and having withal a great stretch of identifying

intellect, such a comparison would then be possible. We may pursue the same example one stage further, and

come to the discovery of steam power, or the identification of expanding vapor with the previously known

sources of mechanical force. To the common eye, for ages, vapor presented itself as clouds in the sky; or as a

hissing noise at the spout of a kettle, with the formation of a foggy curling cloud at a few inches' distance.

The forcing up of the lid of a kettle may also have been occasionally observed. But how long was it ere any

one was struck with the parallelism of this appearance with a blast of wind, a rush of water, or an exertion of

animal muscle? The discordance was too great to be broken through by such a faint and limited amount of

likeness. In one mind, however, the identification did take place, and was followed out into its consequences.

The likeness had occurred to other minds previously, but not with the same results. Such minds must have

been in some way or other distinguished above the millions of mankind; and we are now endeavoring to give

the explanation of their superiority. The intellectual character of Watt contained all the elements preparatory

to a great stroke of similarity in such a case; a high susceptibility, both by nature and by education, to the

mechanical properties of bodies; ample previous knowledge or familiarity; and indifference to the superficial

and sensational effects of things. It is not only possible, however, but exceedingly probable, that many men

possessed all these accomplishments; they are of a kind not transcending common abilities. They would in

some degree attach to a mechanical education almost as a matter of course. That the discovery was not sooner

made supposes that something farther, and not of common occurrence, was necessary; and this additional

endowment appears to be the identifying power of Similarity in general; the tendency to detect likeness in the

midst of disparity and disguise. This supposition accounts for the fact, and is consistent with the known

Dr. Hodgson's account of association is by all odds the best yet propounded in English.[43] All these writers

hold more or less explicitly to the notion of atomistic 'ideas' which recur. In Germany, the same mythological

supposition has been more radically grasped, and carried out to a still more logical, if more repulsive,

extreme, by Herbart[44] and his followers, who until recently may be said to have reigned almost supreme in

their native country.[45] For Herbart each idea is a permanently existing entity, the entrance whereof into

consciousness is but an accidental determination of its being. So far as it succeeds in occupying the theatre of

consciousness, it crowds out another idea previously there. This act of inhibition gives it, however, a sort of

hold on the other representation which on all later occasions facilitates its following the other into the mind.

The ingenuity with which most special cases of association are formulated in this mechanical language of

struggle and inhibition, is great, and surpasses in analytic thoroughness anything that has been done by the

British school. This, however, is a doubtful merit, in a case where the elements dealt with are artificial; and I

must confess that to my mind there is something almost hideous in the glib Herbartian jargon about

Vorstellungsmassen and their Hemmungen and Hemmungssummen, and sinken and erheben and schweben,

and Verschmelzungen and Complexionen. Herr Lipps, the most recent systematic German Psychologist, has,

I regret to say, carried out the theory of ideas in a way which the great originality, learning, and acuteness he

shows make only the more regrettable.[46] Such elaborately artificial constructions are, it seems to me, only a

In French, M. Rabier in his chapter on Association,[48] handles the subject more vigorously and acutely than

any one. His treatment of it, though short, seems to me for general soundness to rank second only to

In the last chapter we already invoked association to account for the effect of use in improving

discrimination. In later chapters we shall see abundant proof of the immense part which it plays in other

processes, and shall then readily admit that few principles of analysis, in any science, have proved more

fertile than this one, however vaguely formulated it often may have been. Our own attempt to formulate it

more definitely, and to escape the usual confusion between causal agencies and relations merely known, must

not blind us to the immense services of those by whom the confusion was unfelt. From this practical point of

view it would be a true ignoratio elenchi to flatter one's self that one has dealt a heavy blow at the psychology

of association, when one has exploded the theory of atomistic ideas, or shown that contiguity and similarity

between ideas can only be there after association is done.[49] The whole body of the associationist

psychology remains standing after you have translated 'ideas' into 'objects,' on the one hand, and

'brainprocesses' on the other; and the analysis of faculties and operations is as conclusive in these terms as

[1] The theory propounded in this chapter, and a good many pages of the text, were originally published in

[2] Compare Renouvier's criticism of associationism in his Essais de Critique g�n�rale, Logique, II. p. 493

[3] Unless the name belong to a rapidly uttered sentence, when no substantive image may have time to arise.

[4] In his observations he says that time was lost in mentally taking in the word which was the cue, "owing to

the quiet unobtrusive way in which I found it necessary to bring it into view, so as not to distract the

thoughts. Moreover, a substantive standing by itself is usually the equivalent of too abstract an idea for us to

conceive properly without delay. Thus it is very difficult to get a quick conception of the word 'carriage,'

because there are so many different kinds twowheeled, fourwheeled, open and closed, and in so many

different possible positions, that the mind possibly hesitates amidst an obscure sense of many alterations that

cannot blend together. But limit the idea to say a landau, and the mental association declares itself more

[6] For interesting remarks on the sorts of things associated, in these experiments, with the prompting word,

see Galton, op. cit. pp. 185203, and Trautscholdt in Wundt's Psychologische Studien, I. 213.

[8] This value is much smaller than that got by Wundt as above. No reason for the difference is suggested by

Mr. Cattell. Wundt calls attention to the fact that the figures found by him give an average, 0.720", exactly

equal to the time interval which in his experiments (vide infra, chapter on Time) was reproduced without

error either way, and to that required, according to the Webers, for the legs to swing in rapid locomotion. "It

is not improbable," he adds, "that this psychic constant, of the mean associationtime and of the most correct

appreciation of a timeinterval, may have been developed under the influence of the most usual bodily

movements, which also have determined the manner in which we tend to subdivide rhythmically longer

periods of time." (Physiol. Psch., II. 286). The rapprochement is of that tentative sort which it is no harm for

psychologists to make, provided they recollect how very fictitious and incomparable mutually all these

averages derived from different observers, working under different conditions, are. Mr. Cattell's figure throws

Wundt's ingenious parallel entirely out of line. The only measurements of associationtime which so far

seem likely to have much theoretic importance are a few made on insane patients by Von Tschisch (Mendel's

Neurologisches Centralblatt, 15 Mai, 1885, 3 Jhrg., p. 217). The simple reaction time was found about

normal in three patients, one with progressive paralysis, one with inveterate mania of persecution, one

recovering from ordinary mania. In the convalescent maniac and the paralytic, however, the associationtime

was hardly half as much as Wundt's normal figure (0.28" and 0.23" instead of 0.7' smaller also than

Cattell's), whilst in the sufferer from delusions of persecution and hallucinations it was twice as great as

normal (1.39" instead of 0.7"). This latter patient's time was sixfold that of the paralytic. Herr von Tschisch

remarks on the connection of the short times with diminished power for clear and consistent processes of

thought, and on that of the long times with the persistent fixation of the attention upon monotonous objects

(delusions). Miss Marie Walitzky (Revue Philosophique, XXVIII. 583) has carried Von Tschisch's

observations still farther, making 18,000 measurements in all. She found associationtime increased in

paralytic dementia and diminished in mania. Choicetime, on the contrary, is increased in mania.

[10] Compare Bain's law of Association by Contiguity: "Actions, Sensations, and States of Feeling, occurring

together or in close succession, tend to grow together, or cohere, in such a way that, when any one of them is

afterwards presented to the mind, the others are apt to be brought up in idea" (Senses and Intellect, p. 327).

Compare also Hartley's formulation: "Any sensations A, B, C, etc., by being associated with one another a

sufficient Number of Times, get such a power over the corresponding Ideas, a, b, c, etc., that any one of the

sensations A, when impressed alone, shall be able to excite in the Mind b, c, etc., the ideas of the rest."

(Observations on Man, part I. chap. I. � 2, Prop. X.) The statement in the text differs from these in holding

fast to the objective point of view. It is things, and objective properties in things, which are associated in our

[13] The difficulty here as with habit �berhaupt is in seeing how new paths come first to be formed (cf.

above, 109). Experience shows that a new path is formed between centres for sensible impressions whenever

these vibrate together or in rapid succession. A child sees a certain bottle and hears it called 'milk,' and

thenceforward thinks the name when he again sees the bottle. But why the successive or simultaneous

excitement of two centres independently stimulated from without, one by sight and the other by hearing,

should result in a path between them, one does not immediately see. We can only make hypotheses. Any

hypothesis of the specific mode of their formation which tallies well with the observed facts of association

will be in so far forth credible, in spite of possible obscurity. Herr M�nsterberg thinks (Beitr�ge zur exp.

Psychologie, Heft 1, p. 132) that between centres excited successively from without no path ought to be

formed, and that consequently all contiguous association is between simultaneous experiences. Mr. Ward

(loc. cit.) thinks on the contrary, that it can only be between successive experiences: "The association of

objects simultaneously presented can be resolved into an association of objects successively attended to.... It

seems hardly possible to mention a case in which attention to the associated objects could not have been

successive. In fact, an aggregate of objects on which attention could be focused at once would be already

associated." Between these extreme possibilities, I have refrained from deciding in the text, and have

described contiguous association as holding between both successively and coexistently presented objects.

The physiological question as to how we may conceive the paths to originate had better be postponed till it

comes to us again in the chapter on the Will, where we can treat it in a broader way. It is enough here to have

[14] Essay, bk. II. chap. XXXIII. � 6. Compare Hume, who, like Locke, only uses the principle to account for

"'Twould have been easy to have made an imaginary dissection of the brain, and have shown why, upon our

conception of any idea, the animal spirits run into all the contiguous traces, and rouse up the other ideas that

are related to it. But though I have neglected any advantage which I might have drawn from this topic in

explaining the relations of ideas, I am afraid I must here have recourse to it, in order to account for the

mistakes that arise from these relations. I shall therefore observe, that as the mind is endowed with a power of

exciting any idea it pleases; whenever it dispatches the spirits into that region of the brain in which the idea is

placed, these spirits always excite the idea, when they run precisely into the proper traces, and rummage that

cell which belongs to the idea. But as their motion is seldom direct, and naturally turns a little to the one side

or the other; for this reason the animal spirits, falling into the contiguous traces, present other related ideas in

lieu of that which the mind desired at first to survey. This change we are not always sensible of; but

continuing still the same train of thought, make use of the related idea which is presented to us, and employ it

in our reasoning, as if it were the same with what we demanded. This is the cause of many mistakes and

sophisms in philosophy; as will naturally be imagined, and as it would be easy to show, if there was

[17] I strongly advise the student to read his Senses and Intellect, pp. 544556.

[18] Time and Space, p. 266. Compare Coleridge: "The true practical general law of association is this: that

whatever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest will determine the mind

to recall these, in preference to others equally linked together by the common condition of contemporaeity or

of contiguity. But the will itself, by confining and intensifying the attention, may arbitrarily give vividness or

[20] I refer to a recency of a few hours. Mr. Galton found that experiences from boyhood and youth were

more likely to be suggested by words seen at random than experiences of later years. See his highly

interesting account of experiments in his Inquiries into Human Faculty, pp. 191203.

[21] For other instances see Wahle, in Vierteljsch f. Wiss. Phil., IX. 144417 (1885).

[22] I retain the title of association by similarity in order not to depart from common usage. The reader will

observe, however, that my nomenclature is not based on the same principle throughout. Impartial

redintegration connotes neural processes; similarity is an objective relation perceived by the mind; ordinary

or mixed association is a merely denotative word. Total recall, partial recall, and focalized recall, of

associates, would be better terms. But as the denotation of the latter word is almost identical with that of

association by similarity, I think it better to sacrifice propriety to popularity, and to keep the latter wellworn

[23] No one has described this process better than Hobbes: "Sometimes a man seeks what he hath lost; and

from that place and time wherein he misses it, his mind runs back from place to place and time to time to find

where and when he had it; that is to say, to find some certain and limited time and place, in which to begin a

method of seeking. Again, from thence his thoughts run over the same places and times to find what action or

other occasion might make him lose it. This we call Remembrance, or calling to mind. Sometimes a man

knows a place determinate, within the compass whereof he is to seek; and then his thoughts run over all the

parts thereof, in the same manner as one would sweep a room to find a jewel, or as a spaniel ranges the field

till he find a scent, or as a man should run over the alphabet to start a rhyme." (Leviathan, 165, p. 10.)

[27] Ibid p. 400. Compare Bain, Emotions and Will, p. 377. "The outgoings of the mind are necessarily

random; the end alone is the thing that is clear to the view, and with that there is a perception of the fitness of

every passing suggestion. The volitional energy keeps up the attention on the active search: and the moment

that anything in point rises before the mind, it springs upon that like a wild beast upon its prey."

[28] Compare what is said of the principle of Similarity by F. H. Bradley, Principles of Logic, pp. 294 ff.; E.

Rabier, Psychologie, 187 ff.; Paulhan, Critique Philosophique, 2me S�rie, I. 458; Rabier, ibid. 460; Pillon,

ibid. II. 55; B. P. Bowne, Introduction to Psych. Theory, 92; Ward, Encyclop. Britt. art. Psychology, p. 60;

[29] Dr. McCosh is accordingly only logical when he sinks similarity in what he calls the "Law of

Correlation, according to which, when we have discovered a relation between things, the idea of one tends to

bring up the others" (Psychology, the Cognitive Powers, p. 130). The relations mentioned by this author are

Identity, Whole and Parts, Resemblance, Space, Time, Quantity, Active Property, and Cause and Effect. If

perceived relations among objects are to be treated as grounds for their appearance before the mind, similarity

[30] Cf. Bain, Senses and Intellect, 564 ff.; J. S. Mill, Note 39 to J. Mill's Analysis; Lipps, Grundtatsachen,

[31] See, for farther details, Hamilton's Reid, Appendices D** and D***; and L. Ferri, La Psychologie de

l'Association (Paris, 1883). Also Robertson, art. Association in Encyclop. Britannica.

[39] Review of Bain's Psychology, by J. S. Mill, in Edinb. Review, Oct. 1, 1859, p. 293.

[40] Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, J. S. Mill's edition, vol. I. p. 111.

[41] On the Associability of Relations between Feelings, in Principles of Psychology, vol. I. p. 259. It is

impossible to regard the "cohering of each feeling with previouslyexperienced feelings of the same class,

order, genus, species, and, so far as may be, the same variety," which Spencer calls (p. 257) 'the sole process

of association of feelings.' as any equivalent for what is commonly known as Association by similarity.

[43] See his Time and Space, chapter V, and his Theory of Practice, �� 53 to 57.

[45] Prof. Ribot, in chapter I of his 'Contemporary German Psychology,' has given a good account of Herbart

and his school, and of Beneke, his rival and partial analogue. See also two articles on the Herbartian

Psychology, by G. F. Stout, in Mind for 1888. J. D. Morrell's Outlines of Mental Philosophy (2d ed., London,

1862) largely follows Herbart and Beneke. I know of no other English book which does so.

[46] See his Grundtatsachen des Bewusstseins (1883), chap. VI et passim, especially pp. 106 ff., 364.

[47] The most burdensome and utterly gratuitous of them are perhaps Steinthal's, in his Einleitung in die

Psychologie, 2te Aufl. (1881). Cf. also G. Glogau: Steinthal's Psychologische Formeln (1886).

[49] Mr. F. H. Bradley seems to me to have been guilty of something very like this ignoratio elenchi in the, of

course, subtle and witty but decidedly longwinded critique of the association of ideas, contained in book II.

An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario

In the next two chapters I shall deal with what is sometimes called internal perception, or the perception of

time, and of events as occupying a date therein, especially when the date is a past one, in which case the

perception in question goes by the name of memory. To remember a thing as past, it is necessary that the

notion of 'past' should be one of our 'ideas.' We shall see in the chapter on Memory that many things come to

be thought by us as past, not because of any intrinsic quality of their own, but rather because they are

associated with other things which for us signify pastness. But how do these things get their pastness? What

is the original of our experience of pastness, from whence we get the meaning of the term? It is this question

which the reader is invited to consider in the present chapter. We shall see that we have a constant feeling sui

generis of pastness, to which every one of our experiences in turn falls a prey. To think a thing as past is to

think it amongst the objects or in the direction of the objects which at the present moment appear affected by

this quality. This is the original of our notion of past time, upon which memory and history build their

systems. And in this chapter we shall consider this immediate sense of time alone.

If the constitution of consciousness were that of a string of beadlike sensations and images, all separate,

"we never could have any knowledge except that of the present instant. The moment each of our sensations

ceased it would be gone for ever; and we should be as if we had never been.... We should be wholly incapable

of acquiring experience.... Even if our ideas were associated in trains, but only as they are in imagination, we

should still be without the capacity of acquiring knowledge. One idea, upon this supposition, would follow

another. But that would be all. Each of our successive states of consciousness, the moment it ceased, would

We might, nevertheless, under these circumstances, act in a rational way, provided the mechanism which

produced our trains of images produced them in a rational order. We should make appropriate speeches,

though unaware of any word except the one just on our lips; we should decide upon the right policy without

ever a glimpse of the total grounds of our choice. Our consciousness would be like a glowworm spark,

illuminating the point it immediately covered, but leaving all beyond in total darkness. Whether a very highly

developed practical life be possible under such conditions as these is more than doubtful; it is, however,

I make the fanciful hypothesis merely to set off our real nature by the contrast. Our feelings are not thus

contracted, and our consciousness never shrinks to the dimensions of a glowworm spark. The knowledge of

some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the

A simple sensation, as we shall hereafter see, is an abstraction, and all our concrete states of mind are

representations of objects with some amount of complexity. Part of the complexity is the echo of the objects

just past, and, in a less degree, perhaps, the foretaste of those just to arrive. Objects fade out of consciousness

slowly. If the present thought is of A B C D E F G, the next one will be of B C D E F G H, and the one after

that of C D E F G H I the lingerings of the past dropping successively away, and the incomings of the

future making up the loss. These lingerings of old objects, these incomings of new, are the germs of memory

and expectation, the retrospective and the prospective sense of time. They give that continuity to

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the

most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch

and it is only as entering into the living and moving organization of a much wider tract of time that the strict

present is apprehended at all. It is, in fact, an altogether ideal abstraction, not only never realized in sense, but

probably never even conceived of by those unaccustomed to philosophic meditation. Reflection leads us to

the conclusion that it must exist, but that it does exist can never be a fact of our immediate experience. The

only fact of our immediate experience is what Mr. E. R. Clay has well called 'the specious present.' His words

"The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given as being of the

present, but the part of time referred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous of the

past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. The present to which the datum refers is

really a part of the past a recent past delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past

and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let the past, that is given as being the past, be known

as the obvious past. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present. All the

changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. At the instant of the

termination of such series, no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then, considered

relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present, the real

present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three... nonentities the past, which

does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it

In short, the practically cognized present is no knifeedge, but a saddleback, with a certain breadth of its

own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of

our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were a rearward and a

forwardlooking end.[5] It is only as parts of this durationblock that the relation of succession of one end to

the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of

the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its

two ends embedded in it. The experience is from the outset a synthetic datum, not a simple one; and to

sensible perception its elements are inseparable, although attention looking back may easily decompose the

When we come to study the perception of Space, we shall find it quite analogous to time in this regard. Date

in time corresponds to position in space; and although we now mentally construct large spaces by mentally

imagining remoter and remoter positions, just as we now construct great durations by mentally prolonging a

series of successive dates, yet the original experience of both space and time is always of something already

given as a unit, inside of which attention afterward discriminates parts in relation to each other. Without the

parts already given as in a time and in a space, subsequent discrimination of them could hardly do more than

perceive them as different from each other; it would have no motive for calling the difference temporal order

And just as in certain experiences we may be conscious of an extensive space full of objects, without locating

each of them distinctly therein; so, when many impressions follow in excessively rapid succession in time,

although we may be distinctly aware that they occupy some duration, and are not simultaneous, we may be

quite at a loss to tell which comes first and which last; or we may even invert their real order in our judgment.

In complicated reactiontime experiments, where signals and motions, and clicks of the apparatus come in

exceedingly rapid order, one is at first much perplexed in deciding what the order is, yet of the fact of its

We must now proceed to an account of the facts of timeperception in detail as preliminary to our speculative

conclusion. Many of the facts are matters of patient experimentation, others of common experience.

First of all, we note a marked difference between the elementary sensations of duration and those of space.

The former have a much narrower range; the timesense may be called a myopic organ, in comparison with

the eye, for example. The eye sees rods, acres, even miles, at a single glance, and these totals it can afterward

subdivide into an almost infinite number of distinctly identified parts. The units of duration, on the other

hand, which the timesense is able to take in at a single stroke, are groups of a few seconds, and within these

units very few subdivisions perhaps forty at most, as we shall presently see can be clearly discerned.

The durations we have practically most to deal with minutes, hours, and days have to be symbolically

conceived, and constructed by mental addition, after the fashion of those extents of hundreds of miles and

upward, which in the field of space are beyond the range of most men's practical interests altogether. To

'realize' a quarter of a mile we need only look out of the window and feel its length by an act which, though it

may in part result from organized associations, yet seems immediately performed. To realize an hour, we

must count 'now! now! now! now! ' indefinitely. Each 'now' is the feeling of a separate bit of

time, and the exact sum of the bits never makes a very clear impression on our mind.

How many bits can we clearly apprehend at once? Very few if they are long bits, more if they are extremely

short, most if they come to us in compound groups, each including smaller bits of its own.

Hearing is the sense by which the subdivision of durations is most sharply made. Almost all the experimental

work on the timesense has been done by means of strokes of sound. How long a series of sounds, then, can

we group in the mind so as not to confound it with a longer or a shorter series?

Our spontaneous tendency is to break up any monotonously given series of sounds into some sort of a

rhythm. We involuntarily accentuate every second, or third, or fourth beat, or we break the series in still more

intricate ways. Whenever we thus grasp the impressions in rhythmic form, we can identify a longer string of

Each variety of verse, for example, has its 'law'; and the recurrent stresses and sinkings make us feel with

peculiar readiness the lack of a syllable or the presence of one too much. Divers verses may again be bound

together in the form of a stanza, and we may then say of another stanza, "Its second verse differs by so much

from that of the first stanza," when but for the felt stanzaform the two differing verses would have come to

us too separately to be compared at all. But these superposed systems of rhythm soon reach their limit. In

music, as Wundt[6] says, "while the measure may easily contain 12 changes of intensity of sound (as in 12/8

time), the rhythmical group may embrace 6 measures, and the period consist of 4, exceptionally of 5 [8?]

Wundt and his pupil Dietze have both tried to determine experimentally the maximal extent of our immediate

Wundt found[7] that twelve impressions could be distinguished clearly as a united cluster, provided they

were caught in a certain rhythm by the mind, and succeeded each other at intervals not smaller than 0.3 and

not larger than 0.5 of a second. This makes the total time distinctly apprehended to be equal to from 3.6 to 6

Dietze[8] gives larger figures. The most favorable intervals for clearly catching the strokes were when they

came at from 0.3 second to 0.18 second apart. Forty strokes might then be remembered as a whole, and

identified without error when repeated, provided the mind grasped them in five subgroups of eight, or in

eight subgroups of five strokes each. When no grouping of the strokes beyond making couples of them by

the attention was allowed and practically it was found impossible not to group them in at least this

simplest of all ways 16 was the largest number that could be clearly apprehended as a whole.[9] This

would make 40 times 0.3 second, or 12 seconds, to be the maximum filled duration of which we can be both

The maximum unfilled, or vacant duration, seems to lie within the same objective range. Estel and Mehner,

also working in Wundt's laboratory, found it to vary from 5 or 6 to 12 seconds, and perhaps more. The

These figures may be roughly taken to stand for the most important part of what, with Mr. Clay, we called, a

few pages back, the specious present. The specious present has, in addition, a vaguely vanishing backward

and forward fringe; but its nucleus is probably the dozen seconds or less that have just elapsed.

If these are the maximum, what, then, is the minimum amount of duration which we can distinctly feel?

The smallest figure experimentally ascertained was by Exner, who distinctly heard the doubleness of two

successive clicks of a Savart's wheel, and of two successive snaps of an electric spark, when their interval

With the eye, perception is less delicate. Two sparks, made to fall beside each other in rapid succession on

the centre of the retina, ceased to be recognized as successive by Exner when their interval fell below

Where, as here, the succeeding impressions are only two in number, we can easiest perceive the interval

between them. President Hall, who experimented with a modified Savart's wheel, which gave clicks in

"In order that their discontinuity may be clearly perceived, four or even three clicks or beats must be farther

apart than two need to be. When two are easily distinguished, three or four separated by the same interval...

are often confidently pronounced to be two or three respectively. It would be well if observations were so

directed as to ascertain, at least up to ten or twenty, the increase [of interval] required by each additional click

Where the first impression falls on one sense, and the second on another, the perception of the intervening

time tends to be less certain and delicate, and it makes a difference which impression comes first. Thus,

From sight to touch.................. 0.071 From touch to sight.................. 0.053 From sight to

hearing................0.16 From hearing to sight................0.06 From one ear to another...........0.064 To be

conscious of a time interval at all is one thing; to tell whether it be shorter or longer than another interval is a

different thing. A number of experimental data are on hand which give us a measure of the delicacy of this

latter perception. The problem is that of the smallest difference between two times which we can perceive.

The difference is at its minimum when the times themselves are very short. Exner,[16] reacting as rapidly as

possible with his foot, upon a signal seen by the eye (spark), noted all the reactions which seemed to him

either slow or fast in the making. He thought thus that deviations of about 1/100 of a second either way from

the average were correctly noticed by him at the time. The average was here 0.1840". Hall and Jastrow

listened to the intervals between the clicks of their apparatus. Between two such equal intervals of 4.27" each,

a middle interval was included, which might be made either shorter or longer than the extremes. "After the

series had been heard two or even three times, no impression of the relative length of the middle interval

would often exist, and only after hearing the fourth and last [repetition of the series] would the judgment

incline to the plus or minus side. Inserting the variable between two invariable and like intervals greatly

facilitated judgment, which between two unlike terms is far less accurate."[17] Three observers in these

experiments made no error when the middle interval varied 1/60 from the extremes. When it varied 1/120,

errors occurred, but were few, This would make the minimum absolute difference perceived as large as

This minimum absolute difference, of course, increases as the times compared grow long. Attempts have

been made to ascertain what ratio it bears to the times themselves. According to Fechner's 'Psychophysic

Law' it ought always to bear the same ratio. Various observers, however, have found this not to be the

case.[18] On the contrary, very interesting oscillations in the accuracy of judgment and in the direction of the

error oscillations dependent upon the absolute amount of the times compared have been noticed by all

In the first place, in every list of intervals experimented with there will be found what Vierordt calls an

'INDIFFERENCEPOINT;' that is to say, an interval which we judge with maximum accuracy, a time which

we tend to estimate as neither longer or shorter than it really is, and away from which, in both directions,

errors increase their size.[19] This time varies from one observer to another, but its average is remarkably

The times, noted by the ear, and the average indifferencepoints (given in seconds) were, for

Wundt[21]............................................. 0.72 Kollert[22]............................................. 0.75 Estel

(probably)........................................ 0.75 Mehner................................................. 0.71

Stevens[23]............................................. 0.71 Mach[24].............................................. 0.35 Buccola

(about)[25]................................... 0.40 The odd thing about these figures is the recurrence they show in so

many men of about three fourths of a second, as the interval of time most easy to catch and reproduce. Odder

still, both Estel and Mehner found that multiples of this time were more accurately reproduced than the

timeintervals of intermediary length;[26] and Glass found a certain periodicity, with the constant increment

of 1.25 sec., in his observations. There would seem thus to exist something like a periodic or rhythmic

sharpening of our timesense, of which the period differs somewhat from one observer to the next.

Our sense of time, like other senses, seems subject to the law of contrast. It appeared pretty plainly in Estel's

observations that an interval sounded shorter if a long one had immediately preceded it, and longer when the

Like other senses, too, our sense of time is sharpened by practice. Mehner ascribes almost all the

Tracks of time filled (with clicks of sound) seem longer than vacant ones of the same duration, when the

latter does not exceed a second or two.[28] This, which reminds one of what happens with spaces seen by the

eye, becomes reversed when longer times are taken. It is, perhaps, in accordance with this law that a loud

sound, limiting a short interval of time, makes it appear longer, a slight sound shorter. In comparing intervals

There is a certain emotional feeling accompanying the intervals of time, as is well known in music. The sense

of haste goes with one measure of rapidity, that of delay with another; and these two feelings harmonize with

different mental moods. Vierordt listened to series of strokes performed by a metronome at rates varying

from 40 to 200 a minute, and found that they very naturally fell into seven categories, from 'very slow' to

'very fast.'[30] Each category of feeling included the intervals following each other within a certain range of

speed, and no others. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative judgment an �sthetic judgment, in fact. The

middle category, of speed that was neutral, or, as he calls it, 'adequate,' contained intervals that were grouped

about 0.62 second, and Vierordt says that this made what one might almost call an agreeable time.[31]

The feeling of time and accent in music, of rhythm, is quite independent of that of melody. Tunes with

marked rhythm can be readily recognized when simply drummed on the table with the fingertips.

Although subdividing the time by beats of sensation aids our accurate knowledge of the amount of it that

elapses, such subdivision does not seem at the first glance essential to our perception of its flow. Let one sit

with closed eyes and, abstracting entirely from the outer world, attend exclusively to the passage of time, like

one who wakes, as the poet says, "to hear time flowing in the middle of the night, and all things moving to a

day of doom." There seems under such circumstances as these no variety in the material content of our

thought, and what we notice appears, if anything, to be the pure series of durations budding, as it were, and

growing beneath our indrawn gaze. Is this really so or not? The question is important, for, if the experience

be what it roughly seems, we have a sort of special sense for pure time a sense to which empty duration is

an adequate stimulus; while if it be an illusion, it must be that our perception of time's flight, in the

experiences quoted, is due to the filling of the time, and to our memory of a content which it had a moment

It takes but a small exertion of introspection to show that the latter alternative is the true one, and that we can

no more intuit a duration than we can intuit an extension, devoid of all sensible content. Just as with closed

eyes we perceive a dark visual field in which a curdling play of obscurest luminosity is always going on; so,

be we never so abstracted from distinct outward impressions, we are always inwardly immersed in what

Wundt has somewhere called the twilight of our general consciousness. Our heartbeats, our breathing, the

pulses of our attention, fragments of words or sentences that pass through our imagination, are what people

this dim habitat. Now, all these processes are rhythmical, and are apprehended by us, as they occur, in their

totality; the breathing and pulses of attention, as coherent successions, each with its rise and fall; the

heartbeats similarly, only relatively far more brief; the words not separately, but in connected groups. In

short, empty our minds as we may, some form of changing process remains for us to feel, and cannot be

expelled. And along with the sense of the process and its rhythm goes the sense of the length of time it lasts.

Awareness of change is thus the condition on which our perception of time's flow depends; but there exists no

reason to suppose that empty time's own changes are sufficient for the awareness of change to be aroused.

The change must be of some concrete sort an outward or inward sensible series, or a process of attention

And here again we have an analogy with space. The earliest form of distinct spaceperception is undoubtedly

that of a movement over some one of our sensitive surfaces, and this movement is originally given as a

simple whole of feeling, and is only decomposed into its elements successive positions successively

occupied by the moving body when our education in discrimination is much advanced. But a movement is

a change, a process; so we see that in the timeworld and the spaceworld alike the first known things are not

elements, but combinations, not separate units, but wholes already formed. The condition of being of the

wholes may be the elements; but the condition of our knowing the elements is our having already felt the

In the experience of watching empty time flow 'empty' to be taken hereafter in the relative sense just set

forth we tell it off in pulses. We say 'now! now! now!' or we count 'more! more! more!' as we feel it bud.

This composition out of units of duration is called the law of time's discrete flow. The discreteness is,

however, merely due to the fact that our successive acts of recognition or apperception of what it is are

discrete. The sensation is as continuous as any sensation can be. All continuous sensations are named in

beats. We notice that a certain finite 'more' of them is passing or already past. To adopt Hodgson's image, the

sensation is the measuringtape, the perception the dividingengine which stamps its length. As we listen to

a steady sound, we take it in in discrete pulses of recognition, calling it successively 'the same! the same! the

After a small number of beats our impression of the amount we have told off becomes quite vague. Our only

way of knowing it accurately is by counting, or noticing the clock, or through some other symbolic

conception.[33] When the times exceed hours or days, the conception is absolutely symbolic. We think of the

amount we mean either solely as a name, or by running over a few salient dates therein, with no pretence of

imagining the full durations that lie between them. No one has anything like a perception of the greater length

of the time between now and the first century than of that between now and the tenth. To an historian, it is

true, the longer interval will suggest a host of additional dates and events, and so appear a more multitudinous

thing. And for the same reason most people will think they directly perceive the length of the past fortnight to

exceed that of the past week. But there is properly no comparative time intuition in these cases at all. It is but

dates and events, representing time; their abundance symbolizing its length. I am sure that this is so, even

where the times compared are no more than an hour or so in length. It is the same with Spaces of many miles,

From this we pass naturally to speak of certain familiar variations in our estimation of lengths of time. In

general, a time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look

back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short. A

week of travel and sightseeing may subtend an angle more like three weeks in the memory; and a month of

sickness hardly yields more memories than a day. The length in retrospect depends obviously on the

multitudinousness of the memories which the time affords. Many objects, events, changes, many

subdivisions, immediately widen the view as we look back. Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel

up. In Von Holtei's 'Vagabonds' one Anton is described as revisiting his native village.

"Seven years," he exclaims, "seven years since I ran away! More like seventy it seems, so much has

happened. I cannot think of it all without becoming dizzy at any rate not now. And yet again, when I look

at the village, at the churchtower, it seems as if I could hardly have been seven days away."

Prof. Lazarus[35] (from whom I borrow this quotation), thus explains both of these contrasted illusions by

"The circle of experiences, widely extended, rich in variety, which he had in view on the day of his leaving

the village rises now in his mind as its image lies before him. And with it in rapid succession and violent

motion, not in chronologic order, or from chronologic motives, but suggesting each other by all sorts of

connections arise massive images of all his rich vagabondage and roving life. They roll and wave

confusedly together, first perhaps one from the first year, then from the sixth, soon from the second, again

from the fifth, the first, etc., until it seems as if seventy years must have been there, and he reels with the

fulness of his vision.... Then the inner eye turns away from all this past. The outer one turns to the village,

especially to the churchtower. The sight of it calls back the old sight of it, so that the consciousness is filled

with that alone, or almost alone. The one vision compares itself with the other, and looks so near, so

The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older that is, the days, the months, and the years do so;

whether the hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds to all appearance remain about the same.

"Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past

five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember

his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of

So writes Prof. Paul Janet,[36] and gives a solution which can hardly be said to diminish the mystery. There

is a law, he says, by which the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man's life is proportional to

the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life a man of 50 as 1/50,

the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length. This formula roughly expresses the

phenomena, it is true, but cannot possibly be an elementary psychic law; and it is certain that, in great part at

least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory's content, and the

consequent simplification of the backwardglancing view. In youth we may have an absolutely new

experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and

our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something

intricate, multitudinous, and longdrawnout. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into

automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection

So much for the apparent shortening of tracts of time in retrospect. They shorten in passing whenever we are

so fully occupied with their content as not to note the actual time itself. A day full of excitement, with no

pause, is said to pass 'ere we know it.' On the contrary, a day full of waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change,

will seem a small eternity. T�dium, ennui, Langweile, boredom, are words for which, probably, every

language known to man has its equivalent. It comes about whenever, from the relative emptiness of content

of a tract of time, we grow attentive to the passage of the time itself. Expecting, and being ready for, a new

impression to succeed; when it fails to come, we get an empty time instead of it; and such experiences,

ceaselessly renewed, make us most formidably aware of the extent of the mere time itself.[37] Close your

eyes and simply wait to hear somebody tell you that a minute has elapsed. The full length of your leisure with

it seems incredible. You engulf yourself into its bowels as into those of that interminable first week of an

ocean voyage, and find yourself wondering that history can have overcome many such periods in its course.

All because you attend so closely to the mere feeling of the time per se, and because your attention to that is

susceptible of such finegrained successive subdivision. The odiousness of the whole experience comes from

its insipidity; for stimulation is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience, and the feeling of

bare time is the least stimulating experience we can have.[38] The sensation of t�dium is a protest, says

Exactly parallel variations occur in our consciousness of space. A road we walk back over, hoping to find at

each step an object we have dropped, seems to us longer than when we walked over it the other way. A space

we measure by pacing appears longer than one we traverse with no thought of its length. And in general an

amount of space attended to in itself leaves with us more impression of spaciousness than one of which we

I do not say that everything in these fluctuations of estimate can be accounted for by the time's content being

crowded and interesting, or simple and tame. Both in the shortening of time by old age and in its lengthening

by ennui some deeper cause may be at work. This cause can only be ascertained, if it exist, by finding out

why we perceive time at all. To this inquiry let us, though without much hope, proceed.

If asked why we perceive the light of the sun, or the sound of an explosion, we reply, "Because certain outer

forces, etherwaves or airwaves, smite upon the brain, awakening therein changes, to which the conscious

perceptions, light and sound, respond." But we hasten to add that neither light nor sound copy or mirror the

ether or airwaves; they represent them only symbolically. The only case, says Helmholtz, in which such

"our perceptions can truly correspond with outer reality, is that of the timesuccession of phenomena.

