Psyche

PSYCHOLOGY The Standpoint of Psychology. I

N the several natural sciences the scope and subjectmatter of each are so evident that little preliminary discussion on this score is called for. It is easy to distinguish the facts dealt with in a treatise on light from those that belong to one on sound; and even when the need arises to compare the results of two such sciences— as in the case, say, of light and electricity—there is still no difficulty,—apart, of course, from any which the imperfect state of the sciences themselves may occasion. Theoretically, a standpoint is attainable from which this comparison can be made, in so far, say, as the facts of both sciences can be expressed in terms of matter and motion. But with psychology, however much it is freed from metaphysics, all this is different. It is indeed ordinarily assumed that its subject-matter can be at once defined: “It is what you can perceive by consciousness or reflexion or the internal sense,” says one, “just as the subject-matter of optics is what you can perceive by sight.” Or, “psychology is the science of the phenomena of mind,” we are told again, “and is thus marked off from the physical sciences, which treat only of the phenomena of matter.” But, whereas nothing is simpler than to distinguish between seeing and hearing, or between the phenomena of heat and the phenomena of gravitation, a very little reflexion may convince us that we cannot in the same fashion distinguish internal from external sense, or make clear to ourselves what we mean by phenomena of mind as distinct from phenomena of matter.

Let us begin with the supposed differentia of internal and external; and first of all what are we to understand by an inner sense? To every sense there corresponds a sense-organ; the several senses are distinct and independent, so that no one sense can add to or alter the materials of another; and each is sui generis as regards quality,—the possession of five senses, e.g., furnishing no data as to the character of a possible sixth. Moreover, sense-impressions are passively received and occur in the first instance without regard to the feeling or volition of the recipient and without any manner of relation to the ‘ ‘ contents of consciousness” at the moment. Now such a description will apply but very partially to the so-called “internal sense.” We can imagine consciousness without self-consciousness, still more without introspection, much as we can imagine sight without taste or smell. But this does not entitle us to speak of self-consciousness as a sense. For we do not by means of it passively receive impressions differing from all previous presentations, as the sensations of colour for one couched differ· from all he has experienced before: the new facts consist rather in the recognition of certain relations among pre-existing presentations, i. e., are due to our mental activity and not to a special mode of what has been called our sensitivity. For when we taste we cannot hear that we taste, when we see we cannot smell that we see; but when we taste we may be conscious that we taste, when we hear we may be conscious that we hear. In this way all the objects of the external senses are recognized as having new relations by the miscalled “internal sense.” Moreover, the facts so ascertained are never independent of feeling and volition and of the contents of consciousness at the time, as true sensations are. Also if we consult the physiologist we learn that there is no evidence of any organ or “centre” that could be regarded as the “physical basis” of this inner sense; and, if self-consciousness alone is temporarily in abeyance and a man merely “beside himself,” such state of delirium has little analogy to the functional blindness or deafness that constitutes the temporary suspension of sight or hearing.

To the conception of an internal perception or observation the preceding objections do not necessarily apply,—that is to say, this conception may be so defined that they need not. But then in proportion as we escape the charge of assuming a special sense which furnishes the material for such perception or observation, in that same proportion are we compelled to seek for some other mode of distinguishing its subject-matter. For, so far as the mere mental activity of perceiving or observing is concerned, it is not easy to see any essential difference in the process whether what is observed be psychical or physical. It is quite true that the so-called psychological observation is more difficult, because the facts observed are often less definite and less persistent, and admit less of actual isolation than physical facts do; but the process of recognizing similarities or differences, the dangers of mal-observation or non-observation, are not materially altered on that account. It may be further allowed that there is one difficulty peculiarly felt in psychological observation, the one most inaccurately expressed by saying that here the observer and the observed are one. But this difficulty is surely in the first instance due to the very obvious fact that our powers of attention are limited, so that we cannot alter the distribution of attention at any moment without altering the contents of consciousness at that moment. Accordingly, where there are no other ways of surmounting this difficulty, the psychological observer must either trust to representations at a later time, or he must acquire the power of taking momentary glances at the psychological aspects of the phase of consciousness in question. And this one with any aptitude for such studies can do with so slight a diversion of attention as not to disturb very seriously either the given state or that which immediately succeeds it. But very similar difficulties have to be similarly met by physical observers in certain special cases, as, e.g., in observing and registering the phenomena of solar eclipse; and similar aptitudes in the distribution of attention have to be acquired, say, by extempore orators or skilful surgeons. Just as little, then, as there is anything that we can with propriety call an inner sense, just so little can we find in the process of inner perception any satisfactory characteristic of the subject-matter of psychology. The question still is: What is it that is perceived or observed? and the readiest answer of course is: Internal experience as distinguished from external, what takes place in the mind as distinct from what takes place without.

This answer, it must be at once allowed, is adequate for most purposes, and a great deal of excellent psychological work has been done without ever calling it in question. But the distinction between internal and external experience is not one that can be drawn from the standpoint of psychology, at least not at the outset. From this standpoint it appears to be either (1) inaccurate or (2) not extra - psychological. As to (1), the boundary between the internal and the external was, no doubt, originally the surface of the body, with which the subject or self was identified; and in this sense the terms are of course correctly used. For a thing may, in the same sense of the word, be in one space and therefore not in —i.e., out of—another; but we express no intelligible relation if we speak of two things as being one in a given room and the other in last week. Any one is at liberty to say if he choose that a certain thing is “in his mind”; but if in this way he distinguishes it from something else not in his mind, then to be intelligible this must imply one of two statements,—either that the something else is actually or possibly in some other mind, or, his own mind being alone considered, that at the time the something else does not exist at all. Yet, evident as it seems that the correlatives in and not-in must both apply to the same category, whether space, time, presentation (or non-presentation) to a given subject, and so forth, we still find psychologists more or less consciously confused between “internal,” meaning “presented” in the psychological sense, and “external,” meaning not “not-presented” out corporeal or offener extra-corporeal. But (2), when used to distinguish between presentations (some of which, or some relations of which with respect to others, are called “internal,” and others or other relations, “external ”), these terms are at all events accurate; only then they cease to mark oif the psychological from the extra-psychological, inasmuch as psychology has to analyse this distinction and to exhibit the steps by which it has come about. But we have still to examine whether the distinction of phenomena of Matter and phenomena of Mind furnishes a better dividing line than the distinction of internal and external.

A phenomenon, as commonly understood, is what is manifest, sensible, evident, the implication being that there are eyes to see, ears to hear, and so forth,—in other words, that there is presentation to a subject; and wherever there is presentation to a subject it will be allowed that we are in the domain of psychology. But in talking of physical phenomena we, in a way, abstract from this fact of presentation. Though consciousness should cease, the physicist would consider the sum total of objects to remain the same: the orange would still be round, yellow, and fragrant as before. For the physicist—whether aware of it or not—has taken up a position which for the present may be described by saying that phenomenon with him means appearance or manifestation, or—as we had better say—object, not for a concrete individual, but rather for what Kant called Bexcusstsein überhaupt, or, as some render it, the objective consciousness, i.e., for an imaginary subject freed from all the limitations of actual subjects save that of depending on “sensibility” for the material of experience. However, this is not all, for, as we shall see presently, the psychologist also occupies this position; at least if he does not, his is not a true science. But further, the physicist leaves out of sight altogether the facts of attention, feeling, and so forth, all which actual presentation entails. From the psychological point of view, on the other hand, the removal of the subject removes not only all such facts as attention and feeling, but all presentation or possibility of presentation whatever. Surely, then, to call a certain object, when we abstract from its presentation, a material phenomenon, and to call the actual presentation of this object a mental phenomenon,. is a clumsy and confusing way of representing the difference between the two points of view. For the terms “material” and “mental” seem to imply that the two so-called phenomena have nothing in common, whereas the same object is involved in both, while the term “phenomenon” implies that the point of view is in each case the same, when in truth what is emphasized by the one the other ignores.

Paradoxical though it may be, we must then conclude that psychology cannot be defined by reference to a special subject-matter as such concrete sciences, for example, as mineralogy and botany can; and, since it deals in some sort with the whole of experience, it is obviously not an abstract science, in any ordinary sense of that term. To be characterized at all, therefore, apart from metaphysical assumptions, it must be characterized by the standpoint from which this experience is viewed. It is by way of expressing this that widely different schools of psychology define it as subjective, all other positive sciences being distinguished as objective. But this seems scarcely more than a first approximation to the truth, and, as we have seen incidentally, is apt to be misleading. The distinction rather is that the standpoint of psychology is what is sometimes termed “individualistic,” that of the so-called objectsciences being “universalistic,” both alike being objective in the sense of being true for all, consisting of what Kant would call judgments of experience. For psychology is not a biography in any sense, still less a biography dealing with idiosyncrasies, and in an idiom having an interest and a meaning for one subject only, and incommunicable to any other. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have been of late severely handled because they regarded the critical investigation of knowledge as a psychological problem, and set to work to study the individual mind simply for the sake of this problem. But none the less their standpoint was the proper one for the science of psychology itself; and, however surely their philosophy was foredoomed to a collapse, there is no denying a steady psychological advance as we pass from Locke to Hume and his modern representatives. By “idea” Locke tells us he means “whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks” (i.e., is conscious), and having, as it were, shut himself within such a circle of ideas he finds himself powerless to explain his knowledge of a world that is independent of it; but he is able to give a very good account of some of these ideas themselves. He cannot justify his belief in the world of things whence certain of his simple ideas “were conveyed” anymore than Robinson Crusoe could have explored the continents whose products were drifted to his desert island, though he might perhaps survey the island itself well enough. Berkeley accordingly, as Professor Fraser happily puts it, abolished Locke’s hypothetical outer circle. Thereby he made the psychological standpoint clearer than ever—hence the truth of Hume’s remark, that Berkeley’s arguments “admit of n<? answer”; at the same time the epistemological problem was as hopeless as before—hence again the truth of Hume’s remark that those arguments “produced no conviction.” Of all the facts with which he deals, the psychologist may truly say that their esse is percipi,, inasmuch as all his facts are facts of presentation, are ideas in Locke’s sense, or objects which imply a subject. Before we became conscious there was no world for us; should our consciousness cease, the world for us ceases too; had we been born blind, the world would for us have had no colour; if deaf, it would have had no sounds; if idiotic, it would have had no meaning. Psychology, then, never transcends the limits of the individual; even the knowledge that there is a real world, as common-sense assumes, is, when psychologically regarded, an individual’s knowledge, which had a beginning and a growth, and can have an end. In fact, for the psychologist it is not essentially knowledge, but presentations, partly possible, partly actual, in the mind of A, B, or C; just as this page is for the printer essentially “copy,” and only for the reader essentially “discourse.” But what the psychologist has to say about knowledge is, of course, itself knowledge, i.e., assuming it to be correct; the knowledge about which he knows is, however, for him not primarily knowledge, but “states of consciousness.”

But now, though this Berkeleyan standpoint is the standpoint of psychology—as we find it occupied, say, by J. S. Mill and Dr Bain—psychology is not pledged to the method employed by Berkeley and by Locke. Psychology may be individualistic without being confined exclusively to the introspective method. There is nothing to hinder the psychologist from employing materials furnished by his observations of other men, of infants, of the lower animals, or of the insane; nothing to hinder him taking counsel with the philologist or even the physiologist, provided always he can show the psychological bearings of those facts which are not directly psychological. Nor, again, are we bound, because we take the individualistic standpoint as psychologists, to accept the philosophical conclusions that have been reached from it, unless, indeed, we hold that it is the right point of view for philosophical speculation. A psychologist may be an idealist in Berkeley’s sense or in Fichte’s, but he need not; he is just as free, if he see reason, to call himself, after Hamilton, a natural realist; only psychology will afford him no safe warrant for the realism part of it. The standpoint of psychology, then, is individualistic; by whatever methods, from whatever sources its facts are ascertained, they must—to have a psychological import—be regarded as having place in, or as being part of, some one's consciousness. In this sense, i.e., as presented to an individual, “the whole choir of heaven and furniture of earth” may belong to psychology, but otherwise they are psychological nonentities. The problem of psychology, in dealing with this complex subject-matter, is in general—first, to ascertain its constituent elements, and secondly, to ascertain and explain the laws of their combination and interaction.

General Analysis of Mind; its Ultimate Constituents.

As to the first, there is in the main substantial agreement: the elementary facts of mind cannot, it is held, be expressed in less than three propositions,—I feel somehow, I know something, I do something. But here at once there arises an important question, viz., What are we to understand by the subject of these propositions? Nobody nowadays would understand it to imply that every psychical fact must be ascertained or verified by personal introspection; perhaps no modern writer ever did understand this; at any rate to do so is to confound the personal with the psychological. We are no more confined to our own immediate observations here than elsewhere; but the point is that, whether seeking to analyse one’s own consciousness or to infer that of a lobster, whether discussing the association of ideas or the expression of emotions, there is always an individual mind or self or subject in question. It is not enough to talk of feelings or volitions: what we mean is that some individual, man or worm, feels, wills, acts—thus or thus. Obvious as this may seem, it has been frequently either forgotten or gainsaid. It has been forgotten among details or through the assumption of a medley of faculties, each treated as an individual in turn, and among which the real individual was lost. Or it has been gainsaid, because to admit that all psychological facts pertain to a psychological subject seemed to carry with it the admission that they pertained to a particular spiritual substance, which was simple, indestructible, and so forth; and it was manifestly desirable to exclude such assumptions from psychology, i.e., from a science which aims only at a scientific exposition of what can be known and verified by observation. But, however much assailed or disowned, the conception of a mind or conscious subject is to be found implicitly or explicitly in all psychological writers whatever,—not more in Berkeley, who accepts it as a fact, than in Hume, who accepts it as a fiction. This being so, we are far more likely to reach the truth eventually if we openly acknowledge this inexpugnable assumption, if such it prove, instead of resorting to all sorts of devious periphrases to hide it. Now wherever the word Subject, or its derivatives, occurs in psychology we might substitute the word Ego and analogous derivatives, did such exist. But Subject is almost always the preferable term; its impersonal form is an advantage, and it readily recalls its modern correlative Object. Moreover, Ego has two senses, distinguished by Kant as pure and empirical, the latter of which is, of course, an object, while the former is subject always. By pure Ego or Subject it is proposed to denote the simple fact that everything mental is referred to a Self. This psychological conception of a self or subject, then, is after all by no means identical with the metaphysical conceptions of a soul or mind-atom, or of mind-stuff not atomic; it may be kept as free from metaphysical implications as the conception of the biological individual or organism with which it is so intimately connected.