Simultaneity, succession, and the regular return of simultaneity or succession, can obtain as well in sensations

as in outer events. Events, like our perceptions of them, take place in time, so that the timerelations of the

latter can furnish a true copy of those of the former. The sensation of the thunder follows the sensation of the

lightning just as the sonorous convulsing of the air by the electric discharge reaches the observer's place later

One experiences an almost instinctive impulse, in pursuing such reflections as these, to follow them to a sort

of crude speculative conclusion, and to think that he has at last got the mystery of cognition where, to use a

vulgar phrase, 'the wool is short.' What more natural, we say, than that the sequences and durations of things

should become known? The succession of the outer forces stamps itself as a like succession upon the brain.

The brain's successive changes are copied exactly by correspondingly successive pulses of the mental stream.

The mental stream, feeling itself, must feel the timerelations of its own states. But as these are copies of the

outward timerelations, so must it know them too. That is to say, these latter timerelations arouse their own

cognition; or, in other words, the mere existence of time in those changes out of the mind which affect the

This philosophy is unfortunately too crude. Even though we were to conceive the outer successions as forces

stamping their image on the brain, and the brain's successions as forces stamping their image on the

mind,[41] still, between the mind's own changes being successive, and knowing their own succession, lies as

broad a chasm as between the object and subject of any case of cognition in the world. A succession of

feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession. And since, to our successive feelings, a feeling of their

own succession is added, that must be treated as an additional fact requiring its own special elucidation,

which this talk about outer timerelations stamping copies of themselves within, leaves all untouched.

I have shown, at the outset of the article, that what is past, to be known as past, must be known with what is

present, and during the 'present' spot of time. As the clear understanding of this point has some importance,

let me, at the risk of repetition, recur to it again. Volkmann has expressed the matter admirably, as follows:

"One might be tempted to answer the question of the origin of the timeidea by simply pointing to the train

of ideas, whose various members, starting from the first, successively attain to full clearness. But against this

it must be objected that the successive ideas are not yet the idea of succession, because succession in thought

is not the thought of succession. If idea A follows idea B, consciousness simply exchanges one for another.

That B comes after A is for our consciousness a nonexistent fact; for this after is given neither in B nor in A;

and no third idea has been supposed. The thinking of the sequence of B upon A is another kind of thinking

from that which brought forth A and then brought forth B; and this first kind of thinking is absent so long as

merely the thinking of A and the thinking of B are there. In short, when we look at the matter sharply, we

come to this antithesis, that if A and B are to be represented as occurring in succession they must be

simultaneously represented; if we are to think of them as one after the other, we must think them both at

If we represent the actual timestream of our thinking by an horizontal line, the thought of the stream or of

any segment of its length, past, present, or to come, might be figured in a perpendicular raised upon the

horizontal at a certain point. The length of this perpendicular stands for a certain object or content, which in

this case is the time thought of, and all of which is thought of together at the actual moment of the stream

upon which the perpendicular is raised. Mr. James Ward puts the matter very well in his masterly article

'Psychology' in the ninth edition of the Encyclop�dia Britannica, page 64. He says:

"We may, if we represent succession as a line, represent simultaneity as a second line at right angles to the

first; empty time or timelength without timebreadth, we may say is a mere abstraction. Now, it is

with the former line that we have to do in treating of time as it is, and with the latter in treating of our

intuition of time, where, just as in a perspective representation of distance, we are confined to lines in a plane

at right angles to the actual line of depth. In a succession of events, say of senseimpressions, A B C D E... ,

the presence of B means the absence of A and C, but the presentation of this succession involves the

simultaneous presence in some mode or other of two or more of the presentations A B C D. In reality, past,

present, and future are differences in time, but in presentation all that corresponds to these differences is in

There is thus a sort of perspective projection of past objects upon present consciousness, similar to that of

And since we saw a while ago that our maximum distinct intuition of duration hardly covers more than a

dozen seconds (while our maximum vague intuition is probably not more than that of a minute or so), we

must suppose that this amount of duration is pictured fairly steadily in each passing instant of consciousness

by virtue of some fairly constant feature in the brainprocess to which the consciousness is tied. This feature

of the brainprocess, whatever it be, must be the cause of our perceiving the fact of time at all.[43] The

duration thus steadily perceived is hardly more than the 'specious present,' as it was called a few pages back.

Its content is in a constant flux, events dawning into its forward end as fast as they fade out of its rearward

one, and each of them changing its timecoefficient from 'not yet,' or 'not quite yet,' to 'just gone' or 'gone,' as

it passes by. Meanwhile, the specious present, the intuited duration, stands permanent, like the rainbow on the

waterfall, with its own quality unchanged by the events that stream through it. Each of these, as it slips out,

retains the power of being reproduced; and when reproduced, is reproduced with the duration and neighbors

which it originally had. Please observe, however, that the reproduction of an event, after it has once

completely dropped out of the rearward end of the specious present, is an entirely different psychic fact from

its direct perception in the specious present as a thing immediately past. A creature might be entirely devoid

of reproductive memory, and yet have the timesense; but the latter would be limited, in his case, to the few

seconds immediately passing by. Time older than that he would never recall. I assume reproduction in the

text, because I am speaking of human beings who notoriously possess it. Thus memory gets strewn with

dated things dated in the sense of being before or after each other.[44] The date of a thing is a mere

relation of before or after the present thing or some past or future thing. Some things we date simply by

mentally tossing them into the past or future direction. So in space we think of England as simply to the

eastward, of Charleston as lying south. But, again, we may date an event exactly, by fitting it between two

terms of a past or future series explicitly conceived, just as we may accurately think of England or Charleston

The things and events thus vaguely or exactly dated become thenceforward those signs and symbols of longer

timespaces, of which we previously spoke. According as we think of a multitude of them, or of few, so we

imagine the time they represent to be long or short. But the original paragon and prototype of all conceived

times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible.

Now, to what element in the brainprocess may this sensibility be due? It cannot, as we have seen, be due to

the mere duration itself of the process; it must be due to an element present at every moment of the process,

and this element must bear the same inscrutable sort of relation to its correlative feeling which all other

elements of neural activity bear to their psychic products, be the latter what they may. Several suggestions

have been made as to what the element is in the case of time. Treating of them in a note,[46] I will try to

express briefly the only conclusion which seems to emerge from a study of them and of the facts unripe

The phenomena of 'summation of stimuli' in the nervous system prove that each stimulus leaves some latent

activity behind it which only gradually passes away. (See above, pp. 8285.) Psychological proof of the same

fact is afforded by those 'afterimages' which we perceive when a sensorial stimulus is gone. We may read

off peculiarities in an afterimage, left by an object on the eye, which we failed to note in the original. We

may 'hark back' and take in the meaning of a sound several seconds after it has ceased. Delay for a minute,

however, and the echo itself of the clock or the question is mute; present sensations have banished it beyond

recall. With the feeling of the present thing there must at all times mingle the fading echo of all those other

things which the previous few seconds have supplied. Or, to state it in neural terms, there is at every moment

a cumulation of brainprocesses overlapping each other, of which the fainter ones are the dying phases of

processes which but shortly previous were active in a maximal degree. The AMOUNT OF THE

OVERLAPPING determines the feeling of the DURATION OCCUPIED. WHAT EVENTS shall appear to

occupy the duration depends on just WHAT PROCESSES the overlapping processes are. We know so little

of the intimate nature of the brain's activity that even where a sensation monotonously endures, we cannot say

that the earlier moments of it do not leave fading processes behind which coexist with those of the present

moment. Duration and events together form our intuition of the specious present with its content.[47] Why

such an intuition should result from such a combination of brainprocesses I do not pretend to say. All I aim

I have assumed that the brainprocesses are sensational ones. Processes of active attention (see Mr. Ward's

account in the long footnote) will leave similar fading brainprocesses behind. If the mental processes are

conceptual, a complication is introduced of which I will in a moment speak. Meanwhile, still speaking of

sensational processes, a remark of Wundt's will throw additional light on the account I give. As is known,

Wundt and others have proved that every act of perception of a sensorial stimulus takes an appreciable time.

When two different stimuli e.g. a sight and a sound are given at once or nearly at once, we have

difficulty in attending to both, and may wrongly judge their interval, or even invert their order. Now, as the

result of his experiments on such stimuli, Wundt lays down this law:[48] that of the three possible

"namely, simultaneity, continuous transition, and discontinuous transition only the first and last are

realized, never the second. Invariably, when we fail to perceive the impressions as simultaneous, we notice a

shorter or longer empty time between them, which seems to correspond to the sinking of one of the ideas and

to the rise of the other.... For our attention may share itself equally between the two impressions, which will

then compose one total percept [and be simultaneously felt]; or it may be so adapted to one event as to cause

it to be perceived immediately, and then the second event can be perceived only after a certain time of

latency, during which the attention reaches its effective maximum for it and diminishes for the first event. In

this case the events are perceived as two, and in successive order that is, as separated by a timeinterval in

which attention is not sufficiently accommodated to either to bring a distinct perception about.... While we

are hurrying from one to the other, everything between them vanishes in the twilight of general

One might call this the law of discontinuous succession in time, of percepts to which we cannot easily attend

at once. Each percept then requires a separate brainprocess; and when one brainprocess is at its maximum,

the other would appear perforce to be in either a waning or a waxing phase. If our theory of the timefeeling

be true, empty time must then subjectively appear to separate the two percepts, no matter how close together

they may objectively be; for, according to that theory, the feeling of a timeduration is the immediate effect

of such an overlapping of brainpro cesses of different phase wherever and from whatever cause it may

To pass, now, to conceptual processes: Suppose I think of the Creation, then of the Christian era, then of the

battle of Waterloo, all within a few seconds. These matters have their dates far outside the specious present.

The processes by which I think them, however, all overlap. What events, then, does the specious present

seem to contain? Simply my successive acts of thinking these longpast things, not the longpast things

themselves. As the instantlypresent thought may be of a longpast thing, so the justpast thought may be of

another longpast thing. When a longpast event is reproduced in memory and conceived with its date, the

reproduction and conceiving traverse the specious present. The immediate content of the latter is thus all my

direct experiences, whether subjective or objective. Some of these meanwhile may be representative of other

The number of these direct experiences which the specious present and immediatelyintuited past may

embrace measures the extent of our 'primary,' as Exner calls it, or, as Richet calls it, of our 'elementary'

memory.[50] The sensation resultant from the overlapping is that of the duration which the experiences seem

to fill. As is the number of any larger set of events to that of these experiences, so we suppose is the length of

that duration to this duration. But of the longer duration we have no direct 'realizing sense.' The variations in

our appreciation of the same amount of real time may possibly be explained by alterations in the rate of

fading in the images, producing changes in the complication of superposed processes, to which changes

changed states of consciousness may correspond. But however long we may conceive a space of time to be,

the objective amount of it which is directly perceived at any one moment by us can never exceed the scope of

We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ enormously in the amounts of duration

which they intuitively feel, and in the fineness of the events that may fill it. Von B�r has indulged[52] in

some interesting computations of the effect of such differences in changing the aspect of Nature. Suppose we

were able, within the length of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely 10, as now; if our

life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short. We should

live less than a month, and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should

believe in summer as we now believe in the heats of the Carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings

would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be

almost free from change, and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one

1000th part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently to live 1000 times as long.

Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swiftergrowing plants will

shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth

like restlessly boilingwater springs; the motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements

of bullets and cannonballs; the sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him,

etc. That such imaginary cases (barring the superhuman longevity) may be realized somewhere in the animal

"A gnat's wings," says Mr Spencer,[53] "make ten or fifteen thousand strokes a second. Each stroke implies a

separate nervous action. Each such nervous action or change in a nervous centre is probably as appreciable by

the gnat as is a quick movement of his arm by a man. And if this, or anything like this, is the fact, then the

time occupied by a given external change, measured by many movements in the one case, must seem much

In hashishintoxication there is a curious increase in the apparent timeperspective. We utter a sentence, and

ere the end is reached the beginning seems already to date from indefinitely long ago. We enter a short street,

and it is as if we should never get to the end of it. This alteration might conceivably result from an approach

to the condition of Von B�r's and Spencer's shortlived beings. If our discrimination of successions became

finergrained, so that we noted ten stages in a process where previously we only noted one; and if at the same

time the processes faded ten times as fast as before; we might have a specious present of the same subjective

length as now, giving us the same timefeeling and containing as many distinguishable successive events, but

out from the earlier end of it would have drooped nine tenths of the real events it now contains. They would

have fallen into the general reservoir of merely dated memories, reproducible at will. The beginning of our

sentences would have to be expressly recalled; each word would appear to pass through consciousness at a

tenth of its usual speed. The condition would, in short, be exactly analogous to the enlargement of space by a

microscope; fewer real things at once in the immediate field of view, but each of them taking up more than its

Under other conditions, processes seem to fade rapidly without the compensating increase in the

subdivisibility of successions. Here the apparent length of the specious present contracts. Consciousness

dwindles to a point, and loses all intuitive sense of the whence and whither of its path. Express acts of

memory replace rapid bird'seye views. In my own case, something like this occurs in extreme fatigue. Long

illnesses produce it. Occasionally, it appears to accompany aphasia.[54] It would be vain to seek to imagine

the exact brainchange in any of these cases. But we must admit the possibility that to some extent the

variations of timeestimate between youth and age, and excitement and ennui, are due to such causes, more

But whether our feeling of the time which immediatelypast[55] events have filled be of something long or

of something short, it is not what it is because those events are past, but because they have left behind them

processes which are present. To those processes, however caused, the mind would still respond by feeling a

specious present, with one part of it just vanishing or vanished into the past. As the Creator is supposed to

have made Adam with a navel sign of a birth which never occurred so He might instantaneously make

a man with a brain in which were processes just like the 'fading' ones of an ordinary brain. The first real

stimulus after creation would set up a process additional to these. The processes would overlap; and the

newcreated man would unquestionably have the feeling, at the very primal instant of his life, of having been

Let me sum up, now, by saying that we are constantly conscious of a certain duration the specious present

varying in length from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and that this duration (with its

content perceived as having one part earlier and the other part later) is the original intuition of time. Longer

times are conceived by adding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this vaguely bounded unit, and are

habitually thought by us symbolically. Kant's notion of an intuition of objective time as an infinite necessary

continuum has nothing to support it. The cause of the intuition which we really have cannot be the duration of

our brainprocesses or our mental changes. That duration is rather the object of the intuition which, being

realized at every moment of such duration, must be due to a permanently present cause. This cause

probably the simultaneous presence of brainprocesses of different phasefluctuates; and hence a certain

range of variation in the amount of the intuition, and in its subdivisibility, accrues.

[1] This chapter is reprinted almost verbatim from the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. XX. p. 374.

[3] "What I find, when I look at consciousness at all, is, that what I cannot divest myself of, or not have in

consciousness, if I have consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings.... The simultaneous

perception of both subfeelings, whether as parts of a coexistence or of a sequence, is the total feeling the

minimum of consciousness and this minimum has duration... Timeduration, however, is inseparable

from the minimum, notwithstanding that, in an isolated moment, we could not tell which part of it came first,

which last.... We do not require to know that the subfeelings come in sequence, first one, then the other; nor

to know what coming in sequence means. But we have, in any artificially isolated minimum of

consciousness, the rudiments of the perception of former and latter in time, in the subfeeling that grows

fainter, and the subfeeling that grows stronger, and the change between them....

"In the next place, I remark that the rudiments of memory are involved in the minimum of consciousness. The

first beginnings of it appear in that minimum, just as the first beginnings of perception do. As each member

of the change or difference which goes to compose that minimum is the rudiment of a single perception, so

the priority of one member to the other, although both are given to consciousness in one empirical present

moment, is the rudiment of memory. The fact that the minimum of consciousness is difference or change in

feelings, is the ultimate explanation of memory as well as of single perceptions. A former and a latter are

included in the minimum of consciousness; and this is what is meant by saying that all consciousness is in the

form of time, or that time is the form of feeling, the form of sensibility. Crudely and popularly we divide the

course of time into past, present, and future; but, strictly speaking, there is no present; it is composed of past

and future divided by an indivisible point or instant. That instant, or timepoint, is the strict present. What we

call, loosely, the present, is an empirical portion of the course of time, containing at least a minimum of

consciousness, in which the instant of change is the present timepoint.... If we take this as the present

timepoint, it is clear that the minimum of feeling contains two portions a subfeeling that goes and a

subfeeling that comes. One is remembered, the other imagined. The limits of both are indefinite at

beginning and end of the minimum, and ready to melt into other minima, proceeding from other stimuli.

"Time and consciousness do not come to us ready marked out into minima; we have to do that by reflection,

asking ourselves, What is the least empirical moment of consciousness? That least empirical moment is what

we usually call the present moment; and even this is too minute for ordinary use; the present moment is often

extended practically to a few seconds, or even minutes, beyond which we specify what length of time we

"But this popular way of thinking imposes itself on great numbers even of philosophicallyminded people,

and they talk about the present as if it was a datum as if time came to us marked into present periods like a

"The representation of time agrees with that of space in that a certain amount of it must be presented together

included between its initial and terminal limit. A continuous ideation, flowing from one point to another,

would indeed occupy time, but not represent it, for it would exchange one element of succession for another

instead of grasping the whole succession at once. Both points the beginning and the end are equally

essential to the conception of time, and must be present with equal clearness together." (Herbart: Psychol. als

"Assume that... similar pendulumstrokes follow each other at regular intervals in a consciousness otherwise

void. When the first one is over, an image of it remains in the fancy until the second succeeds. This, then,

reproduces the first by virtue of the law of association by similarity, but at the same time meets with the

aforesaid persisting image.... Thus does the simple repetition of the sound provide all the elements of

timeperception. The first sound [as it is recalled by association] gives the beginning, the second the end, and

the persistent image in the fancy represents the length of the interval. At the moment of the second

impression, the entire timeperception exists at once, for then all its elements are presented together, the

second sound and the image in the fancy immediately, and the first impression by reproduction. But, in the

same act, we are aware of a state in which only the first sound existed, and of another in which only its image

existed in the fancy. Such a consciousness as this is that of time.... In it no succession of ideas takes place."

(Wundt: Physiol. Psych., 1st ed. pp. 6812.) Note here the assumption that the persistence and the

reproduction of an impression are two processes which may go on simultaneously. Also that Wundt's

description is merely an attempt to analyze the 'deliverance' of a timeperception, and no explanation of the

[5] Locke, in his dim way, derived the sense of duration from reflection on the succession of our ideas

(Essay, book II. chap. XIV. � 3; chap. XV. � 12). Reid justly remarks that if ten successive elements are to

make duration, "then one must make duration, otherwise duration must be made up of parts that have no

duration, which is impossible.... I conclude, therefore, that there must be duration in every single interval or

element of which the whole duration is made up. Nothing, indeed, is more certain than that every elementary

part of duration must have duration, as every elementary part of extension must have extension. Now, it must

be observed that in these elements of duration, or single intervals of successive ideas, there is no succession

of ideas, yet we must conceive them to have duration; whence we may conclude with certainty that there is a

conception of duration where there is no succession of ideas in the mind." (Intellectual Powers. essay III.

chap. V.) ''Qu'on ne cherche point," says Royer Collard in the Fragments added to Jouffroy's Translation of

Reid, "la dur�e dans la succession; on ne l'y trouvera jamais; la dur�e a pr�c�d� la succession; in notion de la

dur�e a pr�c�d� la notion de la succession. Elle en est donc tout� fait ind�pendante, diraton? Oui, elle en

[9] Counting was of course not permitted. It would have given a symbolic concept and no intuitive or

immediate perception of the totality of the series. With counting we may of course compare together series of

any length series whose beginnings have faded from our mind, and of whose totality we retain no sensible

impression at all. To count a series of clicks is an altogether different thing from merely perceiving them as

discontinuous. In the latter case we need only be conscious of the bits of empty duration between them ; in

the former we must perform rapid acts of association between them and as many names of numbers.

[10] Estel in Wundt's Philosophische Studien, II. 50. Mehner, ibid. II. 571. In Dietze's experiments even

numbers of strokes were better caught than odd ones, by the ear. The rapidity of their sequence had a great

influence on the result. At more than 4 seconds apart it was impossible to perceive series of them as units in

all (cf. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., II. 214). They were simply counted as so many individual strokes. Below

0.21 to 0.11 second, according to the observer, judgment again became confused. It was found that the rate of

succession most favorable for grasping long series was when the strokes were sounded at intervals of from

0.3" to 0.18" apart. Series of 4, 6, 8, 16 were more easily identified than series of 10, 12, 14, 18. The latter

could hardly be clearly grasped at all. Among odd numbers, 3, 5, 7 were the series easiest caught ; next, 9, 15;

[11] The exact interval of the sparks was 0.00205". The doubleness of their snap was usually replaced by a

singleseeming sound when it fell to 0.00198", the sound becoming louder when the sparks seemed

simultaneous. The difference between these two intervals is only 7/100000 of a second; and, as Exner

remarks, our ear and brain must be wonderfully efficient organs to get distinct feelings from so slight an

[12] Ibid. p. 407. When the sparks fell so close together that their irradiationcircles overlapped, they

appeared like one spark moving from the position of the first to that of the second; and they might then

follow each other as close as 0.015" without the direction of the movement ceasing to be clear. When one

spark fell on the centre, the other on the margin, of the retina, the timeinterval for successive apprehension

[14] Nevertheless, multitudinous impressions may be felt as discontinuous, though separated by excessively

minute intervals of time. Gr�nhagen says (Pfl�ger's Archiv, VI. 175) that 10,000 electric shocks a second are

felt as interrupted, by the tongue (!). Von Wittich (ibid. II. 329), that between 1000 and 2000 strokes a second

are felt as discrete by the finger. W. Preyer, on the other hand (Die Grenzen des Empfindungsverm�gens,

etc., 1868, p. 15), makes contacts appear continuous to the finger when 36.8 of them follow in a second.

Similarly, Mach (Wiener Sitzgsb., LI. 2, 142) gives about 36. Lalanne (Comptes Rendus, LXXXII. p. 1314)

found summation of fingercontacts after 22 repetitions in a second. Such discrepant figures are of doubtful

worth. On the retina 20 to 30 impressions a second at the very utmost can be felt as discrete when they fall on

the same spot. The ear, which begins to fuse stimuli together into a musical tone when they follow at the rate

of a little over 30 a second, can still feel 132 of them a second as discontinuous when they take the shape of

[15] Pfl�ger's Archiv, XI. 428. Also in Herrmann's Hdbh. d. Physiol., 2 Bd., I. Thl. pp. 260262.

[16] Pfl�ger's Archiv, VII. 639. Tigerstedt (Bihang till Kongl. Svenska VetenskapsAkad. Handl., Bd. 8,

H�fte 2, Stockholm, 1884) revises Exner's figures, and shows that his conclusions are exaggerated. According

to Tigerstedt, two observers almost always rightly appreciated 0.05" or 0.06" of reactiontime difference.

Half the time they did it rightly when the difference sank to 0.03", though from 0.03" and 0.06" differences

were often not noticed at all. Buccola found (Le Legge del Tempo nei Fenomeni del Pensiero, Milano, 1883,

p. 371) that, after much practice in making rapid reactions upon a signal, he estimated directly, in figures, his

own reactiontime, in 10 experiments, with an error of from 0.010" to 0.018"; in 6, with one of 0.005" to

[18] Mach, Wiener Sitzungsb., LI. 2. 133 (1865); Estel, loc. cit. p. 65; Mehner, loc. cit. p. 586; Buccola, op.

cit. p 378. Fechner labors to prove that his law is only overlaid by other interfering laws in the figures

recorded by these experimenters; but his case seems to me to be one of desperate infatuation with a hobby.

[19] Curious discrepancies exist between the German and the American observers with respect to the

direction of the error below and above the point of indifference differences perhaps due to the fatigue

involved in the American method. The Germans lengthened intervals below it and shortened those above.

With seven Americans experimented on by Stevens this was exactly reversed. The German method was to

passively listen to the intervals, then judge; the American was to reproduce them actively by movements of

the hand. In Mehner's experiments there was found a second indifferencepoint at about 5 seconds, beyond

which times were judged again too long. Glass, whose work on the subject is the latest (Philos. Studien, IV.

423), found (when corrections were allowed for) that all times except 0.8 sec. were estimated too short. He

found a series of points of greatest relative accuracy (viz., at 1.5, 2.5, 3.75, 5, 6.25, etc., seconds

respectively[)], and ([sic] thought that his observations roughly corroborated Weber's law. As 'maximum' and

[20] With Vierordt and his pupils the indifference point lay as high as from 1.5 sec. to 4.9 sec., according to

the observer (cf. Der Zeitsinn, 1868, p. 112). In most of these experiments the time heard was actively

reproduced, after a short pause, by movements of the hand, which were recorded. Wundt gives good reasons

(Physiol. Psych., II. 289, 290) for rejecting Vierordt's figures as erroneous. Vierordt's book, it should be said,

[25] Op. cit. p. 376. Mach's and Buccola's figures, it will be observed, are about one half of the rest

submultiples, therefore. It ought to be observed, however, that Buccola's figure has little value, his

[26] Estel's figures led him to think that all the multiples enjoyed this privilege; with Mehner, on the other

hand, only the odd multiples showed diminution of the average error; thus, 0.71, 2.15, 3.55, 5, 6.4, 7.8, 9.3,

and 10.65 second were respectively registered with the least error. Cf. Phil. Studien, II. pp. 57, 562565.

[30] "The number of distinguishable differences of speed between these limits is, as he takes care to remark,

[32] I leave the text just as it was printed in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (for 'Oct. 1886') in 1887.

Since then M�nsterberg in his masterly Beitr�ge zur experimentellen Psychologie (Heft 2, 1889) seems to

have made it clear what the sensible changes are by which we measure the lapse of time. When the time

which separates two sensible impressions is less than one third of a second, he thinks it is almost entirely the

amount to which the memoryimage of the first impression had faded when the second one overtakes it,

which makes us feel how wide they are apart (p. 29). When the time is longer than this, we rely, he thinks,

exclusively upon the feelings of muscular tension and relaxation, which we are constantly receiving although

we give to them so little of our direct attention. These feelings are primarily in the muscles by which we

adopt our senseorgans in attending to the signals used, some of the muscles being in the eye and ear

themselves, some of them in the head, neck, etc. We here judge two timeintervals to be equal when between

the beginning and end of each we feel exactly similar relaxations and subsequent expectant tensions of these

muscles to have occurred. In reproducing intervals ourselves we try to make our feelings of this sort just what

they were when we passively heard the interval. These feelings by themselves, however, can only be used

when the intervals are very short, for the tension anticipatory of the terminal stimulus naturally reaches its

maximum very soon. With longer intervals we take the feeling of our inspirations and expirations into

account. With our expirations all the other muscular tensions in our body undergo a rhythmical decrease; with

our inspirations the reverse takes place. When, therefore, we note a timeinterval of several seconds with

intent to reproduce it, what we seek is to make the earlier and later interval agree in the number and amount

of these respiratory changes combined with senseorgan adjustments with which they are filled. M�nsterberg

has studied carefully in his own case the variations of the respiratory factor. They are many; but he sums up

his experience by saying that whether he measured by inspirations that were divided by momentary pauses

into six parts, or by inspirations that were continuous; whether with sensory tension during inspiration and

relaxation during expiration, or by tension during both inspiration and expiration, separated by a sudden

interpolated relaxation; whether with special notice taken of the cephalic tensions, or of those in the trunk and

shoulders, in all cases alike and without exception he involuntarily endeavored, whenever he compared two

times or tried to make one the same as the other, to get exactly the same respiratory conditions and conditions

of tension, all the subjective conditions, in short, exactly the same during the second interval as they were

during the first. M�nsterberg corroborated his subjective observations by experiments. The observer of the

time had to reproduce as exactly as possible an interval between two sharp sounds given him by an assistant.

The only condition imposed upon him was that he should not modify his breathing for the purposes of

measurement. It was then found that when the assistant broke in at random with his signals, the judgment of

the observer was vastly less accurate than when the assistant carefully watched the observer's breathing and

made both the beginning of the time given him and that of the time which he was to give coincide with

identical phases thereof. Finally, M�nsterberg with great plausibility tries to explain the discrepancies

between the results of Vierordt, Estel, Mehner, Glass, etc., as due to the fact that they did not all use the same

measure. Some breathe a little faster, some a little slower. Some break their inspirations into two parts, some

do not, etc. The coincidence of the objective times measured with definite natural phases of breathing would

[33] "Any one wishing yet further examples of this mental substitution will find one on observing how

habitually he thinks of the spaces on the clockface instead of the periods they stand for; how, on discovering

it to be half an hour later than he supposed, he does not represent the half hour in its duration, but scarcely

passes beyond the sign of it marked by the finger." (H. Spencer: Psychology, � 336.)

[34] The only objections to this which I can think of are: (1) The accuracy with which some men judge of the

hour of day or night without looking at the clock; (2) the faculty some have of waking at a preappointed hour;

(3) the accuracy of timeperception reported to exist in certain trancesubjects. It might seem that in these

persons some sort of a subconscious record was kept of the lapse of time per se. But this cannot be admitted

until it is proved that there are no physiological processes, the feeling of whose course may serve as a sign of

how much time has sped, and so lead us to infer the hour. That there are such processes it is hardly possible

to doubt. An ingenious friend of mine was long puzzled to know why each day of the week had such a

characteristic physiognomy to him. That of Sunday was soon noticed to be due to the cessation of the city's

rumbling, and the sound of people's feet shuffling on the sidewalk; of Monday, to come from the clothes

drying in the yard and casting a white reflection on the ceiling; of Tuesday, to a cause which I forget; and I

think my friend did not get beyond Wednesday. Probably each hour in the day has for most of us some outer

or inner sign associated with it as closely as these signs with the days of the week. It must be admitted, after

all, however, that the great improvement of the timeperception during sleep and trance is a mystery not as

yet cleared up. All my life I have been struck by the accuracy with which I will wake at the same exact

minute night after night and morning after morning, if only the habit fortuitously begins. The organic

registration in me is independent of sleep. After lying in bed a long time awake I suddenly rise without

knowing the time, and for days and weeks together will do so at an identical minute by the clock, as if some

inward physiological process caused the act by punctually running down. Idiots are said sometimes to

possess the timemeasuring faculty in a marked degree. I have an interesting manuscript account of an idiot

girl which says: "She was punctual almost to a minute in her demand for food and other regular attentions.

Her dinner was generally furnished her at 12.30 P.M., and at that hour she would begin to scream if it were

not forthcoming. If on Fastday or Thanksgiving it were delayed, in accordance with the New England

custom, she screamed from her usual dinnerhour until the food was carried to her. On the next day,

however, she again made known her wants promptly at 12.30. Any slight attention shown her on one day was

demanded on the next at the corresponding hour. If an orange were given her at 4 P.M. on Wednesday, at the

same hour on Thursday she made known her expectation, and if the fruit were not given her she continued to

call for it at intervals for two or three hours. At four on Friday the process would be repeated but would last

less long; and so on for two or three days. If one of her sisters visited her accidentally at a certain hour, the

sharp piercing scream was sure to summon her at the same hour the next day," etc., etc. For these obscure

[37] "Empty time is most strongly perceived when it comes as a pause in music or in speech. Suppose a

preacher in the pulpit, a professor at his desk, to stick still in the midst of his discourse; or let a composer (as

is sometimes purposely done) make all his instruments stop at once; we await every instant the resumption of

the performance, and, in this awaiting, perceive, more than in any other possible way, the empty time. To

change the example, let, in a piece of polyphonic music a figure, for instance, in which a tangle of

melodies are under way suddenly a single voice be heard, which sustains a long note, while all else is

hushed.... This one note will appear very protracted why? Because we expect to hear accompanying it the

notes of the other instruments, but they fail to come." (Herbart: Psychol. als W., �115.) Compare also

[38] A night of pain will seem terribly long; we keep looking forward to a moment which never comes the

moment when it shall cease. But the odiousness of this experience is not named ennui or Langweile, like the

odiousness of time that seems long from its emptiness. The more positive odiousness of the pain, rather, is

what tinges our memory of the night. What we feel, as Prof. Lazarus says (op cit. p. 202), is the long time of

[39] On these variations of timeestimate, cf. Romanes, Consciousness of Time. in Mind, vol. III. p. 297; J.

Sully, Illusions, pp. 245261, 302305; W. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., II. 287, 288; besides the essays quoted

from Lazarus and Janet. In German, the successors of Herbart have treated of this subject: compare

Volkmann's Lehrbuch d. Psych., � 89, and for references to other authors his note 3 to this section. Lindner

(Lbh. d. empir. Psych.), as a parallel effect, instances Alexander the Great's life (thirtythree years), which

seems to us as if it must be long, because it was so eventful. Similarly the English Commonwealth, etc.

[41] Succession, time per se, is no force. Our talk about its devouring tooth, etc., is all elliptical. Its contents

are what devour. The law of innertia is incompatible with time's being assumed as an efficient cause of

[44] "'No more' and 'not yet' are the proper timefeelings, and we are aware of time in no other way than

through these feelings," says Volkmann (Psychol., � 87). This, which is not strictly true of our feeling of time

per se, as an elementary bit of duration, is true of our feeling of date in its events.

[45] We construct the miles just as we construct the years. Travelling in the cars makes a succession of

different fields of view pass before our eyes. When those that have passed from present sight revive in

memory, they maintain their mutual order because their contents overlap. We think them as having been

before or behind each other; and, from the multitude of the views we can recall behind the one now

It is often said that the perception of time develops later than that of space, because children have so vague an

idea of all dates before yesterday and after tomorrow. But no vaguer than they have of extensions that

exceed as greatly their unit of spaceintuition. Recently I heard my child of four tell a visitor that he had been

'as much as one week' in the country. As he had been there three months, the visitor expressed surprise;

whereupon the child corrected himself by saying he had been there 'twelve years.' But the child made exactly

the same kind of mistake when he asked if Boston was not one hundred miles from Cambridge, the distance

[46] Most of these explanations simply give the signs which, adhering to impressions, lead us to date them

within a duration, or, in other words, to assign to them their order. Why it should be a timeorder, however,

is not explained. Herbart's wouldbe explanation is a simple description of timeperception. He says it comes

when, with the last member of a series present to our consciousness, we also think of the first; and then the

whole series revives in our thought at once, but with strength diminishing in the backward direction (Psychol.

als Wiss., � 115; Lehrb. zur Psychol., �� 171, 172, 175). Similarly Drobisch, who adds that the series must

appear as one already elapsed (durchlaufene), a word which shows even more clearly the questionbegging

nature of this sort of account (Empirische Psychol., � 59). Th. Waitz is guilty of similar questionbegging

when he explains our timeconsciousness to be engendered by a set of unsuccessful attempts to make our

percepts agree with our expectations (Lehrb. d. Psychol., � 52). Volkmann's mythological account of past

representations striving to drive present ones out of the seat of consciousness, being driven back by them,

etc., suffers from the same fallacy (Psychol., � 87). But all such accounts agree in implying one fact viz.,

that the brainprocesses of various events must be active simultaneously, and in varying strength, for a

timeperception to be possible. Later authors have made this idea more precise. Thus, Lipps:

"Sensations arise, occupy consciousness, fade into images, and vanish. According as two of them, a and b, go

through this process simultaneously, or as one precedes or follows the other, the phases of their fading will

agree or differ; and the difference will be proportional to the timedifference between their several moments

of beginning. Thus there are differences of quality in the images, which the mind may translate into

corresponding differences of their temporal order. There is no other possible middle term between the

objective timerelations and those in the mind than these differences of phase." (Grundtatsachen des

Seelenlebens, p. 588.) Lipps accordingly calls them 'temporal signs,' and hastens explicitly to add that the

soul's translation of their order of strength into a timeorder is entirely inexplicable (p. 591). M. Guyau's

account (Revue Philosophique, XIX. 353) hardly differs from that of his predecessors, except in

picturesqueness of style. Every change leaves a series of train�es lumineuses in the mind like the passage of

shooting stars. Each image is in a more fading phase, according as its original was more remote. This group

of images gives duration, the mere timeform, the 'bed' of time. The distinction of past, present, and future

within the bed comes from our active nature. The future (as with Waitz) is what I want, but have not yet got,

Mr. Ward gives, in his Encyclop�dia Britannica article (Psychology. p. 65, col. 1), a still more refined

attempt to specify the 'temporal sign.' The problem being, among a number of other things thought as

successive, but simultaneously thought, to determine which is first and which last, he says: "After each

distinct representation, a b c d, there may intervene the representation of that movement of attention of which

we are aware in passing from one object to another. In our present reminiscence we have, it must be allowed,

little direct proof of this intervention; though there is, I think, indirect evidence of it in the tendency of the

flow of ideas to follow the order in which the presentations were at first attended to. With the movement

itself when the direction of attention changes, we are familiar enough, though the residua of such movements

are not ordinarily conspicuous. These residua, then, are our temporal signs.... But temporal signs alone will

not furnish all the pictorial exactness of the timeperspective. These give us only fixed series; but the law of

obliviscence, by insuring a progressive variation in intensity as we pass from one member of the series to the

other, yields the effect which we call timedistance. By themselves such variations in intensity would leave

us liable to confound more vivid representations in the distance with fainter ones nearer the present, but from

this mistake the temporal signs save us; where the memorycontinuum is imperfect such mistakes continually

occur. On the other hand, where these variations are slight and imperceptible, though the memorycontinuum

preserves the order of events intact, we have still no such distinct appreciation of comparative distance in

time as we have nearer to the present, where these perceptive effects are considerable.... Locke speaks of our

ideas succeeding each other 'at certain distances not much unlike the images in the inside of a lantern turned

round by the heat of a candle,' and 'guesses' that 'this appearance of theirs in train varies not very much in a

waking man.' Now what is this 'distance' that separates a from b, b from c, and so on; and what means have

we of knowing that it is tolerably constant in waking life? It is, probably, that, the residuum of which I have

called a temporal sign; or, in other words, it is the movement of attention from a to b." Nevertheless, Mr.