The attempt, indeed, has frequently been made to resolve the former into the latter, and so to find in mind only such an individuality as has an obvious counterpart in this individuality of the organism, i.e., what we may call an objective individuality. But such procedure owes all its plausibility to the fact that it leaves out of sight the difference between the biological and the psychological standpoints. All that the biologist means by a dog is “the sum of the phenomena which make up its corporeal existence.” And, inasmuch as its presentation to any one in particular is a point of no importance, the fact, of presentation at all may be very well dropped out of account. Let us now turn to mind: Why should we not take this word or “the word ‘soul’ simply as a name for the series of mental phenomena which make up an indi vidual mind ?” Surely the moment we try distinctly to understand this question we realize that the cases are different. “Series of mental phenomena” for whom? For any passer-by such as might take stock of our biological dog? No, obviously only for that individual mind itself; yet that is supposed to be made up of, to be nothing different from, the series of phenomena. Are we, then, (1) quoting J. S. Mill’s words, “to accept the paradox that something which ex hypothesi is but a series of feelings, can be aware of itself as a series ?” Or (2) shall we say that the several parts of the series are mutually phenomenal, much as A may look at B, who was just now looking at A? Or (3) finally, shall we say that a large part of the so-called series, in fact every term but one, is phenomenal for the rest—for that one?

As to the first alternative, paradox is too mild a word for it; even contradiction will hardly suffice. It is as impossible to express “being aware of” by one term as it is to express an equation or any other relation by one term: what knows can no more be identical with what is known than a weight with what it weighs. If a series of feelings is what is known or presented, then what knows, what it is presented to, cannot be that series of feelings, and this without regard to the point Mill mentions, viz., that the infinitely greater part of the series is either past or future. The question is not in the first instance one of time or substance at all, but simply turns upon the fact that knowledge or consciousness is unmeaning except as it implies something knowing or conscious of something. But it maybe replied :—Granted that the formula for consciousness is something doing something, to put it generally; still, if the two somethings are the same when I touch myself or when I see myself, why may not agent and patient be the same when the action is knowing or being aware of; why may I not know myself—in fact, do I not know myself? Certainly not; agent and patient never are the same in the same act; the conceptions of self-caused, selfmoved, self-known, et id genus omne, either connote the incomprehensible or are abbreviated expressions—such, e.g., as touching oneself when one’s right hand touched one’s left.

And so we come to the second alternative :—As one hand washes the other, may not different members of the series of feelings be subject and object in turn? Compare, for example, the state of mind of a man succumbing to temptation (as he pictures himself enjoying the coveted good and impatiently repudiates scruples of conscience or dictates of prudence) with his state when, filled with remorse, he sides with conscience and condemns this “former self,”—the “better self” having meanwhile become supreme. Here the cluster of presentations and their associated sentiments and motives, which together play the rôle of self in the one field of consciousness, have —only momentarily it is true, but still have—for a time the place of not-self; and under abnormal circumstances this partial alternation may become complete alienation, as in what is called ‘ ‘ double consciousness.” Or again, the development of self-consciousness might be loosely described as taking the subject or self of one stage as an object in the next,—self being, e.g., first identified with the body and afterwards distinguished from it. But all this, however true, is beside the mark; and it is really a very serious misnomer, —though the vagueness of our psychological terminology seems to allow it—to do, as e.g., Mr Spencer does—represent the development of self-consciousness as a “differentiation of subject and object.” It is, if anything, a differentiation of object and object, i.e., in plainer words, it is a differentiation among presentations— a differentiation every step of which implies just that relation to a subject which it is supposed to supersede.

There still remains an alternative, which, like the first, may be expressed in the words of J. S. Mill, viz., “the alternative of believing that the Mind or Ego is something different from any series of feelings or possibilities of them.” To admit this, of course, is to admit the necessity of distinguishing between Mind or Ego, meaning the unity or continuity of consciousness as a complex of presentations, and Mind or Ego as the subject to which this complex is presented. In dealing with the body from the ordinary biological standpoint no such necessity arises. But, whereas there the individual organism is spoken of unequivocally, in psychology, on the other hand, the individual mind may mean either (i.) the series of feelings or “mental phenomena” above referred to; or (ii.) the subject of these feelings for whom they are phenomena; or (iii.) the subject of these feelings or phenomena + the series of feelings or phenomena themselves, the two being in that relation to each other in which alone the one is subject and the other a series of feelings, phenomena, or objects. It is in this last sense that Mind is used in empirical psychology, its exclusive use in the first sense being favoured only by those who shrink from the speculative associations connected with its exclusive use in the second. But psychology is not called upon to transcend the relation of subject to object or, as we may call it, the fact of presentation. On the other hand, as has been said, the attempt to ignore one term of the relation is hopeless; and equally hopeless, even futile, is the attempt, by means of phrases such as consciousness or the unity of consciousness, to dispense with the recognition of a conscious subject

We might now proceed to inquire more closely into the character and relations of the three states, modes, or acts of this subject, which are commonly held to be the invariable constituents of psychical life and broadly distinguished as cognitions, feelings, and conations. But we should be at once confronted by a doctrine much in vogue at present, which, strictly taken, amounts almost to a denial of this tripartite classification of the facts of mind—the doctrine, viz., that feeling alone is primordial, and invariably present wherever there is consciousness at-all. Every living creature, it is said, feels, though it may never do any more; only the higher animals, and these only after a time, learn to discriminate and identify and to act with a purpose. This doctrine, as might be expected, derives its plausibility partly from the vagueness of psychological terminology, and partly from the intimate connexion that undoubtedly exists between feeling and cognition on the one hand and feeling and volition on the other. As to the meaning of the term, it is plain that further definition is requisite for a word that may mean (a) a touch, as feeling of roughness; (ό) an organic sensation, as feeling of hunger; (c) an emotion, as feeling of anger; (d) feeling proper, as pleasure or pain. But, even taking feeling in the last, its strict sense, it has been maintained that all the more complex forms of consciousness are resolvable into, or at least have been developed from, feelings of pleasure and pain. The only proof of such position, since we cannot directly observe the beginnings of conscious life, must consist of considerations such as the following. So far as we can judge, we find feeling everywhere; but, as we work down wards from higher to lower forms of life, the possible variety and the definiteness of sense-impressions both steadily diminish. Moreover, we can directly observe in our own organic sensations, which seem to come nearest to the whole content of infantile and molluscous experience, an almost entire absence of any assignable quale. Finally, in our senseexperience generally, we find the element of feeling at a maximum in the lower senses and the intellectual element at a maximum in the higher. But the so-called intellectual senses are the most used, and use we know blunts feeling and favours intellection, as we see in chemists, who sort the most filthy mixtures by smell and taste without discomfort. If, then, feeling predominates more and more as we approach the beginning of consciousness, may we not say that it is the only sine qua non of consciousness? Considerations of this kind, however impressive when exhibited at length, are always liable to be overturned by some apparently unimportant fact which may easily be overlooked. Two lines, e.g., may get nearer and nearer and yet will never meet, if the rate of approach is simply proportional to the distance. A triangle may be diminished indefinitely and yet we cannot infer that it becomes eventually all angles, though the angles get no less and the sides do. Now, before we decide that pleasure or pain alone may constitute a complete state of mind, it may be well to inquire: What is the connexion between feelings of pleasure and pain and the two remaining possible constituents of consciousness, as we can observe them now? And this is an inquiry which will help us towards an answer to our main question, namely, that concerning the nature and connexions of what are commonly regarded as the three ultimate facts of mind.

Broadly speaking, in any state of mind that we can directly observe, what we find is (1) that we are aware of a certain change in our sensations, thoughts, or circum stances, (2) that we are pleased or pained with the change, and (3) that we act accordingly. We never find that feeling directly alters— i.e. i without the intervention of the action to which it prompts—either our sensations or situation, but that regularly these latter with remarkable promptness and certainty alter it. We have not first a change of feeling, and then a change in our sensations, perceptions, and ideas; but, these changing, change of feeling follows. In short, feeling appears frequently to be an effect, which therefore cannot exist without its cause, though in different circumstances the same cause may produce a different amount or even a different state of feeling. Turning from what we may call the receptive phase of consciousness to the active or appetitive phase, we find in like manner that feeling is certainly not, in such cases as we can clearly observe, the whole of consciousness at any moment. True, in common speech we talk of liking pleasure and disliking pain; but this is either tautology, equivalent to saying, we are pleased when we are pleased and pained when we are pained, or else it is an allowable abbreviation, and means that we like pleasurable objects and dislike painful objects, as when we say, we like feeling warm and dislike feeling hungry. And feeling warm or feeling hungry, we must remember, is not pure feeling in the strict sense of the word. Such states admit, if not of description, yet at least of identification and distinction as truly as colours and sounds do. Within the limits of our observation, then, we find that feeling accompanies some more or less definite presentation which for the sake of it becomes the object of appetite or aversion; in other words, feeling implies a relation to a pleasurable or painful presentation, that, as cause of feeling and end of the action to which feeling prompts, is doubly distinguished from it. Thus the very facts that lead us to distinguish feeling from cognition and conation make against the hypothesis that consciousness can ever be all feeling.

But, as already said, the plausibility of this hypothesis is in good part due to a laxity in the use of terms. Most psychologists before Kant, and English psychologists even to the present day, speak of pleasure and pain as sensations. But it is plain that pleasure and pain are not simple ideas, as Locke called them, in the sense in which touches and tastes are,—that is to say, they are never like these localized or projected, nor elaborated in conjunction with other sensations and movements into percepts or intuitions of the external. This confusion of feeling with sensations is largely consequent on the use of one word pain for certain organic sensations and for the purely subjective state. But, to say nothing of the fact that such pains are always more or less definitely localized,—which of itself is so far cognition,—they are also distinguished as shooting, burning, gnawing, &c. <fcc., all which symptoms indicate a certain objective quality. Accordingly all the more recent psychologists have been driven by one means or another to recognize two “aspects” (Bain), or “properties” (Wundt), in what they call a sensation, the one a “sensible or intellectual” or “qualitative,” the other an “affective” or “emotive,” aspect or property. The term “aspect” is figurative and obviously inaccurate; even to describe pleasure and pain as properties of sensation is a matter open to much question. But the point which at present concerns us is simply that when feeling is said to be the primordial element in consciousness more is usually included under feeling than pure pleasure and pain, viz., some characteristic or quality by which one pleasurable or painful sensation is distinguishable from another. No doubt, as we go downwards in the chain of life the qualitative or objective elements in the so-called sensations become less and less definite; and at the same time organisms with well-developed sense-organs give place to others without any clearly differentiated organs at all. But there is no ground for supposing even the amoeba itself to be affected in all respects the same whether by changes of temperature or of pressure or by changes in its internal fluids, albeit all of these changes will further or hinder its life and so presumably be in some sort pleasurable or painful. On the whole, then, there are grounds for saying that the endeavour to represent all the various facts of consciousness as evolved out of feeling is due to a hasty striving after simplicity, and has been favoured by the ambiguity of the term feeling itself. If by feeling we mean a certain subjective state varying continuously in intensity and passing from time to time from its positive phase (pleasure) to its negative phase (pain), then this purely pathic state implies an agreeing or disagreeing something which psychologically determines it. If, on the other hand, we let feeling stand for both this state and the cause of it, then, perhaps, a succession of such “feelings” may make up a consciousness; but then we are including two of our elementary facts under the name of one of them. The, simplest form of psychical life, therefore, involves not only a subject feeling but a subject having qualitatively distinguishable presentations which are the occasion of its feeling.

We may now try to ascertain what is meant by cognition as an essential element in this life, or, more exactly, what we are to understand by the term presentation. It was an important step onwards for psychology when Locke introduced that “new way of ideas” which Stillingfleet found alternately so amusing and so dangerous. By idea Locke tells us he meant true appearances in men’s minds, or “whatsoever is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding”; and it was so far a retrograde step when Hume restricted the term to certain only of these appearances or objects, or rather to these appearances or objects in a certain state, viz., as reproduced ideas or images. And, indeed, the history of psychology seems to show that its most important advances have been made by those who have kept closely to this way of ideas; the establishment of the laws of association and their many fruitful applications and the whole Herbartian psychology may suffice as instances (see Herbart). The truth is that the use of such a term is itself a mark of an important generalization, one which helps to free us from the mythology and verbiage of the “faculty-psychologists.” All that variety of mental facts which we speak of as sensations, perceptions, images, intuitions, concepts, notions, have two characteristics in common :—(1) they admit of being more or less attended to, and (2) can be reproduced and associated together. It is here proposed to use the term presentation to connote such a mental fact, and as the best English equivalent for what Locke meant by idea and what Kant and Herbart called a Vorstellung.

A presentation has then a twofold relation,—first, directly to the subject, and secondly, to other presentations. By the first is meant the fact that the presentation is attended to, that the subject is more or less conscious of it: it is “in his mind” or presented. As presented to a subject a presentation might with advantage be called an object, or perhaps a psychical object, to distinguish it from what are called objects apart from presentation, i.e., conceived as independent of any particular subject. Locke, as we have seen, did so call it; still, to avoid possible confusion, it may turn out best to dispense with the frequent use of object in this sense. But on one account, at least, it is desirable not to lose sight altogether of this which is after all the stricter as well as the older signification of object, namely, because it enables us to express definitely, without implicating any ontological theory, what we have so far seen reason to think is the fundamental fact in psychology. Instead of depending mainly on that vague and treacherous word “consciousness,” or committing ourselves to the position that ideas are modifications of a certain mental substance and identical with the subject to which they are presented, we may leave all this on one side, and say that ideas are objects, and the relation of objects to subjects—that whereby the one is object and the other subject—is presentation. And it is because only objects sustain this relation that they may be spoken of simply as presentations.