Ward does not call our feeling of this movement of attention the original of our feeling of time, or its

brainprocess the brainprocess which directly causes us to perceive time. He says, a moment later, that "

though the fixation of attention does of course really occupy rime, it is probably not in the first instance

perceived as time i.e. as continuous 'protensity,' to use a term of Hamilton's but as intensity. Thus, if

this supposition be true, there is an element in our concrete timeperceptions which has no place in our

abstract conception of Time. In Time physically conceived there is no trace of intensity; in time psychically

experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude, and so far literally a perception." Its 'original' is,

then, if I understand Mr. Ward, something like a feeling which accompanies, as pleasure and pain may

accompany, the movements of attention. Its brainprocess must, it would seem, be assimilated in general

type to the brainprocesses of pleasure and pain. Such would seem more or less consciously to be Mr. Ward's

own view, for he says: "Everybody knows what it is to be distracted by a rapid succession of varied

impressions, and equally what it is to be wearied by the slow and monotonous recurrence of the same

impressions. Now these 'feelings' of distraction and tedium owe their characteristic qualities to movements of

attention. In the first, attention is kept incessantly on the move; before it is accommodated to a, it is disturbed

by the suddenness, intensity, and novelty of b; in the second, it is kept all but stationary by the repeated

presentation of the same impression. Such excess and defect of surprises make one realize a fact which in

ordinary life is so obscure as to escape notice. But recent experiments have set this fact in a more striking

light, and made clear what Locke had dimly before his mind in talking of a certain distance between the

presentations of a waking man. In estimating very short periods of time of a second or less, indicated, say, by

the beats of a metronome, it is found that there is a certain period for which the mean of a number of

estimates is correct, while shorter periods are on the whole over, and longer periods underestimated. I take

this to be evidence of the time occupied in accommodating or fixing attention." Alluding to the fact that a

series of experiences, a b c d e, may seem short in retrospect, which seemed everlasting in passing, he says:

"What tells in retrospect is the series a b c d e, etc.; what tells in the present is the intervening t1 t2 t3, etc., or

rather the original accommodation of which these temporal signs are the residuum." And he concludes thus:

"We seem to have proof that our perception of duration rests ultimately upon quasimotor objects of varying

intensity, the duration of which we do not directly experience as duration at all."

Wundt also thinks that the interval of about threefourths of a second, which is estimated with the minimum

of error, points to a connection between the timefeeling and the succession of distinctly 'apperceived'

objects before the mind. The 'associationtime' is also equal to about three fourths of a second. This

associationtime he regards as a sort of internal standard of duration to which we involuntarily assimilate all

intervals which we try to reproduce, bringing shorter ones up to it and longer ones down. [In the Stevens

result we should have to say contrast instead of assimilate, for the longer intervals there seem longer, and the

shorter ones shorter still.] "Singularly enough," he adds (Physiol. Psych., II. 286), "this time is about that in

which in rapid walking, according to the Webers, our legs perform their swing. It seems thus not unlikely that

both psychical constants, that of the average speed of reproduction and that of the surest estimation of time,

have formed themselves under the influence of those most habitual movements of the body which we also use

Finally, Prof. Mach makes a suggestion more specific still. After saying very rightly that we have a real

sensation of time how otherwise should we identify two entirely different airs as being played in the same

'time'? how distinguish in memory the first stroke of the clock from the second, unless to each there clove its

special timesensation, which revived with it? he says "it is probable that this feeling is connected with

that organic consumption which is necessarily linked with the production of consciousness, and that the time

which we feel is probably due to the [mechanical?] work of [the process of?] attention. When attention is

strained, time seems long; during easy occupation, short, etc.... The fatigue of the organ of consciousness, as

long as we wake, continually increases, and the work of attention augments as continually. Those impressions

which are conjoined with a greater amount of work of attention appear to us as the later." The apparent

relative displacement of certain simultaneous events and certain anachronisms of dreams are held by Mach to

be easily explicable as effects of a splitting of the attention between two objects, one of which consumes most

of it (Beitr�ge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, p. 103 foll.). Mach's theory seems worthy of being better

worked out. It is hard to say now whether he, Ward, and Wundt mean at bottom the same thing or not. The

theory advanced in my own text, it will be remarked, does not pretend to be an explanation, but only an

elementary statement of the 'law' which makes us aware of time. The Herbartian mythology purports to

[47] It would be rash to say definitely just how many seconds long this specious present must needs be, for

processes fade 'asymptotically,' and the distinctly intuited present merges into a penumbra of mere dim

recency before it turns into the past which is simply reproduced and conceived. Many a thing which we do

not distinctly date by intercalating it in a place between two other things will, nevertheless, come to us with

this feeling of belonging to a near past. This sense of recency is a feeling sui generis, and may affect things

that happened hours ago. It would seem to show that their brainprocesses are still in a state modified by the

foregoing excitement, still in a 'fading' phase, in a spite of the long interval.

[49] I leave my text as it was printed before M�nsterberg's essay appeared (see above page 620, note). He

denies that we measure any but minimal durations by the amount of fading in the ideational processes, and

talks almost exclusively of our feelings of muscular tension in his account, whereas I have made no mention

of such things in mine. I cannot, however, see that there is any conflict between what he and I suggest. I am

mainly concerned with the consciousness of duration regarded as a specific sort of object, he is concerned

with this object's measurement exclusively. Feelings of tension might be the means of the measurement,

whilst overlapping processes of any and every kind gave the object to be measured. The accommodative and

respiratory movements from which the feelings of tension come form regularly recurring sensations divided

by their 'phases' into intervals as definite as those by which a yardstick is divided by the marks upon its

Let a1, a2, a3, a4, be homologous phases in four successive movements of this kind. If four outer stimuli 1, 2,

3, 4, coincide each with one of these successive phases, then their 'distances apart' are felt as equal, otherwise

not. But there is no reason whatever to suppose that the mere overlapping of the brainprocess of 2 by the

fading process of1, or that of 3 by that of 2, etc., does not give the characteristic quality of content which we

call 'distance apart' in this experience, and which by aid of the muscular feelings gets judged to be equal.

Doubtless the muscular feelings can give us the object 'time' as well as its measure, because their earlier

phases leave fading sensations which constantly overlap the vivid sensation of the present phase. But it would

be contrary to analogy to suppose that they should be the only experiences which give this object. I do not

understand Herr M�nsterberg to claim this for them. He takes our sense of time for granted, and only

[50] Exner in Hermann's Hdbch. d. Physiol., Bd. II. Thl. II. p. 281. Richet in Revue Philosophique, XXI. 568

[51] I have spoken of fading brainprocesses alone, but only for simplicity's sake. Dawning processes

probably play as important a part in giving the feeling of duration to the specious present.

[54] "The patient cannot retain the image of an object more than a moment. His memory is as short for

sounds, letters, figures, and printed words. If we cover a written or printed word with a sheet of paper in

which a little window has been cut, so that only the first letter is visible through the window, he pronounces

this letter. If, then, the sheet is moved so as to cover the first letter and make the second one visible, he

pronounces the second, but forgets the first, and cannot pronounce the first and second together." And so

forth to the end. "If he closes his eyes and draws his finger exploringly over a wellknown object like a knife

or key, he cannot combine the separate impressions and recognize the object. But if it is put into his hand so

that he can simultaneously touch it with several fingers, he names it without difficulty. This patient has thus

lost the capacity for grouping successive... impressions... into a whole and perceiving them as a whole."

(Grashey, in Archiv f�r Psychiatrie, Bd. XVI. pp. 672673.) It is hard to believe that in such a patient the

time intuited was not clipped off like the impressions it held, though perhaps not so much of it.

I have myself often noted a curious exaggeration of timeperspective at the moment of a falling asleep. A

person will be moving or doing something in the room, and a certain stage of his act (whatever it may be)

will be my last waking perception. Then a subsequent stage will wake me to a new perception. The two

stages of the act will not be more than a few seconds apart; and yet it always seems to me as if, between the

earlier and the later one, a long interval has passed away. I conjecturally account for the phenomenon thus,

calling the two stages of the act a and b respectively: Were I awake, a would leave a fading process in my

sensorium which would overlap the process of b when the latter came, and both would then appear in the

same specious present, a belonging to its earlier end. But the sudden advent of the brainchange called sleep

extinguishes a's fading process abruptly. When b then comes and wakes me, a comes back, it is true, but not

as belonging to the specious present. It has to be specially revoked in memory. This mode of revocation

An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario

In the last chapter what concerned us was the direct intuition of time. We found it limited to intervals of

considerably less than a minute. Beyond its borders extends the immense region of conceived time, past and

future, into one direction or another of which we mentally project all the events which we think of as real,

and form a systematic order of them by giving to each a date. The relation of conceived to intuited time is just

like that of the fictitious space pictured on the flat backscene of a theatre to the actual space of the stage.

The objects painted on the latter (trees, columns, houses in a receding street, etc.) carry back the series of

similar objects solidly placed upon the latter, and we think we see things in a continuous perspective, when

we really see thus only a few of them and imagine that we see the rest. The chapter which lies before us deals

with the way in which we paint the remote past, as it were, upon a canvas in our memory, and yet often

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some,

no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours, or days.

Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as

The first point to be noticed is that for a state of mind to survive in memory it must have endured for a certain

length of time. In other words, it must be what I call a substantive state. Prepositional and conjunctival states

of mind are not remembered as independent facts we cannot recall just how we felt when we said 'how' or

'notwithstanding.' Our consciousness of these transitive states is shut up to their own moment hence one

Any state of mind which is shut up to its own moment and fails to become an object for succeeding states of

mind, is as if it belonged to another stream of thought. Or rather, it belongs only physically, not intellectually,

to its own stream, forming a bridge from one segment of it to another, but not being appropriated inwardly by

later segments or appearing as part of the empirical self, in the manner explained in Chapter X. All the

intellectual value for us of a state of mind depends on our aftermemory of it. Only then is it combined in a

system and knowingly made to contribute to a result. Only then does it count for us. So that the EFFECTIVE

consciousness we have of our states is the afterconsciousness; and the more of this there is, the more

influence does the original state have, and the more permanent a factor is it of our world. An

"To suffer for only a hundredth of a second is not to suffer at all; and for my part I would readily agree to

undergo a pain, however acute and intense it might be, provided it should last only a hundredth of a second,

Not that a momentary state of consciousness need be practically resultless. Far from it: such a state, though

absolutely unremembered, might at its own moment determine the transition of our thinking in a vital way,

and decide our action irrevocably.[2] But the idea of it could not afterwards determine transition and action,

its content could not be conceived as one of the mind's permanent meanings: that is all I mean by saying that

As a rule sensations outlast for some little time the objective stimulus which occasioned them. This

phenomenon is the ground of those 'afterimages' which are familiar in the physiology of the senseorgans.

If we open our eyes instantaneously upon a scene, and then shroud them in complete darkness, it will be as if

we saw the scene in ghostly light throught [sic] the dark screen. We can read off details in it which were

In every sphere of sense, an intermittent stimulus, often enough repeated, produces a continuous sensation.

This is because the afterimage of the impression just gone by blends with the new impression coming in.

The effects of stimuli may thus be superposed upon each other many stages deep, the total result in

consciousness being an increase in the feeling's intensity, and in all probability, as we saw in the last chapter,

"Impressions to which we are inattentive leave so brief an image in the memory that it is usually overlooked.

When deeply absorbed, we do not hear the clock strike. But our attention may awake after the striking has

ceased, and we may then count off the strokes. Such examples are often found in daily life. We can also

prove the existence of this primary memoryimage, as it may be called, in another person, even when his

attention is completely absorbed elsewhere. Ask someone, e.g., to count the lines of a printed page as fast as

he can, and whilst this is going on walk a few steps about the room. Then, when the person has done

counting, ask him where you stood. He will always reply quite definitely that you have walked. Analogous

experiments may be done with vision. This primary memoryimage is, whether attention have been turned to

the impression or not, an extremely lively one, but is subjectively quite distinct from every sort of

afterimage or hallucination.... It vanishes, if not caught by attention, in the course of a few seconds. Even

when the original impression is attended to, the liveliness of its image in memory fades fast."[4]

The physical condition in the nervetissue of this primary memory is called by Richet 'elementary

memory.'[5] I much prefer to reserve the word memory for the conscious phenomenon. What happens in the

nervetissue is but an example of that plasticity or of semiinertness, yielding to change, but not yielding

instantly or wholly, and never quite recovering the original form, which, in Chapter V, we saw to be the

groundwork of habit. Elementary habit would be the better name for what Professor Richet means. Well, the

first manifestation of elementary habit is the slow dying away of an impressed movement on the neural

matter, and its first effect in consciousness is this socalled elementary memory. But what elementary

memory makes us aware of is the just past. The objects we feel in this directly intuited past differ from

properly recollected objects. An object which is recollected, in the proper sense of that term, is one which has

been absent from consciousness altogether, and now revives anew. It is brought back, recalled, fished up, so

to speak, from a reservoir in which, with countless other objects, it lay buried and lost from view. But an

object of primary memory is not thus brought back; it never was lost; its date was never cut off in

consciousness from that of the immediately present moment. In fact it comes to us as belonging to the

rearward portion of the present space of time, and not to the genuine past. In the last chapter we saw that the

portion of time which we directly intuit has a breadth of several seconds, a rearward and a forward end, and

may be called the specious present. All stimuli whose first nervevibrations have not yet ceased seem to be

conditions of our getting this feeling of the specious present. They give rise to objects which appear to the

When we have been exposed to an unusual stimulus for many minutes or hours, a nervous process is set up

which results in the haunting of consciousness by the impression for a long time afterwards. The tactile and

muscular feelings of a day of skating or riding, after long disuse of the exercise, will come back to us all

through the night. Images of the field of view of the microscope will annoy the observer for hours after an

unusually long sitting at the instrument. A thread tied around the finger, an unusual constriction in the

clothing, will feel as if still there, long after they have been removed. These revivals (called phenomena of

Sinnesged�chtniss by the Germans) have something periodical in their nature.[7] They show that profound

rearrangements and slow settlings into a new equilibrium are going on in the neural substance, and they form

the transition to that more peculiar and proper phenomenon of memory, of which the rest of this chapter must

treat. The first condition which makes a thing susceptible of recall after it has been forgotten is that the

original impression of it should have been prolonged enough to give rise to a recurrent image of it, as

distinguished from one of those primary afterimages which very fleeting impressions may leave behind, and

which contain in themselves no guarantee that they will ever come back after having once faded away.[8] A

certain length of stimulation seems demanded by the inertia of the nervesubstance. Exposed to a shorter

influence, its modification fails to 'set,' and it retains no effective tendency to fall again into the same form of

vibration at which the original feeling was due. This, as I said at the outset, may be the reason why only

'substantive' and not 'transitive' states of mind are as a rule recollected, at least as independent things. The

Memory proper, or secondary memory as it might be styled, is the knowledge of a former state of mind after

it has already once dropped from consciousness; or rather it is the knowledge of an event, or fact, of which

meantime we have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that we have thought or experienced

The first element which such a knowledge involves would seem to be the revival in the mind of an image or

copy of the original event.[9] And it is an assumption made by many writers[10] that the revival of an image

is all that is needed to constitute the memory of the original occurrence. But such a revival is obviously not a

memory, whatever else it may be; it is simply a duplicate, a second event, having absolutely no connection

with the first event except that it happens to resemble it. The clock strikes today; it struck yesterday; and

may strike a million times ere it wears out. The rain pours through the gutter this week; it did so last week;

and will do so in s�cula s�culorum. But does the present clockstroke become aware of the past ones, or the

present stream recollect the past stream, because they repeat and resemble them? Assuredly not. And let it not

be said that this is because clockstrokes and gutters are physical and not psychical objects; for psychical

objects (sensations for example) simply recurring in successive editions will remember each other on that

account no more than clockstrokes do. No memory is involved in the mere fact of recurrence. The

successive editions of a feeling are so many independent events, each snug in its own skin. Yesterday's

feeling is dead and buried; and the presence of today's is no reason why it should resuscitate. A farther

condition is required before the present image can be held to stand for a past original.

That condition is that the fact imaged be expressly referred to the past, thought as in the past. But how can we

think a thing as in the past, except by thinking of the past together with the thing, and of the relation of the

two? And how can we think of the past? In the chapter on Timeperception we have seen that our intuitive or

immediate consciousness of pastness hardly carries us more than a few seconds backward of the present

instant of time. Remoter dates are conceived, not perceived; known symbolically by names, such as 'last

week,' '1850;' or thought of by events which happened in them, as the year in which we attended such a

school, or met with such a loss. So that if we wish to think of a particular past epoch, we must think of a

name or other symbol, or else of certain concrete events, associated therewithal. Both must be thought of, to

think the past epoch adequately. And to 'refer' any special fact to the past epoch is to think that fact with the

names and events which characterize its date, to think it, in short, with a lot of contiguous associates.

But even this would not be memory. Memory requires more than mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be

dated in my past. In other words, I must think that I directly experienced its occurrence. It must have that

'warmth and intimacy' which were so often spoken of in the chapter on the Self, as characterizing all

A general feeling of the past direction in time, then, a particular date conceived as lying along that direction,

and defined by its name or phenomenal contents, an event imagined as located therein, and owned as part of

It follows that what we began by calling the 'image,' or 'copy,' of the fact in the mind, is really not there at all

in that simple shape, as a separate 'idea.' Or at least, if it be there as a separate idea, no memory will go with

it. What memory goes with is, on the contrary, a very complex representation, that of the fact to be recalled

plus its associates, the whole forming one 'object' (as explained on page 275, Chapter IX), known in one

integral pulse of consciousness (as set forth on pp. 276 ff.) and demanding probably a vastly more intricate

Most psychologists have given a perfectly clear analysis of the phenomenon we describe. Christian Wolff, for

"Suppose you have seen Mevius in the temple, but now afresh in Titus' house. I say you recognize Mevius,

that is, are conscious of having seen him before, because, although now you perceive him with your senses

along with Titus' house, your imagination produces an image of him along with one of the temple, and of the

acts of your own mind reflecting on Mevius in the temple. Hence the idea of Mevius which is reproduced in

sense is contained in another series of perceptions than that which formerly contained it, and this difference is

the reason why we are conscious of having had it before.... For whilst now you see Mevius in the house of

Titus, your imagination places him in the temple, and renders you conscious of the state of mind which you

found in yourself when you beheld him there. By this you know that you have seen him before, that is, you

recognize him. But you recognize him because his idea is now contained in another series of perceptions

"In my remembrance of George III., addressing the two houses of parliament, there is, first of all, the mere

idea, or simple apprehension, the conception, as it is sometimes called, of the objects. There is combined with

this, to make it memory, my idea of my having seen and heard those objects. And this combination is so close

that it is not in my power to separate them. I cannot have the idea of George III.; his person and attitude, the

paper he held in his hand, the sound of his voice while reading from it; without having the other idea along

with it, that of my having been a witness of the scene.... If this explanation of the case in which we remember

sensations is understood, the explanation of the case in which we remember ideas cannot occasion much of

difficulty. I have a lively recollection of Polyphemus's cave, and the actions of Ulysses and the Cyclops, as

described by Homer. In this recollection there is, first of all, the ideas, or simple conceptions of the objects

and acts; and along with these ideas, and so closely com bined as not to be separable, the idea of my having

formerly had those same ideas. And this idea of my having formerly had those ideas is a very complicated

idea; including the idea of myself of the present moment remembering, and that of myself of the past moment

conceiving; and the whole series of the states of consciousness, which intervened between myself

Memory is then the feeling of belief in a peculiar complex object; but all the elements of this object may be

known to other states of belief; nor is there in the particular combination of them as they appear in memory

anything so peculiar as to lead us to oppose the latter to other sorts of thought as something altogether sui

generis, needing a special faculty to account for it. When later we come to our chapter on Belief we shall see

that any represented object which is connected either mediately or immediately with our present sensations or

emotional activities tends to be believed in as a reality. The sense of a peculiar active relation in it to

ourselves is what gives to an object the characteristic quality of reality, and a merely imagined past event

differs from a recollected one only in the absence of this peculiar feeling relation. The electric current, so to

speak, between it and our present self does not close. But in their other determinations the rerecollected past

and the imaginary past may be much the same. In other words, there is nothing unique in the object of

memory, and no special faculty is needed to account for its formation. It is a synthesis of parts thought of as

related together, perception, imagination, comparison and reasoning being analogous syntheses of parts into

complex objects. The objects of any of these faculties may awaken belief or fail to awaken it; the object of

memory is only an object imagined in the past (usually very completely imagined there) to which the emotion

Such being the phenomenon of memory, or the analysis of its object, can we see how it comes to pass? can

Now the cause both of retention and of recollection is the law of habit in the nervous system, working as it

Associationists have long explained recollection by association. James Mill gives an account of it which I am

unable to improve upon, unless it might be by translating his word 'idea' into 'thing thought of,' or 'object,' as

"There is," he says, "a state of mind familiar to all men, in which we are said to remember. In this state it is

certain we have not in the mind the idea which we are trying to have in it.[13] How is it, then, that we

proceed in the course of our endeavor, to procure its introduction into the mind? If we have not the idea itself,

we have certain ideas connected with it. We run over those ideas, one after another, in hopes that some one of

them will suggest the idea we are in quest of; and if any one of them does, it is always one so connected with

it as to call it up in the way of association. I meet an old acquaintance, whose name I do not remember, and

wish to recollect. I run over a number of names, in hopes that some of them may be associated with the idea

of the individual. I think of all the circumstances in which I have seen him engaged; the time when I knew

him, the persons along with whom I knew him, the things he did, or the things he suffered; and, if I chance

upon any idea with which the name is associated, then immediately I have the recollection; if not, my pursuit

of it is vain.[14] There is another set of cases, very familiar, but affording very important evidence on the

subject. It frequently happens that there are matters which we desire not to forget. What is the contrivance to

which we have recourse for preserving the memory that is, for making sure that it will be called into

existence, when it is our wish that it should? All men invariably employ the same expedient. They endeavor

to form an association between the idea of the thing to be remembered, and some sensation, or some idea,

which they know beforehand will occur at or near the time when they wish the remembrance to be in their

minds. If this association is formed, and the association or idea with which it has been formed occurs; the

sensation, or idea, calls up the remembrance; and the object of him who formed the association is attained. To

use a vulgar instance: a man receives a commission from his friend, and, that he may not forget it, ties a knot

in his handkerchief. How is this fact to be explained? First of all, the idea of the commission is associated

with the making of the knot. Next, the handkerchief is a thing which it is known beforehand will be

frequently seen, and of course at no great distance of time from the occasion on which the memory is desired.

The handkerchief being seen, the knot is seen, and this sensation recalls the idea of the commission, between

In short, we make search in our memory for a forgotten idea, just as we rummage our house for a lost object.

In both cases we visit what seems to us the probable neighborhood of that which we miss. We turn over the

things under which, or within which, or alongside of which, it may possibly be; and if it lies near them, it

soon comes to view. But these matters, in the case of a mental object sought, are nothing but its associates.

The machinery of recall is thus the same as the machinery of association, and the machinery of association, as

And this same law of habit is the machinery of retention also. Retention means liability to recall, and it means

nothing more than such liability. The only proof of there being retention is that recall actually takes place.

The retention of an experience is, in short, but another name for the possibility of thinking it again, or the

tendency to think it again, with its past surroundings. Whatever accidental cue may turn this tendency into an

actuality, the permanent ground of the tendency itself lies in the organized neural paths by which the cue calls

up the experience on the proper occasion, together with its past associates, the sense that the self was there,

the belief that it really happened, etc., etc., just as previously described. When the recollection is of the 'ready'

sort, the resuscitation takes place the instant the occasion arises; when it is slow, resuscitation comes after

delay. But be the recall prompt or slow, the condition which makes it possible at all (or in other words, the

'retention' of the experience) is neither more nor less then the brainpaths which associate the experience

with the occasion and cue of the recall. When slumbering, these paths are the condition of retention; when

A simple scheme will now make the whole cause of memory plain. Let n be a past event; o its 'setting'

(concomitants, date, self present, warmth and intimacy, etc., etc., as already set forth); and m some present

thought or fact which may appropriately become the occasion of its recall. Let the nervecentres, active in

the thought of m, n, and o, be represented by M, N, and O, respectively; then the existence of the paths MN

and NO will be the fact indicated by the phrase 'retention of the event n in the memory,' and the excitement

of the brain along these paths will be the condition of the event n's actual recall. The retention of n, it will be

observed, is no mysterious storing up of an 'idea' in an unconscious state. It is not a fact of the mental order at

all. It is a purely physical phenomenon, a morphological feature, the presence of these 'paths,' namely, in the

finest recesses of the brain's tissue. The recall or recollection, on the other hand, is a psychophysical

phenomenon, with both a bodily and a mental side. The bodily side is the functional excitement of the tracts

and paths in question; the mental side is the conscious vision of the past occurrence, and the belief that we

These habitworn paths of association are a clear rendering of what authors mean by 'predispositions,'

'vestiges,' 'traces,' etc., left in the brain by past experience. Most writers leave the nature of these vestiges

vague; few think of explicitly assimilating them to channels of association. Dr. Maudsley, for example,

"When an idea which we have once had is excited again, there is a reproduction of the same nervous current,

with the conscious addition that it is a reproduction it is the same idea plus the consciousness that it is the

same. The question then suggests itself, What is the physical condition of this consciousness? What is the

modification of the anatomical substrata of fibres and cells, or of their physiological activity, which is the

occasion of this plus element in the reproduced idea? It may be supposed that the first activity did leave

behind it, when it subsided, some aftereffect, some modification of the nerveelement, whereby the

nervecircuit was disposed to fall again readily into the same action; such disposition appearing in

consciousness as recognition or memory. Memory is, in fact, the conscious phase of this physiological

disposition when it becomes active or discharges its functions on the recurrence of the particular mental

experience. To assist our conception of what may happen, let us suppose the individual nerveelements to be

endowed with their own consciousness, and let us assume them to be, as I have supposed, modified in a

certain way by the first experience; it is hard to conceive that when they fall into the same action on another

occasion they should not recognize or remember it; for the second action is a reproduction of the first, with

the addition of what it contains from the aftereffects of the first. As we have assumed the process to be

conscious, this reproduction with its addition would be a memory or remembrance."[16]

In this passage Dr. Maudsley seems to mean by the 'nerveelement,' or 'anatomical substratum of fibres and

cells,' something that corresponds to the N of our diagram. And the 'modification' he speaks of seems

intended to be understood as an internal modification of this same particular group of elements. Now the

slightest reflection will convince anyone that there is no conceivable ground for supposing that with the mere

reexcitation of N there should arise the 'conscious addition' that it is a reexcitation. The two excitations are

simply two excitations, their consciousnesses are two consciousnesses, they have nothing to do with each

other. And a vague 'modification,' supposed to be left behind by the first excitation, helps us not a whit. For,

according to all analogy, such a modification can only result in making the next excitation more smooth and

rapid. This might make it less conscious, perhaps, but could not endow it with any reference to the past. The

gutter is worn deeper by each successive shower, but not for that reason brought into contact with previous

showers. Psychology (which Dr. Maudsley in his next sentence says "affords us not the least help in this

matter") puts us on the track of an at least possible brainexplanation. As it is the setting o of the idea, when

it recurs, which makes us conscious of it as past, so it can be no intrinsic modification of the 'nerveelement'

N which is the organic condition of memory, but something extrinsic to it altogether, namely, its connections

with those other nerveelements which we called O that letter standing in the scheme for the cerebral

substratum of a great plexus of things other than the principal event remembered, dates, names, concrete

surroundings, realized intervals, and what not. The 'modification' is the formation in the plastic

The only hypothesis, in short, to which the facts of inward experience give countenance is that the

braintracts excited by the event proper, and those excited in its recall, are in part different from each other.

If we could revive the past event without any associates we should exclude the possibility of memory, and

simply dream that we were undergoing the experience as if for the first time.[17] Wherever, in fact, the

recalled event does appear without a definite setting, it is hard to distinguish it from a mere creation of fancy.

But in proportion as its image lingers and recalls associates which gradually become more definite, it grows

more and more distinctly into a remembered thing. For example, I enter a friend's room and see on the wall a

painting. At first I have the strange, wondering consciousness, 'surely I have seen that before,' but when or

how does not become clear. There only clings to the picture a sort of penumbra of familiarity, when

suddenly I exclaim: "I have it, it is a copy of part of one of the Fra Angelicos in the Florentine Academy I

recollect it there!" But the motive to the recall does not lie in the fact that the braintract now excited by the

painting was once before excited in a similar way; it lies simply and solely in the fact that with that

braintract other tracts also are excited: those which sustain my friend's room with all its peculiarities, on the

one hand; those which sustain the mental image of the Florence Academy, on the other hand, with the

circumstances of my visit there; and finally those which make me (more dimly) think of the years I have lived

through between these two times. The result of this total braindisturbance is a thought with a peculiar

object, namely, that I who now stand here with this picture before me, stood so many years ago in the

M. Taine has described the gradual way in which a mental image develops into an object of memory, in his

"I meet casually in the street a person whose appearance I am acquainted with, and say to myself at once that

I have seen him before. Instantly the figure recedes into the past, and wavers about there vaguely, without at

once fixing itself in any spot. It persists in me for some time, and surrounds itself with new details. 'When I

saw him he was bareheaded, with a workingjacket on, painting in a studio; he is soandso, of

suchandsuch a street. But when was it? It was not yesterday, nor this week, nor recently. I have it: he told

me that he was waiting for the first leaves to come out to go into the country. It was before the spring. But at

what exact date? I saw, the same day, people carrying branches in the streets and omnibuses: it was Palm

Sunday!' Observe the travels of the internal figure, its various shiftings to front and rear along the line of the

past; each of these mental sentences has been a swing of the balance. When confronted with the present

sensation and with the latent swarm of indistinct images which repeat our recent life, the figure first recoiled

suddenly to an indeterminate distance. Then, completed by precise details, and confronted with all the

shortened images by which we sum up the proceedings of a day or a week, it again receded beyond the

present day, beyond yesterday, the day before, the week, still farther, beyond the illdefined mass constituted

by our recent recollections. Then something said by the painter was recalled, and it at once receded again

beyond an almost precise limit, which is marked by the image of the green leaves and denoted by the word

spring. A moment afterwards, thanks to a new detail, the recollection of the branches, it has shifted again, but

forward this time, not backward; and, by a reference to the calendar, is situated at a precise point, a week

further back than Easter, and five weeks nearer than the carnival, by the double effect of the contrary

impulsions, pushing it, one forward and the other backward, and which are, at a particular moment, annulled

The remembered fact being n, then, the path N O is what arouses for n its setting when it is recalled, and

makes it other than a mere imagination. The path M N, on the other hand, gives the cue or occasion of its

being recalled at all. Memory being thus altogether conditioned on brainpaths, its excellence in a given

individual will depend partly on the number and partly on the persistence of these paths.

The persistence or permanence of the paths is a physiological property of the braintissue of the individual,

whilst their number is altogether due to the facts of his mental experience. Let the quality of permanence in

the paths be called the native tenacity, or physiological retentiveness. This tenacity differs enormously from

infancy to old age, and from one person to another. Some minds are like wax under a seal no impression,

however disconnected with others, is wiped out. Others, like a jelly, vibrate to every touch, but under usual

conditions retain no permanent mark. These latter minds, before they can recollect a fact, must weave it into

their permanent stores of knowledge. They have no desultory memory. Those persons, on the contrary, who

retain names, dates and addresses, anecdotes, gossip, poetry, quotations, and all sorts of miscellaneous facts,

without an effort, have desultory memory in a high degree, and certainly owe it to the unusual tenacity of

their brainsubstance for any path once formed therein. No one probably was ever effective on a voluminous

scale without a high degree of this physiological retentiveness. In the practical as in the theoretic life, the man

whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing, whilst his neighbors, spending

most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own. A

Charlemagne, a Luther, a Leibnitz, a Walter Scott, any example, in short, of your quarto or folio editions of

mankind, must needs have amazing retentiveness of the purely physiological sort. Men without this

retentiveness may excel in the quality of their work at this point or at that, but will never do such mighty

But there comes a time of life for all of us when we can do no more than hold our own in the way of

acquisitions, when the old paths fade as fast as the new ones form in our brain, and when we forget in a week

quite as much as we can learn in the same space of time. This equilibrium may last many, many years. In

extreme old age it is upset in the reverse direction, and forgetting prevails over acquisition, or rather there is

no acquisition. Brainpaths are so transient that in the course of a few minutes of conversation the same

question is asked and its answer forgotten half a dozen times. Then the superior tenacity of the paths formed

in childhood becomes manifest: the dotard will retrace the facts of his earlier years after he has lost all those

It is obvious that the more there are of such paths as M N in the brain, and the more of such possible cues

or occasions for the recall of n in the mind, the prompter and surer, on the whole, the memory of n will be,

the more frequently one will be reminded of it, the more avenues of approach to it one will possess. In mental

terms, the more other facts a fact is associated with in the mind, the better possession of it our memory

retains. Each of its associates becomes a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up by when sunk beneath

the surface. Together, they form a network of attachments by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our

thought. The 'secret of a good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with

every fact we care to retain. But this forming of associations with a fact, what is it but thinking about the fact

as much as possible? Briefly, then, of two men with the same outward experiences and the same amount of

mere native tenacity, the one who THINKS over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic

relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory. We see examples of this on every hand. Most

men have a good memory for facts connected with their own pursuits. The college athlete who remains a

dunce at his books will astonish you by his knowledge of men's 'records' in various feats and games, and will

be a walking dictionary of sporting statistics. The reason is that he is constantly going over these things in his

mind, and comparing and making series of them. They form for him not so many odd facts, but a

conceptsystem so they stick. So the merchant remembers prices, the politician other politicians' speeches

and votes, with a copiousness which amazes outsiders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on

these subjects easily explains. The great memory for facts which a Darwin and a Spencer reveal in their

books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a brain with only a middling degree of

physiological retentiveness. Let a man early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of

evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Their relations to the theory

will hold them fast; and the more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition will become.

Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him

and forgotten as soon as heard. An ignorance almost as encyclop�dic as his erudition may coexist with the

latter, and hide, as it were, in the interstices of its web. Those who have had much to do with scholars and

In a system, every fact is connected with every other by some thoughtrelation. The consequence is that

every fact is retained by the combined suggestive power of all the other facts in the system, and forgetfulness

The reason why cramming is such a bad mode of study is now made clear. I mean by cramming that way of

preparing for examinations by committing 'points' to memory during a few hours or days of intense

application immediately preceding the final ordeal, little or no work having been performed during the

previous course of the term. Things learned thus in a few hours, on one occasion, for one purpose, cannot

possibly have formed many associations with other things in the mind. Their brainprocesses are led into by

few paths, and are relatively little liable to be awakened again. Speedy oblivion is the almost inevitable fate

of all that is committed to memory in this simple way. Whereas, on the contrary, the same materials taken in

gradually, day after day, recurring in different contexts, considered in various relations, associated with other

external incidents, and repeatedly reflected on, grow into such a system, form such connections with the rest

of the mind's fabric, lie open to so many paths of approach, that they remain permanent possessions. This is

the intellectual reason why habits of continuous application should be enforced in educational establishments.

Of course there is no moral turpitude in cramming. If it led to the desired end of secure learning it would be

infinitely the best method of study. But it does not; and students themselves should understand the reason

It will now appear clear that all improvement of the memory lies in the line of ELABORATING THE

ASSOCIATES of each of the several things to be remembered. No amount of culture would seem capable of

modifying a man's GENERAL retentiveness. This is a physiological quality, given once for all with his

organization, and which he can never hope to change. It differs no doubt in disease and health; and it is a fact

of observation that it is better in fresh and vigorous hours than when we are fagged or ill. We may say, then,

that a man's native tenacity will fluctuate somewhat with his hygiene, and that whatever is good for his tone

of health will also be good for his memory. We may even say that whatever amount of intellectual exercise is

bracing to the general tone and nutrition of the brain will also be profitable to the general retentiveness. But

more than this we cannot say; and this, it is obvious, is far less than most people believe.

It is, in fact, commonly thought that certain exercises, systematically repeated, will strengthen, not only a

man's remembrance of the particular facts used in the exercises, but his faculty for remembering facts at

large. And a plausible case is always made out by saying that practice in learning words by heart makes it

easier to learn new words in the same way.[20] If this be true, then what I have just said is false, and the

whole doctrine of memory as due to 'paths' must be revised. But I am disposed to think the alleged fact

untrue. I have carefully questioned several mature actors on the point, and all have denied that the practice of

learning parts has made any such difference as is alleged. What it has done for them is to improve their power

of studying a part systematically. Their mind is now full of precedents in the way of intonation, emphasis,

gesticulation; the new words awaken distinct suggestions and decisions; are caught up, in fact, into a

preexisting network, like the merchant's prices, or the athlete's store of 'records,' and are recollected easier,

although the mere native tenacity is not a whit improved, and is usually, in fact, impaired by age. It is a case

of better remembering by better thinking. Similarly when schoolboys improve by practice in ease of learning

by heart, the improvement will, I am sure, be always found to reside in the mode of study of the particular

piece (due to the greater interest, the greater suggestiveness, the generic similarity with other pieces, the more

sustained attention, etc., etc.), and not at all to any enhancement of the brute retentive power.