It will be convenient here to digress for a moment to take account of an objection that is sure to be urged, viz., that sensations at all events ought not to be called objects, that they are “states of the subject” and that this is a deliverance of common sense, if anything is. Now if by this be meant (L) that sensations are metaphysically subjective modifications in an idealistic sense, there is no need at this stage either to assert or deny that. But if the meaning be (ii.) that sensations are presented as modes of the subject, such a position is due to a confusion between the subject proper or pure Ego and that complex presentation or object, the empirical, or as we might call it the biotic, Ego. A self-conscious subject may not only have a sensation but may recognize it as its own,—recognize a certain connexion, that is to say, between the sensation and that presentation of the empirical self which self-consciousness implies. But such reference only renders more obvious the objective nature of a sensation, in the psychological sense of the term objective. Or, again, the meaning may be (iii.) that a subject whose presentations were all sensations would know nothing of the difference between subject and object. In this objection there is a lurking confusion between the standpoint of a given experience and the standpoint of its exposition. The true way, surely, to represent the bare fact of sensation is not to attempt to reproduce an experience as yet confined to sensations, but to describe such experience as a scientific psychologist would do if we could imagine him a spectator of it. The infant who is delighted by a bright colour does not of course conceive himself as face to face with an object; but neither does he conceive the colour as a subjective affection. We are bound to describe his state of mind truthfully, but that is no reason for abandoning terms which have no counterpart in his consciousness, when these terms are only used to depict that consciousness to us. As to the objection (iv.) that, when all is said and done, sensations are conceived by common sense as modifications of self, whether so presented or not, it may be granted that it appears so at first blush, but not when common sense is more closely examined. The fact is we are here upon what has been called “the margin of psychology,” where our ordinary thinking brings into one view what science has to be at great pains to keep distinct. Though it is scientifically a long way round from a fact of mind to the corresponding fact of body, yet it is only on careful reflexion that we can distinguish the two in those cases in which our practical interests have closely associated them. Such a case is that of sensation. The ordinary conception of a sensation coincides, no doubt, with the definition given by Hamilton and Mansel :— “Sensation proper is the consciousness of certain affections of our body as an animated organism”; and it is because in ordinary thinking we reckon the body as part of self that we come to think of sensations as subjective modifications. But, when considerations of method compel us to eliminate physiological implications from the ordinary conception of a sensation, we are able here to distinguish the conscious subject and the “affections” of which it is conscious as clearly as we can distinguish subject and object in other cases of presentation. On the whole, then, we may conclude that there is nothing either in the facts or in oιir necessary conceptions of them to prevent us from representing whatever admits of psychical reproduction and association, no matter how simple it be, as an object presented to a subject.

As to the subjective relation of objects, the relation of presentation itself, we have merely to note that on the side of the subject it implies what, for want of a better word, may be called attention, extending the denotation of this term so as to include even what we ordinarily call inattention. Attention so used will thus cover part of what is meant by consciousness,—so much of it, that is, as answers to being mentally active, active enough at least to “receive impressions.” Attention on the side of the subject implies intensity on the side of the object: we might indeed almost call intensity the matter of a presentation, without which it is a nonentity. As to the connexion between these two, subjective attention and objective intensity—in that higher form of attention called voluntary we are aware (1) that concentration of attention increases or its abstraction diminishes the intensity of a presentation in circumstances where physically and physiologically there is nothing to prevent the intensity of the presentation from continuing uniform. Again, (2) in circumstances when psychologically we are aware of no previous change in the distribution of attention, we find the intensity of a presentation increased or diminished if certain physical concomitants of the presentation (e.g., stimulus, nervous process, &c.) are increased or diminished. Thus, though this is a point we-could hardly establish without the aid of psychophysics, we may conclude that the intensity of a presentation may be altered from two sides; that it depends, in other words, partly upon what we may perhaps call its physical intensity and partly on the amount of attention it receives.

Some further exposition of the connexion between subjective attention and objective intensity is perhaps desirable here, where we are seeking to get a general view of the essential facts of mind and their relations, rather than later on, when we shall be more concerned with details. We are aware in ordinary life that the intensity of any given sensation depends upon certain physical quantities, varying directly in some proportion as these vary. Hence, since our habitual standpoint is the physical not the psychological, we conceive sensory objects as having an intensity per se apart from the attention that their presentation secures. From the physical standpoint indeed it is manifest that no other conception is compatible with a scientific treatment of phenomena. Subjective sources of variation are supposed to be eliminated: the general mind to which, according to the physicist’s conception of a phenomenon, that phenomenon is implicitly supposed to be presented is a mind in which there is no feeling to produce variations of attention, or to favour aesthetic combinations of objects. Attention is thus assumed to be constant, and all variations in intensity to be objectively determined. But psychologically we cannot assume this. In any given presentation there is, it must be admitted, no immediate evidence that the intensity of the object is a function of two variables,—(1) what we have called its physical or absolute intensity and (2) the intensity of attention. Still there are facts which justify this conclusion. That the intensity of the presentation varies with the absolute intensity of the object, attention remaining constant, is a proposition not likely to be challenged. What has to be shown is that the intensity of presentations varies with the attention, all else remaining constant. Assuming that voluntary and noa-voluntary attention are fundamentally the same, this amounts to showing (1) that concentration of attention upon some objects diminishes the intensity of presentation of others in the same field, whether the concentration be voluntary or nonvoluntary, i.e., due to a shock; and (2) that, even though only within narrow limits, increasing attention voluntarily has the same effect on the presentation as increasing the objective intensity from the physical side. The narrowness of these limits—practically an all-important fact—is theoretically no objection. It would not be difficult psychologically to account for our inability to concentrate attention indefinitely: that we can concentrate it at all is enough to show that there is a subjective as well as an objective factor in the intensity of a presentation. Any fuller consideration of the connexion between attention and presentations may be deferred.

The inter-objective relations of presentations, on which their second characteristic, that of revivability and asso-ciability depends, though of the first importance in themselves, hardly call for examination in a general analysis like the present. But there is one point still more fundamental that we cannot wholly pass by: it is—in part at any rate—what is commonly termed the unity or continuity of consciousness. From the physical standpoint and in ordinary life we can talk of objects that are isolated and independent and in all respects distinct individuals. The screech of the owl, for example, has physically nothing to do with the brightness of the moon: either may come or go without changing the order of things to which the other belongs. But psychologically, for the individual percipient, they are parts of one whole: special attention to one diminishes the intensity of presentation of the other and the recurrence of the one will afterwards entail the re-presentation of the other also. Not only are they still parts of one whole, but such distinctness as they have at present is the result of a gradual differentiation. It is quite impossible for us now to imagine the effects of years of experience removed, or to picture the character of our infantile presentations before our interests had led us habitually to concentrate attention on some, and to ignore others, whose intensity thus diminished as that of the former increased. In place of the many things which we can now see and hear, not merely would there then be a confused presentation of the whole field of vision and of a mass of undistinguished sounds, but even the difference between sights and sounds themselves would be without its present distinctness. Thus the further we go back the nearer we approach to a total presentation having the character of one general continuum in which differences are latent. There is, then, in psychology, as in biology, what may be called a principle of “progressive differentiation or specialization” · and this, as well as the facts of reproduction and association, forcibly suggests the conception of a certain objective continuum forming the background or basis to the several relatively distinct presentations that are elaborated out of it—the equivalent, in fact, of that unity and continuity of consciousness which has been supposed to supersede the need for a conscious subject.

There is one class of objects of special interest even in a general survey, viz., movements or motor presentations. These, like sensory presentations, admit of association and reproduction, and seem to attain to such distinctness as they possess in adult human experience by a gradual differentiation out of an original diffused mobility which is little besides emotional expression. Of this, however, more presently. It is primarily to such dependence upon feeling that movements owe their distinctive character, the possession, that is, under normal circumstances, of definite and assignable psychical antecedents, in contrast to sensory presentations, which enter the field of consciousness ex abrupto. We cannot psychologically explain the order in which particular sights and sounds occur; but the movements that follow them, on the other hand, can be adequately explained only by psychology. The twilight that sends the hens to roost sets the fox to prowl, and the lion’s roar which gathers the jackals scatters the sheep. Such diversity in the movements, although the sensory presentations are similar, is due, in fact, to what we might call the principle of “subjective or hedonic selection ”—that, out of all the manifold changes of sensory presentation which a given individual experiences, only a few are the occasion of such decided feeling as to become objects of possible appetite (or aversion). The representation of what interests us comes to be associated with the representation of such movements as will secure its realization, so that— although no concentration of attention will secure the requisite intensity to a pleasurable object present only in idea—we can by what is strangely like a concentration of attention convert the idea of a movement into the fact, and by means of the movement attain the coveted reality.

And this has brought us round naturally to what is perhaps the easiest way of approaching the question: What is a conation or action r l In ordinary voluntary movement we have first of all an idea or re-presentation of the movement, and last of all the actual movement itself,—a new presentation which may for the present be described as the filling out of the re-presentation, which thereby attains that intensity, distinctness, and embodiment we call reality. How does this change come about? The attempt has often been made to explain it by a reference to the more uniform, and apparently simpler, case of reflex action, including under this term what are called sensorimotor and ideo-motor actions. In all these the movement seems to be the result of a mere transference of intensity from the associated sensation or idea that sets on the movement. But, when by some chance or mischance the same sensory presentation excites two alternative and conflicting motor ideas, a temporary block, it is said, occurs; and, when at length one of these nascent motor changes finally prevails and becomes real, then we have the state of mind called volition. But this assumption that sensory and motor ideas are associated before volition, and that the volition begins where automatic or reflex action ends, is due to that inveterate habit of confounding the psychical and the physical which is the bane of modern psychology. How did these particular sensory and motor presentations ever come to be associated? It is wholly beside the mark to answer that they are “organically determined psychical changes.” In one respect all psychical changes alike are organically determined, inasmuch as all alike—so far, at least, as we at all know or surmise—have organic concomitants. In another respect no psychical changes are organically determined, inasmuch as physical events and psychical events have no common factors. Now the only psychological evidence we have of any very intimate connexion between sensory and motor representations is that furnished by our acquired dexterities, i.e., by such movements as Hartley styled secondary automatic. But then all these have been preceded by volition: as Mr Spencer says, “the child learning to walk wills each movement before walking it.” Surely, then, a psychologist should take this as his typical case and prefer to assume that all automatic actions that come within his ken at all are in this sense secondarily automatic, i.e., to say that either in the experience of the individual or of his ancestors volition, or something analogous to it, preceded habit.

But, if we are thus compelled by a sound method to regard sensori-motor actions as degraded or mechanical forms of voluntary actions, instead of regarding voluntary actions as gradually differentiated out of something physical, we have not to ask: What happens when one of two alternative movements is executed? but the more general question: What happens when any movement is made in consequence of feeling? It is obvious that on this view the simplest definitely purposive movement must have been preceded by some movement simpler still. For any distinct movement purposely made presupposes the ideal presentation, before the actual realization, of the movement. But such ideal presentation, being a re-presentation, equally presupposes a previous actual movement of which it is the so-called mental residuum. There is then, it would seem, but one way left, viz., to regard those movements which are immediately expressive of pleasure or pain as primordial, and to regard the so-called voluntary movements as elaborated out of these. The vague and diffusive character of these primitive emotional manifestations is really a point in favour of this position. For such “diffusion” is evidence of an underlying continuity of motor presentations parallel to that already discussed in connexion with sensory presentations, a continuity which, in each case, becomes differentiated in the course of experience into comparatively distinct and discrete movements and sensations respectively.

But, whereas we can only infer, and that in a very roundabout fashion, that our sensations are not absolutely distinct but are parts of one massive sensation, as it were, we are still liable under the influence of strong emotion directly to experience the corresponding continuity in the case of movement. Such motor-continuum we may suppose is the psychical counterpart of that permanent readiness to act, or rather that continual nascent acting, which among the older physiologists was spoken of as “tonic action”; and as this is now known to be intimately dependent on afferent excitations so is our motor consciousness on our sensory. Still, since we cannot imagine the beginning of life but only life begun, the simplest picture we can form of a concrete state of mind is not one in which there are movements before there are any sensations or sensations before there are any movements, but one in which change of sensation is followed by change of movement, the link between the two being a change of feeling.

Having thus simplified the question, we may now ask again: How is this change of movement through feeling brought about? The answer, as already hinted, appears to be: By a change of attention. We learn from such observations as psychologists describe under the head of fascination, imitation, hypnotism, &c., that the mere concentration of attention upon a movement is often enough to bring the movement to pass. But, of course, in such cases there is neither emotional experience nor volition in question; such facts are only cited to show the connexion between attention and movements. Everybody too has often observed how the execution of any but mechanical movements arrests attention to thoughts or sensations, and vice versa. Let us suppose, then, that we have at any given moment a certain distribution of attention between sensory and motor presentations; a change in that distribution means a change in the intensity of some or all of these, and change of intensity in motor presentations means change of movement. Such changes are, however, quite minimal in amount so long as the given presentations are not conspicuously agreeable or disagreeable. As soon as they are, we find pleasure to lead at once to concentration of attention on the pleasurable object; so that pleasure is not at all so certainly followed by movement as we find pain to be, save of course when movements are themselves the pleasurable objects and are executed, as we say, for their own sakes. In fact, pleasure would seem rather to repress movement, except so far as it is coincident either with a more economic distribution, or with a positive augmentation, of the available attention; and either of these, on the view supposed, would lead to increased but indefinite (i.e., playful) movement. Pain, on the other hand, is much more closely connected with movement, and movement too which for obvious reasons much sooner acquires a purposive character. Instead of voluntary concentration of attention upon a painful presentation we find attention to such an object always involuntary; in other words, attention is, as it were, excentrated, dispersed, or withdrawn. If, therefore, the painful presentation is a movement, it is suspended; if it is a sensation, movements are set up which further distract attention, and some of which may effect the removal of the physical source of the sensation.