The error I speak of pervades an otherwise useful and judicious book, 'How to Strengthen the Memory,' by

Dr. Holbrook of New York.[21] The author fails to distinguish between the general physiological

retentiveness and the retention of particular things, and talks as if both must be benefited by the same means.

"I am now treating," he says, "a case of loss of memory in a person advanced in years, who did not know that

his memory had failed most remarkably till I told him of it. He is making vigorous efforts to bring it back

again, and with partial success. The method pursued is to spend two hours daily, one in the morning and one

in the evening, in exercising this faculty. The patient is instructed to give the closest attention to all that he

learns, so that it shall be impressed on his mind clearly. He is asked to recall every evening all the facts and

experiences of the day, and again the next morning. Every name heard is written down and impressed on his

mind clearly, and an effort made to recall it at intervals. Ten names from among public men are ordered to be

committed to memory every week. A verse of poetry is to be learned, also a verse from the Bible, daily. He is

asked to remember the number of the page in any book where any interesting fact is recorded. These and

I find it very hard to believe that the memory of the poor old gentleman is a bit the better for all this torture

except in respect of the particular facts thus wrought into it, the occurrences attended to and repeated on those

days, the names of those politicians, those Bible verses, etc., etc. In another place Dr. Holbrook quotes the

account given by the late Thurlow Weed, journalist and politician, of his method of strengthening his

"My memory was a sieve. I could remember nothing. Dates, names, appointments, faces everything

escaped me. I said to my wife, 'Catherine, I shall never make a successful politician, for I cannot remember,

and that is a prime necessity of politicians.' My wife told me I must train my memory. So when I came home

that night, I sat down alone and spent fifteen minutes trying silently to recall with accuracy the principal

events of the day. I could remember but little at first; now I remember that I could not then recall what I had

for breakfast. After a few days' practice I found I could recall more. Events came back to me more minutely,

more accurately, and more vividly than at first. After a fortnight or so of this, Catherine said, 'Why don't you

relate to me the events of the day, instead of recalling them to yourself? It would be interesting, and my

interest in it would be a stimulus to you.' Having great respect for my wife's opinion, I began a habit of oral

confession, as it were, which was continued for almost fifty years. Every night, the last thing before retiring, I

told her everything I could remember that had happened to me or about me during the day. I generally

recalled the dishes I had had for breakfast, dinner, and tea; the people I had seen and what they had said; the

editorials I had written for my paper, giving her a brief abstract of them. I mentioned all the letters I had sent

and received, and the very language used, as nearly as possible; when I had walked or ridden I told her

everything that had come within my observation. I found I could say my lessons better and better every year,

and instead of the practice growing irksome, it became a pleasure to go over again the events of the day. I am

indebted to this discipline for a memory of somewhat unusual tenacity, and I recommend the practice to all

who wish to store up facts, or expect to have much to do with influencing men."[23]

I do not doubt that Mr. Weed's practical command of his past experiences was much greeter after fifty years

of this heroic drill than it would have been without it. Expecting to give his account in the evening, he

attended better to each incident of the day, named and conceived it differently, set his mind upon it, and in the

evening went over it again. He did more thinking about it, and it stayed with him in consequence. But I

venture to affirm pretty confidently (although I know how foolish it often is to deny a fact on the strength of a

theory) that the same matter, casually attended to and not thought about, would have stuck in his memory no

better at the end than at the beginning of his years of heroic selfdiscipline. He had acquired a better method

of noting and recording his experiences, but his physiological retentiveness was probably not a bit

All improvement of memory consists, then, in the improvement of one's habitual methods of recording facts.

In the traditional terminology methods are divided into the mechanical, the ingenious, and the judicious.

The mechanical methods consist in the intensification, prolongation, and repetition of the impression to be

remembered. The modern method of teaching children to read by blackboard work, in which each word is

impressed by the fourfold channel of eye, ear, voice, and hand, is an example of an improved mechanical

Judicious methods of remembering things are nothing but logical ways of conceiving them and working them

into rational systems, classifying them, analyzing them into parts, etc., etc. All the sciences are such methods.

Of ingenious methods, many have been invented, under the name of technical memories. By means of these

systems it is often possible to retain entirely disconnected facts, lists of names, numbers, and so forth, so

multitudinous as to be entirely unrememberable in a natural way. The method consists usually in a framework

learned mechanically, of which the mind is supposed to remain in secure and permanent possession. Then,

whatever is to be remembered is deliberately associated by some fanciful analogy or connection with some

part of this framework, and this connection thenceforward helps its recall. The best known and most used of

these devices is the figurealphabet. To remember numbers, e.g., a figurealphabet is first formed, in which

each numerical digit is represented by one or more letters. The number is then translated into such letters as

will best make a word, if possible a word suggestive of the object to which the number belongs. The word

"To briefly show its use, suppose it is desired to fix 1142 feet in a second as the velocity of sound: t, t, r, n,

are the letters and order required. Fill up with vowels forming a phrase, like 'tight run' and connect it by some

such flight of the imagination as that if a man tried to keep up with the velocity of sound, he would have a

tight run. When you recall this a few days later great care must be taken not to get confused with the velocity

of light, nor to think he had a hard run which would be 3000 feet too fast."[25]

Dr. Pick and others use a system which consists in linking together any two ideas to be remembered by

means of an intermediate idea which will be suggested by the first and suggest the second, and so on through

"Let us suppose that we are to retain the following series of ideas: garden, hair, watchman, philosophy,

copper, etc.... We can combine the ideas in this manner: garden, plant, hair of plant hair; hair, bonnet,

watchman; watchman, wake, study, philosophy; philosophy, chemistry, copper; etc. etc." (Pick.)[26]

It is matter of popular knowledge that an impression is remembered the better in proportion as it is

The effect of recency is all but absolutely constant. Of two events of equal significance the remoter one will

be the one more likely to be forgotten. The memories of childhood which persist in old age can hardly be

compared with the events of the day or hour which are forgotten, for these latter are trivial oncerepeated

things, whilst the childish reminiscences have been wrought into us during the retrospective hours of our

entire intervening life. Other things equal, at all times of life recency promotes memory. The only exception I

can think of is the unaccountable memory of certain moments of our childhood, apparently not fitted by their

intrinsic interest to survive, but which are perhaps the only incidents we can remember out of the year in

which they occurred. Everybody probably has isolated glimpses of certain hours of his nursery life, the

position in which he stood or sat, the light of the room, what his father or mother said, etc. These moments so

oddly selected for immunity from the tooth of time probably owe their good fortune to historical peculiarities

which it is now impossible to trace. Very likely we were reminded of them again soon after they occurred;

that became a reason why we should again recollect them, etc., so that at last they became ingrained.

The attention which we lend to an experience is proportional to its vivid or interesting character; and it is a

notorious fact that what interests us most vividly at the time is, other things equal, what we remember best.

An impression may be so exciting emotionally as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues; and thus

originates a pathological delusion. "A woman attacked by robbers takes all the men whom she sees, even her

own son, for brigands bent on killing her. Another woman sees her child run over by a horse; no amount of

reasoning, not even the sight of the living child, will persuade her that he is not killed. A woman called 'thief'

in a dispute remains convinced that every one accuses her of stealing (Esquirol). Another, attacked with

mania at the sight of the fires in her street during the Commune, still after six months sees in her delirium

On the general effectiveness of both attention and repetition I cannot do better than copy what M. Taine has

"If we compare different sensations, images, or ideas, we find that their aptitudes for revival are not equal. A

large number of them are obliterated, and never reappear through life; for instance, I drove through Paris a

day or two ago, and though I saw plainly some sixty or eighty new faces, I cannot now recall any one of

them; some extraordinary circumstance, a fit of delirium, or the excitement of haschish would be necessary to

give them a chance of revival. On the other hand, there are sensations with a force of revival which nothing

destroys or decreases. Though, as a rule, time weakens and impairs our strongest sensations, these reappear

entire and intense, without having lost a particle of their detail, or any degree of their force. M. Brierre de

Boismont, having suffered when a child from a disease of the scalp, asserts that 'after fiftyfive years have

elapsed he can still feel his hair pulled out under the treatment of the skullcap.' For my own part, after

thirty years, I remember feature for feature the appearance of the theatre to which I was taken for the first

time. From the third row of boxes, the body of the theatre appeared to me an immense well, red and flaming,

swarming with heads; below, on the right, on a narrow floor, two men and a woman entered, went out, and

reentered, made gestures, and seemed to me like lively dwarfs: to my great surprise, one of these dwarfs fell

on his knees, kissed the lady's hand, then hid behind a screen; the other, who was coming in, seemed angry,

and raised his arm. I was then seven, I could understand nothing of what was going on; but the well of

crimson velvet was so crowded, gilded, and bright, that after a quarter of an hour I was, as it were,

"Every one of us may find similar recollections in his memory, and may distinguish in them a common

character. The primitive impression has been accompanied by an extraordinary degree of attention, either as

being horrible or delightful, or as being new, surprising, and out of proportion to the ordinary run of our life;

this it is we express by saying that we have been strongly impressed; that we were absorbed, that we could

not think of anything else; that our other sensations were effaced; that we were pursued all the next day by

the resulting image; that it beset us, that we could not drive it away; that all distractions were feeble beside it.

It is by force of this disproportion that impressions of childhood are so persistent; the mind being quite fresh,

ordinary objects and events are surprising. At present, after seeing so many large halls and full theatres, it is

impossible for me, when I enter one, to feel swallowed up, engulfed, and, as it were, lost in a huge dazzling

well. The medical man of sixty, who has experienced much suffering, both personally and in imagination,

"Whatever may be the kind of attention, voluntary or involuntary, it always acts alike; the image of an object

or event is capable of revival, and of complete revival, in proportion to the degree of attention with which we

have considered the object or event. We put this rule in practice at every moment in ordinary life. If we are

applying ourselves to a book or are in lively conversation, while an air is being sung in the adjoining room,

we do not retain it; we know vaguely that there is singing going on, and that is all. We then stop our reading

or conversation, we lay aside all internal preoccupations and external sensations which our mind or the outer

world can throw in our way; we close our eyes, we cause a silence within and about us, and, if the air is

repeated, we listen. We say then that we have listened with all our ears, that we have applied our whole

minds. If the air is a fine one, and has touched us deeply, we add that we have been transported, uplifted,

ravished, that we have forgotten the world and ourselves; that for some minutes our soul was dead to all but

"This exclusive momentary ascendency of one of our states of mind explains the greater durability of its

aptitude for revival and for more complete revival. As the sensation revives in the image, the image reappears

with a force proportioned to that of the sensation. What we meet with in the first state is also to be met with

in the second, since the second is but a revival of the first. So, in the struggle for life, in which all our images

are constantly engaged, the one furnished at the outset with most force retains in each conflict, by the very

law of repetition which gives it being, the capacity of treading down its adversaries; this is why it revives,

incessantly at first, then frequently, until at last the laws of progressive decay, and the continual accession of

new impressions bake away its preponderance, and its competitors, finding a clear field, are able to develop

"A second cause of prolonged revivals is repetition itself. Every one knows that to learn a thing we must not

only consider it attentively, but consider it repeatedly. We say as to this in ordinary language, that an

impression many times renewed is imprinted more deeply and exactly on the memory. This is how we

contrive to retain a language, airs of music, passages of verse or prose, the technical terms and propositions of

a science, and still more so the ordinary facts by which our conduct is regulated. When, from the form and

color of a currantjelly, we think of its taste, or, when tasting it with our eyes shut, we magine [sic] its red

tint and the brilliancy of a quivering slice, the images in our mind are brightened by repetition. Whenever we

eat, or drink, or walk, or avail ourselves of any of our senses, or commence or continue any action whatever,

the same thing happens. Every man and every animal thus possesses at every moment of life a certain stock

of clear and easily reviving images, which had their source in the past in a confluence of numerous

experiences, and are now fed by a flow of renewed experiences. When I want to go from the Tuileries to the

Panth�on, or from my study to the diningroom, I foresee at every turn the colored forms which will present

themselves to my sight; it is otherwise in the case of a house where I have spent two hours, or of a town

where I have stayed three days; after ten years have elapsed the images will be vague, full of blanks,

sometimes they will not exist, and I shall have to seek my way or shall lose myself. This new property of

images is also derived from the first. As every sensation tends to revive in its image, the sensation twice

repeated will leave after it a double tendency, that is, provided the attention be as great the second time as the

first; usually this is not the case, for, the novelty diminishing, the interest diminishes; but if other

circumstances renew the interest, or if the will renovates the attention, the incessantly increasing tendency

will incessantly increase the chances of the resurrection and integrity of the image."[28]

If a phenomenon is met with, however, too often, and with too great a variety of contexts, although its image

is retained and reproduced with correspondingly great facility, it fails to come up with any one particular

setting, and the projection of it backwards to a particular past date consequently does not come about. We

recognize but do not remember it its associates form too confused a cloud. No one is said to remember,

"that the object at which he looks has an opposite side; or that a certain modification of the visual impression

implies a certain distance; or that the thing he sees moving about is a live animal. To ask a man whether he

remembers that the sun shines, that fire burns, that iron is hard, would be a misuse of language. Even the

almost fortuitous connections among our experiences cease to be classed as memories when they have

become thoroughly familiar. Though, on hearing the voice of some unseen person slightly known to us, we

say we recollect to whom the voice belongs, we do not use the same expression respecting the voices of those

with whom we live. The meanings of words which in childhood have to be consciously recalled seem in adult

These are cases where too many paths, leading to too diverse associates, block each other's way, and all that

the mind gets along with its object is a fringe of felt familiarity or sense that there are associates. A similar

result comes about when a definite setting is only nascently aroused. We then feel that we have seen the

object already, but when or where we cannot say, though we may seem to ourselves to be on the brink of

saying it. That nascent cerebral excitations can effect consciousness with a sort of sense of the imminence of

that which stronger excitations would make us definitely feel, is obvious from what happens when we seek to

remember a name. It tingles, it trembles on the verge, but does not come. Just such a tingling and trembling

of unrecovered associates is the penumbra of recognition that may surround any experience and make it seem

There is a curious experience which everyone seems to have had the feeling that the present moment in its

completeness has been experienced before we were saying just this thing, in just this place, to just these

people, etc. This 'sense of preexistence' has been treated as a great mystery and occasioned much

speculation. Dr. Wigan considered it due to a dissociation of the action of the two hemispheres, one of them

becoming conscious a little later than the other, but both of the same fact.[31] I must confess that the quality

of mystery seems to me a little strained. I have over and over again in my own case succeeded in resolving

the phenomenon into a case of memory, so indistinct that whilst some past circumstances are presented again,

the others are not. The dissimilar portions of the past do not arise completely enough at first for the date to be

identified. All we get is the present scene with a general suggestion of pastness about it. That faithful

observer, Prof. Lazarus, interprets the phenomenon the same way;[32] and it is noteworthy that just as soon

as the past context grows complete and distinct the emotion of weirdness fades from the experience.

have recently been made in Germany. Professor Ebbinghaus, in a really heroic series of daily observations of

more than two years' duration, examined the powers of retention and reproduction. He learned lists of

meaningless syllables by heart, and tested his recollection of them from day to day. He could not remember

more than 7 after a single reading. It took, however, 16 readings to remember 12, 44 readings to remember

24, and 55 readings to remember 26 syllables, the moment of 'remembering' being here reckoned as the first

moment when the list could be recited without a fault.[33] When a 16syllable list was read over a certain

number of times on one day, and then studied on the day following until remembered, it was found that the

number of seconds saved in the study on the second day was proportional to the number of readings on the

first proportional, that is, within certain rather narrow limits, for which see the text.[34] No amount of

repetition spent on nonsenseverses over a certain length enabled Dr. Ebbinghaus to retain them without

error for 24 hours. In forgetting such things as these lists of syllables, the loss goes on very much more

rapidly at first than later on. He measured the loss by the number of seconds re quired to relearn the list after

it had been once learned. Roughly speaking, if it took a thousand seconds to learn the list, and five hundred to

relearn it, the loss between the two learnings would have been one half. Measured in this way, full half of the

forgetting seems to occur within the first halfhour, whilst only four fifths is forgotten at the end of a month.

The nature of this result might have been anticipated, but hardly its numerical proportions. Dr. Ebbinghaus

"The initial rapidity, as well as the final slowness, as these were ascertained under certain experimental

conditions and for a particular individual,... may well surprise us. An hour after the work of learning had

ceased, forgetting was so far advanced that more than half of the original work had to be applied again before

the series of syllables could once more be reproduced. Eight hours later two thirds of the original labor had to

be applied. Gradually, however, the process of oblivion grew slower, so that even for considerable stretches

of time the losses were but barely ascertainable. After 24 hours a third, after 6 days a fourth, and after a

whole month a good fifth of the original labor remain in the shape of its aftereffects, and made the

But the most interesting result of all those reached by this author relates to the question whether ideas are

recalled only by those that previously came immediately before them, or whether an idea can possibly recall

another idea with which it was never in immediate contact, without passing through the intermediate mental

links. The question is of theoretic importance with regard to the way in which the process of 'association of

ideas' must be conceived; and Dr. Ebbinghaus's attempt is as successful as it is original, in bringing two

views, which seem at first sight inaccessible to proof, to a direct practical test, and giving the victory to one

of them. His experiments conclusively show that an idea is not only 'associated' directly with the one that

follows it, and with the rest through that, but that it is directly associated with all that are near it, though in

unequal degrees. He first measured the time needed to impress on the memory certain lists of syllables, and

then the time needed to impress lists of the same syllables with gaps between them. Thus, representing the

syllables by numbers, if the first list were 1, 2, 3, 4,... 13, 14, 15, 16, the second would be 1, 3, 5,...15, 2, 4,

Now, if 1 and 3 in the first list were learned in that order merely by 1 calling up 2, and by 2 calling up 3,

leaving out the 2 ought to leave 1 and 3 with no tie in the mind; and the second list ought to take as much

time in the learning as if the first list had never been heard of. If, on the other hand, 1 has a direct influence

on 3 as well as on 2, that influence should be exerted even when 2 is dropped out; and a person familiar with

the first list ought to learn the second one more rapidly than otherwise he could. This latter case is what

actually occurs; and Dr. Ebbinghaus has found that syllables originally separated by as many as seven

intermediaries still reveal, by the increased rapidity with which they are learned in order, the strength of the

tie that the original learning established between them, over the heads, so to speak, of all the rest. These last

results ought to make us careful, when we speak of nervous 'paths,' to use the word in no restricted sense.

They add one more fact to the set of facts which prove that association is subtler than consciousness, and that

a nerveprocess may, without producing consciousness, be effective in the same way in which consciousness

would have seemed to be effective if it had been there.[36] Evidently the path from 1 to 3 (omitting 2 from

consciousness) is facilitated, broadened perhaps, by the old path from 1 to 3 through 2 only the

component which shoots round through this latter way is too feeble to let 2 be thought as a distinct object.

"These tongues gave tones differing by 2 vibrations only in the two lower octaves, and by 4 vibrations in the

three higher octaves. In the first series of experiments a tone was selected, and, after sounding it for one

second, a second tone was sounded, which was either the same as the first, or different from it by 4, 8, or 12

vibrations in different series. The person experimented upon was to answer whether the second tone was the

same as the first, thus showing that he recognized it, or whether it was different, and, if so, whether it was

higher or lower. Of course, the interval of time between the two tones was an important factor. The

proportionate number of correct judgments, and the smallness of the difference of the vibrationrates of the

two tones, would measure the accuracy of the tonememory. It appeared that one could tell more readily

when the two tones were alike than when they were different, although in both cases the accuracy of the

memory was remarkably good.... The main point is the effect of the timeinterval between the tone and its

reproduction. This was varied from 1 second to 30 seconds, or even to 60 seconds or 120 seconds in some

experiments. The general result is, that the longer the interval, the smaller are the chances that the tone will

be recognized; and this process of forgetting takes place at first very rapidly, and then more slowly.... This

law is subject to considerable variations, one of which seems to be constant and is peculiar; namely, there

seems to be a rhythm in the memory itself, which, after falling, recovers slightly, and then fades out

This periodical renewal of acoustic memory would seem to be an important element in the production of the

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

"The memory of some men, it is true, is very tenacious, even to a miracle; but yet there seems to be a

constant decay of all our ideas, even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive; so

that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of

objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen. Thus

the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us; and our minds represent to us those tombs to

which we are fast approaching; where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by

time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colors; and, if not

sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear. How much the constitution of our bodies, and the make of our

animal spirits, are concerned in this; and whether the temper of the brain makes this difference, that in some it

retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like freestone, and in others little better than sand, I

shall not here inquire, though it may seem probable that the constitution of the body does sometimes

influence the memory; since we oftentimes find a disease quite strip the mind of all its ideas, and the flames

of a fever in a few days calcine all those images to dust and confusion, which seemed to be as lasting as if

This peculiar mixture of forgetting with our remembering is but one instance of our mind's selective activity.

Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious.

If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It

would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never

get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening;

and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts which filled them.

"As fast as the present enters into the past, our states of consciousness disappear and are obliterated. Passed in

review at a few days' distance, nothing or little of them remains: most of them have made shipwreck in that

great nonentity from which they never more will emerge, and they have carried with them the quantity of

duration which was inherent in their being. This deficit of surviving conscious states is thus a deficit in the

amount of represented time. The process of abridgment, of foreshortening, of which we have spoken,

presupposes this deficit. If, in order to reach a distant reminiscence, we had to go through the entire series of

terms which separate it from our present selves, memory would become impossible on account of the length

of the operation. We thus reach the paradoxical result that one condition of remembering is that we should

forget. Without totally forgetting a prodigious number of states of consciousness, and momentarily forgetting

a large number, we could not remember at all. Oblivion, except in certain cases, is thus no malady of

There are many irregularities in the process of forgetting which are as yet unaccounted for. A thing forgotten

on one day will be remembered on the next. Something we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but

all in vain, will, soon after we have given up the attempt, saunter into the mind, as Emerson somewhere says,

as innocently as if it had never been sent for. Experiences of bygone date will revive after years of absolute

oblivion, often as the result of some cerebral disease or accident which seems to develop latent paths of

association, as the photographer's fluid develops the picture sleeping in the collodion film. The oftenest

"In a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a young woman, who could neither read nor write, was seized with a

fever, and was said by the priests to be possessed of a devil, because she was heard talking Latin, Greek, and

Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were written out, and found to consist of sentences intelligible in

themselves, but having slight connection with each other. Of her Hebrew sayings, only a few could be traced

to the Bible, and most seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick was out of the question; the woman

was a simple creature; there was no doubt as to the fever. It was long before any explanation, save that of

demoniacal possession, could be obtained. At last the mystery was unveiled by a physician, who determined

to trace back the girl's history, and who, after much trouble, discovered that at the age of nine she had been

charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived till his death.

On further inquiry it appeared to have been the old man's custom for years to walk up and down a passage of

his house into which the kitchen opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice out of his books. The books

were ransacked, and among them were found several of the Greek and Latin Fathers, together with a

collection of Rabbinical writings. In these works so many of the passages taken down at the young woman's

bedside were identified that there could be no reasonable doubt as to their source."[40]

Hypnotic subjects as a rule forget all that has happened in their trance. But in a succeeding trance they will

often remember the events of a past one. This is like what happens in those cases of 'double personality' in

which no recollection of one of the lives is to be found in the other. We have already seen in an earlier

chapter that the sensibility often differs from one of the alternate personalities to another, and we have heard

M. Pierre Janet's theory that an�sthesias carry amnesias with them (see above, pp. 385 ff.). In certain cases

this is evidently so; the throwing of certain functional braintracts out of gear with others, so as to dissociate

their consciousness from that of the remaining brain, throws them out for both sensorial and ideational

service. M. Janet proved in various ways that what his patients forgot when an�sthetic they remembered

when the sensibility returned. For instance, he restored their tactile sense temporarily by means of electric

currents, passes, etc., and then made them handle various objects, such as keys and pencils, or make

particular movements, like the sign of the cross. The moment the an�sthesia returned they found it

impossible to recollect the objects or the acts. 'They had had nothing in their hands, they had done nothing,'

etc. The next day, however, sensibility being again restored by similar processes, they remembered perfectly

All these pathological facts are showing us that the sphere of possible recollection may be wider than we

think, and that in certain matters apparent oblivion is no proof against possible recall under other conditions.

They give no countenance, however, to the extravagant opinion that nothing we experience can be absolutely

forgotten. In real life, in spite of occasional surprises, most of what happens actually is forgotten. The only

reasons for supposing that if the conditions were forthcoming everything would revive are of a transcendental

sort. Sir Wm. Hamilton quotes and adopts them from the German writer Schmid. Knowledge being a

"this energy being once determined, it is natural that it should persist, until again annihilated by other causes.

This [annihilation] would be the case, were the mind merely passive.... But the mental activity, the act of

knowledge, of which I now speak, is more than this; it is an energy of the selfactive power of a subject one

and indivisible: consequently a part of the ego must be detached or annihilated, if a cognition once existent be

again extinguished. Hence it is that the problem most difficult of solution is not, how a mental activity

Those whom such an argument persuades may be left happy with their belief. Other positive argument there

When memory begins to decay, proper names are what go first, and at all times proper names are harder to

This seems due to the fact that common qualities and names have contracted an infinitely greater number of

associations in our mind than the names of most of the persons whom we know. Their memory is better

organized. Proper names as well organized as those of our family and friends are recollected as well as those

of any other objects.[43] 'Organization' means numerous associations; and the more numerous the

associations, the greater the number of paths of recall. For the same reason adjectives, conjunctions,

prepositions, and the cardinal verbs, those words, in short, which form the grammatical framework of all our

speech, are the very last to decay. Kussmaul[44] makes the following acute remark on this subject:

"The concreter a conception is, the sooner is its name forgotten. This is because our ideas of persons and

things are less strongly bound up with their names than with such abstractions as their business, their

circumstances, their qualities. We easily can imagine persons and things without their names, the sensorial

image of them being more important than that other symbolic image, their name. Abstract conceptions, on the

other hand, are only acquired by means of the words which alone serve to confer stability upon them. This is

why verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and still more adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions are more intimately

The disease called Aphasia, of which a little was said in Chapter II, has let in a flood of light on the

phenomenon of Memory, by showing the number of ways in which the use of a given object, like a word,

may be lost by the mind. We may lose our acoustic idea or our articulatory idea of it; neither without the

other will give up proper command of the word. And if we have both, but have lost the paths of association

between the braincentres which support the two, we are in as bad a plight. 'Ataxic' and 'amnesic' aphasia,

'worddeafness,' and 'associative aphasia' are all practical losses of wordmemory. We have thus, as M.

Ribot says, not memory so much as memories.[45] The visual, the tactile, the muscular, the auditory memory

may all vary independently of each other in the same individual; and different individuals may have them

developed in different degrees. As a rule, a man's memory is good in the departments in which his interest is

strong; but those departments are apt to be those in which his discriminative sensibility is high. A man with a

bad ear is not likely to have practically a good musical memory, or a purblind person to remember visual

appearance well. In a later chapter we shall see illustrations of the differences in men's imagining power.[46]

Mr. Galton, in his work on English Men of Science,[47] has given a very interesting collation of cases

showing individual variations in the type of memory, where it is strong. Some have it verbal. Others have it

good for facts and figures, others for form. Most say that what is to be remembered must first be rationally

There is an interesting fact connected with remembering, which, so far as I know, Mr. R. Verdon was the first

writer expressly to call attention to. We can set our memory as it were to retain things for a certain time, and

"Individuals often remember clearly and well up to the time when they have to use their knowledge, and then,

when it is no longer required, there follows a rapid and extensive decay of the traces. Many schoolboys forgot

their lessons after they have said them, many barristers forgot details got up for a particular case. Thus a boy

learns thirty lines of Homer, says them perfectly, and then forgets them so that he could not say five

consecutive lines the next morning, and a barrister may be one week learned in the mysteries of making

cogwheels, but in the next he may be well acquainted with the anatomy of the ribs instead."[49]

The rationale of this fact is obscure; and the existence of it ought to make us feel how truly subtle are the

"When the use of a record is withdrawn, and attention withdrawn from it, and we think no more about it, we

know that we experience a feeling of relief, and we may thus conclude that energy is in some way liberated.

If the... attention is not withdrawn, so that we keep the record in mind, we know that this feeling of relief

does not take place.... Also we are well aware, not only that after this feeling of relief takes place, the record

does not seem so well conserved as before, but that we have real difficulty in attempting to remember it."

This shows that we are not as entirely unconscious of a topic as we think, during the time in which we seem

"Practically," says Mr. Verdon, "we sometimes keep a matter in hand not exactly by attending to it, but by

keeping our attention referred to something connected with it from time to time. Translating this into the

language of physiology, we mean that by referring attention to a part within, or closely connected with, the

system of traces [paths] required to be remembered, we keep it well fed, so that the traces are preserved with

This is perhaps as near as we can get to an explanation. Setting the mind to remember a thing involves a

continual minimal irradiation of excitement into paths which lead thereto, involves the continued presence of

the thing in the 'fringe' of our consciousness. Letting the thing go involves withdrawal of the irradiation,

A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I

mean that in learning by heart (for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and

recollect by an effort from within, then to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way,

we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book once

more. The learning by heart means the formation of paths from a former set to a later set of cerebral

wordprocesses: call 1 and 2 in the diagram the processes in question; then when we remember by inward

effort, the path is formed by discharge from 1 to 2, just as it will afterwards be used. But when we excite 2 by

the eye, although the path 1 2 doubtless is then shot through also, the phenomenon which we are

discussing shows that the direct discharge from 1 into 2, unaided by the eyes, ploughs the deeper and more

permanent groove. There is, moreover, a greater amount of tension accumulated in the brain before the

discharge from 1 to 2, when the latter takes place unaided by the eye. This is proved by the general feeling of

strain in the effort to remember 2; and this also ought to make the discharge more violent and the path more

deep. A similar reason doubtless accounts for the familiar fact that we remember our own theories, our own

discoveries, combinations, inventions, in short whatever 'ideas' originate in our own brain, a thousand times

A word, in closing, about the metaphysics involved in remembering. According to the assumptions of this

book, thoughts accompany the brain's workings, and those thoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole

relation is one which we can only write down empirically, confessing that no glimmer of explanation of it is

yet in sight. That brains should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, this is the one mystery which

returns, no matter of what sort the consciousness and of what sort the knowledge may be. Sensations, aware

of mere qualities, involve the mystery as much as thoughts, aware of complex systems, involve it. To the

platonizing tradition in philosophy, however, this is not so. Sensational consciousness is something

quasimaterial, hardly cognitive, which one need not much wonder at. Relating consciousness is quite the

reverse, and the mystery of it is unspeakable. Professor Ladd, for example, in his usually excellent book,[50]

after well showing the matteroffact dependence of retention and reproduction on brainpaths, says:

"In the study of perception psychophysics can do much towards a scientific explanation. It can tell what

qualities of stimuli produce certain qualities of sensations; it can suggest a principle relating the quantity of

the stimuli to the intensity of the sensation; it can investigate the laws under which, by combined action of

various excitations, the sensations are combined [?] into presentations of sense; it can show how the

timerelations of the sensations and percepts in consciousness correspond to the objective relations in time of

the stimulations. But for that spiritual activity which actually puts together in consciousness the sensations, it

cannot even suggest the beginning of a physical explanation. Moreover, no cerebral process can be conceived

of, which in case it were known to exist could possibly be regarded as a fitting basis for this unifying

actus of mind. Thus also, and even more emphatically, must we insist upon the complete inability of

physiology to suggest an explanation for conscious memory, in so far as it is memory that is, in so far as it

most imperatively calls for explanation.... The very essence of the act of memory consists in the ability to

say: This afterimage is the image of a percept I had a moment since; or this image of memory is the image

of the percept I had at a certain time I do not remember precisely how long since. It would, then, be quite

contrary to the facts to hold that, when an image of memory appears in consciousness, it is recognized as

belonging to a particular original percept on account of its perceived resemblance to this percept. The original

percept does not exist and will never be reproduced. Even more palpably false and absurd would it be to hold

that any similarity of the impressions or processes in end organs or central organs explains the act of

conscious memory. Consciousness knows nothing of such similarity; knows nothing even of the existence of

nervous impressions and processes. Moreover, we could never know two impressions or processes that are

separated in time to be similar, without involving the same inexplicable act of memory. It is a fact of

consciousness on which all possibility of connected experience and of recorded and cumulative human

knowledge is dependent that certain phases or products of consciousness appear with a claim to stand for (to

represent)[51] past experiences to which they are regarded as in some respect similar. It is this peculiar claim

in consciousness which constitutes the essence of an act of memory; it is this which makes the memory

wholly inexplicable as a mere persistence or recurrence of similar impressions. It is this which makes

conscious memory a spiritual phenomenon, the explanation of which, as arising out of nervous processes and

conditions, is not simply undiscovered in fact, but utterly incapable of approach by the imagination. When,

then, we speak of a physical basis of memory, recognition must be made of the complete inability of science

to suggest any physical process which can be conceived of as correlated with that peculiar and mysterious

actus of the mind, connecting its present and its past, which constitutes the essence of memory."

This passage seems to me characteristic of the reigning halfway modes of thought. It puts the difficulties in

the wrong places. At one moment it seems to admit with the cruder sensationalists that the material of our

thoughts is independent sensations reproduced, and that the 'putting together' of these sensations would be

knowledge, if it could only be brought about, the only mystery being as to the what 'actus' can bring it about.

At another moment it seems to contend that even this sort of 'combining' would not be knowledge, because

certain of the elements con nected must 'claim to represent or stand for' past originals, which is incompatible

with their being mere images revived. The result is various confused and scattered mysteries and unsatisfied

intellectual desires. But why not 'pool' our mysteries into one great mystery, the mystery that brainprocesses

occasion knowledge at all? It is surely no different mystery to feel myself by means of one brainprocess

writing at this table now, and by means of a different brainprocess a year hence to remember myself writing.

All that psychology can do is to seek to determine what the several brainprocesses are; and this, in a

wretchedly imperfect way, is what such writings as the present chapter have begun to do. But of 'images

reproduced,' and 'claiming to represent,' and 'put together by a unifying actus,' I have been silent, because

such expressions either signify nothing, or they are only roundabout ways of simply saying that the past is

known when certain brainconditions are fulfilled, and it seems to me that the straightest and shortest way of

For a history of opinion about Memory, and other bibliographic references, I must refer to the admirable little

monograph on the subject by Mr. W. H. Burnham in the American Journal of Psychology, vols. I and II.

Useful books are: D. Kay's Memory, What It Is, and How to Improve It (1888); and F. Fauth's Das

[2] Professor Richet has therefore no right to say, as he does in another place (Revue Philosophique, XXI.

570): "Without memory no conscious sensation, without memory no consciousness." All he is entitled to say

is: "Without memory no consciousness known outside of itself." Of the sort of consciousness that is an object

for later states, and becomes as it were permanent, he gives a good example: "Who of us, alas! has not

experienced a bitter and profound grief, the immense laceration caused by the death of some cherished

fellowbeing? Well, in these great griefs the present endures neither for a minute, for an hour, nor for a day,

but for weeks and months. The memory of the cruel moment will not efface itself from consciousness. It

disappears not, but remains living, present, coexisting with the multitude of other sensations which are

juxtaposed in consciousness alongside of this one persistent emotion which is felt always in the present tense.

A long time is needed ere we can attain to forgetting it, ere we can make it enter into the past. H�ret lateri

[3] This is the primary positive afterimage. According to Helmholtz, one third of a second is the most

favorable length of exposure to the light for producing it. Longer exposure, complicated by subsequent

admission of light to the eye, results in the ordinary negative and complementary afterimages, with their

changes, which may (if the original impression was brilliant and the fixation long) last for many minutes.

Fechner gives the name of memoryafterimages (Psychophysik, II 492) to the instantaneous positive

effects, and distinguishes them from ordinary after images by the following characters: 1) Their originals

must have been attended to only such parts of a compound original as have been attended to appearing. This

is not the case in common visual afterimages. 2) The strain of attention towards them is inward, as in

ordinary remembering, not outward, as in observing a common afterimage. 3) A short fixation of the

original is better for the memoryafterimage, a long one for the ordinary afterimage. 4) The colors of the

[6] Richet says: "The present has a certain duration, a variable duration, sometimes a rather long one, which

comprehends all the time occupied by the afterreverberation [retentissement, afterimage] of a sensation.

For example, if the reverberation of an electric shock within our nerves lasts ten minutes, for that electric

shock there is a present of ten minutes. On the other hand, a feebler sensation will have a shorter present. But

in every case, for a conscious sensation [I should say for a remembered sensation] to occur, there must be a

present of a certain duration, of a few seconds at least." We have seen in the last chapter that it is hard to trace

the backward limits of this immediately intuited duration, or specious present. The figures which M. Richet

[8] The primary afterimage itself cannot be utilized if the stimulus is too brief. Mr. Cattell found

(Psychologische Studien, III. p. 93 ff.) that the color of a light must fall upon the eye for a period varying

from 0.00275 to 0.006 of a second, in order to be recognized for what it is. Letters of the alphabet and

familiar words require from 0.00075 to 0.00175 sec. truly an interval extremely short. Some letters, E for

example, are harder than others. In 1871 Helmholtz and Boxt had ascertained that when an impression was

immediately followed by another, the latter quenched the former and prevented it from being known to later

consciousness. The first stimulus was letters of the alphabet, the second a bright white disk. "With an interval

of 0.0048 sec. between the two excitations [I copy here the abstract in Ladd's Physiological Psychology, p.