We are now at the end of our analysis, and the results may perhaps be most conveniently summarized by first throwing them into a tabular form and then appending a few remarks by way of indicating the main purport of the table. Taking no account of the specific difference between one concrete state of mind and another, and supposing that we are dealing with presentations in their simplest form, i.e., as sensations and movements, we have :— [table]

Of the three phases, thus logically distinguishable, the first and the third correspond in the main with the receptive and active states or powers of the older psychologists. The second phase, being more difficult to isolate, was long overlooked; or, at all events, its essential characteristics were not distinctly marked: it was either confounded with (1), which is its cause, or with (3), its effect. But perhaps the most important of all psychological distinctions is that which traverses both the old bipartite and the prevailing tripartite classification, viz., that between the subject, on the one hand, as acting and feeling, and the objects of this activity on the other. Such distinction lurks indeed under such terms as faculty, power, consciousness, but they tend to keep it out of sight. With this distinction clearly before us—instead of crediting the subject with an indefinite number of faculties or capacities, we must seek to explain not only reproduction, association, agreement, difference, <fcc., but all varieties of thinking and acting by the laws pertaining to ideas or presentations, leaving to the subject only the one power of variously distributing that attention upon which the intensity of a presentation in part depends. Of this single subjective activity what we call activity in the narrower sense (as, e.g., purposive movement and intellection) is but a special case, although a very important one.

According to this view, then, presentations, attention, feeling, are not to be regarded as three co-ordinate genera, each a distinguishable “state of mind or consciousness,” i.e., as being all alike included under this one supreme category. There is, as Berkeley long ago urged, no resemblance between activity and an idea ; nor is it easy to see anything common to pure feeling and an idea, unless it be that both possess intensity. Classification seems, in fact, to be here out of place. Instead, therefore, of the one sumrnuτn genus, state of mind or consciousness, with its three co-ordinate subdivisions—cognition, emotion, conation—our analysis seems to lead us to recognize three distinct and irreducible facts—attention, feeling, and objects or presentations—as together, in a certain connexion, constituting one concrete state of mind or psychosis. Of such concrete states of mind we may then say there are two forms, more or less distinct, corresponding to the two ways in which attention may be determined and the two classes of objects attended to in each, viz., (1) the sensory or receptive state, when attention is non-voluntarily determined, i.e., where feeling follows the act of attention; and

(2) the motor or active state, where feeling precedes the act of attention, which is thus determined voluntarily.

To say that feeling and attention are not presentations will seem to many an extravagant paradox. If all knowledge consists of presentations, it will be said, how come we to know anything of feeling and attention if they are not presented? We know of them indirectly through their effects, not directly in themselves. This is, perhaps, but a more concrete statement of what philosophers have very widely acknowledged in a more abstract form since the days of Kant —the impossibility of the subjective qua subjective being presented. It is in the main clearly put in the following passage from Hamilton, who, however, has not had the strength of his convictions in all cases:—“The peculiarity of feeling, therefore, is that there is nothing but what is subjectively subjective; there is no object different from self,—no objectification of any mode of self. We are, indeed, able to constitute our states of pain and pleasure into objects of reflexion, but, in so far as they are objects of reflexion, they are not feelings but only reflex' cognitions of feelings.” But this last sentence is not, perhaps, altogether satisfactory. The meaning seems to be that feeling ‘ ‘ can only be studied through its reminiscence,” which is what Hamilton has said elsewhere of the “phaenomena of consciousness " generally. But this is a position hard to reconcile with the other, viz., that feeling and cognition are generically distinct. How can that which was not originally a cognition become such by being reproduced? The statements that feeling is “subjectively subjective,” that in it “there is no object different from self,” are surely tantamount to saying that it is not presented; and what is not presented cannot, of course, be re-presented. Instead, therefore, of the position that feeling and attention are known by being made objects of reflexion, it would seem we can only maintain that we know of them by their effects, by the changes, i.e., which they produce in the character and succession of our presentations. We ought also to bear in mind that the effects of attention and feeling cannot be known without attention and feeling: to whatever stage we advance, therefore, we have always in any given “state of mind” attention and feeling on the one side, and on the other a presentation of objects. Attention and feeling seem thus to be ever present, and not to admit of the continuous differentiation into parts which gives to presentations a certain individuality, and makes their association and reproduction possible.

Theory of Presentations.

Having now ascertained what seem to be the essential elements in any state of mind, we may next proceed to examine these several elements separately in more detail. It will be best to begin with that which is both the clearest in itself and helps us the most to understand the rest, viz., the objects of attention or consciousness, i.e., presentations. And this exposition will be simplified if we start with à supposition that will enable us to leave aside, at least for the present, the difficult question of heredity.

We know that in the course of each individual’s life there is more or less of progressive differentiation or development; we know too that the same holds broadly of a race; and it is believed to hold in like manner of the evolution of the animal kingdom generally. It is believed that there has existed a series of sentient individuals beginning with the lowest form of life and advancing continuously up to man. Some traces of the advance already made may be reproduced in the growth of each human being now, but for the most part such traces have been obliterated. What was experience in the past has become instinct in the present. The descendant has no consciousness of his ancestors’ failures when performing by “an untaught ability” what they slowly and painfully found out. But if we are to attempt to follow the genesis of mind from its earliest dawn it is the primary experience rather than the eventual instinct that we have first of all to keep in view. To this end, then, it is proposed to assume that we are dealing with one individual which has continuously advanced from the beginning of psychical life, and not with a series of individuals of which all save the first have inherited certain capacities from its progenitors. The life-history of such an imaginary individual, that is to say, would correspond with all that was new, all that could be called evolution or development, in a certain typical series of individuals each of whom advanced a certain stage in mental differentiation. On the other hand, from this history would be omitted that inherited reproduction of ancestral experience, or tendency to its reproduction, by which alone, under the actual conditions of existence, progress is possible.

If an assumption of this kind had been explicitly avowed by the psychologists who have discussed the growth of experience in accordance with the evolution hypothesis, not a few of the difficulties in the way of that hypothesis might have been removed. That individual minds make some advance in the complexity and distinctness of their presentations between birth and maturity is an obvious fact; heredity, though a less obvious fact, is also beyond question. Using Locke’s analogy of a writing-tablet—or let us say an etching-tablet—by way of illustration, we may be sure that every individual started with some features of the picture completely preformed, however latent, others more or less clearly outlined, and others again barely indicated, while of others there is as yet absolutely no trace. But the process of reproducing the old might differ as widely from that of producing the new as electrotyping does from engraving. However, as psychologists we know nothing directly about it; neither can we distinguish precisely at any link in the chain of life what is old and inherited—original in the sense of Locke and Leibnitz—from what is new or acquired —original in the modern sense. But we are bound as a matter of method to suppose all complexity and differentiation among presentations to have been originated, i.e., experimentally acquired, at some time or other. So long, then, as we are concerned primarily with the progress of this differentiation we may disregard the fact that it has not actually been, as it were, the product of one hand dealing with one tabula rasa but of many hands, each of which, starting with a reproduction of what had been wrought on the preceding tabulae, put in more or fewer new touches before devising the whole to a successor who would proceed in like manner.

What is implied in this process of differentiation or mental growth and what is it that grows or becomes differentiated Ί — these are the questions to which we must now attend. Psychologists have usually represented mental advance as consisting fundamentally in the combination and recombination of various elementary units, the so-called sensations and primitive movements, or, in other words, in a species of “mental chemistry.” If we are to resort to physical analogies at all—a matter of very doubtful propriety—we shall find in the growth of a seed or an embryo far better illustrations of the unfolding of the contents of consciousness than in the building up of molecules: the process seems much more a segmentation of what is originally continuous than an aggregation of elements at first independent and distinct. Comparing higher minds or stages of mental development with lower—by what means such comparison is possible we need not now consider— we find in the higher conspicuous differences between presentations which in the lower are indistinguishable or absent altogether. The worm is aware only of the difference between light and dark. The steel-worker sees half a dozen tints where others see only a uniform glow. To the child, it is said, all faces are alike; and throughout life we are apt to note the general, the points of resemblance, before the special, the points of difference. But, even when most definite, what we call a presentation is still part of a larger whole. It is not separated from other presentations, whether simultaneous or successive, by something which is not of the nature of presentation, as one island is separated from another by the intervening sea, or one note in a melody from the next by an interval of silence. In our search for a theory of presentations, then, it is from this “unity of consciousness” that we must take our start. Working backwards from this as we find it now, we are led alike by particular facts and general considerations to the conception of a totum, objectiυum or objective continuum which is gradually differentiated, thereby becoming what we call distinct presentations, just as with mental growth some particular presentation, clear as a whole, as Leibnitz would say, becomes a complex of distinguishable parts. Of the very beginning of this continuum we can say nothing: absolute beginnings are beyond the pale of science. Actual presentation consists in this continuum being differentiated; and every differentiation constitutes a new presentation. Hence the commonplace of psychologists :—We are only conscious as we are conscious of change.

But “change of consciousness” is too loose an expression to take the place of the unwieldy phrase differentiation of a presentation-continuum, to which we have been driven. For not only does the term “consciousness” confuse what exactness requires us to keep distinct, an activity and its object, but also the term “change” fails to express the characteristics which distinguish presentations from other changes. Differentiation implies that the simple becomes complex or the complex more complex; it implies also that this increased complexity is due to the persistence of former changes; we may even say such persistence is essential to the very idea of development or growth. In trying, then, to conceive our psychological individual in the earliest stages of development we must not picture it as experiencing a succession of absolutely new sensations, which, coming out of nothingness, admit of being strung upon the “thread of consciousness” like beads picked up at random, or cemented into a mass like the bits of stick and sand with which the young caddis covers its nakedness. The notion, which Kant has done much to encourage, that psychical life begins with a confused manifold of sensations not only without logical but without psychological unity is one that becomes more inconceivable the more closely we consider it. An absolutely new presentation, having no sort of connexion with former presentations till the subject has synthesized it with them, is a conception for which it would be hard to find a warrant either by direct observation, by inference from biology, or in considerations of an a priori kind. At any given moment we have a certain whole of presentations, a “field of consciousness” psychologically one and continuous; at the next we have not an entirely new field but a partial change within this field. Many who would allow this in the case of representations, i.e., where idea succeeds idea by the workings of association, would demur to it in the case of primary presentations or sensations. “For,” they would say, “may not silence be broken by a clap of thunder, and have not the blind been made to see 1” To urge such objections is to miss the drift of our discussion, and to answer them may serve to make it clearer. Where silence can be broken there are representations of preceding sounds and in all probability even subjective presentations of sound as well; silence as experienced by one who has heard is very different from the silence of Condillac’s statue before it had ever heard. The question is rather whether such a conception as that of Condillac’s is possible; supposing a sound to be, qualitatively, entirely distinct from a smell, could a field of consciousness consisting of smells be followed at once by one in which sounds had part? And, as regards the blind coming to see, we must remember not only that the "blind have eyes but that they are descended from ancestors who could see. What nascent presentations of sight are thus involved it would be hard to say; and the problem of heredity is one that we have for the present left aside.

The view here taken is (1) that at its first appearance in psychical life a new sensation or so-called elementary presentation is really a partial modification of some preexisting presentation, which thereby becomes as a whole more complex than it was before; and (2) that this complexity and differentiation of parts never become a plurality of discontinuous presentations, having a distinctness and individuality such as the atoms or elementary particles of the physical world are supposed to have. Beginners in psychology, and some who are not beginners, are apt to be led astray by expositions which begin with the sensations of the special senses, as if these furnished us with the type of an elementary presentation. The fact is we never experience a mere sensation of colour, sound, touch, and the like; and what the young student mistakes for such is really a perception, a sensory presentation combined with various sensory and motor presentations and with representations—and having thus a definiteness and completeness only possible to com} Jex presentations. Moreover, if we could attend to a pure sensation of sound or colour by itself, there is much to justify the suspicion that even this is complex and not simple, and owes to such complexity its clearly marked specific quality. In certain of our vaguest and most diffused organic sensations, in which we can distinguish little besides variations in intensity and massiveness, there is probably a much nearer approach to the character of the really primitive presentations.

The importance of getting a firm grasp of this conception of a presentation-continuum as fundamental to the whole doctrine of presentations will justify us in ignoring a little longer the details of actual mental development and regarding it first from this more general point of view. In a given sensation, more particularly in our organic sensations, we can distinguish three variations, viz., variations of quality, of intensity, and of what Dr Bain has called massiveness, or, as we will say, extensity. This last characteristic, which everybody knows who knows the difference between the ache of a big bruise and the ache of a little one, between total and partial immersion in a bath, is, as we shall see later on, an essential element in our perception of space. But it is certainly not the whole of it, for in this experience of massive sensation alone it is impossible to find other elements which an analysis of spatial intuition unmistakably yields. Extensity and extension, then, are not to be confounded. Now we find, even at our level of mental evolution, that an increase in the intensity of a sensation is apt to entail an increase in its extensity too; this is still more apparent in the case of movements, and especially in the movements of the young. In like manner we observe a greater extent of movement in emotional expression when the intensity of the emotion increases. Even the higher region of imagination is no exception, as is shown by the whirl and confusion of ideas incident to delirium, and, indeed, to all strong excitement. But this “diffusion” or “radiation,” as it has been called, diminishes as we pass from the class of organic sensations to the sensations of the five senses, from movements expressive of feeling to movements definitely purposive, and from the tumult of ideas excited by passion to the steadier sequences determined by efforts to think. Increased differentiation seems, then, to be intimately connected with increased “restriction.” The causal relations of the two must be largely matter of conjecture and cannot be fully discussed here. Probably there may be found certain initial differentiations which for psychology are ultimate facts that it cannot explain. But, such differentiations being given, then it may be safely said that, in accordance With what we have called the principle of subjective selection (see p. 42), attention would be voluntarily concentrated upon some of them and voluntary movements specially connected with these. To such subjectively initiated modifications of the presentationcontinuum, moreover, we may reasonably suppose “restriction” to be in large measure due. But increased restriction would render further differentiation of the given presentation possible and so the two processes might supplement each other. But, be their interaction what it may, these processes have now proceeded so far that at the level of human consciousness we find it hard to form any tolerably clear conception of a field of consciousness in which an intense sensation, no matter what, might diffuse over the whole. Colours, e.g., are with us so distinct from sounds that—except as regards the drain upon attention—there is nothing in the intensest colour to affect the simultaneous presentation of a sound. But at the beginning whatever we regard as the earliest differentiation of sound might have been incopresentable with the earliest differentiation of colour, if sufficiently diffused, just as now a field of sight all blue is incopresentable with one all red. Or, if the stimuli appropriate to both were active together, the resulting sensation might have been what we should describe as a blending of the two, as purple is a blending of red and violet. Now, on the other hand, colours and sounds are necessarily so far localized that we are directly aware that the eye is concerned with the one and the ear with the other. This brings to our notice a fact so ridiculously obvious that it has never been deemed worthy of mention, and yet it has undeniably important bearings—the fact, viz., that certain sensations or movements are an absolute bar to the simultaneous presentation of other sensations or movements. We cannot see an orange as at once yellow and green, though we can feel it at once as both smooth and cold ; we cannot open and close the same hand at the same moment, but we can open one hand while closing the other. Such incopresentability or contrariety is thus more than mere difference, and occurs only between presentations belonging to the same sense or to the same group of movements. Strictly speaking, it does not always occur even then; for red and yellow, hot and cold, are presentable together provided they have certain other differences which we shall meet again presently as differences of local sign.

In the preceding paragraphs we have had occasion to distinguish between the presentation-continuum or whole field of consciousness, as we may for the present call it, and those several modifications within this field which are ordinarily spoken of as presentations, and to which—now that their true character as parts is clear—we too may confine the term. But it will be well in the next place, before inquiring more closely into their characteristics, to consider for a moment that persistence of preceding modifications which the differentiation of the presentationcontinuum implies. This persistence is best spoken of as retentiveness; it is sometimes confounded with memory, though this is something much more complex and special. Betentiveness is both a biological and a psychological fact; memory is exclusively the latter. In memory there is necessarily some contrast of past and present, in retentiveness nothing but the persistence of the old. If psychologists have erred in regarding the presentations in consciousness together as a plurality of units, they have erred in like manner concerning the persisting residua of such presentations. As we see a certain colour or a certain object again and again, we do not go on accumulating images or representations of it, which are somewhere crowded together like shades on the banks of the Styx; nor is such colour, or whatever it be, the same at the hundredth time of presentation as at the first, as the hundredth impression of a seal on wax would be. There is no such constancy or uniformity in mind. Obvious as this must appear when we pause to think of it, yet the explanations of perception most iri vogue seem wholly to ignore it. Such explanations are far too mechanical and, so to say, atomistic; but we must fall back upon the unity and continuity of our presentation-continuum if we are to get a better. Suppose that in the course of a few minutes we take half a dozen glances at a strange and curious flower. We have not as many complex presentations which we might symbolize as F l , F 2 , F 3 . But rather, at first only the general outline is noted, next the disposition of petals, stamens, &c., then the attachment of the anthers, form of the ovary, and so on; that is to say, symbolizing the whole flower as [p' (a b) s' (c √) o' (f ^)], we first apprehend say [p'.. s'. . o'], then [p' (a b) s'.. o'.J, or [ρ ’ (a . .) s' (c . .) o' (∕..)], and so forth. It is because the earlier apprehensions persist that the later are an advance upon them and an addition to them. There is nothing in this process properly answering to the reproduction and association of ideas: in the last and complete apprehension as much as in the first vague and inchoate one the flower is there as a primary presentation. There is a limit, of course, to such a procedure, but the instance taken, we may safely say, is not such as to exceed the bounds of a simultaneous field of consciousness. Now the question is: Ought we not to assume that such increase of differentiation through the persistence of preceding differentiations holds of the contents of consciousness as a whole? Here, again, we shall find limitations,—limitations too of great practical importance; for, if presentations did not pale as well as persist, and if the simpler presentations admitted of indefinite differentiation, mental advance— unless the field of consciousness, t.e., the number of presentations to which we could attend together, increased without limit—would be impossible. But, allowing all this, it is still probably the more correct and fundamental view to suppose that, in those circumstances in which we now have a sensation of, say, red or sweet, there was in the primitive consciousness nothing but a vague modification, which persisted; and that on a repetition of the circumstances this persisting modification was again further modified. The whole field of consciousness would thus, like a continually growing picture, increase indefinitely in complexity of pattern, the earlier presentations not disappearing, like the waves of yesterday in the calm of to-day, but rather lasting on, like old scars that show beneath new ones.

There is yet one more topic of a general kind calling for attention before we turn to the consideration of particular presentations—the hypothesis of unconscious mental modifications, as it has been unfortunately termed,—the hypothesis of subconsciousness, as we may style it to avoid this contradiction in terms. It is a fact easily verified, that we do not distinguish or attend separately to presentations of less than a certain assignable intensity. On attaining this intensity presentations are said to pass over the threshold of consciousness, to use Herbart’s now classic phrase. What are we to say of them before they have attained it? After they have attained it, any further increase in their intensity is certainly gradual; are we then to suppose that before this their intensity changed instantly from zero to a finite quantity, and not rather that there was also a subliminal stage where too it only changed continuously? The latter alternative constitutes the hypothesis of subconsciousness. According to this hypothesis, a presentation does not cease to be so long as it has any intensity, no matter how little. We can directly observe that an increase in the intensity of many complex presentations brings to light details and differences before imperceptible; since these details are themselves presentations, they have been brought by this increase from the subconscious stage into the field of consciousness. Similarly, presentations not separately distinguishable, because of too close a proximity in time, become distinguishable when the interval between them is such as to allow of a separate concentration of attention upon each. Again, we find that presentations “revived” or re-presented after their disappearance from the field of consciousness appear fainter and less distinct the longer the time that has elapsed between their exits and their re-entrances. Nobody hesitates to regard such obliviscence as a psychological fact; why, then, should we hesitate to suppose that presentations, even when no longer intense enough directly to influence attention, continue to be presented, though with ever lessening intensity?

On the whole we seem justified in assuming three grades of consciousness thus widely understood—(1) a centre or focus of consciousness within (2) a wider field, any part of which may at once become the focus. Just as in sight, surrounding the limited area of distinct vision on which the visual axes are directed, there is a wider region of indirect vision to any part of which those axes may be turned either voluntarily or by a reflex set up by the part itself, as happens, e.g., with moving objects quite on the margin of vision. But in describing (3) subconsciousness as the third grade, this simile, due to Wundt, more or less forsakes us. Presentations in subconsciousness have not the power to divert attention, nor can we voluntarily concentrate attention upon them. Before either can happen the subconscious presentations must cross the threshold of consciousness, and so cease to be subconscious; and this, of course, is far from being always possible. Now in the case of sight an object may fail to catch the eye, either because, though within the field of sight, it is too far away to make a distinct impression or because it is outside the field altogether. But we cannot conveniently interpret “threshold of consciousness” in keeping with the latter alternative; mere accretion from without is a conception as alien to psychology as it is to biology. We must make the best we can of a totum objectivum differentiated within itself, and so are confined to the first alternative. Our threshold must be compared to the surface of a lake and subconsciousness to the depths beneath it, and all the current terminology of presentations rising and sinking implies this or some similar figure.

This hypothesis of subconsciousness has been strangely misunderstood, and it would be hard to say at whose hands it has suffered most, those of its exponents or those of its opponents. In the main it is nothing more than the application to the facts of presentation of the law of continuity, its introduction into psychology being due to Leibnitz, who first formulated that law. Half the difficulties in the way of its acceptance are due to the manifold ambiguities of the word consciousness. With Leibnitz consciousness was not coextensive with all psychical life, but only with certain higher phases of it. Of late, however, the tendency has been to make consciousness cover all stages of mental development and all grades of presentation, so that a presentation of which there is no consciousness resolves itself into the manifest contradiction of an unpresented presentation—a contradiction not involved in Leibnitz’s “unapperceived perception.” Moreover, the active form of the word “conscious” almost unavoidably suggests that an “unconscious mental modification” must be one in which that subjective activity, variously called consciousness, attention, or thinking, has no part But such is not the meaning intended when it is said, for example, that a soldier in battle is often unconscious of his wounds or a scholar unconscious at any one time of most of the knowledge “hidden in the obscure recesses of his mind.” There would be no point in saying a subject is not conscious of objects that are not presented at all; but to say that what is presented lacks the intensity requisite in the given distribution of attention to change that distribution appreciably is pertinent enough. Subconscious presentations may tell on conscious life—as sunshine or mist tells on a landscape or the underlying writing on a palimpsest —although lacking either the differences of intensity or the individual distinctness requisite to make them definite features. Even if there were no facts to warrant this conception of a subliminal presentation of impressions and ideas it might still claim an a priori justification. For to assume that there can be no presentations save such as pertain to the complete and perfect consciousness of a human being is as arbitrary and as improbable as it would be to suppose—in the absence of evidence to the contrary—that there was no vision or audition save such as is mediated by human eyes and ears. Psychological magnification is not more absurd than physical, although the processes in the two cases must be materially different; but of course in no case is magnification possible without limit. The point is that, while we cannot fix the limit at which the subconscious becomes the absolutely unconscious, it is only reasonable to expect beforehand that this limit is not just where our powers of discrimination cease.

Over and above hindrances to its acceptance which may be set down to the paradoxical and inaccurate use of the word unconsciousness, there are two material difficulties which prevent this hypothesis from finding favour. First, the prevailingly objective implications of language are apt to make us assume that, as a tree remains the same thing whether it is in the foreground of a landscape or is lost in the grey distance, so a presentation must be a something which is in itself the same whether above the threshold of consciousness or below, if it exist, that is, in this lower degree at all. But it must be remembered that we are not now dealing with physical things but with presentations, and that to these the Berkeleyan dictum applies that their esse is percipi, provided, of course, we give to percipi the wide meaning now assigned to consciousness. The qualitative differences of all presentations and the distinctness of structure of such as are complex both diminish with a diminution of intensity. In this sense much is latent or “involved” in presentations lying below the threshold of consciousness that becomes patent or “evolved” as they rise above it. But, on the other hand, the hypothesis of subconsciousness does not commit us to the assumption that all presentations are by their very nature imperishable: while many modifications of consciousness sink only into obliviscence, many, we may well suppose, lapse into complete oblivion and from that there is no recall. Secondly, to any one addicted to the atomistic view of presentations just now referred to it may well seem incredible that all the incidents of a long lifetime and all the items of knowledge of a well-stored mind that may possibly recur—“the infinitely greater part of our spiritual treasures,” as Hamilton says—can be in any sense present continuously. The brunt of such an objection is effectually met by the fact that the same presentation may figure in very various connexions, as may the same letter, for example, in many words, the same word in many sentences. We cannot measure the literature of a language by its vocabulary, nor may we equate the extent of our spiritual treasures as successively unfolded with the psychical apparatus, so to say, into which they resolve.

The attempt has more than once been made to avoid the difficulties besetting subconsciousness by falling back on the conceptions of faculties, capacities, or dispositions. Stored-up knowledge, says J. S. Mill, “is not a mental state but a capability of being put into a mental state”; similarly of the cases which Hamilton records, “in which the extinct memory [?] of whole languages was suddenly restored,” he says, “it is not the mental impressions that are latent but the power of reproducing them.” But surely the capability of being put into a mental state is itself a mental state and something actual, and is, moreover, a different something when the state to be reproduced is different. If not, how is such capability ever exerted? Even where the capability cannot be consciously exerted, must there not still be something actual to justify the phrase latent power? The “exaltation” of delirium may account for the intensification but not for the contents of the “extinct memories” which its unwonted glow reveals. It seems extraordinary that Mill of all men, and in psychology of all subjects, should have supposed such merely formal conveniences as these conceptions of faculties and powers could ever dispense us from further inquiry. It might be urged in Mill’s defence that he has investigated further and concludes that the only distinct meaning he can attach to unconscious mental modification is that of unconscious modification of the nerves—a modification of the nerves, that is to say, without any psychical accompaniment. But, while we can frequently understand a psychical fact better if we can understand its physical counterpart, a physiological explanation can never take the place of a psychological explanation. If all we have to deal with are nervous modifications which have no psychical concomitants, then so far there is nothing psychological to explain; but, if there really is anything calling for psychological explanation—and this Mill does not deny—then physical accompaniments must admit of psychical interpretation if they are to be of any avail. And in fact, although Mill professes to recognize only unconscious modifications of nerves, he finds a psychological meaning for these by means of his “mental chemistry,”—a doctrine which has done its work and which we need not here discuss.