480], the disk appeared as scarcely a trace of a weak shimmer; with an interval of 0.0096 sec., letters

appeared in the shimmer one or two which could be partially recognized when the interval increased to

0.0144 sec. When the interval was made 0.0192 sec. the objects were a little more clearly discerned; at

0.0336 sec. four letters could be well recognized; at 0.0432 sec., five letters; and at 0.0528 sec. all the letters

[9] When the past is recalled symbolically, or conceptually only, it is true that no such copy need be there. In

no sort of conceptual knowledge is it requisite that definitely resembling images be there (cf. pp. 471 ff.). But

as all conceptual knowledge stands for intuitive knowledge, and terminates therein, I abstract from this

complication, and confine myself to those memories in which the past is directly imaged in the mind, or, as

[10] E.g. Spencer, Psychology, I. p. 448. How do the believers in the sufficiency of the 'image' formulate the

cases where we remember that something did not happen that we did not wind our watch, did not lock the

door, etc.? It is very hard to account for these memories of omission. The image of winding the watch is just

as present to my mind now when I remember that I did not wind it as if I remembered that I did. It must be a

difference in the mode of feeling the image which leads me to such different conclusions in the two cases.

When I remember that I did wind it, I feel it grown together with its associates of past date and place. When I

remember that I did not, it keeps aloof; the associates fuse with each other, but not with it. This sense of

fusion, of the belonging together of things, is a most subtle relation; the sense of nonfusion is an equally

subtle one. Both relations demand most complex mental processes to know them, processes quite different

from that mere presence or absence of an image which does such service in the cruder books.

[12] Analysis, I. 3301. Mill believed that the various things remembered, the self included, enter

consciousness in the form of separate ideas, but so rapidly that they are 'all clustered into one.' "Ideas called

up in close conjunction... assume, even when there is the greatest complexity, the appearance, not of many

ideas, but of one" (vol. I. p. 123). This mythology does not impair the accuracy of his description of

[14] Professor Bain adds, in a note to this passage of Mill's: "This process seems best expressed by laying

down a law of Compound or Composite Association, under which a plurality of feeble links of connection

[17] The only fact which might plausibly be alleged against this view is the familiar one that we may feel the

lapse of time in an experience so monotonous that its earlier portions can have no 'associates' different from

its later ones. Sit with closed eyes, for example, and steadily pronounce some vowelsound, thus,

aaaaa.... thinking only of the sound. Nothing changes during the time occupied by the

experiment, and yet at the end of it you know that its beginning was far away. I think, however, that a close

attention to what happens during this experiment shows that it does not violate in the least the conditions of

recall laid down in the text; and that if the moment to which we mentally hark back lie many seconds behind

the present instant, it always has different associates by which we define its date. Thus it was when I had just

breathed out, or in; or it was the 'first moment' of the performance, the one 'preceded by silence;' or it was

'one very close to that;' or it was 'one when we were looking forward instead of back, its now;' or it is simply

represented by a number and conceived symbolically with no definite image of its date. It seems to me that I

have no really intuitive discrimination of the different past moments after the experience has gone on some

little time, but that back of the 'specious present' they all fuse into a single conception of the kind of thing that

has been going on, with a more or less clear sense of the total time it has lasted, this latter being based on an

automatic counting of the successive pulses of thought by which the process is from moment to moment

recognized as being always the same. Within the few seconds which constitute the specious present there is

an intuitive perception of the successive moments. But these moments, of which we have a primary

memoryimage, are not properly recalled from the past, our knowledge of them is in no way analogous to a

[19] Not that mere native tenacity will make a man great. It must be coupled with great passions and great

intellect besides. Imbeciles sometimes have extraordinary desultory memory. Drobisch describes (Empirische

Psychol., p. 95) the case of a young man whom he examined. He had with difficulty been taught to read and

speak. "But if two or three minutes were allowed him to peruse an octave page, he then could spell the single

words out from his memory as well as if the book lay open before him.... That there was no deception I could

test by means of a new Latin lawdissertation which had just come into my hands, which he never could have

seen, and of which both subject and language were unknown to him. He read off [mentally] many lines,

skipping about too, of the page which had been given him to see, no worse than if the experiment had been

made with a child's story." Drobisch describes this case as if it were one of unusual persistence in the visual

image ['primary memory,' vide supra, p. 643]. But he adds that the youth 'remembered his pages a long time.'

In the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for Jan. 1871 (VI. 6) is an account by Mr. W. D Henkle (together

with the stock classic examples of preternatural memory) of an almost blind Pennsylvania farmer who could

remember the day of the week on which any date had fallen for fortytwo years past, and also the kind of

weather it was, and what he was doing on each of more than fifteen thousand days. Pity that such a

What these cases show is that the mere organic retentiveness of a man need bear no definite relation to his

other mental powers. Men of the highest general powers will often forget nothing, however insignificant. One

of the most generally accomplished men I know has a memory of this sort. He never keeps written note of

anything, yet is never at a loss for a fact which he has once heard. He remembers the old addresses of all his

New York friends, living in numbered streets, addresses which they themselves have long since moved away

from and forgotten. He says that he should probably recognize an individual fly, if he had seen him thirty

years previous he is, by the way, an entomologist. As an instance of his desultory memory, he was

introduced to a certain colonel at a club. The conversation fell upon the signs of age in man. The colonel

challenged him to estimate his age. He looked at him, and gave the exact day of his birth, to the wonder of

all. But the secret of this accuracy was that, having picked up some days previously an armyregister, he had

idly turned over its list of names, with dates of birth, graduation, promotions, etc., attached, and when the

colonel's name was mentioned to him at the club, these figures, on which he had not bestowed a moment's

thought, involuntarily surged up in his mind. Such a memory is of course a priceless boon.

[20] Cf. Ebbinghaus: Ueber das Ged�chtniss (1885), pp. 67, 45. One may hear a person say: "I have a very

poor memory, because I was never systematically made to learn poetry at school."

[21] How to Strengthen the Memory; or, The Natural and Scientific Methods of Never Forgetting. By M. H.

[24] In order to test the opinion so confidently expressed in the text, I have tried to see whether a certain

amount of daily training in learning poetry by heart will shorten the time it takes to learn an entirely different

kind of poetry. During eight successive days I learned 158 lines of Victor Hugo's 'Satyr.' The total number of

minutes required for this was 131 5/6 it should be said that I had learned nothing by heart for many years.

I then, working for twentyodd minutes daily, learned the entire first book of Paradise Lost, occupying 38

days in the process. After this training I went back to Victor Hugo's poem, and found that 158 additional lines

(divided exactly as on the former occasion) took me 151 1/2 minutes. In other words, I committed my Victor

Hugo to memory before the training at the rate of a line in 50 seconds, after the training at the rate of a line in

57 seconds, just the opposite result from that which the popular view would lead one to expect. But as I was

peceptibly tagged with other work at the time of the second batch of Victor Hugo, I thought that might

explain the retardation; so I persuaded several other persons to repeat the test.

Dr. W. H. Burnham learned 16 lines of In Memoriam for 8 days; time, 1417 minutes daily average 14

3/4. He then trained himself on Schiller's translation of the second book of the �neid into German, 16 lines

daily for 26 consecutive days. On returning to the same quantity of In Memoriam again, he found his

maximum time 20 minutes, minimum 10, average 14 27/48. As he feared the outer conditions might not have

been as favorable this time as the first, he waited a few days and got conditions as near as possible identical.

Mr. E. S. Drown tested himself on Virgil for 16 days, then again for 16 days, after training himself on Scott.

Average time before training, 13 minutes 26 seconds; after training, 12 minutes 16 seconds. [Sixteen days is

Mr. C. H. Baldwin took 10 lines for l5 days as his test, trained himself on 450 lines 'of an entirely different

verse,' and then took 15 days more of the former verse 10 lines a day. Average result: 3 minutes 41 seconds

Mr. E. A. Pease tested himself on Idyls of the King, and trained himself on Paradise Lost. Average result of 6

days each time: 14 minutes 34 seconds before, 14 minutes 55 seconds after, training. Mr. Burnham having

suggested that to eliminate facilitating effect entirely from the training verses one ought to test one's self � l�

Ebbinghaus on series of nonsensesyllables, having no analogy whatever with any system of expressive

verses. I induced two of my students to perform that experiment also. The record is unfortunately lost; but the

result was a very considerable shortening of the average time of the second series of nonsensesyllables,

learned after training. This seems to me, however, more to show the effects of rapid habituation to the

nonsenseverses themselves than those of the poetry used between them. But I mean to prosecute the

One of my students having quoted a clergyman of his acquaintance who had marvellously improved by

practice his power of learning his sermons by heart, I wrote to the gentleman for corroboration. I append his

reply, which shows that the increased facility is due rather to a change in his methods of learning than to his

native retentiveness having grown by exercise: "As for memory, mine has improved year by year, except

when in illhealth, like a gymnast's muscle. Before twenty it took three or four days to commit an hourlong

sermon; after twenty, two days, one day, half a day, and now one slow analytic, very attentive or adhesive

reading does it. But memory seems to me the most physical of intellectual powers. Bodily ease and freshness

have much to do with it. Then there is a great difference of facility in method. I used to commit sentence by

sentence. Now I take the idea of the whole, then its leading divisions, then its subdivisions, then its

[26] This system is carried out in great detail in a book called 'Memory Training,' by Wm. L. Evans (1889).

[27] Paulhan, L'Activit� mental, et les �1�ments de 1'Esprit (1889), p. 70.

[30] Professor H�ffding considers that the absence of contiguous associates distinctly thoughtof is a proof

that associative processes are not concerned in these cases of instantaneous recognition where we get a strong

sense of familiarity with the object, but no recall of previous time or place. His theory of what happens is that

the object before us, A, comes with a sense of familiarity whenever it awakens a slumbering image, a, of its

own past self, whilst without this image it seems unfamiliar. The quality of familiarity is due to the

coalescence of the two similar processes A + a in the brain (Psychologie, p. 188; Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil.,

XIII. 432 [1889]). This explanation is a very tempting one where the phenomenon of recognition is reduced

to its simplest terms. Experiments have been performed in Wundt's laboratory (by Messrs. Wolfe, see below,

p. 679, and Lehmann (Philosophische Studien,v. 96)), in which a person had to tell out of several closely

resembling sensible impressions (sounds, tints of color) presented, which of them was the same with one

presented a moment before. And it does seem here as if the fading process in the justexcited tract must

combine with the process of the new impression to give to the latter a peculiar subjective tinge which should

separate it from the impressions which the other objects give. But recognition of this immediate sort is

beyond our power after a very short time has intervened. A couple of minutes' interval is generally fatal to it;

so that it is impossible to conceive that our frequent instantaneous recognition of a face, e.g., as having been

met before, takes place by any such simple process. Where we associate a head of classification with the

object, the timeinterval has much less effect. Dr. Lehmann could identify shades of gray much more

successfully and permanently after mentally attaching names or numbers to them. Here it is the recall of the

contiguous associate, the number or name, which brings about the recognition. Where an experience is

complex, each element of the total object has had the other elements for its past contiguous associates. Each

element thus tends to revive the other elements from within, at the same time that the outward object is

making them revive from without. We have thus, whenever we meet a familiar object, that sense of

expectation gratified which is so large a factor in our �sthetic emotions; and even were there no 'fringe of

tendency' toward the arousal of extrinsic associates (which there certainly always is), still this intrinsic play

of mutual association among the parts would give a character of ease to familiar percepts which would make

of them a distinct subjective class. A process fills its old bed in a different way from that in which it makes a

new bed. One can appeal to introspection for proof. When, for example, I go into a slaughterhouse into

which I once went years ago, and the horrid din of the screaming hogs strikes me with the overpowering

sense of identification, when the bloodstained face of the 'sticker,' whom I had long ceased to think of, is

immediately recognized as the face that struck me so before; when the dingy and reddened woodwork, the

purpleflowing floor, the smell, the emotion of disgust, and all the details, in a word, forthwith reestablish

themselves as familiar occupants of my mind; the extraneous associates of the past time are anything but

prominent. Again, in trying to think of an engraving, say the portrait of Rajah Brooke prefixed to his

biography, I can do so only partially; but when I take down the book and, looking at the actual face, am

smitten with the intimate sense of its sameness with the one I was striving to resuscitate, where in the

experience is the element of extrinsic association? In both these cases it surely feels as if the moment when

the sense of recall is most vivid were also the moment when all extraneous associates were most suppressed.

The butcher's face recalls the former walls of the shambles; their thought recalls the groaning beasts, and they

the face again, just as I now experience them, with no different past ingredient. In like manner the peculiar

deepening of my consciousness of the Rajah's physiognomy at the moment when I open the book and say

"Ah! that's the very face!" is so intense as to banish from my mind all collateral circumstances, whether of the

present or of former experiences. But here it is the nose preparing tracts for the eye, the eye preparing them

for the mouth, the mouth preparing them for the nose again, all these processes involving paths of contiguous

association, as defended in the text. I cannot agree, therefore, with Prof. H�ffding, in spite of my respect for

him as a psychologist, that the phenomenon of instantaneous recognition is only explicable through the recall

and comparison of the thing with its own past image. Nor can I see in the facts in question any additional

ground for reinstating the general notion which we have already rejected (supra, p. 592) that a 'sensation' is

ever received into the mind by an 'image' of its own past self. It is received by contiguous associates; or if

they form too faint a fringe, its neural currents run into a bed which is still 'warm' from justprevious

currents, and which consequently feel different from currents whose bed is cold. I agree, however, with

H�ffding that Dr. Lehmann's experiments (many of them) do not seem to prove the point which he seeks to

establish. Lehmann, indeed, seems himself to believe that we recognize a sensation A by comparing it with

its own past image a (loc. cit. p. 114), in which opinion I altogether fail to concur.

[31] Duality of the Mind, p. 84. The same thesis is defended by the late Mr. R. H. Proctor, who gives some

cases rather hard to reconcile with my own proposed explanation, in 'Knowledge' for Nov. 8, 1884. See also

[36] All the inferences for which we can give no articulate reasons exemplify this law. In the chapter on

Perception we shall have innumerable examples of it. A good pathological illustration of it is given in the

curious observations of M. Binet on certain hysterical subjects, with an�sthetic hands, who saw what was

done with their hands as an independent vision but did not feel it. The hand being hidden by a screen, the

patient was ordered to look at another screen and to tell of any visual image which might project itself

thereon. Numbers would then come, corresponding to the number of times the insensible member was raised,

touched, etc. Colored lines and figures would come, corresponding to similar ones traced on the palm; the

hand itself, or its fingers, would come when manipulated; and, finally, objects placed in it would come; but

on the hand itself nothing could ever be felt. The whole phenomenon shows how an idea which remains itself

below the threshold of a certain conscious self may occasion associative effects therein. The skinsensations,

unfelt by the patient's primary consciousness, awaken, nevertheless, their usual visual associates therein.

[37] I copy from the abstract of Wolfe's paper in 'Science' for Nov. 19, 1886. The original is in

[40] Biographia Literaria, ed. 1847, I. 117(quoted in Carpenter's Mental Physiology, chapter X, which see for

a number of other cases, all unfortunately deficient, like this one, in the evidence of erect verification which

'psychical research 'demands). Compare also Th. Ribot, Diseases of Memory. chap. IV. The knowledge of

foreign words, etc., reported in trancemediums, etc., may perhaps often be explained by exaltation of

memory. An hysteroepileptic girl, whose case I quoted in Proc. of Am. Soc. for Psychical Research,

automatically writes an 'Ingoldsby Legend ' in several cantos, which her parents say she 'had never read.' Of

course she must have read or heard it, but perhaps never learned it. Of some macaronic LatinEnglish verses

about a seaserpent which her hand also wrote unconsciously, I have vainly sought the original (see Proc.,

[42] Cf. on this point J. Delb�uf, Le Sommeil et les R�ves (1885), p 119 ff., R. Verdon, Forgetfulness, in

[46] "Those who have a good memory for figures are in general those who know best how to handle them,

that is, those who are most familiar with their relations to each other and to things." (A. Maury, Le Sommeil

[48] For other examples see Hamilton's Lectures, II. 219, and A. Huber: Das Ged�chtniss, p. 36 ff.

Classics in the History of Psychology An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York

After inner perception, outer perception! The next three chapters will treat of the processes by which we

cognize all times the present world of space and the material things which it contains. And first, of the

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,' aprehended irrelatively to other things, the more the state mind approaches pure

sensation. The fuller of relations an object is, on the contrary; the more it is something eased, located,

measured, compared, assigned to a function, etc., etc.; the more unreservedly do we call the state mind a

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

outboard reality, and this makes them differ from 'thought' and 'conception,' whose objects do not appear

present in this immediate physical way. From the physio logical point of view both sensations and

perception differ from 'thoughts' (in the narrower sense of the word) in the fact that nervecurrents coming in

from the periphery are involved in their production. In perception these nervecurrents arouse voluminous

associative or reproductive processes in the cortex; but when sensation occurs alone, or with a minimum of

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 I

sensations, such matters finding their proper place, and being sufficiently well treated, in all the physiological

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

traininginstitutions for the blind they teach the pupils as much about light as in ordinary schools. Reflection,

refraction, the spectrum, the ethertheory, etc., are all studied. But the best taught bornblind 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 booklearning can replace. All

this is so obvious that we usually find sensation I 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

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

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

halffilled 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 wellworn 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 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 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 bygone

sensation of my gout was painful, as Reid somewhere says; the thought of the same gout as bygone is

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

"though there be a great number of considerations wherein things may be compared one with another, and so

a multitnde 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 ideas will never be unravelled till the next 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 perceptions can come, sensations must have come; but sensations come, no psychic

fact need have existed, a current is enough. If the nervecurrent be not given, nothing else will take its place.

"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] [8] 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

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 teminus ad quem of thought. To find such termini is

our aim with all our theories to conceive first when and where a certain sensation maybe 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,

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 senseorgans the brain is plunged in

deep sleep and consciousness is practically nonexistent. Even the first weeks after birth are passed in almost

unbroken sleep by human infants. It takes a strong message from the senseorgans to break this slumber. In a

newborn 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 senseorgans 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

The first sensation which an infant gets is for him the Universe. And the Universe which he latter 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 nervecurrents

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 man qualities. [10] For as the currents vary, and the

brainpaths 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

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,

noncognitive, and vile. [11] His latest followers seem to seek to crowd it out of existence altogether. The

only reals for the neoHegelian writers appear to be relations, relations without terms, or whose terms are

speciously such and really consist in knots, or gnarls 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 relations it would not exist at

all." [12] "The single feeling is nothing real." "On the recognition of relations as constituting the nature of

Such quotations as these from the late T. H. Green [13] would be matters of curiosity rather than of

importance, were it not that sensationalist writers themselves believe in a socalled '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

"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

The two leading facts from which the doctrine of universal relativity derives its widespread 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

Neither of these facts proves anything about the presence or nonpresence 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. [15] 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 of notes, the

pairs themselves would be the same, an language could get along without substantives. But Professor Bain

does not mean seriously what he says, and spend no more time on this vague and popular form of doctrine.

[16] The facts which seem to hover before the minds of its champions are those which are best described

I will first enumerate the main facts which fall under this law, and then remark upon what seems to me their

[ [18] 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 sthetic 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

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 per fectly steady, slight differences in

shade and color may entirely disappear. If we now turn aside the eyes, a negative afterimage 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 contract, and to complicate the

A visual image is modified not only by other sensations just previously experienced, but also by all those

experiences 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

The phenomena of simultaneous contrast in sight are so complicated by other attendant phenomena that it is

diffi cult to isolate them and observe them in their purity. Yet is evidently of the greatest importance to do

so, if one could conduct his investigations accurately. Neglect of this principle has led to many mistakes

being made in counting for the facts observed. As we have seen, if the eye is allowed to wander here and

there about the field as ordinarily does, successive contrast results and allowance must be made for its

presence. It can be avoided only by successfully fixating with the wellrested eye a point of one field, and by

then observing the changes which occur in is 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 one field tend to spread

themselves over and mingle with the color and brightness of the neighboring fields, thus substituting

Not only must we recognize and eliminate the effects of successive contrast, of temporal changes due to

fixation, and of simultaneous induction, in analysing the phenomena of simultaneous contrast, but we must

also take into account various other influences which modify its effects. Under favorable circumstances the

contrasteffects are very striking, and did they always occur as strongly they could not fail 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 course grain, rough surface, intricate pattern, etc.

the contrast effect appears weaker. This does not imply that the acts of contrast are absent, but merely that

the resulting sensations are overpowered by the many other stronger sen sations which entirely occupy the

attention. On such a ground a faint negative afterimage undoubtedly due to retinal modifications may

become invisible; and even weak objective differences in color may become imperceptible. For example, a

faint spot or greasestain on woollen cloth, easily seen at a distance, when the fibres are not distinguishable,

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

To obtain the best contrasteffects, therefore, the contrasting fields should be near together, should not be

separated by shadows or black lines, should be of homogeneous texture, and should be 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 condition most favorable for the appearance of good contrasteffects,

various experiments have been devised, which will be explained in comparing the rival theories of

There are two theories the psychological and the physiological which attempt to explain the

Of these the psychological one was the first to gain prominence. Its most notable 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," [20] 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."

"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 reddishyellow 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

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

"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 contrastcolor arises not through an act of

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

In opposition to this theory has been developed on which attempts to explain all cases of contrast as depend

ing purely on physiological action of the terminal apparatus of vision. Hearing 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

"If this psychophysical process is aroused, as usually happens, by lightrays 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." [24]

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 directlyexcited 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 contrastcolor 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

contrasteffect is still produced, but that the conditions are such that the slight changes in color and

The two theories, stated thus broadly, may seem equally plausible. Hering, however, has conclusively proved,

by experiments with afterimages, that the process on one part of the retina does modify that on neighboring

portions, under conditions where deception of judgment is impossible. [25] 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 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 placed on a colored background, and both are covered a sheet of transparent white paper. The gray

spot then assumes a contrastcolor, complementary to that of the background, which shines with a whitish

"If the background is green, the coveringpaper itself appears to be a greenish color. If now the substance of

the paper extends without apparent interruption over the gray which lies under it, we think that glimmering

through the greenish paper, and such an object be rosered, in order to give white light. If, however, the grey

spot has its limits so fixed that it appears to be an independent continuity with the greenish portion of the

The contrastcolor may thus be made to disappear by placing 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 contrastcolor now appear. Hering [27] 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, having 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 contrastcolor 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 borderline 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 faintlycolored 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

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 a 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 lastnamed 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

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

contrastphenomena, 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

"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 surface are conceived as alterations of the one

groundcolor of the surface such as might arise through shadows falling on it, through colored reflexes, or

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." [28]

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 through there is no groundcolor, 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 looses its contrastcolor either wholly or in part.

Hering points out the inaccuracy of all the claims. Under favorable conditions it is impossible to make the

contrast dissappear by means of balck enclosing lines, although they naturally form a disturbing element;

increase in the saturation of the field, if disturbance through increasing brightnesscontrast is to be avoided,

demands a darker grey field, on which contrastcolor are less easily perceived; and careful use of the white

scrap leads to entirely different results. The contrastcolor does appear upon it when it is first placed above

the colored field; but if it is carefully fixated, the contrastcolor diminishes very rapidly both on it and on the

ring, from causes already explained. To secure accurate observation, a 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 re moved. 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 socalled mirror experiment consists of

placing at an angle of 45 [degree] 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 blackspot. The one on the

horizontal surface is seen through the glass and appears dark green, the other is reflection 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. [29]

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. [30]

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

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 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 Vou Kriest [32] speaks of

wandering through evergreen forests covered with snow, and thinking that through the interstices of the

boughs he saw the deep blue of pineclad mountains, cov ered with snow and lighted by brilliant sunshine;

whereas what he really saw was the white snow on trees near by, lying in shadow]. [33] [34]

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

colorcontrast, which unquestionably is a phenomena of sensation immediately aroused.

I have dwelt upon the facts of colorcontrast 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 brainconditions 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. [35] This way

of taking things belongs with the philosophy that looks at the data of sense as something earthborn 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 gasjet. 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 Szabadf�di's observation that small wooden

disks when heated to 122� Fahrenheit often feel heavier than those which are larger but not thus warmed; [36]

or of Hall's observation that a heavy point moving over the skin seems to go faster than a lighter one moving

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. [38] Colored hearing is the name sometimes given to the phenomenon, which has now been

repeatedly described. Quite lately the Viennese artist Urbantschitsch has proved that these cases are only

extreme examples of a very general law, and that all our senseorgans influence each other's sensations. [39]

The hue of patches of color so distant as not to be recognized was immediately, in U.'s patients, perceived

when a tuningfork 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

tuningfork 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. F�r�, 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

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 lightwaves and of airwaves 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

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

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

"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, above, as to knowledge being conquering], [40] for it is an act which

in its perfection results from a long and intricate process of development.... Two noteworthy stages, or

'epochmaking' 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 I (sometimes called 'eccentric perception') or the giving to these sensations

an objective existence (in the fullest sense of the word I objective') as qualities of objects situated within a

field of space and in contact with, or more or less remotely distant from, the body." [41]

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, [42] 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

"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 newborn 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

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. [44] 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

All this seems highly confused and unintelligible. Consciousness, as we saw in an earlier chapter (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

Certainly a child newly born in Boston, who gets a sensation from the candleflame which lights the

bedroom, or from his diaperpin, 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 spacerelations 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 spaceworld 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

'epochmaking achievement' into which our sensations, originally spaceless, are dropped. They bring space

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 candleflame 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 of 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 I 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 coordinates 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

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 steamwhistle; 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 operaglass. 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 op

eration, 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.

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. [45] 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 vibrisse, 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.

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 nerveterminations lie. If, however, the tooth is loose, we feel

From this case 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 fingertip; 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 sur geon'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. [46] 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 elbowjoint, we can feel the

movement in the joint itself; but we always are simultaneously conscious of the path which during the

movement our fingertips describe through the air, and yet these same fingertips 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

nervetrunks, whether of cutaneous or of more special sensibility (such as the optic nerve), give rise to

sensations which are vaguely localized beyond the nervetracts 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

"I recently faradized," says Dr. Mitchell, "a case of disarticulated shoulder without warning my patient of the

possible result. For two year she 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,

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 nonnatural, 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

"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

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 current circumstances) to return again after having migrated. But a little

The objectivity with which each of our sensations originally comes to m, 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 lie afterwards knows as distance; it means only that he has not learned at what tactile or

manual distance things which appear at that visual distances are. [48] And when a person just operated for

cataract gropes close to his face for faroff 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

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

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 extraditionphilosophers

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

nonprimitive 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

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. [51] 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 inferiority which are the notions latest acquired by the human mind. [52]

[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 wind, 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 ChapterVI(see pp.17ff.). The mind of the child enjoying the simple

lemonade flavor and that of the same child grown up and analysing 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, z�allige Anischten, as

Herbart would say, not elements of its composition. Compare the article by Meinong in the Vierteliahrschrift

[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 sail 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 senseorgan 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. Commonsense 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 (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 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 (ausgel�ste 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

[5] Yet even writers like Prof. Bain will deny, in the most gratuitous way, that sensations know anything. "It

is evident that the most restricted form of sensation does not contain an element edge. The mere state of mind

called the sensation of scarlet is edge, although a necessary preparation for it." 'Is not know about scarlet' is

[10] "So far is it from being true that we necessarily have as many feelings in consciousness at one time as

there are isles to the sense then played upon, that it is a fundamental law of pure sensation that each

momentarily 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 riot 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.1924.) Compare also F. H. Bradley, Logic, book i. chap. ii.

"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 Anaxigoras in Aristotle very fairly 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 Anaxagorias speaks, that it may be able to know and

master and conquer its objects, that is to say, to conquer and understand them. In like manner Pieus, in his

book of Sense and Memory, makes to suffer and to be, conquered: one, 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 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

Malbranche: " TH�ODORE. Oh, oh, Ariste! God knows pain, pleasure 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? TH�ODORE.

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 a that it is not to know it clearly, that it is

not to know it by light an by evidence in a word, that it is not to know its nature; in other words 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 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 they body and reality they appear to have, the more dangerous are they an to lead us astray." (Entretiens

sur la M�taphysique, 3me Entretien ad init.) Malebranche's Theodore prudently does not try to explain God's

[13] 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 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, utterances in

the text such others as these: " The waking of Selfconsciousness 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. 3934.) "When," says Green again, "feeling a pain or

pleasure of heat to be connected with the action of approaching the fire, am I not receiving 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 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." (Proglegomena to Ethics, �� 46, 50.) I have expressed myself

[14] 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, 5702; Logic, i. p. 2;

Body and Mind, p. 81) are subscribers to this doctrine also J. S. Mill's analysis, J. S. Mill's edition, ii. 11, 12.

[15] We can steadily hear a note for half an hour. The difference between the senses are marked. Smell and

[16] 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.

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

[19] These phenomena have close analogues in the phenomena of contrast presented by the

temperaturesense (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 vers�. This may be seen if

we press with the palm on two metal surfaces of about inch and a half square and threefourths 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.

[25] 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 34 cm. long and � 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 borderline and parallel to it, and at least 1 cm. distant from it. Fixate � to 1 minute a point on the

borderline between the strips. One strip appears much brighter than the other. Close and cover the eyes, and

the negative afterimage appears... The difference in brightness of the strips in the afterimage 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 tile background.... phase

occurs in which the difference in brightness of the two halves the background entirely disappears, and yet

both afterimages of the strips are still very clear, one of them brighter and one darker than the back ground,

which is equally bright on both halves. Here can no longer be any question of contrasteffect, because the

conditio sine qua non of contrast, namely, the differing brightness of the ground, is no longer present. This

proves that the different brightness of the afterimages 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 origin observation; for the different aftereffect demands

here a different effect.... In the original arrangement, the objectively similar strips appeared of different

brightness, because both corresponding portions retina were truly differently excited."

[30] Hering: Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. XL. B. 172 ff.; Delabarre: American Journal of Psychology, ii.

[35] Physiol. Psych., i. 351, 45860. 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

[41] Physiological Psychology, 385, 387. See also such passages as that in Bain: The Senses and the Intellect,

[42] 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 spreadout." (Ladd, op. cit. p. 391.)

[44] 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 deepseated chamber of the car. 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 armchair 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. 4753.) 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 tile 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. 6772, but it is unfortunately too long to quote.

[45] This is proved by Weber's device of causing the head to be firmly pressed against a support by another

[48] In reality it probably means only a restless movement of desire, which he might make even after he had

[49] 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. 1657. They are also discussed and

[50] The intermediary and shortened locations of the lost band 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

[51] It is from this confused assumption that the timehonored riddle comes, of how, with an upsidedown

picture on the retina, we can see things rightside up. Our consciousness is naively 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

nonexistent 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

[52] 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. 5760 of Riehl's

book quoted above on page 32, and to Uphues: Wahrnehmung und Empfiudung (1888), especially the

Einleitung and pp. 5161. Classics in the History of Psychology An internet resource developed by

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

The blind may dream of sights, the deaf of sounds, for years after they have lost their vision or hearing; [1]

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

Afterimages 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 Sinnesged�chtniss) which

were spoken of in Vol. 1, p. 647, 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

When represented with surroundings concrete enough to constitute a date, these pictures, when they revive,

form recollection. 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

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 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

senseorgans, 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 m the imagination to be completely

adequate copies, not y 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 [2] 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

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

"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

"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

"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 I out of the corner of the eye, or of

the pictures thrown by a badlyfocussed 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 illmarked, 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

deafmutes, are peopled with similarly generated generic ideas of sensible objects." [4]

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

"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 softlylighted turf of the fresh grassplat. 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

eve 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, leaves 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 in individual.

Moreover, my abstract idea is perfectly clear and determinate; now that I possess it, I never fall to

recognize an araucaria among the various plants which may be shown me; it differs then from the coil used

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 I 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 p. 473 ff.,

especially the note to page 477), and I would not touch upon the matter at all here but for its historical

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.

"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

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.

The first breaker of ground in this direction was Fechner, in 1860. Fecher was gifted with unusual talent for

subjective observation, and in chapter xiv of his 'Psychophysik' he gave the results of a most careful

comparison of his own optical afterimages, with his optical memorypictures, together with accounts by

several other individuals of their optical memorypictures. [7] The results 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."

Fechner's intention was independently executed by Mr. Galton, the publication of whose results in 1880 may

"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 allnamely, 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

"The first group of the rather long series of queries related to the illumination, definition, and coloring of the

"Before addressing yourself to any of the Questions on the opposite page, think of some definite object

suppose it is your breakfasttable as you sat down to it this morning and consider carefully the picture

" '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 timid, or is the place of sharpest

" '3. Coloring. Are the colors of the china, of the toast, breadcrust, mustard, meat, parsley, or whatever

"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 visual izing, 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 wellknown hallucinations of sick

"To my astonishment, I found that, the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied protested

that mental imagery way 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 colorblind 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

"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

"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 large number of women, and many boys and girls, declared that

they habitually saw mental imagery, and that it way perfectly distinct to them and full of color. The more I

pressed and crossedquestioned 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

"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 crossexamination (though I could give

one or two amusing instances of breakdown), 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

selfdissection must be a strong ingredient in the pleasure that many are said to take in confessing themselves

"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 overready

perception of sharp mental pictures is antagonistic to the acquirement of habits of highlygeneralized 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 rank of

"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

"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,

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

"I find that a few persons can, by what they often describe as a kind of touchsight, 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

"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

"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 publicschool 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 booklearning 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,

"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 offhand 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 f�tes 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 is "figurezvous,' or 'picture to yourself,' seems to express their dominant mode of perception.

"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

"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

The reader will find further details in Mr. Galton's 'Inquiries into Human Faculty,' pp. 83114. [9] I have

myself for many years collected from each and all of my psychologystudents 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 breakfasttable 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 ill a straight line than if

"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 x 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 dimness of sight which causes the images to appear

indistinct. To come to the question of the breakfasttable, 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 in 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 tablecloth, and I could probably see the color of the wallpaper if I could

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, [10] and

instead of seeing their breakfasttable, 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

The study of Aphasia (see 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 'thoughtstuff,' 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 braintract out of gear; in the other it may affect an unimportant

region. A particularly instructive case was published by Charcot in 1883. [11] 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 be 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 lie thought of a conversation, a saying, an engagement, the place, the people, the entire

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 businessanxieties, loss of sleep, appetite, etc., he noticed

suddenly one day ail 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

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 tile

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. Today he vainly tries to

trace its principal outlines. Asked to draw a minaret, lie 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 semicircular 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 lie drew

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

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 realizes 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

sensations 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 in

ward hearing which precedes articulation rises up in his mind. This feeling was formerly unknown to him. He

speaks French fluently; but affirms that he call 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

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

"The auditory type," says M. A. Binet, [13] "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 tile 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 Legouv�

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 �tes le th��tre m�me, 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 in dividuals 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 moters, in French, motiles, as Mr. Galton proposes to call them

in English] [14] 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). [15] 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 do 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 case the motor images were to reinforce the visual ones. The young savage

was a motor. [16]... 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 wordblindness,

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

The imagination of a blinddeaf mute like Laura Bridgman must be confined entirely to tactile and motor

material All blind persons mart 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

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 else in a couple of monographs with which all students

should become familiar. [19] 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 litter becomes, as it

were, paralysed. In general his imagined movements, of whatsoever objects, seem paralysed the moment no

feelings of movement either in his own eyes or in his own limbs accompany them. [20] The movements of

"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

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,

"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

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. [23] 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

Touchimages are very strong in some people. The most vivid touchimages 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, sine gooseflesh, paling or reddening, and other evidences of

"An educated man," says a writer who must always be quoted when it is question of the powers of

imagination, [25] "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

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

Meyer's account of his own visual images is very interesting; and with it we may close our survey of

"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 ex periment 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] [27] were all fullface. 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

"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

"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 swordhilt with a brass

"5) Most of these subjective appearances, especially when they were bright, left afterimages 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 afterimage.

"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

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

The negative afterimages 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. [29] 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

The commonlyreceived idea is that it is only a milder degree of the same process which took place when the

"Since a sensation in the first instance diffuses nervecurrents 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 selfsustaining 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 else 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

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, canperipheral senseorgans 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 nervecurrent to flow there, making a sort of false

sensation, an influence from within mimicking the influences from without in sensation proper. (See the

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 'gooseflesh'

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 senseorgans are directly excited in consequence of imagination are exceptional rarities if they

exist at all. In common cases of imagination it could seem more natural to suppose that the seat of the process

is purely cerebral, and that the senseorgan is left out. Reasons for such a conclusion would be briefly these:

1) In imagination the startingpoint 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 senseorgans to be excited in these cases, the

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

afterimages) it is directed forward towards the senseorgan. [31] The difference between the two processes

feels like one of kind, and not like a mere 'more' or 'less' of the same. [32] If a sensation of sound were only a

strong imagination, and an imagination a weak sensation, there ought to be a borderline 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, p. 500, note). This is inexplicable if the imagination be simply a weaker

To these reasons the following objections may be made: To l): The current demonstrably does flow backward

down the optic nerve in Meyer's and F�r�'s negative afterimage. Therefore it can flow backward; therefore it

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

faroff 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 violinplayers 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

"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

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

andsensation are notquite 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

The imaginationprocess CAN then pass over into the sensationprocess. 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

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. 4951) that the imaginationprocess dryers

from the sensationprocess 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 eyemuscles 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 braincentres can no more see darkness out of the parts of his retina

which are connected with the brainlesion than lie 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

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. M�nsterberg 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

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

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 braincells while 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 associationpaths, 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

explosionpoint; and the latter must be gained by a sudden current from the periphery or not at all.