The exposition of subconsciousness given by Wundt is in the main an advance on that of Mill and calls for brief notice. Presentations, says Wundt, are not substances but functions, whose physiological counterparts in like manner are functional activities, viz., of certain arrangements of nerve-cells. Consciousness of the presentation and the nervous activity cease together, but the latter leaves behind it a molecular modification of the nervous structure which becomes more and more permanent with exercise, and is such as to facilitate the recurrence of the same functional activity. A more precise account of these after-effects of exercise is for the present unattainable; nevertheless Wundt regards it as obvious that they are no more to be compared to the activity to which they predispose than the molecular arrangement of chlorine and nitrogen in nitric chloride is to be compared to the explosive decomposition that ensues if the chloride is slightly disturbed. Mutatis mutandis, on the psychological side the only actual presentations are those which we are conscious of as such; but presentations that vanish out of consciousness leave behind psychical dispositions tending to renew them. The essential difference is that, whereas we may some day know the nature of the physical disposition, that of the psychical disposition must of necessity be for ever unknown, for the threshold of consciousness is also the limit of internal experience. The theory thus briefly summarized seems in some respects arbitrary, in some respects ambiguous. It is questionable, for instance, whether the extremely meagre information that physiologists at present possess at all compels us to assume that the “physical disposition” of Wundt cannot consist in a continuous but much fainter discharge of function. At all events it is quite beside the mark to urge, as he does, that the effect of training a group of muscles is not shown in the persistence of slight movements during intervals of apparent rest. The absence of molar motions is no evidence of the absence of molecular motions. And it is certain that psychologically we can be conscious of the idea of a movement without the movement actually ensuing, yet only in such wise that the idea is more apt to pass over into action the intenser it is, and often actually passes over in spite of us. Surely there must be some functional activity answering to this conscious presentation, and if this amount of activity is possible without movement why may not a much less amount be conceived possible too? Again, what meaning can possibly be attached to a psychical disposition which is the counterpart, not of physical changes, but of an arrangement of molecules? Compared with such an inconceivable unknown, the perfectly conceivable hypothesis of infinitesimal presentations so faint as to elude discrimination is every way preferable. In fact, if conceivability is to count for anything, we have, according to Wundt, no choice, for “we can never think of a presentation that has disappeared from consciousness except as retaining the properties it had when in consciousness.” None the less he holds it to be an error “to apply to presentations themselves a style of conception that has resulted from our being of necessity confined to consciousness.” Verily, this is phenomenalism with a vengeance, as if presentations themselves were not also confined to consciousness!

This will be the most convenient place to take note of certain psychological doctrines which, though differing in some material respects, are usually included under the term Law of Relativity.

1. Hobbes’s Idem semper sentire et non sentire ad idem recidunt is often cited as one of the first formulations of this law; and if we take it to apply to the whole field of consciousness it becomes at once true and trite: a field of consciousness unaltered either by change of impression or of ideas would certainly be a blank and a contradiction. Understood in this sense the Law of Relativity amounts to what Hamilton called the Law of Variety (Reid’s Works, p. 932). But, though consciousness involves change, it is still possible that particular presentations in the field of consciousness may continue unchanged indefinitely. When it is said that “a constant impression is the same as a blank,” what is meant turns out to be something not psychological at all, as, e.g., our insensibility to the motion of the earth or to the pressure of the air—cases in which there is obviously no presentation, nor even any evidence of nervous change. Or else this paradox proves to be but an awkward way of expressing what we may call accommodation, whether physiological or psychological. Thus the skin soon adapts itself to certain seasonal alterations of temperature, so that heat or cold ceases to be felt: the sensation ceases because the nervous change, its proximate physical counterpart, has ceased. Again, there is what James Mill calls “an acquired incapacity of attention,” such that a constant noise, for example, in which we have no interest is soon inaudible. As attention moves away from a presentation its intensity diminishes, and when the presentation is below the threshold of consciousness its intensity is then subliminal, whatever that of the physical stimulus may be. In such a case of psychological accommodation we should expect also to find on the physiological side some form of central reflexion or isolation more or less complete. As a rule, no doubt, impressions do not continue constant for more than a very short time; still there are sad instances enough in the history of disease, bodily and mental, to show that such a thing can quite well happen, and that such constant impressions (and “fixed ideas,” which are in effect tantamount to them), instead of becoming blanks, may dominate the entire consciousness, colouring or bewildering everything.

2. From the fact that the field of consciousness is continually changing it has been supposed to follow, not only that a constant presentation is impossible, but as a further consequence that every presentation is essentially nothing but a transition or difference. “All feeling,” says Dr Bain, the leading exponent of this view, “is two-sided. . . . We may attend more to one member of the couple than to the other. . . . We are more conscious of heat when passing to a higher temperature, and of cold when passing to a lower. The state we have passed to is our explicit consciousness, the state we have passed from is our implicit consciousness.” But the transition need not be from heat to cold, or vice versa : it can equally well take place from a neutral state, which is indeed the normal state, of neither heat nor cold; a new-born mammal, e.g., must experience cold, having never experienced heat. Again, suppose a sailor becalmed, gazing for a whole morning upon a stretch of sea and sky, what sensations are implicit here? Shall we say yellow as the greatest contrast to blue, or darkness as the contrary of light, or both? What, again, is the implicit consciousness when the explicit is sweet; is it bitter or sour, and from what is the transition in such a case?

It is difficult to avoid suspecting a certain confusion here between the transition of attention from one presentation to another and the qualitative differences among presentations themselves. It is strange that the psychologist who has laid such stress on neutral states of surprise as being akin to feeling, and so distinct from special presentations, should in any way confound the two. The mistake, if mistake indeed it be, is perhaps accounted for by the fact that Dr Bain, in common with the rest of his school, nowhere distinguishes between attention and the presentations that are attended to. To be conscious or mentally alive we must have a succession of shocks or surprises, new objects calling off attention from old ones; but, over and above these movements of attention from presentation to presentation, do we find that each presentation is also itself but a transition or difference? “We do not know any one thing of itself but only the difference between it and another thing,” says Dr Bain. But it is plain we cannot speak of contrast or difference between two states or things as a contrast or difference if the states or things are not themselves presented, else the so-called contrast or difference would itself be a single presentation, and its supposed “relativity” but an inference. Difference is not more necessary to the presentation of two objects than two objects to the presentation of difference. And, what is more, a difference between presentations is not at all the same thing as the presentation of that difference. The former must precede the latter; the latter, which requires active comparison, need not follow. There is an ambiguity in the words “know,” “knowledge,” which Dr Bain seems not to have considered: “to know” may mean either to perceive or apprehend, or it may mean to understand or comprehend. Knowledge in the first sense is only what we shall have presently to discuss as the recognition or assimilation of an impression (see below, p. 53); knowledge in the latter sense is the result of intellectual comparison and is embodied in a proposition. Thus a blind man who cannot know light in the first sense can know about light in the second if he studies a treatise on optics. Now in simple perception or recognition we cannot with any exactness say that two things are perceived: straight is a thing, i.e., a definite object presented; not so not-straight, which may be qualitatively obscure or intensively feeble to any degree. Only when we rise to intellectual knowledge is it true to say, “No one could understand the meaning of a straight line without being shown a line not straight, a bent or crooked line.” Two distinct presentations are necessary to the comparison that is here implied; but we cannot begin with such definitional differentiation: we must first recognize our objects before we can compare them. We need, then, to distinguish between the comparativity of intellectual knowledge, which we must admit—for it rests at bottom on a purely analytical proposition—and the “differential theory of presentations,” which, however plausible at first sight, must be wrong somewhere since it commits us to absurdities. Thus, if we cannot have a presentation X but only the presentation of the difference between Y and Z, it would seem that in like manner we cannot have the presentation of Y or Z, nor therefore of their difference X, till we have had the presentation of A and B say, which differ by Y, and of C and D, which we may suppose differ by Z. The lurking error in this doctrine, that all presentations are but differences, may perhaps emerge if we examine more closely what may be meant by difference. We may speak of (a) differences in intensity between sensations supposed to be qualitatively identical, or of (δ) differences in quality in the same continuum or class of presentations, or of (c) differences between sensations of different classes or continua. Now, as regards (a) and (ό), it will be found that the difference between two intensities of the same quality, or between two qualities of the same continuum, may be itself a distinct presentation. But nothing of this kind holds of (c). In passing from a load of 10 ft) to one of 20 ft), or from the sound of a note to that of its octave, it is possible to make the change continuously, and to estimate it as one might the distance between two places on the same road. But in passing from the scent of a rose to the sound of a gong or a sting from a bee we have no such means of bringing the two into relation—scarcely more than we might have of measuring the length of a journey made partly on the common earth and partly through the looking-glass. In (c), then, we have only a change, a difference of presentation, but not a presentation of difference; and we only have more than this in (a) or (6) provided the selected presentations occur together. If red follows green we may be aware of a greater difference than we could if red followed orange; and we should ordinarily call a 10-ft> load heavy after one of 5 ft» and light after one of 20 ft). Facts like these it is which make the differential theory of presentations plausible.

3. On the strength of such facts Wundt has formulated a law of relativity, free, apparently, from the objections just urged against Dr Bain’s doctrine, which runs thus: —“Our sensations afford no absolute but only a relative. measure of external impressions. The intensities of stimuli, the pitch of tones, the qualities of light, we apprehend (empfinden) in general only according to their mutual relation, not according to any unalterably fixed unit given along with or before the impression itself.” We are not now concerned with so much of this statement as relates to the physical antecedents of sensation; but that what is of psychological account in it requires very substantial qualification is evident at once from a single consideration, viz., that if true this law would make it quite immaterial what the impressions themselves were: provided the relation continued the same, the sensation would be the same too, just as the ratio of 2 to 1 is the same whether our unit be miles or millimètres. In the case of intensities, €.<?., there is a minimum sensibile and a maximum sensibile. The existence of such extremes is alone sufficient to turn the flank of the thoroughgoing relativists; but there are instances enough of intermediate intensities that are directly recognized. A letter-sorter, for example, who identifies an ounce or two ounces with remarkable exactness identifies each for itself and not the first as half the second; of an ounce and a half or of three ounces he may have a comparatively vague idea. And so generally within certain limits of error, indirectly ascertained, we can identify intensities, each for itself, neither referring to a common standard nor to one that varies from time to time —to any intensity, that is to say, that chances to be simultaneously presented; just as an enlisting sergeant will recognize a man fit for the Guards without a yard measure and whether the man’s comrades are tall or short. Of course such identification is only possible through the reproduction of past impressions, but then such reproduction itself is only possible because the several impressions concerned have all along had a certain independence of related impressions, and a certain identity among themselves. As regards the qualities of sensations the outlook of the relativists is, if anything, worse. In what is called Meyer’s experiment, e.g. (described under Eye, vol. viii. p. 825), what appears greenish on a red ground will appear of an orange tint on a ground of blue; but this contrast is only possible within certain very narrow limits. In fact, the phenomena of colour-contrast, so far from proving, distinctly disprove that we apprehend the qualities of light only according to their mutual relation. In the case of tones it is very questionable whether such contrasts exist at all. Summing up on the particular doctrine of relativity of which Wundt is the most distinguished adherent, the truth seems to be that, in some cases where two presentations whose difference is itself presentable occur in close connexion, this difference—as we indirectly learn—exerts a certain bias on the assimilation or identification of one or both of the presentations. There is no “unalterably fixed unit” certainly, but, on the other hand, “the mutual relations of impressions” are not everything. Sensation and Movement.

One of the first questions to arise concerning our simplest presentations or sensations is to account for their differences of quality. In some respects it may well seem an idle question, for at some stage or other we must acknowledge final or irresolvable differences. Still, differences can be frequently shown to be due to variety in the number, arrangement, and intensity of parts severally the same,— these several parts being either simultaneously presented or succeeding each other with varying intervals. It is a sound scientific instinct which has led writers like G. H. Lewes and Mr Spencer to look out for evidence of some simple primordial presentation—the psychical counterpart, they supposed, of a single nerve-shock or neural tremor— out of which by various grouping existing sensations have arisen. It must, however, be admitted that but little of such evidence is at present forthcoming; and further, if we look at the question for a moment from the physiological standpoint which these writers are too apt to affect, what we find seems on the whole to make against this assumption. Protoplasm in its simplest state is readily irritated either by light, heat, electricity, or mechanical shock. Till the physiological characteristics of these various stimuli are better known, it is fruitless to speculate as to the nature of primitive sensation. But we have certainly no warrant for supposing that any existing class of sensations is entitled to rank as original. Touch, as we experience it now, is probably quite as complex as any of our special sensations. If a supposition must be ventured at all, it is perhaps most in keeping with what we know to suppose that the sensations answering to the five senses in their earliest form were only slightly differing variations of the more or less massive organic sensation which constituted the primitive presentation-continuum. We may suppose, in other words, that at the outset these sensations corresponded more completely with what we might call the general physiological action of light, heat, <fcc., as distinct from the action of these stimulants on specially differentiated end-organs. But, short of resolving such sensations into combinations of one primordial modification of consciousness, if we could conceive such, there are many interesting facts which point clearly to a complexity that we can seldom directly detect. Many of our supposed sensations of taste, e.q., are complicated with sensations of touch and smell: thus the pungency of pepper and the dryness of wine are tactual sensations, and their spicy flavours are really smells. How largely smells mingle with what we ordinarily take to be simply tastes is best brought home to us by a severe cold in the head, as this temporarily prevents the access of exhalations to the olfactory surfaces. The difference between the smooth feel of a polished surface and the roughness of one that is unpolished, though to direct introspection an irresolvable difference of quality, is probably due to the fact that several nerve-terminations are excited in each case: where the sensation is one of smoothness all are stimulated equally; where it is one of roughness the ridges compress the nerve-ends more, and the hollows compress them less, than the level parts do. The most striking instance in point, however, is furnished by musical timbre (see Ear, vol. vii. p. 593).

We find other evidence of the complexity of our existing sensations in the variations in quality that accompany variations in intensity, extensity, and duration. With the exception of spectral red all colours give place, sooner or later, to a mere colourless grey as the intensity of the light diminishes, and all in like manner become indis-tinguishably white after a certain increase of intensity. A longer time is also in most cases necessary to produce a sensation of colour than to produce a sensation merely of light or brightness: the solar spectrum seen for a moment appears not of seven colours but of two only— faintly red towards the left side and blue towards the right. Very small objects, again, such as coloured specks on a white ground, though still distinctly seen, appear as colourless if of less than a certain size, the relation between their intensity and extensity being such that within certain limits the brighter they are the smaller they may be without losing colour, and the larger they are the fainter in like manner. Similar facts are observable in the case of other senses, so that generally we seem justified in regarding what we now distinguish as a sensation as probably complicated in several respects. In other words, if psychical magnification were possible, we might be directly aware that sensations which we now suppose to be both single and simple were both compound and complex—that they consisted, that is, of two or more sensational elements or changes, alike or different in quality, of uniform or variable intensity, and occurring either simultaneously or in regular or irregular succession.