[1] 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

[7] The differences noted by Fechner between afterimages and images of imagination proper are as follows:

Afterimages. Imaginationimages. 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 afterimages; 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 with open eyes; Are more easily had with open than with shut eyes; Seem to move

when the bend or eyes move; Need not follow movements of head or eyes. The field within which they

appear (with closed eyes) is dark, contracted, flat, close to the eyes, in front, and the images have no

perspective; The field is extensive in three dimensions, and objects can be imagined in it above or behind

almost m easily as in front. The attention seems directed forwards towards the senseorgan, in observing

afterimages. In imagining, the attention feels as if drawn backwards towards the brain.

Finally, Fechner speaks of the impossibility of attending to both afterimages and imaginationimages 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 to repeat. To them may be added, as a universal proposition, that

afterimages seem larger if we project them on a distant screen, and smaller if project them on a near one,

[8] [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.]

[9] 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

[10] 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 cell 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 ray 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

[11] Progr�s M�dical, 21 juillet. I abridge from the German report of the case in Wilbrand: Die

[12] 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

dearlybeloved 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."

[15][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

affrim that they can see an entire word at once, especially a short one like 'dog,' with no such feeling of

[16] 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.

[17]See an interesting case of a similar sort, reported by Farges, in l'Ec�phale, 7me Ann�e, p. 545.

[19] Studien �ber die Sprachvorstellungen (1880), and Studien �ber die Bewegungsvorstellungen (1882).

[20] Prof. Stricker admits that by practice he has succeeded in making his eyemovements 'act vicariously'

[23] Studien �ber Sprachvorstellungen, 28, 31 etc. Cf. pp. 4950, etc. Against Stricker, see Stumpf,

Tonpsychol., 155162, 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. 5960).

[24] 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 eyemovements accompany

them, though these latter give rise to such slight feelings that they are almost impossible of detection.

Absolutely no legmovements 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.

Touchimagination 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 thoughtstuff. 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

[25] Geo. Herm. Meyer, Untersuchungen �b. d. Physiol. d, Nervenfaser (1848) p. 238. For other cases see

[29] That of Dr. Ch. F�r� in the Revue Philosophique, xx. 364. Johannes M�ller'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, 1842, p. 1894). 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 afterimages. Nor have I as

[32] V. Kandinsky (Kritische u. klinische Betrachtungen im Gebiete der Sinnestauschungen (Berlin, 1885), p.

135 fi.) insists that in even the liveliest pseudohallucinations (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 ganter Abgrund separates these 'ideas' from true hallucination acid

[33] 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 'bluishgreen'

cross. The genuineness of the result has been doubted, but there seems no good reason for rejecting M.

Binet's account (Le Magn�tisme Animal, 1887, p. 188). M. Binet, following M. Parinaud, and on the faith of

a certain experiment, at one time believed, the optical braincentres and not the retina to be the seat of

ordinary negative afterimages. 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

afterimage of the colored spot will presently appear. (Psychologie du Raisonnment, 1886, p. 45.) But Mr.

Delabarre has proved (American Journal of Psychology, ii. 326) that this afterimage 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

The fact remains, however, that the negative afterimages of HerrMeyer, M. F�r�, and the hypnotic

subjects, form aria exception to all that we know of nervecurrents, 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

[35] See an important article by Binet in the Revue Philosophique, xxvi. 481 (1888); also Dufour, in Revue

M�d, de la Suisse Romande, 1889, No. 8, cited in the Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1890, p. 48.

[36] Die Willenshandlung (1888), pp. 12940. Classics in the History of Psychology An internet resource

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" [1] 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

Perception thus differs from sensation by the consciousness of farther facts associated with the object of the

" 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 information 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

This passage from James Mill [2] 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 tangible; 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," [3] that we think we see the whole object,

Sensational and reproductive brainprocesses 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

horsecar'; but the sound is not the horsecar, it is one of the horsecar's least important manifestations. The

real horsecar 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 eyepicture with lines not parallel, and with angles unlike, and call it my

big solid rectangular walnut librarytable, 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,

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." [4]

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

"supplements a senseimpression 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

Every reader's mind will supply abundant examples of tire 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

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 senseorgan 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.

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 alreadyquoted catch, Pas de lieu Rhone 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

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

Another wellknown change is when we look at a landscape with our head upside down. Perception is to a

certain extent baffled by this manoeuvre; gradations of distance and other spacedeterminations 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. [6] 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 an 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 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 tile

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

The chief cerebral conditions of perception are the paths of association irradiating from the

senseimpression, 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. That we

more commonly get is first one object in its completeness, and then the other in its completeness. In other

words, all brainprocesses 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

hodgepodges 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 'suppertime' 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 mis takes consist in using entire wrong words instead of right ones. It is only

in grave lesions that he becomes quite inarticulate. These facts show how subtle is the associative link; how

delicate yet how strong that connection among brainpaths 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. 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 aur� of epilepsy, globes of light, fiery vision,

roarings in the ears, the sensations which electric currents give rise to when passed through head, these are

unfigured because they are strong. Weaker feelings of the same sort would probably suggest objects. Many

years ago, after reading daury's book, Le Sommeil et lee R�ves, I began for the first time to observe ideas

which faintly hit through the mind at all times ,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 afterimage 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 afterimage were the same, although the idea

had details which the retinal image lacked. We shall probably never know just what part retinal afterimages

play in determining the train of our thoughts. Judging by my own experiences I should suspect it of being not

Illusions Let us now, for brevity's sake, treat A and B in Fig, 47 as if they stood for objects instead of

brainprocesses. 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 Inter tactile experiences prove to be not there. The socalled

'fallacy of the senses,' of which the ancient sceptics made so much account, is not fallacy of the senses proper,

So much premised, let us look a little closer at these illusions. They are due to two main causes. The wrong

1) Although not on this occasion the real cause, it is yet the habitual, inveterate, or most probable cause of

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 call

One of the oldest instances dates from Aristotle. Cross two fingers and roll a pea, penholder, or other small

object between them. It will seem double. Professor Groom Robertson has given the dearest 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 forefingertouch seems

higher, though the finger is really lower; the secondfingertouch 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. [9]

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 ,which is always to react on the

sensation, in a determinate and figured fashion if possible, and in as probable fashion as the case admits. To

couple faces and hollow ness 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

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 activelyproduced positions of the

eyeballs, are normally linked with the sense of every determinate position which an outer thing may come to

occupy. Since we perceive the usual position, even if the optical sensation be artificially brought from a

different part of space. Prisms warp the lightrays 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 [sic] 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 anger, and objects move and are translocated

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 movementfeeling, but think our eyes are still; and 2) when ever we think

that our eyes move, but fail to get the retinal movementfeeling. We believe objects to be still, on the

contrary, 1) whenever we get the retinal movementfeeling, but think our eyes are moving; and 2) whenever

we neither think our eyes are moving, nor get the retinal movementfeeling. 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. Put 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 are unaware of the slow leftward automatic movements our eyeballs, and

think that the retinal movementsensations thereby aroused must be due to a rightward motion 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 giddiness, with exactly similar results. Giddiness is

easiest produced by whirling on our heels. It is a feeling of movement of our own head and body through

space, is now pretty well understood to be due to the irritation of the semicircular canals of the inner ear.

[10] 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 movementfeelings 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

conform and intensify our impression of a leftwardwhirling 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. [11]

0ptical vertigo, as these illusions of objective movement are called, results sometimes from braintrouble,

intoxications, paralysis, etc. A man will awaken with a, weakness of one of his eyemuscles. An intended

orbital rotation will then not produce its expected result in the way of retinal movementfeelingwhence

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

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 more 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 judge its actual size to be. Hence in the train, the faster we go,

the nearer do the trees and houses seem, and nearer they seem, the smaller do they look. [13]

Other illusions are due to the feeling of convergence being interpreted. When we converge our eyeballs we an

approximation of whatever thing we may be 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 end 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 operaglass

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 itby 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

The wellknown 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, deem that it must be a larger body, and we so perceive it. It looks particularly

enormous when it comes up directly behind some wellknown large object, as a house or tree distant enough

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 eyefeeling

which we receive significant of nothing but approach. When we relax 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 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 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 socalled micropsy, Aubert relates that he saw a man

apparently no larger then a photograph. But the small made the man seem farther off. The real distance was

two or three feet, and he seemed against the wall of the room. [15] Of these vacillations we shall have to

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. [17] Suffice it that images of the two

lines fell on 'corresponding' rows of retinal points, and that the illusory vertical line is the only object capable

"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] [18] 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 a

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 lot of lines at once, all ready to throw their images upon the

vertical meridian, is a thing that has hardly ever happened to 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

In other words, we see, as always, the most probable object. The foregoing may serve as examples of the first

type 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 which they are embodied. In the chapter on

Sensation sew that many illusions commonly ranged under this are, physiologically considered, of another

sort altogether, and that associative processes, strictly so called, � nothing to do with their production.

We may now turn to illusions of the second of the two type discriminated on page 86. In this type we

perceive a wrong object because our mind is full of the thought of it 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

"a sportsman, while shooting W. in cover, sees a bird ;the size and color of a W. get up and By

through the foli age, 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 W., 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

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

The Proofreader'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

"Practised novel or newspaperreaders 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 wellknown 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 little

errors better than his friend, because the latter's perception of the words as totals was too swift." [20]

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 fronted by a prisoner whom he forthwith

perceives in light of that image, and recognizes or 'identifies' as participant, although he may never have been

near that spot. Similarly at the socalled 'materializing se�ances which fraudulent mediums give: in a dark

room a man sees a gauzerobed figure who in a whisper tells him she is the spirit of his sister, mother, wife,

or child, and falls upon is 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 's�ances'

would furnish most precious documents to the psychology of perception, if they could only satisfactorily

inquired into. In the hypnotic trance any suggested object is sensibly perceived. In certain subject happens

more or less completely after waking from the trance. It would seem that under favorable conditions

somewhat similar susceptibility to suggestion may exit certain persons who are not otherwise entranced at all.

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

"We know that a weak smell or taste may he 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

violetsmell, 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;

where upon 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 call 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 longhaired 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 ex posed to confound objectsof touch with one

High authorities have doubted this power of imagination to falsify present impressions of sense. [22] 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 smellsense. When we have paid the faithless

plumber pretending to mend our drains, the intellect inhibits nose from perceiving the same unaltered odor,

until perhaps several days go by. As regards the ventilation 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

"A patient called at my office one day in a state of great excitement from the effects of an offensive odor in

the horsecar she had come 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 before experienced and was something dreadful. Leaving my office soon after, it so

happened that I found her at the streetcorner, waiting for a car: we thus entered the car together. She

immediately cal attention to the same sickening odor which she had experienced 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." [23]

It is the same with touch. Everyone must have felt the sensible quality change under his hand, as sudden con

tact 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 tablecloth, which we

pick up, thinking it a crumb of bread, feels horrible for a few moments to our fancy, and different from what

Weight or muscular feeling is a sensation; yet who 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 clockstrokes (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 handorgan 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 avantcourier 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 door. 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 Delbuf and Reid, this was probably also the case, though it is not so stated. Reid

" 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. Delbuf's story is as follows: 'The illustrious P. J. van

Beneden, senior, was walking one evening with a friend along a moody 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 givingtongue 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 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 no wise resembling that of hounds giving chase." [24]

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 s 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 object of 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 sensation which first apprehend them are

Of accidental and occasional illusions of sight amusing examples might be given. Two will suffice. One is a

reminiscence of my own. I was lying in my berth steamer listening to the sailors holystone the deck outside;

when, on turning my eyes to the window, I perceived perfect distinctness that the chiefengineer of the vessel

had entered my stateroom, 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 peculiarlooking mall; 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 lovescenes and sanguinary tragedies might have taken place. The night was so

lovely that many of the people were strolling through the narrow lanes or socalled 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

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 (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 simples case) of the general fact that our nervecentres are an

organ for reacting on senseimpressions, and that our hemisphere in particular, are given us in order that

records of our private past experience may cooperate in the reaction. Of course such a general way of

stating the fact is vague; and all the those follow the current theory of ideas will be prompt 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, one may seem fastidious in objecting

to such a state, 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 along so considered it), why should

we entertain it unless confessedly as a mere figure of speech? As such, of course is convenient and welcome

to pass. But if we try to put an exact meaning into it, all we find is that the brain react paths which previous

experiences have worn, and make 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 present, 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, mill 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 afterimage on the receding wall or ceiling is actually seen as an ellipse, a square afterimage of a

cross there is seen as slantlegged, etc., because only in the process correlated with the vision of the latter

We must remember this when, in dealing with the eye, we come to point oat the erroneousness of the

principle laid down by Reid and Helmholtz that true sensations can never be changed by the suggestions of

A certain illusion of which I have not yet spoken affords 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 an�esthesia of the moving parts. Close the patient's eyes, hold his an�esthetic a

still, and tell him to raise his hand to his head; and when he opens his eyes he will be astonished to find that

movement has not taken place. All reports of anaesthetic cases seem to mention this illusion. Sternberg who

wrote on a subject in 1885,[26] lays it down as a law that the intention move is the same thing as the feeling

of the motion. We will 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 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 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. [27] The visual suggestion of the path traversed by the

fingertip as the locus of the movementfeeling in the joint, which we discussed on page 41, is another

example of this semihallucinatory 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. [28] 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.

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. [29] 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 an�sthesia 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 I a great deal to say about a

process called Apperception. [30] 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 apperception because it has carried very different meaning in the history of philosophy, [31] 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 pretend to analyze the socalled

apperceptive performances beyond the first or perceptive stage, because their variations and degrees are

literally innumerable. 'Apperception' a name for the sumtotal 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, 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 Is the 'apperceiving mass,' though of

course this may occasion be convenient. On the whole I am inclined think Mr. Lewes's term of 'assimilation'

Professor H. Steinthal has analyzed apperceptive processes with a, sort of detail which is simply burdensome.

[33] His introduction of the matter may, however, be quoted. He begins with an anecdote from a comic paper.

"In the compartment of a railwaycarriage 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 notebook, 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

"To this the naturalist had answered, 'natural 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, [34] and that is whatever is most newly related to his pursuit in life. Every question is a

holedrilling 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

"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 senseimpression). 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 prori;

the supervening factor is given, a posteriori, factor passive.... We may then define Apperception as the

movement of two masses of consciousness (Vorstellungsmassen) against each other so as to produce a

"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, apperceptionprocesses can perfectly

well occur in which the new observation transforms or en riches the apperceiving group of ideas. A child

who hitherto has seen none but fourcornered 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." [35]

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 pocketcorkscrew he unhesitatingly called 'badscissors.' 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. Oldfogyism, 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, twentyfour 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

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 wellknown 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.[36] The Fuegians, in Darwin's voy age, 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 copperplate

inscription should possess that degree of beauty. But if we are shown a pendrawing 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?"

A widelyspread opinion (which has been held by such men as Schopenhauer, Spencer, Hartmann, Wundt,

Helmholtz, and lately interestingly pleaded for by M. Binet [37]) 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 aboveboard, 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, end that the

middle term is unconscious. When the sensation which I have called' this ' (p. 83, supra) is felt, they think that

Now there seem no good grounds for supposing this additional wheel work 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

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 habitworn paths in the brain makes such images entirely superfluous

for explaining the phenomena in point. Since the brainprocess 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

coordinate 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 end 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.

[39] 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

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 [41] In or

dinary 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 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

pseudohallucinations. Pseudohallucinations 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 pseudohallucinatory 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

pseudohallucination 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 pseudohallucination 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 pseudohallucinatory lion of natural size, which appeared and quickly laid its forepaws

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 'expressiveplastic 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."

From ordinary images of memory and fancy, pseudohallucinations differ in being much more vivid, minute,

de tailed, 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

pseudohallucinations 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 pseudohallucinations 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 pseudohallucinations. 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; end 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. [43] 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 knittingneedle 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 centretable, with his arms folded (an unusual position with him), but, to my dismay, I

per ceived 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, baring 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

"One night in March 1873 or '74, I cannot recollect which year, I was attending on the sickbed 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 diningroom, 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,

"In response to your request to write out my experience of Oct. 30, 1888, I will inflict on you a letter.

"On the day above mentioned, Oct. 30, 1888, 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 for mulae. 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 formul�, 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 raised 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

"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

telegraphoffice. 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 telegraphoffice. 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 telegraphoffice. The first person I saw on

arriving at said office was the telegraphoperator, 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 ' thoughttransference,' 'unconscious cerebration;' etc., etc., but I am absolutely certain about what

"In regard to the remark which I heard, 'It is a little Herman,' etc., I would add that we had previously decided

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 bad never anything

"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

sale 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 love 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 forgot a faint sense of C.... [the town in which the writer was] [45], 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 feverdelirium are a mixture of pseudohallucination, true hallucination, and illusion.

Those of opium, hasheesh, and belladonna resemble them in this respect. The following vivid account of a fit

"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, lampposts, 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 brightlyilluminated 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

"I could feel each pulsation through my whole system, and a curious twitching commenced, which no effort

"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

"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 aides, while huge wares 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 there after.) 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

"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

"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 doublefaced doll, with a

cylindrical body running down to a point like a pegtop. 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

Januslike 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 longforgotten spot and seeing some sight that had faded from the

"The effects of the drug lasted about an hour and a half, leaving me a trifle tipsy and dizzy; but after a

tenhour sleep I was myself again, save for a slight inability to keep my mind fixed on any piece of work for

Examples of these singular perversions of perception might be multiplied indefinately, 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 cur rents from the senseorgans arouse would seem under normal circumstances to be arousable in

no other way. On p. 72 if. 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 processes therein aroused.

Referring the reader back to that pal sage and to what was more lately said on p. 103 ff., I no proceed to

complete my theory of the perceptive process by an analysis of what may most probably be believed take

We have seen (p. 75) that the free discharge of 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 the maximal explosionpoint, unless

the exciting currents are greater than those which the various portions of cortex supply to each other. Currents

from the periphery are (as it seems) the only currents whose energy can vanquish the supraideational

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 explosionpoint, 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 fun of supplying it with water. One of these vessels stands 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 vessel, however, stands for the peripheral senseorgan, 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

To apply this to the brain and to thought, if we take a series of processes A B CD 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

haltingplaces 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' [46] hallucinations are the regular

concomitant of the process of [p. 125]. falling asleep. Trains of faces, landscapes, etc., pass before the mental

eye, first as fancies, then as pseudohallucinations, finally as fullhedged hallucinations forming dreams. If

we regard associationpaths 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 an 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 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 subjective facts by the everpresent 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 fashion gives an account

of the facts. [47] And yet it certainly fails to explain the extraordinary vivacity and completeness of so many

of our dreamsfantasms. The process of 'imagining' must (in these cases at least [48]) be not merely

relatively, but absolutely and in itself more intense than at other times. The fact is, it is not a process of

imaging, but genuine sensational process; and the theory in question therefore false as far as that point is

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 brainprocesses 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

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 explosionpoint, when the inhibition commonly exerted by the higher centres falls too

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. [50] Thus it will happen that

causes of an amount of activity in braincells 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 pitchplaster 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. [51]

We seem herewith to have an explanation for a certain number of hallucinations. Whenever the normal

forward irradiation of intracortical excitement through associationpaths is checked, any accidental

spontaneous activity or ally peripheral stimulation (however inadequate at other times) by which a brain

centre may be visited, sets up a process off 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, [52] the dot is

the outward point de rep�re which is needed to give objectivity to your suggestion, and without which the

latter will only produce a conception in the subject's mind. [53] M. Binet has shown that such a periphe [p.

129]. ral point de rep�re 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 bears 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 if 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 senseorgan, 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

Binet's theory accounts indeed for a multitude of casts, but certainly not for all. The prism does not always

double the false appearance,[54] nor does the latter always disappear when the eyes are closed. Dr. Hack

Tuke [55] gives several examples in sane people of wellexteriorized hallucinations which could not respond

to Binet's tests; and Mr. Edmund Gurney [56] gives a number of reasons why intensity in a cortical process

may be expected to result from local pathological activities just as much as its peculiar nature does. For

Binet, an abnormally exclusively active part of the cortex gives the nature of what shall appear, whilst a

peripheral senseorgan 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 plausable 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

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

The part played by the peripheral senseorgan 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

afterimages of mental pictures reported by Meyer and F�r�, and the negative afterimages of hypnotic

hallucinations reported by Binet and others so far constitute the only evidence there is for the retina being

involved. But until these afterimages a 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

The time which the perceptive process occupies has been inquired into by various experimenters. Some call it

perceptiontime, some choicetime, some discriminationtime. The results have been already given in

Chapter XIII (vol., p. 623 ff.), to which the reader is consequently referred. Dr. Romanes gives an interesting

"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

"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 octave), 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 render, 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. End so

"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 server highly distinguished men in science and literature, most whom I found

[1] 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). [2] Analysis, I. 97.

[4] 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

either learned the objects which emit them, or have become blunted to them by frequent experience of their

[6] Cf. Helmholtz, Optik, pp. 433, 723, 728, 772; and Spencer, Psychology, vol. n. p. 24q note.

[7] The more or less geometrically regular phantasms which are produced by pressure on the eyeballs.

congestion of the head inhalation of an�sthetics, etc., might again be cited to prove that feint and vague

excitements of senseorgans 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 wallpapers, 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 held

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 M�ler's Physiology, Baly's tr., p. 1397). The fortification and

zigzagpatterns, which are wellknown appearances in the held 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 treuts. 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

afterimage is seen. Lazarus himself proposes the name of 'visionary illusions' for such modifications of ideal

pictures by peripheral stimulations (Lehre von den Sinnestiluschunjien, 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, UriRothsdock, etc. I was looking alternately with the naked eye and with a spyglass ;

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 corpselike hue, a

greenishyellow 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 corpselike 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 held surrounding them, how their lines 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

the laws of association, had combined with an optical afterimage. excessive excitation of the periphery of

the optic nerve. I mean the longcontinued preceding sensation of my eyes when contemplating the color of

the mountain, had indirectly provoked a subjective and durable sensation, that of the complemenatry color;

and my reminiscence, incorporating itself with this subjective sensation, became the corpselike phantom I

[8] 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.' 'Optics'

illusions' are generally errors of touch and muscular sensibility, and the fallaciously perceived object and the

[9] 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 as a matter of fact we feel two. It should be remarked in explanation of this

that an object placed between ,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 of

[10] 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 Ontology, Oct. 1882) that in deafmutes (whose semicircular

canals are auditory nerves must often be disorganized) there very frequently exists no susceptibility to

[11] 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 afterimage of the original retinal movementsensations, as we shall see

[12] We never, so far as I know, get the converse illusion at a railroad station and believe the other train to

[14] C. Berkeley's Theory of Vision, � � 6779; Helmholtz: Physiologische Optik, pp. 6301; Lechelas in

[16] 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 reci must be neutralized by a correspondingly excessive

contraction of the external reci. But this is a sigh of the object's recession, etc.

[20] 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 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 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 they speak so indistinctly and so low. The

verbal objects for interpreting the sounds by lire not alert and ready made in our minds, as they are in our

[22] Helmholtz, P. 0. 438. The question will soon come before us again in the chapter on the Perception of

[25] Compare A. W Volkmann's essay 'Ueber Urspr�ngliches und Erworbenes in den Raumanschauungen,'

on p. 139 of his Untersuchungen re der Optik; and Chapter xiii of Hering's contribution to Hermann's

[26] In the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, pp. 2534. I have tried to account

for some of the variations in this conscious 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 pa 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 feelings '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

represented in the sense of the missing extremity which these patients say they have. Indeed I have seldom

seen a more plausible lot, 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

[29] I ought to say that in almost all cases the volition is followed by actual contraction of muscles in the

[31] Compare the historical reviews by K. Lange: Ueber Apperception (Plauen, 1879), pp. 1214; by Staude

in Wundt's Philosophische Studien, i. 149; and by Marty in Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil., x. 347 ff. ,

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

[34] 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

[36] The great maxim in pedagogy is to knit every new piece of knowledge on to a preexisting 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, slid 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' should 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

confirmationday, you may learn a trade, and grow as old as I am, then only will the cannonball be

getting near, then you may jump to one side! See, so great as that is the sun's distance!"' (K. Langue, Ueber

[37] 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. Beitr�ge, pp,. 422 ff.; Vorlesungen, iv, xii. H.

Helmholtz, Physiol Optik, pi,. 430, 447. A. Binet, Psychol. du Raisonnement, chaps. iii, v. Wundt and

[38] 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

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

"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 all 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

[41] 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 religions 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 osight. Dr. Clouston (Clinical Lectures on Mental Disease, lecture ii 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 soulbeing 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 undt 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 helms on the head; that the head is severed from the body; being chloroformed; that

children are burning; having committed murder; that murders take place around; fear of being hanged; that it

is wrong to take food; being called names by persons; being in hell; being acted on by spirits; being tempted

of the devil; being a man; being possessed of the devil; the body being transformed; having committed an

unpardonable sin; insects coming from the body; unseen agencies working; rape being practised on her; her

own identity; having a venereal disease; being on fire; being a fish; being dead; having committed 'suicide of

[42] V. Kandinsky: Kritische u. Klinische Betrachtungen im Gebiete d. de Sinnest�schungen (1885), p. 42.

[43] See Proceedings of Sec. for Psych. Research, Dec. 1859, pp. 7, 183. a International Congress for

Experimental Psychology has now charge the Census, and the present writer is its agent for America.

[44] "This case is of the class which M.r. Myers terms 'veridical.' In a subsequent letter the writer informs me

[47] This theory of incomplete rectification of the inner images by their usual reductives is most brilliantly

[48] Not, of course, in all cases, because the cells remaining active are the: selves on the way to be

[49] 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. 381.

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 hut 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, seas 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 toe 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 fireirons or

on the black hearth." This persistence of dream objects for a few moments after the eyes are oppened seems

to be no extremely rare experience. Many cases of it have been reported to me directly Compare Muuml;ller's

[50] I say the 'normal 'paths. bectlnse 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 reductions 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 wider 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

[52] M. Binet's highly important experiments, which were first published in vol. xvii of the Revue

Philosophique (1884), ale also given in full in chapter rx of his and F�r 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

[53] 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

[54] Only the other day, in three hypnotized girls, I failed to double an hallucination with a prism. Of course

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

[59] Literature. The best example of perception with which I am acquainted is that in Mr. James Sully's book

on 'Illusions' in the International Science Series. On hallucinations the literature is large. Gurney, Kandinsky

(as already cited), and some articles by Kraepelin in the Vierteljahrschrift f�r Wisenachaftliche Philosophie,

vol. v (1881), the most systematic studies recently made. All the works on Insanity treat of them. Dr. W. W.

Ireland's works, 'The Blot upon the Brain' (1886); '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 t article by Mr. Myers on the Demon of Socrates in the

Proceedings of t society for Psychical Research for 1889, p. 522. Classics in the History of Psychology

An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario

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 slatepencil; 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 semicircular 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 thighmuscles 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 thighmuscles 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 spaceelement 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. [2] The ear gives a greater vastness than

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 [4] 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

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." [5] Loud sounds have a certain

enormousness of feeling. It is impossible to conceive of the explosion of a cannon as fining 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

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." [6] A luminous fog, a band of sunshine, affect us in the

" 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 fined 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 fins the whole interior of the glass. By day the socalled 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 fin the space alone. If I look into a

dark box I find it fined with darkness, and this is seen not merely as the darkcolored sides or walls of the

box. A shady corner in an otherwise welllighted 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

There are certain quasimotor 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

"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 senseorgans according as we wish to discriminate a thing delicately by

"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 afterimages) the strain

is plainly forwards, and, when the attention changes from one sense to another, only alters its direction

between the senseorgans, 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 senseorgans, and seems rather to take refuge

in that part of the head which the brain fins. 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

It appears probable that the feelings which Fechner describes are in part constituted by imaginary

semicircular canal sensations. [9] 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

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

" 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

The interior of one's mouthcavity feels larger when explored by the tongue than when looked at. The crater

of a, newlyextracted 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 rolledup tissuepaper

lamplighter, we are surprised at the large radiating sensation which its presence gives us, end at the sense of

clearness and openness which comes when it is removed. It is immaterial to inquire whether the farreaching

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 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 me 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

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 min

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 latticeframe, 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 qu� 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 fin the entire held

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

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 scissorspoints, 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, me 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

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 fingertips. The dotted lines in Figs. 51 and 52 represent the true

path of the compasspoints; the full lines their apparent path. The same length of skin, moreover, will convey

a more extensive sensation according to the manlier of stimulation. If the edge of a card be pressed against

the skis, the distance between its extremities will seem shorter than that between two compasstips touching

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. [13] The inverse effect seems produced by certain drugs and an�sthetics.

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 mere 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 held of vision darkhued 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

nerveterminations simultaneously excited by the outward agent that awakens the sensation. When many

skinnerves 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 compasspoints, 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 Cheselden 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

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 nervetrunks of unusual thickness, which must supply to

every unit of surfacearea 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 abovecited 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 cooperating

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.

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 nerveprocess excited; and all the

nerveprocesses 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. [15] 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 spacedata 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 sensedata have no spatial worth at all, and that the intellect, since it makes the subdivisions,

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

To begin with, there is no reason to suppose that the several sensespaces of which a sentient creature may

become conscious, each fined 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 fined 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 fin the same vaguely objective world. Even

where the qualities are far less disparate, we may have something similar. If me 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, the orderly arrangement of a multitude of sensespaces 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 ad 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 timesuccession 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 part from out of a, larger enveloping space is then the condition sine qu�

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 consistent sounds would necessarily assume web 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

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 best instance to the eye simply as three different kinds

elf impressions, each so peculiar that we should recognize it if it were to return. When Nunnery'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. Distanceapart, 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.

But with distance and direction we pass to the category of spacerelations, and are immediately confronted

by an opinion which makes of all relations something tote coelo 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 de terminations 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 coordinates, 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

'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 spacerelations, 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 catches 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 call 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

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. [16] 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

Thus it appears indubitable that all spacerelations except those of magnitude are nothing more or less than

pure sensational objects. But magnitude appears to outstep this narrow sphere. We hare 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 expense, more light, more blue,

more motion. This transitional sensation of more must Be identical with itself under all these different

accompaniments, or me 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, sensespace 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

We seem thus to have accounted for all spacerelations, 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

relationsensations 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

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.

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. [19] 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

fingertips, but with such inconceivable rapidity on the retina, what are they? Can we discover anything

The most natural and immediate answer to make is that they are unlikeness of place pure and simple. In the

" 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

And yet the moment we reflect on this answer an insuperable logical difficulty seems to present itself. No

single quail 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?

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

"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

"they change, when we pass from one point of the skin to its neighbor, with very different degrees of rapidity.

On delicatelyfeeling parts, used principally for touching, such as the fingertips, 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. Nervepains 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."

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 Medzinische Psychologie [23] first described the sensations in this way,

designating them, thus conceived, as localsigns. This term has obtained wide currency in Germany, and in

speaking of the 'LOCALSIGN 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 and ourselves tempted to accept the Localsign 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 partthey

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 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 nervecentre to irradiate into the nervecentres 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 stomachfeeling seems to lie. Suppose that later a pain arises in the

stomach from some nonmechani cal cause. It will be tinged by the gastric local sign, and the nervecentre

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 stomachsensation '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

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 me 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. [25] 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 tin the fingertips 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

fingertips of which he is usually most conscious. Points on the forearm suggest either the fingertips or the

elbow (the latter being a spot of greater sensibility [26] ). 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 abject 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 fove� 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

candleflame 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

afterimage, displaying the above peculiarity of form according to its situation. [27] 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 held 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 held. The fovea acts thus as the origin of

a system of polar coordinates, in relation to which each and every retinal point has through an

incessantlyrepeated 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

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 a

footnote) 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 timesuccession in which movements

arouse them. But in all this nothing has been said of the comparative measurement of one sensible

spacetotal against another, or of the way in which, by summing our divers simple sensible

spaceexperiences together, we end by constructing what we regard as the unitary, continuous, and infinite

(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

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

recollec tion 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

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

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 localsign. If the skin felt everywhere exactly alike, a

footbath could be distinguished from a total immersion, as being smaller, but never distinguished from a wet

face. The localsigns are indispensable; two points which have the same localsign will always be felt as the

same point. We do not judge them two unless we have discerned their sensations to be different. [29] Granted

none but homogeneous irritants, that organ would then distinguish the greatest multiplicity of irritants

would count most stars or compasspoints, 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

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 fingertip 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 spacioussounding vernacular, of a

'bellyache' one can with difficulty distinguish the northeast from the southwest 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

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; lust 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 localsigns 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 eases 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., compasspoints 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

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. [30]

I should have been wining some years ago to name with out hesitation a third condition of

discriminationsaying it would be most developed in that organ which is susceptible of the most various

qualities of feeling. The retina is un questionably such an organ. The colors and shades it perceives are

infinitely more numerous than the diversities of skinsensation. 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, [31] 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 compasspoint 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. [32] There is, however, one quality of sensa tion

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

The feeling of motion has generally been assumed by physiologists to be impossible until the positions of

terminus ad quem 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. [33] 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 secondhand 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 dialplate. 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 compasspoints 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 pencilpoint, 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 preexisting 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 [34] completes the proof that movement

in 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 righthand one or the lefthand 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

irradiationcircles 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 timeinterval 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

Vierordt, at almost the same time, [35] 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 Bound, 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 foregound 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 held 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, [36] 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 in stinct 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 paralleled in the human race by the breathholding

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. [37] 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 me 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. [38]

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 today 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 of office for the fingertips. Of course fingertips 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 con formation 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 [39] to prove that the muscles are themselves the

spaceperceiving organ. Not surfacesensibility, 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 surfacesensibilities 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

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

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 mouthcavity 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 fingertip,

our lips feel larger then a surface equal to them on our thigh. So much comparison is immediate; but it is

The great agent in comparing the extent felt by one sensory surface with that felt by another, is

superpositionsuperposition 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

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

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 thighsurface is in contact with the entire palm and fingers. And when a

motion of the opposite fingertips 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 toothsocket is believed to be really smaller than the

fingertip 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

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 spacefeeling 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

held 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 aesthetic 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 smell, 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 share of the

If the inconsistencies of sightspaces inter se can thus be reduced, of course there can be no difficulty in

equating sightspaces with spaces given to touch. In this equation it is probably the touchfeeling 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 letter is, in Mr.Spencer's phrase, the 'mothertongue of thought,'

and the handmaid's idiom must be translated into the language of the mistress before it can speak clearly to

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 tastevolumes

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

It will have been noticed in the account given that when two sensorial senseimpressions, believed to come

from the same object, differ, then THE ONE MOST INTERESTING, practically or �sthetically, 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.

Now for the next step in our construction of real space: How are the various sensespaces 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 spaceexperiences form a chaos, out of which we

have no immediate faculty for extricating them. Objects of different senseorgans, 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 spaceexperiences together form an objective total and that this objective total is

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 toothsensibility 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 embed 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 semicircular canals. It would not follow that we should

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 in 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

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 seen.

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 ally which 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 newformed 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 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?

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. [43] 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 me feel something there, we can always see something there when we 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 their properties themselves we regard as overflowing in a weakened form into the spaces fined

by otherthings. In all this, it will be observed, the sensedata whose spaces coalesce into one are yield by

different senseorgans. 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. [44]

Different impressions on the same senseorgan 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 men out of visual ones almost exclusively. As the visual construction is the easiest to

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: [45] 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 call 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?" [46] 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

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. [47] 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.