It is interesting to note that all possible sensations of colour, of tone, and of temperature constitute as many groups of qualitative continua. By continuum is here meant a series of presentations changing gradually in quality, i.e., so that any two differ less the more they approximate in the series. We may represent this relation among presentations spatially, so long as the differences do not exceed three. In this way our normal colour-sensations have been compared to a sphere, in which (a) the maximum of luminosity is at one pole and the minimum at the other; (δ) the series of colours proper (red to violet and through purple back to red), constituting a closed line, are placed round the equator or in zones parallel to it, according to shade; and (c) the amount of saturation (or absence of white) for any given zone of illumination increases with distance from the axis. The several musical tones, again, have been compared to an ascending spiral, a given tone and its octaves lying in the same perpendicular. Temperatures similarly might be represented as ranging in opposite directions, t'.e., through heat or through cold, between a zero of no sensation and the organic sensations that accompany the destructive action of heat and cold alike. As we frequently experience a continuous range of intensity of varying amount, so we may experience continuous variations in quality, as in looking at the rainbow, for example. Still it is not to be· supposed that colours or notes are necessarily presented as continua: that they are such is matter of after-observation.

The groups of sensations known as touches, smells, tastes, on the other hand, do not constitute continua: bitter tastes, for instance, will not shade off into acid or sweet tastes, except, of course, through a gradual diminution of intensity rendering the one quality subliminal followed by a gradual increase from zero in the intensity of the other. This want of continuity might be explained if there were grounds for regarding these groups as more complex than the rest,—in so far as tertiary colours or vowel-sounds, say, are complex and comparatively discontinuous. But it might equally well be argued that they are simpler than the rest and, as simple and different, are necessarily disparate, while the continuity of colours or tones is due to a gradual change of components.

Our motor presentations contrast with the sensory by their want of striking qualitative differences. We may divide them into two groups, (a) motor presentations proper and (ό) auxilio-motor presentations. The former answer to our “feelings of muscular effort” or “feelings of innervation.” The latter are those presentations due to the straining of tendons, stretching and flexing of the skin, and the like, by which the healthy man knows that his efforts to move are followed by movement, and so knows the position of his body and limbs. It is owing to the absence of these presentations that the anaesthetic patient cannot directly tell whether his efforts are effectual or not, nor in what position his limbs have been placed by movements from without. Thus under normal circumstances motor presentations are always accompanied by auxilio-motor; but in disease and in passive movements they are separated and their distinctness thus made manifest. Originally we may suppose auxilio-motor objects to form one imperfectly differentiated continuum, but now, as with sensations, movements have become a collection of special continua, viz., the groups of movements possible to each limb and certain combinations of these.

Perception.

In treating apart of the differentiation of our sensory and motor continua, as resulting merely in a number of distinguishable sensations and movements, we have been compelled by the exigencies of exposition to leave out of sight another process which really advances ])ari passu with this differentiation, viz., the integration or synthesis of these proximately elementary presentations into those complex presentations which are called perceptions, intuitions, sensori-motor reactions, and the like. It is, of course, not to be supposed that in the evolution of mind any creature attained to such variety of distinct sensations and movements as a human being possesses without making even the first step towards building up this material into the most rudimentary knowledge and action. On the contrary, there is every reason to think, as has been said already incidentally, that further differentiation was helped by previous integration, that perception prepared the way for distincter sensations, and purposive action for more various movements. This process of synthesis, which is in the truest sense a psychical process, deserves some general consideration before we proceed to the several complexes that result from it. Most complexes, certainly the most important, are consequences of that principle of subjective selection whereby interesting sensations lead through the intervention of feeling to movements; and the movements that turn out to subserve such interest come to have a share in it. In this way—which we need not stay to examine more closely now—it happens that, in the alternation of sensory and motor phases which is common to all psychical life, a certain sensation, comparatively intense, and a certain movement, definite enough to control that sensation, engage attention in immediate succession, to the more or less complete exclusion from attention of the other less intense sensations and more diffused movements that accompany them. Apart from this intervention of controlling movements, the presentation-continuum, however much differentiated, would be for all purposes of knowledge little better than the disconnected manifold for which Kant took it. At the same time it is to be remembered that the subject obtains command of particular movements out of all the mass involved in emotional expression only because such movements prove on occurrence adapted to control certain sensations. Before experience, and apart from heredity, there seems not only no scientific warrant for assuming any sort of practical prescience but also none for the hypothesis of a priori forms of knowledge. Of a pre-established harmony between the active and passive phases of consciousness we need none, or—it may be safer to say—at least indefinitely little. A sentient creature moves first of all because it feels, not because it intends. A long process, in which natural selection probably played the chief part at the outset—subjective selection becoming more prominent as the process advanced—must have been necessary to secure as much purposive movement as even a lobster displays. It seems impossible to except from this process the movements of the special sense-organs which are essential to our perception of external things. Here too subjective interest will explain, so far as psychological explanation is possible, those syntheses of motor and sensory presentations which we call spatial perceptions and intuitions of material things. For example, some of the earliest lessons of this kind seem to be acquired, as we may presently see, in the process of exploring the body by means of the limbs,—a process for which grounds in subjective interest can obviously never be wanting.

The mere process of “association ”—whereby we may suppose the synthesis of presentations to be effected so that presentations originally in no way connected tend to move in consciousness together—will confront us with its own problems later on. We need for the present only to bear in mind that the conjunction or continuity upon which the association primarily depends is one determined by the movements of attention, which movements in turn depend very largely upon the pleasure or pain that presentations occasion. To some extent, however, there is no doubt that attention may pass non-voluntarily from one indifferent presentation to another, each being sufficiently intense to give what has been called a “shock of surprise,” but not so intense as to awaken feeling to move for their detention or dismissal. But throughout the process of mental development, where we are concerned with what is new, the range of such indifference is probably small: indifferent presentations there will be, but that does not matter while there are others that are interesting to take the lead.

Perception as a psychological term has received various, though related, meanings for different writers. It is sometimes used for the recognition of a sensation or movement as distinct from its mere presentation, and thus is said to imply the more or less definite revival of certain residua or re-presentations of past experience which resembled the present. More frequently it is used as the equivalent of what has been otherwise called the “localization and projection” of sensations,—that is to say, a sensation presented either as an affection of some part of our own body regarded as extended or as a state of some foreign body beyond it. According to the former usage, strictly taken, there might be perception without any spatial presentation at all: a sensation that had been attended to a few times might be perceived as familiar. Such percept being a “presentative-representative” complex, and wholly sensory, we might symbolize it, details apart, as ∕S ’ + s, using ∣S' for the present sensation, and s for a former S represented. According to the latter usage, an entirely new sensation, provided it were complicated with motor experiences in the way required for its localization or projection, would become a perception. Such a perception might be roughly symbolized as X + (Λf + τn), or as X + m simply, J∕ standing for actual movements, as in ocular adjustment, which in some cases might be only former movements represented or m. But as a matter of fact actual perception probably invariably includes both cases: impressions which we recognize we also localize or project, and impressions which are localized or projected are never entirely new,— they are, at least, perceived as sounds or colours or aches, &c. It will, however, frequently happen that we are specially concerned with only one side of the whole process, as is the case with a tea-taster or a colour-mixer on the one hand, or, on the other, with the patient who is perplexed to decide whether what he sees and hears is “subjective,” or whether it is “real.” Usually we have more trouble to discriminate the quality of an impression than to fix it spatially; indeed this latter process was taken for granted by most psychologists till recently. But, however little the two sides are actually separated, it is important to mark their logical distinctness, and it would be well if we had a precise name for each. In any other science save psychology such names would be at once forthcoming; but it seems the fate of this science to be restricted in its terminology to the ill-defined and well-worn currency of common speech, with which every psychologist feels at liberty to do what is right in his own eyes, at least within the wide range which a loose connotation allows. If there were any hope of their general acceptance we might propose to call the first-mentioned process the assimilation or recognition of an impression, and might apply the term localization to its spatial fixation, without distinguishing between the body and space beyond,—a matter of the less importance as projection hardly enters into primitive spatial experience. But there is still a distinction called for: perception as we now know it involves not only localization, or “spatial reference,” as it is not very happily termed, but “objective reference” as well. We may perceive sound or light without any presentation of that which sounds or shines; but none the less we do not regard such sound or light as merely the object of our attention, as having only immanent existence, but as the quality or change or state of a thing, an object distinct not only from the subject attending but from all presentations whatever to which it attends. Here again the actual separation is impossible, because this factor in perception has been so intertwined throughout our mental development with the other two. Still a careful psychological analysis will show that such “reification,” as we might almost call it, has depended on special circumstances, which we can at any rate conceive absent. These special circumstances are briefly the constant conjunctions and successions of impressions, for which psychology can give no reason, and the constant movements to which they prompt. Thus we receive together, e.g., those impressions we now recognize as severally the scent, colour, and “feel” of the rose we pluck and handle. We might call each a “percept,” and the whole a “complex percept.” But there is more in such a complex than a sum of partial percepts; there is the apprehension or intuition of the rose as a thing having this scent, colour, and texture. We have, then, under perception to consider (i.) the assimilation and (ii.) the localization of impressions, and (iii.) the intuition of things.

The range of the terms assimilation or recognition of impressions is wide: between the simplest mental process they may be supposed to denote and the most complex there is a great difference. The penguin that watched unmoved the first landing of man upon its lonely rock becomes as wild and wary as more civilized fowl after two or three visits from its molester: it then recognizes that featherless biped. His friends at home also recognize him though altered by years of peril and exposure. In the latter case some trick of his voice or manner, some “striking” feature, calls up and sustains a crowd of memories of the traveller in the past,—events leading on to the present scene. The two recognitions are widely different, and it is from state's of mind more like the latter than the former that psychologists have usually drawn their description of perception. At the outset, they say, we have a primary presentation or impression P, and after sundry repetitions there remains a mass or a series of P residua, p i p<fp i . . .; perception ensues when, sooner or later, P n “calls up” and associates itself with these re-presentations or ideas. Much of our later perception, and especially when we are at all interested, awakens, no doubt, both distinct memories and distinct expectations; but, since these imply previous perceptions, it is obvious that the earliest form of recognition, or, as we might better call it, assimilation, must be free from such complications, can have nothing in it answering to the overt judgment, P n is a P. Assimilation involves retentiveness and differentiation, as we have seen, and prepares the way for re-presentation; but in itself there is no confronting the new with the old, no determination of likeness, and no subsequent classification. The pure sensation we may regard as a psychological myth; and the simple image, or such sensation revived, seems equally mythical, as we may see later on. The nth sensation is not like the first: it is a change in a presentation-continuum that has itself been changed by those preceding; and it cannot with any propriety be said to reproduce these past sensations, for they never had the individuality which such reproduction implies. Nor does it associate with images like itself, since where there is association there must first have been distinctness, and what can be associated can also, for some good time at least, be dissociated.

To treat of the localization of impressions is really to give an account of the steps by which the psychological individual comes to a knowledge of space. At the outset of such an inquiry it seems desirable first of all to make plain what lies within our purview, and what does not, lest we disturb the peace of those who, confounding philosophy and psychology, are ever eager to fight for or against the a priori character of this element of knowledge. That space is a priori in the epistemological sense it is no concern of the psychologist either to assert or to deny. Psychologically α priori or original in such sense that it has been either actually or potentially an element in all presentation from the very beginning it certainly is not. It will help to make this matter clearer if we distinguish what philosophers frequently confuse, viz., the concrete spatial experiences, constituting actual localization for the individual, and the abstract conception of space, generalized from what is found to be common in such experiences. A gannet’s mind “possessed of” a philosopher, if such a conceit may be allowed, would certainly afford its tenant very different spatial experiences from those he might share if he took up his quarters in a mole. So, any one who has revisited in after years a place from which he had been absent since childhood knows how largely a “personal equation,” as it were, enters into his spatial perceptions. Or the same truth may be brought home to him if, walking with a friend more athletic than himself, they come upon a ditch, which both know to be twelve feet wide, but which the one feels he can clear by a jump and the other feels he cannot. In the concrete “up” is much more than a different direction from “along.” The hen-harrier, which cannot soar, is indifferent to a quarry a hundred feet above it—to which the peregrine, built for soaring, would at once give chase— but is on the alert as soon as it descries prey of the same apparent magnitude, but upon the ground. Similarly, in the concrete, the body is the origin or datum to which all positions are referred, and such positions differ not merely quantitatively but qualitatively. Moreover, our various bodily movements and their combinations constitute a network of co-ordinates, qualitatively distinguishable but geometrically, so to put it, both redundant and incomplete. It is a long way from these facts of perception, which the brutes share with us, to that scientific conception of space as having three dimensions and no qualitative differences which we have elaborated by the aid of thought and language, and which reason may see to be the logical presupposition of what in the order of mental development has chronologically preceded it. That the experience of space is not psychologically original seems obvious—quite apart from any successful explanation of its origin—from the mere consideration of its complexity. Thus we must have a plurality of objects— A out of B, B beside C, distant from D, and so on; and these relations of externality, juxtaposition, and size or distance imply further specialization; for with a mere plurality of objects we have not straightway spatial differences. Juxtaposition, e.g., is only possible when the related objects form a continuum; but, again, not any continuity is extensive. Now how has this complexity come about?