Skinfeelings 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 skinfeelings stands as the

absolute or real size, and the size of the jointfeelings 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 fingertip 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 movementfeeling in the

joints of the upper limb, and the movementfeeling 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 movementseries (arm

moved, leg stroked), the movementspaces 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

movementspaces would be identified, not only as totals, but point for point. [48]

Just so with space beyond the body's limits. Continuing the jointfeeling beyond the toe, the baby hits

another object which he can still think of when he brings his 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 today by a new path, I find myself

suddenly in a glad which affects my senses exactly as did another I reached last week at the end of different

walk, I believe the two identical affection to present the same persisting glade, and infer that I have attained it

by two differing roads. The case in 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'seye view, are much larger than in

I have been led to speak of feelings which arise in joints. As these feeling have too much neglecting

Psychology hitherto, in entering now somewhat minutely in the interest of the reader, which under the rather

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 spacemeasurer 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. Delboeuf, [49] 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 skinfeelings, one of a large patch, one of small one, possess their difference of spatiality, not as an

immediate element, but solely by virtue of the fact that the large, to get its points successively excited,

demands more muscular contraction than the small one does. Fixed associations with the several amounts of

muscular contractions required in this particular experience would thus ex plain the apparent sizes of the

skinpatches, 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 surfacesensibility, provided we take that of the jointsurfaces 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 shoulderjoint indifferently), what

we are conscious of in each case, and indeed most acutely conscious of, is the geometric path described by

the fingertip. Its angles, its subdivisions, are all as distinctly felt as if seen by the eye; and yet the surface of

the fingertip receives no impression at all. [50] 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

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 the 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 retinalsurface 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

skinsurface to perceive, he may reply that the delicacy of the motor percep tion 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 fingertip, a figure which, traced in the same way on our

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

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 an�sthesia 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. [51] 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

That the jointsurfaces 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

startingout 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 greet pity that we have as yet no

direct testimony, no expressions from patients with healthy joints accidentally laid open, of the impressions

The first approach to direct evidence, so far as I know is contained in the paper of Lewinski, [53] published in

1879. This observer had a patient the inner half of whose leg was an�sthetic. 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 knockkneed. 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 jointsurfaces 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 knockkneed 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 jointsurfaces drawn

asunder) all sense of the amount of flexion disappeared. On the contrary, when he pressed a toe 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 [54] 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 hipjoint, 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. An�sthesia of the skin produced by

inductioncurrents 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 pressurefeelings were eliminated by artificial an�sthesia. When the joints themselves,

however, were made artificially an�sthetic 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

Applying this result, which seems invulnerable, to the case of the tracing fingertip, we see that our

perception of the latter gives no countenance to the theory of the muscular sense. We indubitably localize the

fingertip 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 joists at all? Surely to gain something

more valuable than the insipid jointfeelings 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 skinevents 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 jointsensation 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 spaceperceptions before it, congruent in form but different in

scale and place, either of which exclusively it may notice, or both at once, the jointspace which it feels

The jointspaces 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 jointrotation. Jointfeelings, 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 shoulderjoint 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? [55] Why may not the several jointfeelings 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 senseorgan should awaken the sensation it does.

But if the jointfeelings are directions and extents, standing in relation to each other, the task of association

in interpreting their import in eye or skinterms is a good deal simplified. Let the movement bc, of a certain

joint, derive its absolute spacevalue 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 spacevalue, even though it may

never have wholly merged with a skinexperience. So of differences of direction: so much jointdifference =

so much skindifference; therefore, more jointdifference = more skindifference. In fact, the jointfeeling

can frequently 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 jointfeeling 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

The localization of the jointfeeling 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 jointfeeling, 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 fins 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

fingertip 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 jointfeeling 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 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

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 tile sine gu� non of the jointfeeling's

projection to the farther end of it. When it is fined by our own bodily tissues (as where the projection Only

goes as far as the elbow or fingertip) we are sensible of its extent alike by our eye, by our exploring

movements, and by the resident sensations which fin 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 elbowjoint 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 jointfeeling 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. [57] 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

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 allimportant 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 spaceperceptions, 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

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. M�ller says, [58] 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 sensation 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

Empirically we find this probability confirmed by many facts. The judicious A. W. Volkman observes [59]

''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. Musclefeeling

belong to that class of general sensations which tell us of our inner states, but not of outer relations ; it does

E. H. Weber in his article Tastsinn called attention to the fact that muscular movements as large and strong as

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 down ward pictures it as an upward movement, because the chest

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 tile 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

spacesignificance, 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

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

standing how vague their space import appears. Shut the eyes and roll them, and you call with no approach

to accuracy tell the outer object which shall first be seen when you open them again. [61] Moreover, if our

eyemusclecontractions had much to do with giving us our sense of seen extent, we ought to have a natural

illusion of which we and 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. [62] When we turn to the muscles

of the body at large we find the same vagueness. Goldscheider found that the minimal perceived rotation of

size depend on a comparison 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. [63] The consciousness of active movement

became so blunt when the joint (alone!) was made an�sthetic 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. [64] 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

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

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 spaceperceptions out of primitive

incoherency requires any mental powers beyond those displayed in ordinary intellectual operations. I think it

is obvious granting the spacial qualia 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

spacepercep tions 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.

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'seye 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, anti 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. On the prairies the 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 mountaintop 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. Hank Levy, the blind author of 'Blindness and the

"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 quickset 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 dis cover 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, call 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 semicircularcanal feelings play a great part in determining the points of the com pass and the

direction of distant spots, in the blind as in us. We start towards them by feelings of this sort; and so many

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 spacevalues from the semicircularcanal 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 fined

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

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 mall 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 spaceelement 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 severalmile 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 brainwaste in the blind than in the seeing.' This seems to point to a greater

Our own visual explorations go on by means of innumerable stoppings and startings of the eyeballs. Yet these

are all effaced from the final spacesphere of our visual imagination. They have neutralized each other. We

can even distribute our attention to the right and left side 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

spacesphere 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

Sir William Hamilton, and J. S. Mill after him have quoted approvingly an opinion of Platner (an

eighteenthcentury philosopher) regarding the spaceperceptions of the blind. Platner says:

"The attentive observation of it 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

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 [67] 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] [68], 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 semiblind 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." [69]

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. Bough 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

I conclude, then, that although in its more superficial determinations the blind man's space is very different

from 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 newgiven 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: [70]

"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

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 tile 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. [71]

It is when we come to analyze minutely the conditions of visual perception that difficulties arise which have

made psychologists appeal to new and quasimythical 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 banal pages

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 timehonored 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 colorcontrasts and ambiguities, as not directly relevant to the spaceproblem, it is certain that the

same retinal image makes us see quite differentlysized and differentlyshaped 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 and 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

nonvisual 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

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 call 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 if.). It is impossible to lie on one's back on a hill, to let tile

empty abyss of blue 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 hilltop 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

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 held

of view is always a volumeunit. 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

heightfeeling take their absolute measure from the depthfeeling. If we plunge our head into a washbasin,

the felt nearness of the bottom makes us feel the lateral expanse to be small. If, on the contrary, we are on a

mountaintop, the distance of the horizon carries with it in our judgment a proportionate height and length in

the mountainchains 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 tile 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. [73] 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 held 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

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 depthfeeling become signs of given

amounts of the visual depthfeeling. 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

Suppose a colonel in front of his regiment at dressparade, and suppose he walks at right angles towards the

midmost mall 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 lie 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 depthfeeling with a retinal breadthfeeling. If the regiment moved, and the near end of the object.

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 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

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

A sensation is, as we have seen in Chapter XVII, the mental affection that follows most immediately upon the

stimulation of the sensetract. Its antecedent is directly physical, no psychic links, no acts of memory,

inference, or association intervening. Accordingly, if suppose the nexus between neural process in the

senseorgan, 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 senseorgan 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

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 washbasin, 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 ally 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 pasteboardmask like the outside, and look at it with

one eye, the accommodation and parallaxfeelings ape 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 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

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 me 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 eyefeelings serves as a mere signal to awaken this content, our intellect being so

"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 owning to

custom, but to the constitution of nature, when a contrary custom is found neither nor to weaken it."

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

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

"No elements in our perception can he 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." [74]

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 spaceperceptions

whatsoever must have an intellectual origin, and a content that no items of visual sensibility can account for.

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, [76] reverse

Helmholtz's query, and ask: "What would become of our senseperceptions 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 spaceperception (which we must now proceed to consider in more

detail) we find instances of an identical organic eyeprocess, 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

eyeprocess 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 spacesensation, 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 quasihallucinatory strength. But before this conclusion emerges, it will be necessary to have

reviewed the most important facts of optical spaceperception, 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. [77] 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 each other, and each

This theory starts from the truth that on both retin� an impression on the upper half makes us perceive an

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. I 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 lightrays 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. [78] Identical points being impressed, both eyes see their object in the same

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

inkmark on the glass, 'covering' the object as seen by the eye which is momentarily open. On looking now

with both eyes the inkmarks 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 distinct

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 lest a

fingertip 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 retin� act, according to Hering, as if they were superposed in the place

of this Imaginary doubleeye; 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

It is an immediate consequence of the law of identical pro projection of images on geometrically similar

points that images which fall upon geometrically DISPARATE points of the two retin� 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, 0,

instead of being parallel, as in the previously instanced case. If SL and SR in Fig. 55 be the parallel rays, each

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,

Conversely, if the star be looked at directly with parallel axes, O will be seen double, because its images will

effect the outer or cheek halves of the two retin�, 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 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 nonsimilar retinal halves, but on nonsimilar

parts of similar halves. Here, of course, the directions of projection will be less widely disparate than in the

Careful experiments made by many observers according to the socalled haploscopic method confirm this

law, and show that corresponding points of single visual direction, exist upon the two retin�. For the detail of

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 socalled 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

Here comes the first great conflict of the identitytheory with experience. Were the theory true, we ought ail

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, [80] 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 shell 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. [81]

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

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; [82] finally, observe

that the identitytheory, 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

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 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 retin� and affecting the outer half of each eye. On the identitytheory it ought necessarily to

appear double, whilst on the projectiontheory there is no reason whatever why it should not appear single,

provided only it be located by the judgment on each line of visible direc tion, neither nearer nor farther than

Every point in the field of view ought, in truth, if the projectiontheory 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 retin� 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 identitytheory. If the latter ruled, we ought to see most things double all the time. If the

projectiontheory ruled, we ought never to see anything double. As a matter of fact we get too few double

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. diagram will make this clear.

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 retin�. 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 held of our perception. If two halfdollars 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 halfdollar and the

right eye, and the right halfdollar and the left eye. The two halfdollars will then coalesce into one; and this

one will show its apparent approach to the penpoint by seeming Suddenly much reduced in size. [84]

Yet, in spite of this tendency to inaccuracy we are never actually mistaken about the halfdollar being behind

the penpoint. 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 inclusion 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 stovepipe, 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. [85]

Add to this the impossibility, recognized by all observers, of ever seeing double with the fove�, 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 projectiontheory, like its predecessor,

breaks down. Neither formulates exactly or exhaustively a law for all our perceptions. Ambiguity of Retinal

What does each theory try to do? To make of seen location a fixed function of retinal impressions. Other facts

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

afterimage of the sun and look at your fingertip : 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

Project the afterimage of the cross upon the upper left hand part of the well, it min appear as in Fig. 58; on

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. Adding certain lines to others has the same

distorting effect. In what is known as Z�llner's pattern (Pig. 60), the long parallels tip towards each other the

are the same they always were. A similar distortion of parallels appears in Pig 61. Drawing a square inside

the circle (Fig. 52) gives to the outline of the latter an indented appearance where the square's corners touch

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

In the stereoscope certain pairs of lines which look single under ordinary circumstances immediately seem

These facts show the indeterminateness of the spaceimport 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 worst case we may see a stationary field of view with one

moving object in it; in the second, the total held swimming more or less steadily in one direction in the third,

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, [87] 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

But the objective total same 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. He 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 definite 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 distancemeasurer. [88]

With the feelings of accommodation it is very much the same. Donders has shown [89] 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. [90]

There is still another deception, occurring in persons who have had one eyemuscle suddenly paralyzed. has

led Wundt to affirm that the eyeballfeeling proper, the incoming sensation of effected rotation, tells us only

of the direction of our eyemovements, but not of their whole extent. [91] 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 different

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

newlyacquired 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 spacetheories 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. [92] 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 spaceimport of the supposed sensation of

outgoing energy is as ambiguous and indeterminate as that of any other of the eyefeelings we have

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 eyesensation 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

We have native and fixed optical spacesensations; but experience leads us to select certain one 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 spacetheories, but they would

have seen that the objective spatial attributes 'signified' are simply and solely certain other optical sensations

What, for example, is the slantlegged cross which we think we see on the well when we project the

rectangular afterimage 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' slantlegged 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 slantlegged 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 slantlegged cross can throw Why should another one, and that an absent one, of those

innumerable images be picked out to represent exclusively the slantlegged cross's 'true' shape? Why should

that absent and imagined slantlegged 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 slantlegged figure so successfully intrude itself into the place of a presented square

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

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 tabletops constantly

present two acute and two obtuse angles; circles drawn on our wallpapers, 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. [93]

It is very easy to see why the normal situation should have this extraordinary preeminence. First, it is the

position in which we easiest hold anything we are examining in our hands; second, it is a turningpoint

between all right and all lefthand 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 startingpoint of

movements from which the eye is least troubled by axial rotations, by which superposition [94] 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 aesthetic 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

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 appearance, 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, me 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

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

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 sig nified, 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. 3.)

If we review the facts we shall find every grade of nonattention 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

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, musc� volitantes, negative afterimages,

" 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 overtones and

combinationtones 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 afterimages 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

eyedisease which impairs vision suddenly remark for the first time the musc� 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

"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 tile outer world. Only so far as they serve this end hale 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 dryness 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 lend them easily to attract our attention." (Physiol. Optik,

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 which impairs 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 held of view means, he sees it also as it feels that is, as a collection of patches

of color bounded by lines the whole terming 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.

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 spacedetermination of its own,

that might well be added to and overlaid or even momentarily eclipsed by suggestions of its sensation, but

how could it possibly be altered or completely suppressed thereby? Of actually present sensations, he says,

"We have not a single wellattested 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, afterimages, etc., remain projected into their apparent place in

the held 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 afterimages, 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

"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 and themselves obliged to assume that they are overcome by our better

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 probably to conduct the discussion we must divide the alleged

(a) With Helmholtz, colorperception is equally with spaceperception an intellectual affair. The socalled

simultaneous colorcontrast, 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 colorcontrast 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

nerveprocess, 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

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 carwindow in a

moving train, 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

A disk with an Archimedean spiral drawn upon it, whirled round on an ordinary rotating machine, produces

"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 vers� 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."

An elementary form of these motor illusions seems to be the one described by Helmholtz on pp. 568571 of

his Optik. The motion of anything in the field of vision along an acute angle towards a straight line sensibly

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 eve, as it moves. As the compasspoint 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

Any line across which we draw a pencilpoint appears to be animated by a, rapid movement of its own

towards the pencilpoint. 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 'Z�llner'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 Z�llner'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

Now all these facts taken together seen, 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, Delboeuf, Z�llner, 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. 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, 89 of Figs. 60, 61,

62 (pp. 232, 233). This peculiarity of small angles is by Wundt treated as the case of a fined space seeming

larger than an empty one, as in Fig. 68; and this, according to both Delboeuf and Wundt is owing to the fact

that more muscular innervation is needed for the eye to traverse a filled space than so empty one, because the

in the filled space inevitably arrest and constrain the eye, and this makes us feel as if it were doing more

lect that muscular movements are positively proved to have no share in the waterfall and revolvingspirals

illusions. and that it is hard to see how Wundt's and Delboeuf's particular form of muscleexplanation can

possibly apply to the compasspoint illusion considered a moment ago, we must conclude that these writers

have probably exaggerated, to say the least, the reach of their muscleexplanation 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, [98] 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 seeingapparatus, Quite as little as the negative

afterimage 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, [99] 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 muscleexplanation 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

fingertip 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 Z�llner's figure is to be found in Hermann's Handb. d. Physiologie, III. I, p.

579. Lipps [100] 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

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

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 colorcontrast, 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, unsuggestive of those other spacesensations which we all the

time know from extrinsic evidence to constitute the real spacedeterminations of the diagram. Very likely, if

these sensations were as frequent and as practically important as they now are insignificant and dare, we

should end by substituting their significates the real spacevalues of the diagrams for them. These

latter me should then seem to see directly, and the illusions would disappear like that of the side of a

(b) Another batch of cases which we may discard is that of double images. A thoroughgoing

antisensationalist 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

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. [101] 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 skin 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 [sic] a moment ago, where given lines have their spacevalue 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 psychophysiologica1 laws. Thus, if in Fig. 66, l and r be crossed by an

horizontal line at the same level, and viewed stereoscopically, they appear as a single pair of lines, l, in space.

But if the horizontal be at different levels, as in l', r', three lines appear, as in s'. [102] Let us then say no more

about double images. All that the facts prove is what Volkmann says, [103] 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,

one spacesensation into another when the total retinal process changes, there remain but two other groups to

puzzle us. The first is that of the afterimages 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

The phenomena of the first group were described on page 232. A. W. Volkmann has studied them with his

accustomed clearness and care. [105] Even an imaginarily inclined wall, in a picture, will, if an afterimage

be thrown upon it, distort the shape thereof, and make us see a form of which our afterimage 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

afterimage appears as an obliquelegged cross upon the signboard. It is the converse phenomenon of a

The unstable judgments of relative distance and size were also mentioned on pp. 2312. 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 illu sion, 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 visitingcard across the

middle, so that its halves form an angle of 90� more or less; set it upright on the table, as in Fig. 72, and view

You can make it appear either as if it opened towards you or away from you. In the former case, the angle ab

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. [106] Again, look, with either one or two eyes, at the opening of a

wineglass 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, [107] according as the latter is placed beneath or above it.

Plane diagrams also can be conceived as solids, and that in more than one way. Figs. 74, 75, 76, for example,

biguous 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 end 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

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 afterimage, mask or diagram, we see

now this object and now that, as if the retinal image per se had no essential spaceimport. 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 spacesensation ought to be

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 spaceyielding 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 generally to perceive the diagram, solid than flat, seems due to probability. [110] 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

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

When we turn from the diagrams to the actual folded visitingcard and to the real glass, the imagined form

seems fully as real as the correct one. The card flaps over; tile glass rim tilts this may or that, as if some

inward spring suddenly became released in our eye. In these changes the actual retinal image receives

different comments 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. 2378), a set of imaginary absent eyesensations, they seem no

whit less vividly there than the sensation which the eye now receives from without.

The case of the afterimages 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. [111] 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 reel ones, they should in

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 trans 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 afterimage, 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

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 forms 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

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 psychophysical process is aroused, as usually happens, by lightrays 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

"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 cofactor 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

nervesubstance. 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

"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 open thing 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 it 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 (erg�nzende) 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 hat 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 vers�; 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 nerveprocesses 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 disposi tion 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

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

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 afterimage, 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. Delboeuf has found, accordingly,

that if we try to bisect such a line we place the point of division about 1/16 of its length too high. [114]

Similarly, a square cross, or a square, drawn on paper, should look higher than it is broad. And that this is

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, as [upsidedown "S" and "8"] the upper half looks much the larger. [115]

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

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

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

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

eyemovements 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 equivalencejudgment 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

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 im possible where the tracts

make a wide angle with each other. But there are certain directions in the held of view, certain retinal lines,

along which it is particularly easy to make the image of an object slide. The object then be comes 'ruler' for

these lines, as Helmholtz; puts it, [119] making them seem straight throughout if the object looked straight to

But all this need of superposition shows how devoid of exact spaceimport the feelings of movement are per

se. As we compare the spacevalue of two retinal tracts by super posing them successively upon the same

objective line, so we also hare to compare the spacevalue of objective angles and lines by superposing them

on the same retinal tract. Neither procedure would be required if our eyemovements 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 com pare nonparallel figures as it now is to judge of those

which are parallel. [120] Those which it took the same amount of movement to traverse would be equal, in

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

The sensations contributing to spaceperception 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

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 sensespaces are, in the first instance, incoherent with each other; and primitively both they and

The education of our spaceperception consists largely of two processes reducing the various

sensefeelings to a common measure, and adding them together into the single allincluding space of the real

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 spacefeelings 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

For the successive application of the same thing to different spacegiving surfaces motion is indispensable,

and hence plays a great pert in our spaceeducation, 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 spaceperception, 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 spacesensations with which the present one has been associated and which may be

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

The third dimension forms an original element of all our spacesensations. In the eye it is subdivided by

various discriminations. The more distant subdivisions are often shut out altogether, and, in being suppressed,

have the effort of diminishing the absolute spacevalue of the total field of view. [121]

Let us now close with a brief historical survey. The first achievement of note in the study of

spaceperception 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

In other words, that primitively chaotic or semichaotic condition of our various sensespaces 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

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 plurality 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. Spaceperception 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

Whence does the extension come which gets so inseparably associated with these nonextended colored

sensations? From the 'sweep and movements' of the eye from muscular feelings. But, as Prof. Bain says, if

movementfeelings give us any property of things, "it would seem to be not space, but time." [124] And John

Min says that "the idea of space is, at bottom, one of time." [125] 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 then the

association of these different [nonspatial] [126] motor and sensitive effects." [127]

This phrase is mysticalsounding 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 spaceperception 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

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 spaceperception

"No idea of extension can arise from a simultaneous excitation" of a multitude of nerveterminations like

those of the skin or the retina, since this would imply a "knowledge of their relative positions" that is, "a

preexistent 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

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

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 supersensational 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, fining 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 povertystricken 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, anteexperiential 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 drat 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 worldsystem 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 [sic]. 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 band 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 readymade 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

I call this view mythological, because I am conscious of no such Kantian machineshop 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 spaceintuitions 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 fins 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

spacesensations with intellectual relations; but these relations are the same when they obtain between the

elements of the spacesystem as when they obtain between any of the other elements of which the world is

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

The other prominent German writers on space are also 'psychical stimulists.' Herbert, whose influence has

been widest, says 'the resting eye sees no space,' [129] and ascribes visual extension to the influence of

movements combining with the nonspatial retinal feelings so as to form graduated 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

The obvious objection is that mere serial order is a genus, and spaceorder 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.

To Lotze we owe the muchused 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 supersensational, But why sensations themselves might not be the

Wundt has all his life devoted himself to the elaboration of a spacetheory, of which the neatest and most

"In the eye, spaceperception 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 heterogene ous

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

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 localsign system of the retina by the simple localsign 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

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. [132] It confesses that we cannot analyse 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 analyse 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,

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 spacedeterminations we perceive are in every case products of a process of unconscious

inference. [133] The inference is similar to one from induction or analogy. [134] We always see that form

before us which habitually would have caused the sensation we now have. [135] But the latter sensation can

never be intrinsically spatial, or its intrinsic spacedeterminations would never be overcome as they are so

often by the 'illusory' spacedeterminations it so often suggests. [136] 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 sole ly to Experience. [137] The only psychic activity required for this is the association of ideas.

But how, it may be asked, can association produce a. spacequality 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 he judged. No theory is worthy of the name which leaves

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 gent 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. [139] But elsewhere, again, [140] 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, [141] he reinforces this remark by confessing that he does not see how any neural

process can give rise without antecedent experience to a readymade (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 spacepercepts which thus, from the optical point of view, 'may be assumed as given.'

Of course the eyeman has a right to fall back on the skinman for help at a pinch. But doesn't this means

that he is a mere eyeman and not a complete psychologist ? In other words, Helmholtz's Optics and the

'empiristic theory' there professed are not to be understood as attempts at answering the general question of

how spaceconsciousness enters the mind. They simply deny that it enters with the first optical sensations.

[143] 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 thing 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 catchwords work on the popularscientist 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 deathblow at the

old bugaboo of 'innate ideas.' His 'nativistic' adversary Hering, they probably imagine, Heaven save the

After Wundt and Helmholtz, the most important antisensationalist spacephilosopher in Germany is

Professor Lipps, whose deduction of space from an order of nonspatial 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 whenever it does so appear, this

Lipps, and almost all the antisensationalist 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 preexisted 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," [145] and "no idea of extension can arise from the simultaneous excitation" of many

nerves "unless there is a knowledge of their relative positions." [146] Just so Prof. Bain insists that the very

meaning of space is scope for movement, [147] 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 spacesensations. 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.

[148] 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. [149] As well might one say that

because the world consists of all its parts, there fore 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 preexistent

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, Leconte, and Sch�n. 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 soidistant '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 Encyclop�dia 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

[2] 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

spacefeeling from the smaller line as the skin gets from the larger one. Cf. Jastrow: Mind, xi. 5467;

[3] 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. 207211.

[10] Fechner, who was ignorant of the but lately discovered function of the semicircular 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 senseorgans 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 backhead, assumed a fairly morbid

degree of sensibility whenever I tried to think." (Elem. der Psychophysik, ii 49091.)

[11] 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 membran� 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

[12] 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 visitingcard, cutting one edge

of it into a sawtooth pattern, and from the opposite edge cutting out all but the two corners, and then

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

[14] 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 whet it is. We hear it untiringly reiterated by materialists and

spiritualists alike that we can see no possible inward reason why a certain brainprocess 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 other 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 nervetermini, 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 lend 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 nervetips, the matter would hardly be more

transparent, for the mystery would still remain, why are we so much better cognizant of triangles on our

fingertips than on the nervetips 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.)

[15] Musical tones, e.g., have an order of quality independent either of their space or timeorder. Music

comes from the timeorder of the notes upsetting their qualityorder. 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 spaceorder or

timeorder, as d e f a h g, etc., and still the order of quality will remain fixed and unchanged.

[16] 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.

[17] 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 tire compass given absolutely. This inconceivable 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

[18] 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

Another reason why we get to feel as if a spacerelation 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 and, 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.

[19] This often happens when the warm and cold points, or the round and pointed ones, are applied to the

[21] Vorlesungen �b. Menschenu. Thierseele (Leipzig, 1883), i. 214. see also Ladd's Physiological

Psychology, pp. 3968, and compare the account by Cf. 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.

[22] 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. Wunt

(Menschen u. Thierseele, i. 214) called attention to the changes of colorsensibility 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. 118121. Prof. B. Erdman has quite lately (Vierteljahrsschrift f. wiss.

Phil.,x. 3249) 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. 1 should

say. Where, as on the retina, they are less so (Kries and Auerbach), this may well be a mere difficulty of

[24] 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 braintract 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 world presumably both have a

similar intrinsic quality, and at the same time tend each to arouse the other. Since the same nervetrunk in

most cases supplies the skin and the parts beneath, the anatomical hypothesis presents nothing improbable.

[25] 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 semiconscious irritation which needs only the emphasis of

attention, or of some accidental inward irritation, to become strong at any point.

[26] 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 �sthetic 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

[27] These facts were first noticed by Wundt: see his Beitr�ge, p. 140, 208. See also Lamansky, Pfl�ger's

[28] 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

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

The uncritical render, 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, we will see no sort of logical connection between (l) the original

separate local signs, (2) the line as a unit, (3) the line with the points discriminated in it, and (4) the various

nerveprocesses which subserve all these different things. We 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' (l) 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 nerveprocess 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 psycheneural 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 selfcontradiction in it, but only the

universal psychological puzzle of how a new mode of consciousness emerges whenever a fundamentally new

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

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 then in a line in our thought, but we can always distinguish between

But note now the peculiarity of the nerveprocesses 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 spaceposition 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

But not alone the gradation of their quality arranges the localsign feelings in a scale. Our movements

arrange them also in a timescale. Whenever a stimulus passes from point a of the skin or retina to points, it

awakens the localsign feelings in the perfectly definite timeorder 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 being that we never feel either a, c, or f, without there clinging to

it faint reverberations of the various timeorders of transition in which, throughout past experience, it has

been aroused. To the local sign n 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 stores by local signs and great store by movements in

explaining spaceperception, would have a perfectly definite timeorder, due to motion, by which to account

for time 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 bow 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 ver� caus� 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

[29] 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. Skinsensations, different enough to be discriminated when successive, may still fuse

[30] 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 slum

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 fatter 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 nervetermini

exclusively excited by sounds of differing pitch, and yet the sounds seem all to fin 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 tile auditory nervetermini 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 endorgans to different rates of airwave, 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 spacetheory 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

[31] Donaldsan, in Mind, x. 399, 577; Goldscheider, in Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiologie; Blix, in Zeitschrift

f�r Biologie. A good r�sum� may be found in Ladd's Physiol. Psychology, part ii. chap. iv. ��2193.

[32] 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

needleheads, (2) two screwheads, and (3) a needlehead and a screwhead. The distance of the

screwheads 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

drillingmachine, 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 drilling apparatus then almost always

[33] 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

[37] Exner tries to show that the structure of the faceted eye of articulates adapts it for perceiving motions

[38] 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.

In the lefthand 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 righthand

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 dark; 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 rear), 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,

[39] Brown, Bain. J. S. Mill and in a modified manner Wundt, Helmholtz, Sully, etc.

[40] 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 Anger 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 in the middle of the edge opposite to the one against his body, he will draw them asunder tin they

reach the ends of the edge in question: and then, and not tin 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 'lying 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 Ant 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

surfacesensations 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.'

[41] Fechner describes (Psychophysik, i. 132) a method of equivalents' for measuring tile sensibility of the

skin. Two compasses are used, one on the part A. another on the part R, 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

[42] Prof. Jastrow gives as the result of his experiments this general conclusion (Am. Journal of Psychology,

iii. 53): "The spaceperceptions 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 spacesenses must indeed be different from our own.

But he continues: "The existence of the striking disparities between our visual and our other

spaceperceptions 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

[44] Ventriloquism shows this very prettily. The ventriloquist talks with out 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

[47] 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.

[48] The incoherence of the different primordial sensespaces 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 handmovement space, nor an independent member

of his legandfoot space. It has actually no mental existence yet save as this little painspace. What wonder

then, if the pains seems a little spaceworld all by itself? But let the pain once associate itself with these other

spaceworlds, 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 on the toe every time the pain shoots up; let him handle his foot

himself and get the 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

[49] Pourqoi les Sensation visuelles sont elles �tendues? In Revue Philosophique, iv. 167. As the proofs of

this chapter are being corrected, I receive the third 'Heft' of M�nsterberg's Beitr�ge 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

[50] 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.

[51] See for example Duchenne, Electrisation locslis�e, pp. 727, 770; Leyden; Virchow's Archiv, Ed. xlvii.

[55] Direction in its 'first intention,' of course; direction with which so far we merely become acquainted, and

about which we know nothing save perhaps it difference from another direction a moment ago experienced in

[56] 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 fingertip,

is not represented as any specific skintract. What the seeing men 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 spacemagnitude 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

[57] 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 pianoplayer 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

[61] Volkmann, op. cit. p. 189. Compare also what Hering says of the inability in his own case to make

afterimages 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 (Beitr�ge zur Physiologie, 18612, pp. 31, 141). Helmholtz

also allows to the muscles of convergence a very feeble share in our sense of the third dimension

[62] Compare Lipps, Psychologische Studien (1885). p. 18, and the other arguments given on pp. 12 to 27.

The most plausible reasons for corrections of the eyeballmuscles being admitted as original contributors to

the perception of extent, are those of Wundt, Physiologische Psychologie, ii. 98100. 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

M�nsterberg's Beitr�ge 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 M�nsterberg 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 care fully averaged and

'percented ' 20,000 observations, his conclusion must be listened to with great respect. Briefly it is this, that

"our judgments size depend on a comparison of the intensity of the feelings of movement which arise in our

eyeballmuscles 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 M�nsterberg 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 tire movementfeelings 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 tile 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 M�nsterberg; and yet with me there is a strongly pronounced

error the other way. It is the rightwardlying 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 P 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. 2880) we saw many examples of similar alterations, interferences

with, or exaltations of, the sensory effect of one nerveprocess 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 skinsurface,

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 M�nsterberg'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

[65] 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.

[66] 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

[71] 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 underwitted peasant, No� M.,

whose case is described by Dr. Dufour of Laussnne (Guerison d'un AveugeN�, 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 some of

[72] 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. M�ller, 'Raddrehung u. Tiefendimension,' Leipzig

Acad. Berichte, 1875, page 124), for oneeyed 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 au observer Its Helmboltz, who has carefully examined vision with inverted head, can have overlooked

it. (See his Phys. Optik, pp. 433, 723, 728, 772.) I cannot help thinking that anyone who can explain the

exaggeration of the depthsensation in this case will at the same time throw much light on its normal

[73] In Froriep's Notizen (1838, July), No. 133, is to be found a detailed account, with a picture, of an

Estonian 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 Wine, ii. 44)

[74] Physiol. Optik. P. 438. Helmholtz's reservation of 'qualities' 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

[75] It is needless at this point to consider what Helmholtz's views of the nature of the intellectual

[77] 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 distancefeeling. Since oneeyed people have it, and are inferior to

the twoeyed 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 afterimage,

do not Usually see it draw near or recede with varying convergence, it cannot be simply constituted by the

convergencefeeling. For the same reason it would appear nonidentical with the feeling of accommodation.

The differences of apparent parallactic movement between far and near objects as we move our head cannot

constitute the distancesensation, 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

A certain maximum distancevalue. 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 distancevalue, 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

Hering, who has tried to explain the gradations within it by the interaction of certain native distancevalues

belonging to each point of the two retin�, seems willing to admit that the absolute scale of the spacevolume

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 ' (Beitr�ge, p. 344). What he calls the Kernpunkt of this

spacevolume 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 be 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

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 onehalf part of the

Hering's and Stumpf's theories are reported for the English reader by Mr. Sully (in Mind, iii. pp. 1726). Mr.

Abbott, in his Sight and Touch (pp. 968), gives a theory which is to me so obscure that I only refer the

reader to its piece, adding that it seems to make of distance a fixed fluctuation 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 distancejudgments.

Professor Lipps, in his singularly acute Psychologische Studien (p. 69 ff.), argues, as Ferrier, in his review of

Berkeley (Philosophical Remains, 11. 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

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

nerveends affected by the light; in the case of pretension 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 first 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 twoeyed rifleshooting has such advantages over shooting with one eye closed.

[78] 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 same distance behind the plane of the pictures, according to tile 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 faroff convergence is something which the ordinary use of our eyes

[79] These two observations prove the law of identical direction only for objects which excite the fove� or lie

in the line of direct looking. Observers skilled in indirect vision can, however, more or less easily verify the

[80] 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 held. almost all subsequent progress

[81] 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. 7379 ; Wundt, Physiol. Psychol., 2te Anfl. p. 144; Nagel, Sehen mit zwei Augen, pp. 7882.

Against Wheatstone see Volkmann. arch. f. Ophth., v. 274, and Untersuchungen, p. 286; Hering, Beitr�ge

zur Physiologie, 2945, also in Hermann's Hdbch. d Physiol., Ed. iii. 1 Th. p. 435; Aubert, Physiologie d.

Netzhsut, p. 322 ; Sch�n. Archiv f. Ophthal., xxiv. 1. pp. 5665; and Donders, ibid. xiii 1. p. 15 and note.

[82] 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 huger, 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

[83] Professor Joseph Le Conte, who believes strongly in the identitytheory, has embodied the latter in R

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. 3, so I say no more about it now, except

that it does not solve any of the difficulties we are noting in the identitytheory, nor account for the other

[84] Naturally it takes a small object at a less distance to cover by its image a constant amount of retinal

[88] Physiol. Optik, 649664. Later this author is led to value convergence more highly. Arch. f. (Anat. u.)

[89] Anomalies of Accommodation and Refraction (New Sydenham Soc. Transl., London, 1864), p. 155.

[90] These strange contradictions have been called by Aubert 'secondary' deceptions of judgment. See

Grundz�ge 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.

[93] 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

[96] 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 held seems to move

in one way, another part in another. The same is true when we torn from the spiral to look at the wall the

centre of the field alone swells onto or contracts, the margin does the reverse or remains at rest. Mach and

Dvorak have beautifully proved the impossibility of eyerotations in this case ( Sitzunger d. Wiener Aksd.,

[97] Bulletins de l'Acsd. de Belgique, xxi. 2; Revue philosophique, vi. 8236; Physiologische Psycbologie,

[102] See Archiv f. Ophthalm., v. 2, 1 (1859), where many more examples are given.

[104] I pass over certain difficulties shout double images, drawn from the perceptions of a few squinters (e.g.

by Schweigger, Klin. Untersuch �ber dos Schielen. Berlin, 1881; by Javal. annales d'Oculistique, ixxxv. 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 i.

[108] Loeb (Pfl�ger's Archiv, xl. 274) has proved that muscular changes of adaptation in the eye for near and

[109] 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

[110] Cf. E. Mach, Beitr�ge, etc., p. 94 and the preceding chapter of the present work, p. 88 ff.

[111] 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 afterimage 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 afterimage becomes in various ways elliptical on being projected upon the different surfaces of the

[112] 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

[115] 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. Of. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., 2te Aufl. ii. 968; Th. Lipps,

[116] Hering would pertly solve in this way the mystery of Figs. 60, 61, and 87. No doubt the explanation

pertly applies; but the strange cessation of the illusion when we fix the gaze fails to be accounted for thereby.

[117] Helmholtz has sought (Physiol. Optik, p. 715) to explain the divergence of the apparent vertical

meridians of the two retin�, 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 verbatum 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 individuals at diverse times precludes its being due to the mere habitual fallingoff 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 retin�, 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 Innervationsgef�hl (op. cit. ii. 99 ff.).

[119] "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 tin it becomes an afterimage. We follow, in

looking, the direction of this line, and in so doing we slide the line dong 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

held 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' on

the visual held lines which he has studied with his usual care. Cf. Physiol. Optik, p. 648 ff.

[121] This shrinkage and expansion of the absolute spacevalue of the 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

[131] Lehrbuch d. Psychol., 2te Audage, Ed. ii. p. 66. Volkmann's fifth chapter contains a really precious

[132] 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

[143] In fact, to borrow a simile from Prof. G. E. M�ller (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 bin, when no one has any money, but each

[144] Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (l883), pp. 480, 5912. Psychologische Studien (1885), p. 14.

[149] 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

[150] 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. 1; H.

Spencer: Principles of Psychology, pt. vi. chaps. xiv, xvi; J. S. Mill: Examination of Hamilton, chap. xiii (the

best statement of the socalled 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. 1884; another

review in Macmillan's Magazine, Bug. 1866; J. Sully: Outlines of Psychology, chap. vi; J. Ward: Encyclop.

Britannica, 9th Ed., article ' Psychology,' pp. 535. 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).

An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario

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

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 mindstuff is it composed? Second, the way of history:

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 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, though 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 rest thing. [2] Disbelief is thus an incidental

The true opposite 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. [3] The pathological state opposed to this solidity and deepening has been

called the questioning mania (Gr�belsucht 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. [4] [p. 285]

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

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 me

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." [5] [p.

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,

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.276) the 'object' of thought may be comparatively simple, like "Ha! what a pain," or

"ThereexistsanallwiseCreatoroftheworld" 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

"Every object comes into consciousness in a twofold way, as simply thought of [vorgestellt] [6] and as

admitted [anerkaant] [7] 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] [8] 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 a formative, 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 with inner constitution the thoughts 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

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

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.

Suppose a newborn mind, entirely blank and waiting for experience to begin. Suppose that it begins in the

forms of 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

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

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

"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 resistance, he

will necessarily contemplate the horse as present, nor will he be able to doubt of its existence, however little

certain of it he maybe. I deny that a man in so far as he imagines [percipit] [11] affirms nothing. For what is it

to imagine a winged horse but to affirm that, the horse [that horse, namely] [12] 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] [13] its existence."(Ethics, 11, 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

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

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,

The reader will recognize in these two cases the two sorts of judgment called in the logicbooks 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; [14] 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 alarming that their terms are the same with the terms of

these other propositions. A dreamcandle 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 dreamhorse has

wings; but then neither horse nor wings are the same with any horses or wings known to memory. That we

call 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 it attributes, and the existence disregarded an existence into men's land, in the limbo 'where

footless fancies dwell.' The real things are, in Mr. Taine's terminology, the reductives of the things judged

Habitually and practically we do not count these disregarded things as existents at all. For them V� 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

Two subuniverses, at least, connected by relations which philosophy tries to ascertain! Really there are

more than two subuniverses 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 subworlds more or less discontentedly; 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 subworlds, but he also seeks to determine the relation of

The most important subuniverses 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: [p. 292]

(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

(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)

(3) The world of ideal relations, or abstract truths believed or believable by all, and expressed in logical,

(4) The world of 'idols of the tribe,' illusions or prejudices common to the race. All educated people recognize

these as forming one subuniverse. 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

(5) The various supernatural worlds, the Christian heaven and hell, the world of the Hindoo mythology, the

world of Swedenborg's visa et nudita, 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 Pacers, etc. [16] [p. 293]

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 commonsense 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

etherwaves 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.

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

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

In the relative sense, then, the sense in which we contrast reality with simple unreality, 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. [18] 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

Or as Prof. Bain puts it: "In its essential character, belief is a phase of our active nature otherwise called

"The object of belief, then, reality or real existence, in 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

"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." [21]

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 pausing

thought, if nothing more. But, as thinkers with emotional reaction, to give what seems to be 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 pointfirst, 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 believe drifter 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 f�r 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. [22] 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

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 indiarubber; 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

"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 lire 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 senseimpressions, 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 blas� 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

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

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,

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

(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;

(5) Congruity with certain favorite forms of contemplation unity, simplicity, permanence, and the like;

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

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

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 37, 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

Sensible vividness or pungency is then tire 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 our 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

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

"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

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 person� 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 AmazonianIndian 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 afterlife 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 hat, 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 illfated Tasmanians. Among some North American

tribes another 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

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 relies, and

of one of which Fichte could write to his affianced: 'Die Farbe fehlt, das Auge feldt, es fehlt der himmlische

Ausdruck deiner lieblichen Z�ge' and yet go on worshiping 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, chalkmarks, 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 hidingplace the clairvoyant revealed, the whole thing

passes from fairyland to motherearth, so here we believe all the more, if only we see that 'the bricks are

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 aesthetically 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. [27] The real color of a thing is that one colorsensation which it gives us

when most favorably lighted for vision. Soon its real size, its real shape, etc. these are but optical

sensations selected out of thousands of others, because they have aesthetic 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.

Among all sensations, the most beliefcompelling 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 supposed Berkeleyan before Berkeley) the notion that all our perceptions may be but a

" He may please to dream that I make him this answer. 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 skeptical

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] [29] 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

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 curbs one awakens no emotion of dread; so no sense of reality

attaches to it, and we are sure me shall not fall. On a precipice's edge, however, the sickening emotion which

the notion of a possible fall engenders makes ns believe in the latter's imminent reality, and quite unfits us to

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. Ever exciting thought in the natural man carries credence with it. To conceive with passion is ipso facto

"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 donating here and there, but they did not justify the

strength of the emotion, stillness 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

At length the fatal answer came, In characters of living flame Not spoke in words, nor blazed in scroll, But

A hot hash 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 antiCatholicism; Ignatius Loyola in his antiProtestantism; and both, I suppose, felt

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, 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.

Renouvier calls this belief of a thing for no other reason than that we conceive it with passion, by the name of

mental vertigo. [32] 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 tit 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 bailing 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? [33] [p.

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

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

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 rest 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

onefluid and twofluid 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 bring us objects able to account satisfactorily for our sensible experience,

also offers those which are most interesting, those which apiaeal most urgently to our �sthetic, 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: [34]

"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

Willsubstance, or Hartmann's wicked jackatalltrades, 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

"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 I In like manner an enraptured man, a drearyfeeling 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, hut 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 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

"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 crosssection 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 activity 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, Set the earlier claim is only postponed, not

"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 unwillingness 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 an�sthesia, 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 cooperative 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

"If we survey the held 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 pagrtnism 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 �sthetic 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 selfdespair, but which were personal, requiring no priestly intermediation, and which brought their

owner face to face with God? What caused the wildfire 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

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 formulae

than by the agnostics; 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 �sthetic ones. The two great �sthetic

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 phenomenasounds, sights, feelings

and if the man continued to exist, and to be rational at all, his attention would doubtless soon find for him a

way 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." [35]

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. That

these ideal objects and rational relations are will require a separate chapter to show. [36] 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 socalled '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 are 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 derealized, by the ultimate

principle of my belief. The Worldsoul 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 reel. Meanwhile the other systems coexist with the attempts at that one, and, all being alike

I have now, I trust, shown sufficiently what the psychelogic sources of the sense of reality are. Certain

postulatesare given in our nature; and whatever satisfies those postulates is treated as if real. [37] I might

therefore finish the it not that a few additional words will chapter here, were it not that a reset the truth in a

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 Commonsense. 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 extramental world; so

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 and 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. [38] 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 percep tion 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, imply my dim sense of a continuity between the long

dead savage and his doings and the present world of which the hint forms part. It is preeminently 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 (e.g., if I should class

him with 'scientific vagaries' in general), I disbelieve him. The word 'real' itself is, in short, a fringe.

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 want to get up early tomorrow 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 freewill question arises as regards belief. If our wills are

indeterminate, so must our beliefs be, etc. The first act of freewill, in short, would naturally be to believe in

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 same

results by I 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 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

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

[2] 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. r. ch. 3.)

[3] See that very remarkable little work, 'The An�thetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy,' by Benj. P.

[4] 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,,d I had only a minute to escape, and the thought arose ' Have they sent for

fireengines? Is it probable that the man who has the key is off 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, but1 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.

[9] For an excellent account of the history of opinion on this subject see A. Marty, in Vierteljahsch. f. wiss.

[10] We saw near the end of Chapter XIX that a candleimage 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

[14] 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 tit 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

[15] I define the scientific universe here in the radical mechanical way. Practically, it is oftener thought of in

[16] It thus comes about that we can say such things as that Ivanhoe did not really marry Rebecca, as

Thackeray falsely makes him do. In that world 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 Ivanhoeworld 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 fictive status, and relegates them to one of the subuniverses grouped under

[17] 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 dreamworld 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 subuniverse 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 today

dreamobjects figure among the realities in which some ' psychicresearchers' 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.

[18] Distinguishes realities from unrealities. the essential from the rubbishy and neglectable.

[19] Inquiry concerning Hum. Understanding, sec. v. pt. 2 (slightly transposed in my quotation)

[21] Critique of Pure Reason, trans. M�ller, 11, 51517. 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 most lie in the

[22] I use the notion of the Ego here, as commonsense uses it. Nothing is prejudged as to the results (or

[23] Griesinger, Mental Diseases, �� 50, 98. The neologism we so often hear, that an experience 'gives us a

realizing sense' of the truth of some proposition or other, illustrates the dependence of the sense of reality

[24]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 thosewho 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 'testconditions,' 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 weakspirited creature indeed who

should allow anyblown 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

[30] Essay, bk. rv. 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

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 childbearing. 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

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 notebook 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 sway. In a short time we heard warcries ringing loudly and shrilly over the tableland.

Two hours afterwards a long line of warriors were seen descending the tableland 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 hardly 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 halfdozen of the Yowa people came near, and the

" '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! I this is some great mistake, surely.'

Mundel�' replied one of them.... 'our people saw you yesterday make marks on some taratara [paper]

[Classics editors note: James' Insertion]. 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 Mundel� so wicked! We have gathered together to fight you if you do not

burn that taratara 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 notebook contained a vast number of valuable notes.... I could not sacrifice it to

the childish caprice of savages.9s I was rummaging my bookbox, I came across a volume of Shakespeare

[Chandos edition] [Classics editors note: James' insertion] much worn and well thumbed, and which was of

the same size as my fieldbook; its cover was similar also, and it might be passed for the fieldbook,

provided that no one remembered its appearance too well. I took it to them. 'Is this the taratara, friends, that

" '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

''Ahh,' breathed the poor deluded natives sighing their relief....'There is no trouble now.'... End something

approaching to a cheer was shouted among them, which terminated the episode of the burning of

[37] 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 know of

an external reality or demand, that I posit, postulate actively construct on the basis of sensedata,' 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 everyday 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 dearest account of the psychology of belief with which I am

[38] ''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 around of operations continuing for hours, under the full benefit of daylight, it would

unhesitatingly begin the same roll and in the evening. Its state of mind is practically one of unbounded

"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

" 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,

[39] Literature. D Hume : Treatise on Human Nature, part III. �� vix 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 Ch.

Renouvier : Psychologie Rationnelle, vol. ii. pt. ii; and Esquisse d'une Classification syst�matique des

Doctrines Mind, chapter xi Philosophiques, part vi. J. EI. Newman: The Grammar of assent. J.Venn: Some

Characteristics of Belief. V. Brochard: De l'Erreur, part ii chap. vi, ix; and Revue Philosophique, xxvii. 1. E�

Habier: Psychologie, chap xxi, Appendix. Oll� Laprune: La Certitude Morale (1881). Cf. F. Stout: On

Genesis of Cognition of Physical Reality, in 'Mind,' Jan. 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, 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 s 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 out 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 footnote. Refer to a type of experience which has frequently found a place among 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 sense lion 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

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

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 lime Mr.

P. had a musicroom 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

middleaged 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 s if Mr. P. spoke or

made a decided movement. The most singular point in the occurrence was its frequent repetition. Be 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 whenever 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 over work 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 timein 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 heir, was partially gray; also that it war, 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 the 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

On crossexamining 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 fail under the heads laid down in my text.

An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario

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

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

dominate, we have a prosaic mind; if rare contiguities, 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 later that we are thinking of another, to which we have I 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 sunmyths, 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

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 Creek 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, dinnerbell 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, [2] were it not that formal logic has

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. [3] 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

grouparrangements 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 hansomcab just

about to ran 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

How far can this kind of unnamed or nonconceptional 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,

"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

"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?'" [5]

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

"Waterfowl 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 waterfowl

he has two distinct recepts, one of which answers to solid ground, and the other to an unresisting fluid. But

unlike the waterfowl 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

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, I 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 revelry or 'associative'

sequence, the ideas bear certain inward relations to each other which we must proceed to examine with some

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 'ruleofthumb,' 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

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

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,

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

First, sagacity , [7] 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. [8]

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 fullness 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

When we conceive of S merely as M (of vermilion merely as a mercurycompound, 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

mercurycompound, it is vividly red, heavy, and expensive, it comes from China, and so on, in infinitum. All

objects are wellsprings 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, ii 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 chairmaker, of having such a, shape; the orator, of responding to

such and such feelings; the theatremanager, 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 tie 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 beer by aiming, not at his eye or heart, but 'at him gen erally.'

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 ingrained partial that, for commonsense and scholasticism (which is only commonsense grown

articulate), the notion that there is no one quality genuinely, absolutely, and exclusively essential to anything

is almost unthinkable. " B 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

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 truth about it becomes to me as naught. [10] The

properties which are important vary from man to man and from hour to hour. [11] Hence clivers appellations

and conceptions for the same thing. But many objects of daily use as paper, ink, butter, horsecar 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

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

M is not a, concrete, or 'selfsufficient,' 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 generic 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

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 repugance.

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

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 ease.

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 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

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. [14]

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 fromits slotcase of insufficient elevationraise 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 maidservant 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

pendulumbob against the back of the clockcase, 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 tile 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.

First, an extracted character is taken as equivalent to the entire document from which it comes; and ,

Second, the character thus taken suggests a certain consequence more obviously than it was suggested by the

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

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 lightrays in special ways, and that the apparent

size of anything is connected with the amount of the 'bend' of its lightrays 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 lightwaves, 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 front the immediate data that particular ingredient which

shall have this very evident relation to the conclusion. Every phenomenon or socalled '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

2. And, now, to prove the second point: Why are the couplings, consequences, and implications of extracts

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

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

Take another example. I am sitting in a railroadcar, 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 stovepipe'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 saline time streaming

over that mouth; and then the rapid draught of air over the stovepipe'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 wavelength, is that the

immediate consequences of these notions are so few that we can survey them all at once, and promptly pick

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 tile 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. [15] 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 machineshop, 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, 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 aud [sic] 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

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 �sthetic 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 crea tures. The infant notices the candleflame 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 lookingglass, brought by an exploring

vessel, and gives no heed to the features of the vessel itself, which is too much beyond his sphere. These

�sthetic 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

Now, a creature which has few instinctive impulses, or interests, practical or �sthetic, 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 aesthetic 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 had 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

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.

That 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 and 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

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 �sthetic 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 highlygifted minds without any deliberation, spontaneously collecting analogous

instances, uniting in a moment whet 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

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

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

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. [16] 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

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.

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 at 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 boatcleaning operation, nor noticed what the sponge was for. This terrier, in having

picked those details out of the crude mass of his bestexperience 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 attri bute of capacity to

take up water, and had reflected, "For the present purpose they are identical." This, which the dog did not 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 ideal 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 fishbasket, 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. [17] Stories are

told of dogs carrying coppers to pastrycooks 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

lumbercamp 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

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 woodcutter'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. [18]

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 and 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 cutanddried 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. [19] Thoughts will not be found to call up their similars, but only their habitual successors. Sunsets will

not suggest heroes' deaths, but suppertime. 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

Professor Str�mpell quotes a dogstory which is probably a type of many others. The feat performed looks

like abstract reasoning; but an acquaintance with all the circumstances show it to have been a random trick

"I have two dogs, a small, longlegged pet dog and a rather large watchdog. Immediately beyond the

housecourt is the garden, into which one enters through a low latticegate which is closed by a latched on

the yardside. This latch is opened by lifting it. Besides this, moreover, the gate is fastened on the

gardenside by a string nailed to the gatepost. 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 gardenside 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. Certainty 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 he low 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 gardenside 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 book. 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 reached the house ere he was before the gate,

crying 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 Rate, 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

"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 gardengate, 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, hut it has never occurred to him to push the latch up. The brute cannot draw conclusions, that is, he

Other classical differenti� 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 lan guage is assuredly a capital distinction between man and

brute. But it may readily be shown how this distinction merely shows 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

rathunt. 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 rathunthe no doubt does

hare 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

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 signmaker, 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 (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 hash 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 rathunt 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 dooropen

In the human child, however, these ruptures of contiguous association are very soon made; far off cases of

signusing 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. [21]

The exceedingly interesting account which Dr, Rowe gives of the education of his various blinddeaf 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 hash 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

Another of the great capacities in which man has been said to differ fundamentally from the animal is that of

pos sessing selfconsciousness 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,

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 represent in the mind, will not call up other cases, in which the material details were different, but this

feature of pos sible 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

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. [23] 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 �sthetic 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

"And as when a M�onian or a Carian woman stains ivory with purple to be a cheekpiece 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

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. Rarely are both sorts of

intellect, the splendid and the analytic, found in conjunction. Plate among philosophers, and M. Taine, who

cannot quote a child's saying without describing the ' voix chantante, �tonn�e heureuse ' in which it is uttered,

An oftenquoted 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 hashed 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 from

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 [sic] 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

"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 soapsuds 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

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

sugarcane.' 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

adjectivenoun than those in which it does resemble the noun it is used to qualify. After a while certain of

these adjectivelyused 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 indifferent 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

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 �sthetic 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 former, 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 unnoticed are so valuable. Saturated with experience of a particular class of materials, an expert

intuitively feels whether a newlyreported 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 mill be the promising course of

action. The wellknown 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

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 pp. 57881.) 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

brainprocess, 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 benefits the present stage of

nervephysiology) to adumbrate by some possible guess, on what chemical or molecularmechanical 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.

But, meanwhile, this mode of stating the matter suggests a couple of other inferences. The first is brief. If

focali zation of brainactivity 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 inconsciousness of the

important feature of the subject. When not 'focalized,' we are scatterbrained; 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 emotions, how smiting are our words! The whole

network of petty scruples and byconsiderations 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; citybred children are more apt to be nearsighted

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 preeminence 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

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. [25] 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 end complex matter indirectly by

means of these, in a manner which the feminine method of direct intuition, admirably and rapidly as it

In looking back over the subject of reasoning, one feel show 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 M�canique C�leste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words 'it is evident,'

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 hashing 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

forgoes 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

shortwindedness 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 newcomers 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 secondrate. 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 neg ativeness 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

heights, should they choose to come. But even if they never came, what thoughts there were would still

manifest the aristocratic type and wear the wellbred 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 aesthetic 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 inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

[1] The substance of this chapter, and a good many pages of the textually appeared in an article entitled 'Brute

and Human Intellect,' in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for July 1878 (vol. xii. p. 236)

[2] 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 maybe 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 Rasisonnement, 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

[3] Mental Evolution in Man (1889), chapters iii and iv. See especially pp. 6880, and later 353, 396.

[8] 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 be 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 selfeducation, which is a different thing from Logic. They do not tenth 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 tarry 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 tile 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. Of. also bk. iv.

[9] Readers brought up on Popular Science may think that the molecular structure of things is their real

essence in so absolute sense, and that water is HOH 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 HOH primarily, and only secondarily the other things, is that for his purpose of deduction and

compendious definition the HOH aspect of it is the more useful one to bear in mind.

[10] "We find that we take for granted irresistibly that each kind [of thing] [ Classics editors' note: James'

insertion] 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." (VCT. Whewell : Hist. of Scientific Ideas, bk. viii. chapt � 9

[11] I may quote a passage from an article entitled 'The Sentiment of rationality.' published in vol. iiv of

Mind, 1879: " What is a conception ? It is a telelogical instrument. It is a partial aspect of a thing which for

our purpose me 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

furnituremaker as a darkener of wood; the speculator as a commodity whose marketprice today is this and

tomorrow that. The soapboiler, the physicist, the clothesscourer 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

Kompf 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,

[12] 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

selfcontradictory 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 he 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:

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

[13] Compare Lotze, Metaphysik, �� 58, 87, for some Instructive remarks on ways in which the world's

[14] 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 applied 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 shell 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

[16] See his Study of Chapter, chap. xv; also Senses and Intellect, 'Intellect,' chap. ii, the latter half.

[17] 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

In certain stages of the hypnotic trance the subject seems to lapse into the nonanalytic state. If a sheet of

ruled foolscap paper, or a paper with a one 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 trancesubject 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 lookeron, bent as he is on concentration, analysis, and emphasis. What

wonder, then, that, under these experimental conditions, the trancesubject excels him in touching the right

line again? If he has time given him to count the line, he will excel the trancesubject; but if the time be too

short to count, he will best succeed by following the trancemethod, 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

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 trancesubject 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 whish together drive him to a conclusion to which nothing but that

sumtotal 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 trancesubject may seem to

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

[18] 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 muddlehead and a, genius is that between

extracting wrong characters and right ones. In other words, a muddleheadperson is a genius spoiled in the

making. I think it will be admitted that all eminently muddleheeded persons have the temperament of

genius. They are constantly breaking away from the usual consecutions of concretes. A common association

[19] 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

[20] Th Schumann: Journal Daheim, No. 19, 1878. Quoted by Str�mpell: Die Geisteskr�fte der Menschen

verglichen 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.

[21] 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 interactional sign; the second (as Bleek has

well shown) fixes it, stamps it, attends by multiplying the number of determinate specific signs which are

requisite preliminary to the general conscious purpose of signmaking, 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,

[22] See the 'Evolution of Selfconsciousness' 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.

[25] 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 firstrate 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

An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario

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

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

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

There are probably no exceptions to the diffusion of every impression through the nervecentres. 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 heartbeats, and this particular effect of startling fails to occur if the

In general, however, the stimulating effects of a senseimpression 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

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.[2] In Chapter III. (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 bloodsupply 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 pulserate and bloodpressure in dogs.

Fig. 81, a pulsetracing from these authors, shows the tumultuous effect on a dog's heart of hearing the

screams of another dog. The changes of bloodpressure will occurred when the pneumogastric nerves were

cut, showing the vasomotor 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 bloodvessels of the hand, which at every smallest emotion, whether during waking or sleep, changed

shows the way in which the pulse of one subject was modified by the exhibition of a red light lasting from the

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

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 F�r� which explain themselves. They show the effects of light upon

On the sweatglands, similar consequences of sensorial stimuli are observed. Tarchanoff, testing the

condition of the sweatglands by the power of the skin to start a gal vanic 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."[6] 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 awakening there is a dilatation, even if strong light falls on

the eye.[7] The pupil of children can easily be observed to dilate enormously under the influence of fear. It is

As regards effects of the abdominal viscera, they unquestionably exist, but very few accurate observations

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

�sthesiometer as the iris,' and refer to the not uncommon reflex effects of psychic stimuli in the human

female upon this organ.[9] M. F�r� has registered the contractions of the sphincter ani which even indifferent

sensations will produce. In some pregnant women the f�tus 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.[10] That the glands are affected in emotion is patent enough in the case of

the tears of grief, the dry mouth, moist skin, or diar rh�a 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 (gooseflesh) which certain strokings, contacts, and

sounds, musical or nonmusical, provoke, are facts of the same order as the shuddering and standing up of

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. F�r� has given very curious experimental proofs of this. The

strength of contraction of the subject's hand was measured by a selfregistering 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[11] 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. F�r� remarks, such a sour as acetic

excites the nerves of pain and smell as well as of taste. The stimulating effects of tobaccosmoke, alcohol,

beefextract (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. F�r�'s

dynamographic tracings, which explains itself. The smaller contractions are those without stimulus; the

Everyone is familiar with the patellar reflex, or jerk upwards of the foot, which is produced by smartly

tapping the tendon below the kneepan 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.[12] 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

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.

F�r� figures some of them in the article to which I have already referred.[14]

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 nervecentral 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,[15] 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 selfprotective 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

I will now proceed to a detailed study of the more im portant classes of movement consequent upon

1) Instinctive or Impulsive Performances; 2) Expressions of Emotion; and 3) Voluntary Deeds;

[3] La Paura (1884), p. 117. Compare F�r�: Sensation et Movement, chap. XVII.

[5] Revue Phil., XXIV. pp. 5667. For further information about the relations between the brain and

[6] Quoted from the report of Tarchanoff's paper (in Pl�ger's Archiv, XLVI. 46) in the American Journal of

[9] R. Accad. dei Lincei (18812). I follow the report in Hofmann u. Schwalbe's Jahresbericht, X. II. 93.

[11] The figures given are from an hysterical subject, and the differences are greater than normal. M. F�r�

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

[12] Mitchell in (Philadelphia) Medical News (Feb. 13 and 20, 1886); Lombard in American Journal of

[13] 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

kneejerk for retardations of between 0.4' and 1.7'. The kneejerk 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

An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University, Toronto, Ontario

INSTINCT is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such away 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 silkworm

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

A very common way of talking about these admirably definite tendencies to act is by naming abstractly the

purpose they subserve, such as selfpreservation, or defense, 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 selfpreservation, 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 interpret ing 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 appear there he must retire, if at a distance, and scratch if clove by; that he

must withdraw his feet from water and his face from flame, etc. His nervous system is to a great extent a pre

organized 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

At first this view astounds us by the enormous number of special adjustments it supposes animals to possess

readymade 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 hounds. Even so are there no bounds to the minuteness of adaptation in the way of

The older writings on instinct are ineffectual wastes of words, because their authors never came down to this

defi nite 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

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 sensationimpulses, perceptionimpulses, and ideaimpulses. To crouch

from cold is a sensationimpulse; to turn and follow, if we see people running one way, is a

perceptionimpulse; to cast about for cover, if it begins to blow and rain, is an imaginationimpulse. 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 sees, 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

"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 dwellingplace 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 lieu in its nature

to feel, as soon as its cheekpouches 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, ninetynine 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 hardtack and ditchwater? 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

selbstverst�ndlich, an ' a priori syn thesis' 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 upsidedown? 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

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 shebear. 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

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, end seems at the moment the only

eternally right and proper thing to do. It is done for its own sake exclusively. What volup tuous 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

Since the egglaying instincts are simple examples to consider, a few quotations about them from Schneider

"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

material 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 as a bird who sees his henbird 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 tailorbee cuts out pieces of roseleaf, bends them,

carries them into a caterpillaror mousehole in trees or in the earth, covers their seams again with other

pieces, and so makes a thimbleshaped 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 mousehole and the perception of roseleaves

are so correlated in the insect with the several impulses in question, that the performances follow as a matter

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 perceptionimpulse 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], [4] 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 cowbird to lay their eggs in the nests of other species must also be interpreted as a pure

perceptionimpulse. 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 sat 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

Remember that nothing is said yet of the origin of instincts, but only of the constitution of those that exist

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 pert 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 reinforce 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 hoppingtoad, 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

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 excitemotor impulse, due to the preexistence of a certain 'reflex arc' in the nervecentres of the

creature, of course it must follow the law of all such reflex area. One liability of such area is to have their

activity 'inhibited,' by other processes going on at the same time. It makes no difference whether the are be

organized at birth, or ripen spontaneously later, or be due to acquired habit, it must take its chances with all

the other area, 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

Wherever the mind is elevated enough to discriminate; wherever several distinct sensory elements must

combine to discharge the reflexarc; 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 oppor tunity 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

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

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 mall 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

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 tile 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

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

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

The selection of a particular hole to live in, of a, particular mate, of a particular feedingground, a particular

variety of diet, a particular anything, in short, out of a possible multitude, is a very widespread tendency

among animals, even those low down in the scale. The limpet will return to the same stickingplace in its

rook, and the lobster to its favorite nook on the seabottom. 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

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 afterbirth, 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

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 mole disposition to

follow a hen than to follow a duck or a human being. Unreflecting lookerson, 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

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

"Each of them, on being unhooded, evinced the greatest terror tome, 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 constitutionhad 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

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

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

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 graze, expressive of astonishment." At other times she would fly up

with aloud 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.

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

No doubt such a law is restricted. Some instincts are far less transient than others those connected with

feeding and 'selfpreservation' may hardly be transient at all, end 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 nonformation 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 mistreated. It was also placed under the mother at night, but it again left her in the

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 be yond 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

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

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 pretense 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

hindfeet, 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, hungerpangs 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 foodburying propensity in the wild Canid� may not be

"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 sledgehammer 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 burialground. 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 hickorynuts 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,

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 hickorynuts.

One might, indeed, go still further with safety, and expect that, if such a captive squirrel were then set free, he

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 fairytales and learning the external properties of 'things;' with the youth, it is bodily exercises of

a more systematic sort, novels of the real world, boonfellowship and song, friendship and love, nature,

travel and adventure, science and philosophy; with the man, ambitionand 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 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

saturationpoint 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 keeps 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 twentyfive 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, matters 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

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'�tre 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

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 special sorts of outward fact.

Professor Preyer, in his careful little work, 'Die Seeles 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 newborn

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,

Sucking : almost perfect at birth; not coupled with any congenital tendency to seek the breast, this being a

Biting an object placed in the mouth, chewing and grinding the teeth ; licking sugar; making characteristic

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, spittingout, 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

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

Turning the head aside as a gesture of rejection, a gesture usually accompanied with a frown and a bending

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 nervecentres, 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; today 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

The walking instinct may awaken with no less suddenness, and its entire education be completed within a

week's compass, barring, of course, it 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, [12] by describing the demeanor of newborn 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 newborn 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 coordinating centres have quite ripened for their work. Mr. Spalding's

"Birds," be says, A 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, hew a yard or two close to the ground, rose in the direction of a beechtree, 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

In the light of this report, one may well be tempted to make a prediction about the human child, slid 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 nervecentres, 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 wellmarked 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 for mation of new

ones of a fundamentally different sort witness the inevitable 'foreign accent' which distinguishes the speech of

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 beers 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 'patacake,' saying > byebye,

'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. 'Nil

humani 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. [14] A successful

piece of mimicry gives to both bystanders and mimic a peculiar kind of aesthetic 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

Soandso, and you are Soandso, 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 horsecar," or whatever the

feigned object might it 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.

Emulation or Rivalry , a very intense instinct, especially rife with young children, or at least especially

undisguised. Everyone knows it. Ninetenth 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

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 onnium 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 today, the friend of today the enemy of tomorrow; 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

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

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

The hunting instinct has an equally remote origin in the evolution of the race. [16] The hunting and the

fighting in stinct 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 subtle 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

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 hocks round a streetbrawl! Consider the enormous annual sale of

revolvers to persons, not one in a thousands of whom has any serious intention of using them, but of whom

each one has his carnivorous selfconsciousness 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 today, is to arrange some setto of which they may share the rapture without enduring the pains!

The first blows at a prizefight 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

de layed, 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 killinginstinct, 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. [18]

In childhood it takes this form. The boys who pullout 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 'boyfiend' 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 feint bodily ex

pressions, 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 huntinginstinct 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 genu ine 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 ]lumen child. Noises seem

especially to call it forth. Most noises from the outer world, to a child bred in the house, have no exact

"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 receptionroom. She first looked at

the flame in a very frightened way. Brought her near to it. She leaped away and ran to hide under the bed.

Although the he 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

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

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 pugdog of the house, and never betrayed the slightest fear until she was (if I recol lect 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

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

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 hare been carefully guarded from all

ghoststories 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." [20]

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 to1 suppress them. That they are a mere incidental

peculiarity of the nervous system, like liability to seasickness, 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; Pain, 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 fearparoxysm is surely

Fear of the supernatural is one variety of fear. It is difficult to assign ally normal object for this fear, unless it

were a genuine ghost. But, in spite of psychical researchsocieties, 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. Anyone'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. [21] 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. [22] 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 cocksure

evolutionist ought to have no difficulty in explaining these terrors, and the scenery that provokes them, as

relapses into the consciousness of the cavemen, a consciousness usually overlaid in us by experiences of

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 infrahuman ones. In ordinary fear, one

may either run, or remain semiparalyzed. The latter condition reminds us of the socalled deathshamming

instinct shown by many animals. Dr. Lindsay, in his work 'Mind in Animals,' says this must require great

selfcommand in those that practise it. But it is really no feigning of death at all, and requires no

selfcommand. It is simply a terrorparalysis 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 statuelike, 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

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 selfcommand 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

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.' [23] 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. Then 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, al though a collection of any given thing like

postagestamps 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 peachpits

up to books and photographs. Out of a hundred students whom I questioned, only four or five had never

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 call belittle 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

wornout 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

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 woodrat, made in an empty stove

" 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 finelydivided fibres of

hemppacking. Interlaced with the spikes were the following: about two dozen knives, forks, and spoons; all

the butcher's knives, three in number; a large carvingknife, fork, and steel; several large plugs of tobacco,...

an old purse containing some silver, matches, and tobacco; nearly all the small tools from the toolclosets,

with several large angers,... 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." [25]

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 goodsized house from floor to ceiling that his livingspace 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:

A He gathered old newspapers, wrappingpaper, incapacitated umbrellas, canes, pieces of common wire,

castoff clothing, empty barrels, pieces of iron, old bones, battered tinware, 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 storageroom, 'the hermit' covered his

storeroom 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 woodsawyer, the old man had never

thrown away a sawblade or a woodbuck. The bucks were rheumatic and couldn't stand up, and the

sawblades 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 coalheaver, the old man had never cast of a wornout

basket, and there were dozens of the remains of the old things, patched up with canvas and ropeyarns, in the

storeroom. 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

Kleptomania , as it is called, is an uncontrollable impulse to appropriate, occurring in persons whose

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 diningroom, and

utensils which he had stolen from his own kitchen, and for which he had afterward bought substitutes with

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

remodeling, 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, toothfilings, 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 cinder 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 bends; and we see children

today, when playing in wild places, take the greatest delight in discovering and appropriating such retreats

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 playimpulses. 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 stagedriver, 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 cradlesong, or speaks with it as if it were a living being.... This fact that a sexual difference exists in the

playimpulse, 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.

There is another sort of human play, into which higher aesthetic 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 ballroom, 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 startingpoint. 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 cooperation of other aesthetic 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 playactivities in human life is too obvious to

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 survive, 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 a 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 aesthetic 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 gives; 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

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

"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

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

'This odd state of mind," says Darwin, [30] " 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. [31] 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 selfconsciousness, 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

hare no selfconfidence 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 > stagefright' 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

stagefright 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, clue 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 stagefright 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, seasickness, a dizzy head on

high places, and certain squeamishnesses of �sthetic 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 Tire 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 doorbell 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, end pretend we have not seen him. Many friends have confessed tome 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 loveaffairs, 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 upeven 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'. [32] 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. [33] 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 evilsmelling 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 �sthetic nature about which there can be no doubt. But as soon as generalization

and reflection step in, this judging of others leads to anew 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 selfconsciousness 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

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 illdefined 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. [34] 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 respectinspiring 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 homo geneous 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

selfconsciousness 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 selfconsciousness 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

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 essential 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. [35] 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

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. me 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 aver sion 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 wellascertained 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 regime 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,

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 wellbeing, 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

crybaby (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, naturallybred mothers, who, alas! seem to be growing rarer; and thus it is with ah the

higher animalmothers. The maternal joys of a cat, for example, are not to be disguised. With an expression

of infinite comfort she stretches out her forelegs 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 someday 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 A.. 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 in 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,

These are the most prominent of the tendencies which are worthy of being called instinctive in the human

It will be observed that no other mammal, not even the monkey, shows so large an array. In a

perfectlyrounded 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 onesided 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

[1] This chapter has already appeared (almost exactly as now printed) in the form of magazine articles in

[3] It would be very simpleminded 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 P" (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

angry 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

[6] 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.' Ct. 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. 133141; ii. chaps, v,

xx; and K. Semper's Conditions of Existence in Animals, where a great many instances will be found.

[11] "Mr. Spalding," says Mr. Lewes (Problems of Life and Mind, prob. 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

[14] See, for some excellent pedagogic remarks about doing yourself when you want to get your pupils to do,

and not simply telling them to do it, Baumann, Handbuch der Moral (1879), p. 32 ff.

[15] Sympathy has been enormously written about In books on Ethics. a very good recent chapter is that by

[16] 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 banning 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

[17] 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 farmyard,

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, end 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

[18] 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 huntingknife, and not

understanding what had become of the beast, I sought for her on every side in order to continue the struggle.

It was this plight that the arabs found me when they arrived."' (Quoted by Guyan, La Morale sans Obligation,

[19] Psychologie de l'Enfant, pp. 7274. In an account of a young gorilla quoted from Falkenstein, by R.

Hartmann ('Anthropoid Apes,' International Scientific Series, vol. iii (New York, 1886), p. 265), it is said:

"He very much disliked strange noises. Thunder, the rain falling on the skylight, and especially the

longdrawn note of a pipe or trumpet, threw him into such agitation as 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 we had administered purgative medicine."

[22] 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 signlanguage, the wonderful blind deafmute records the following item in her quaint

language: "My father [he was a farmer and probably did his own butchering] [ Classics Editor's note: James'

insertion] 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 coin. 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

[23] 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 smiled themselves, Achilles advanced, shouting "Where's my Patroklos? " Whereupon the

wouldbe Hector piped up, quite distracted from his r�le , "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

[24] In 'The Nation' for September 3, 1886, President G. S. Hall has given some account of a statistical

research on Boston schoolboys, by Miss Wiltse, from which it appears that only nineteen out of two

[26] ,Cf. Flint, Mind, vol. I. pp. 330333; 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.

[28] 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 excitemotor stimulations just

[31] "The certainty that we are well dressed," a charming woman has said, "gives us a peace of heart

[32] Thackeray, in his exquisite Roundabout Paper, 'On a ChalkMark 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 Blackeyed Syousan since the last time they parted at

Wapping Old Stairs; but do you suppose Tom is perfectly frank, familiar, and aboveboard in his

conversation with Admiral Nelson, K.C.B.? There are secrets, prevarications, fibs. if you will, between Tom

and the admiralbetween 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

[33] "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

[34] "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. Waltz,

Anthropologie der Naturv�lker, vol. I. p.358.) The author gives bibliographical references, which I omit.

[35] To most of us it is even unpleasant to sit down in a chair still warm from occupancy by another person's

[36] Some will, of course, find the list too large, others too small. With the boundaries of instinct finding 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 classname. 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. Bantlus (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 tile 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, selfdefence). Such

a muddled list as this shows how great are the advantages of the physiological analysis we have used.