The first condition of spatial experience seems to lie: in what has been noted above (p. 46) as the extensity of i sensation. This much we may allow is original; for the longer we reflect the more clearly we see that no combination or association of sensations varying only in intensity and quality, not even if motor presentations are added, will account for the space-element in our perceptions. A series of touches α, δ, c, d may be combined with a series of movements m 1 , m 2 , m 3 , m i ; both series may be reversed; and finally the touches may be presented simultaneously. In this way we can attain the knowledge of the coexistence of objects that have a certain quasi-distance between them, and such experience is an important element in our perception of space; but it is not the whole of it. For, as has been already remarked by critics of the associationist psychology, we have an experience very similar to this in singing and hearing musical notes or the chromatic scale. The most elaborate attempt to get extensity out of succession and coexistence is that of Mr Herbert Spencer. He has done, perhaps, all that can be done, and only to make it the more plain that the entire procedure is a υστepov πpoτepov. We do not first experience a succession of touches or of retinal excitations by means of movements, and then, when these impressions are simultaneously presented, regard them as extensive, because they are associated with or symbolize the original series of movements; but, before and apart from movement altogether, we experience that massiveness or extensity of impressions in which movements enable us to find positions, and also to measure. But it will be objected, perhaps not without impatience, that this amounts to the monstrous absurdity of making the contents of consciousness extended. The edge of this objection will be best turned by rendering the conception of extensity more precise. Thus, suppose a postage stamp pasted on the back of the hand; we have in consequence a certain sensation. If another be added beside it, the new experience would not be adequately described by merely saying we have a greater quantity of sensation, for intensity involves quantity, and increased intensity is not what is meant. For a sensation of a certain intensity, say a sensation of red, cannot be changed into one having two qualities, red anα' blue, leaving the intensity unchanged; but with extensity this change is possible. For one of the postage stamps a piece of wet cloth of the same size might be substituted and the massiveness of the compound sensation remain very much the same. Intensity belongs to what may be called graded quantity: it admits of increment or decrement, but is not a sum of parts. Extensity, on the other hand, does imply plurality: we might call it latent or merged plurality or a “ground” of plurality, inasmuch as to say that a single presentation has massiveness is to say that a portion of the presentationcontinuum at the moment undifferentiated is capable of differentiation. Attributing this property of extensity to the presentation-continuum as a whole, we may call the relation of any particular sensation to this larger whole its local sign, and can see that, so long as the extensity of a presentation admits of diminution without the presentation becoming nil, such presentation has two or more local signs,—its parts, taken separately, though identical in quality and intensity, having a different relation to the whole. Such difference of relation must be regarded fundamentally as a ground or possibility of distinctness of sign—whether as being the ground or possibility of different complexes or otherwise—rather than as being from the beginning such an overt difference as the term “local sign,” when used by Lotze, is meant to imply. From this point of view we may say that more partial presentations are concerned in the sensation caused by two stamps than in that caused by one. The fact that these partial presentations, though identical in quality and intensity, on the one hand are not wholly identical, and on the other are presented only as a quantity and not as a plurality, is explained by the distinctness along with the continuity of their local signs. Assuming that to every distinguishable part of the body there corresponds a local sign, we may allow that at any moment only a certain portion of this continuum is definitely within the field of consciousness; but no one will maintain that a part of one hand is ever felt as continuous with part of the other or with part of the face. This we can only represent by saying that the local signs have an invariable relation to each other: two continuous signs are not one day coincident and the next widely separate. This last fact is hardly perhaps implied in the mere massiveness of a sensation, but it will be convenient to include it when speaking of the continuum of local signs as extensive. We have, then, a plurality of presentations constituting a continuum, presented simultaneously as impressions and having certain fixed and invariable relations to each other. Of such experience the typical case is that of passive touch, though the other senses exemplify it. It must be allowed that our conception of space in like manner involves a fixed continuity of positions; but then it involves, further, the possibility of movement. Now in the continuum of local signs there is nothing whatever of this; we might call this continuum an implicit plenum. It only becomes the presentation of occupied space after its several local signs are complicated or “associated” in an orderly way with active touches, when in fact we have experienced the contrast of movements with contact and movements without, i.e., in vacuo. It is quite true that we cannot now think of this plenum except as a space, because we cannot divest ourselves of these motor experiences by which we have explored it. We can, however, form some idea of the difference between the perception of space and this one element in the perception by contrasting massive internal sensations with massive superficial ones, or the general sensation of the body as “an animated organism” with our perception of it as extended.

It must seem strange, if this conception of extensity is essential to a psychological theory of space, that it has escaped notice so long. The reason may be that in investigations into the origin of our knowledge of space it was always the conception of space and not our concrete space perceptions that came up for examination. Now in space as we conceive it one position is distinguishable from another solely by its co-ordinates, i.e., by the magnitude and signs of certain lines and angles, as referred to a certain datum position, or origin; and these elements our motor experiences seem fully to explain. But on reflexion we ought, surely, to be puzzled by the question, how these coexistent positions could be known before those movements were made which constitute them different positions. The link we thus suspect to be missing is supplied by the more concrete experiences we obtain from our own body, in which two positions have a qualitative difference or “local colour” independently of movement. True, such positions would not be known as spatial without movement; but neither would the movement be known as spatial had those positions no other difference than such as arises from movement.

We may now consider the part which movement plays in elaborating the presentations of this dimensionless continuum into perceptions of space. In so doing we must bear in mind that this continuum implies the incopresentability of two impressions having the same local sign, but allows not only of the presentation of impressions of varying massiveness but of several distinct impressions at the same time. As regards the motor element itself, the first point of importance is the incopresentability and invariability of a series of auxilio-motor presentations, P γ ,P 2 ,P 3 ,P i . P 1 cannot be presented along with P 2 , and from P i it is impossible to reach P- i again save through P 3 and P 2 . Such a series, taken alone, could afford us, it is evident, nothing but the knowledge of an invariable sequence of impressions which it was in our own power to produce. Its psychological interest would lie solely in the fact that, whereas other impressions depend on an objective initiative, these depend on a subjective. But in the course of the movements necessary to the exploration of say, as Mill seems to do, “that the idea of space is at bottom one of time” (p. 276), we must admit the inadequacy of our experience of movement to explain the origin of it.

the body—probably our earliest lesson in spatial perception —these auxilio-motor presentations receive a new significance from the active and passive touches that accompany them, just as they impart to these last a significance they could never have alone.

It is only in the resulting complex that we have the presentations of position and of spatial magnitude. For space, though conceived as a coexistent continuum, excludes the notion of omnipresence or ubiquity; two positions l d and l g must coexist, but they are not strictly distinct positions so long as we conceive ourselves present in the same sense in both. But, if F d and F g are, e.g., two impressions produced by compass-points touching two different spots as I and l g on the hand or arm, and we place a finger upon l d and move it to l gi experiencing thereby the series P v P v P 3 ,P v this series constitutes l d and l g into positions and also invests F d and F g with a relation not of mere distinctness but of definite distance. The resulting complex perhaps admits of symbolization as follows :—

r a 'PbV c F d 'F e ∙p f F g v 1i γ k Tilt P1PiP3P4

Here the first line represents a portion of the tactual continuum, F d and F g being distinct “feels,” if we may so say, or passive touches presented along with the fainter sensations of the continuum as a whole; T stands for the active touch of the exploring finger and P l for the corresponding auxilio-motor object; the rest of the succession, as not actually present at this stage but capable of revival from past explorations, is symbolized by the 11 1 and P2P3P4∙ When the series of movements is accompanied by active touches without passive there arises the distinction between one’s own body and foreign bodies; when the initial movement of a series is accompanied by both active and passive touches, the final movement by active touches only, and the intermediate movements are unaccompanied by either, we get the further presentation of empty space lying between us and them,—but only when by frequent experience of contacts along with those intermediate movements we have come to know all movement as not only succession but change of position. Thus active touches come at length to be projected, passive touches alone being localized in the stricter sense. But in actual fact, of course, the localization of one impression is not perfected before that of another is begun, and we must take care lest our necessarily meagre exposition give rise to the mistaken notion that localizing an impression consists wholly and solely in performing or imaging the particular movements necessary to add active touches to a group of passive impressions. That this cannot suffice is evident merely from the consideration that a single position out of relation to all other positions is a contradiction. Localization, though it depends on many special experiences of the kind described, is not like an artificial product which is completed a part at a time, but is essentially a growth, its several constituent4ocalizations advancing together in definiteness and interconnexion. So far has this development advanced that we do not even imagine the special movements which the localization of an impression implies, that is to say, they are no longer distinctly represented as they would be if we definitely intended to make them: the past experiences are “retained,” but too much blended in the mere perception to be appropriately spoken of as remembered or imaged.

Apropos of this almost instinctive character of even our earliest spatial perceptions it will be appropriate to animadvert on a misleading implicationin the current use of such terms as “localization,” “projection,” “bodily reference,” “spatial reference,” and the like. The implication is that external space, or the body as extended, is in some sort presented or supposed apart from the localization, projection, or reference of impressions to such space. That it may be possible to put a book in its place on a shelf there must be (1) the book, and (2), distinct and apart from it, the place on the shelf. But in the evolution of our spatial experience impressions and positions are not thus presented apart. We can have, or at least we can suppose, an impression which is recognized without being localized; but if it is localized this means that a more complex presentation is formed by the addition of new elements, not that a second distinct object is presented and some indescribable connexion established between the impression and it, still less that the impression is referred to something not strictly presented at all. The truth is that the body as extended is from the psychological point of view not perceived at all apart from localized impressions. In like manner impressions projected (or the absence of impressions projected) constitute all that is perceived as the occupied (or unoccupied) space beyond. It is not till a much later stage, after many varying experiences of different impressions similarly localized or projected, that even the mere materials are present for the formation of such an abstract conception of space as “spatial reference” implies. Psychologists, being themselves at this later stage, are apt to commit the oversight of introducing it into the earlier stage which they have to expound.

In a complex presentation, such as that of an orange or a piece of wax, may be distinguished the following points concerning which psychology may be expected to give an account :—(a) its reality, (b) its solidity or occupation of space, (c) its permanence, or rather its continuity in time, (<∕) its unity and complexity, and (e) its substantiality and the connexion of its attributes and powers. Though, in fact, these items are most intimately blended, our exposition will be clearer if we consider each for a moment apart.

(a) The terms actuality and reality have each more than one meaning. Thus what is real, in the sense of material, is opposed to what is mental; as the existent or actual it is opposed to the non-existent; and again, what is actual is distinguished from what is possible or necessary. But here both terms, with a certain shade of difference, in so far as actual is more appropriate to movements and events, are used, in antithesis to whatever is ideal or represented, for what is sense-given or presented. This seems at least their primary psychological meaning; and it is the one most in vogue in English philosophy at any rate, over-tinged as that is with psychology. are all real . . . and not fictions at pleasure; for the mind . . . can make to itself no simple idea more than what it has received” {Essay, it 30, 2). And Berkeley says, “The ideas imprinted on the senses by the Author of Nature are called real things ; and those excited in the imagination, being less regular, vivid, and constant, are more properly termed ideas or images of things, which they copy or represent” {Prin. of Hum. Know., part i, § 33). ] Any examination of this characteristic will be best deferred till we come to deal with ideation generally (see p. 58 below). Meanwhile it may suffice to remark that reality or actuality is not a single distinct element added to the others which enter into the complex presentation we call a thing, as colour or solidity may be. Neither is it a special relation among these elements, like that of substance and attribute, for example. In these respects the real and the ideal, the actual and the possible, are alike; all the elements or qualities within the complex, and all the relations of those elements to each other, are the same in the rose represented as in the presented rose. The difference turns not upon what these elements are, regarded as qualities or relations presented or represented, but upon whatever it is that distinguishes the presentation from the representation of any given qualities or relations. Now this, as we shall see, turns partly upon the relation of such complex presentation to other presentations in consciousness with it, partly upon its relation as a presentation to the subject whose presentation it is. In this respect we find a difference, not only between the simple qualities, such as cold, hard, red, and sweet in strawberry ice, e.g., as presented and as represented, but also, though less conspicuously, in the spatial, and even the temporal, relations which enter into our intuition as distinct from our imagination of it. Where no such difference exists we have passed beyond the distinction of percept and image to the higher level of conception and thought. So, then, reality or actuality is not strictly an item by itself, but a characteristic of all the items that follow.

(ft) Here our properly motor presentations or “feelings of effort or innervation” come specially into play. They are not entirely absent in those movements of exploration by which we attain a knowledge of space; but it is when these movements are definitely resisted, or are only possible by increased effort, that we reach the full meaning of body as that which occupies space. Heat and cold, light and sound, the natural man regards as real, and by and by perhaps as due to the powers of things known or unknown, but not as themselves things. At the outset things are all corporeal like his own body, the first and archetypal thing, that is to say: things are intuited only when touch is accompanied by pressure; and, though at a later stage passive touch without pressure may suffice, this is only because pressures depending on a subjective initiative, i.e., on voluntary muscular exertion, have been previously experienced. It is of more than psychological interest to remark how the primordial factor in materiality is thus due to the projection of a subjectively determined reaction to that action of a not-self on which sense-impressions depend,— an action of the not-self which, of course, is not known as such till this projection of the subjective reaction has taken place. Still we must remember that accompanying sense-impressions are a condition of its projection: muscular effort without simultaneous sensations of contact would not yield the distinct presentation of the resistant occupying the space into which we have moved and would move again. Nay more, it is in the highest degree an essential circumstance in this experience that muscular effort, though subjectively initiated, is still only possible when there is contact with something that, as it seems, is making an effort the counterpart of our own. But this something is so far no more than thing-stuff; without the elements next to be considered our psychological individual would fall short of the complete intuition of distinct things.

(c) The remaining important factors in the psychological constitution of things might be described in general terms as the time-relations of their components. Such relations are themselves in no way psychologically determined; impressions recur with a certain order or want of order quite independently of the subject’s interest or of any psychological principles of synthesis or association whatever. It is essential that impressions should recur, and recur as they have previously occurred, if knowledge is ever to begin; out of a continual chaos of sensation, all matter and no form, such as some philosophers describe, nothing but chaos could result. But a flux of impressions having this real or sense-given order will not suffice; there must be also attention to and retention of the order, and these indispensable processes at least are psychological. Still they need not be further emphasized here, nor would it have been necessary at this point to call them to mind at all had not British empirical philosophers brought psychology into disrepute by overlooking them altogether.

But for its familiarity we should marvel at the fact that out of the variety of impressions simultaneously presented we do not instantly group together all the sounds and all the colours, all the touches and all the smells, but, dividing what is given together, single out a certain sound or smell as belonging with a certain colour and feel, similarly singled out from the rest, to what we call one thing. We might wonder, too—those at least who have made so much of association by similarity ought to wonder—that, say, the white of snow calls up directly, not other shades of white or other colours, but the expectation of cold or of powdery softness. The first step in this process has been the simultaneous projection into the same occupied space of the several impressions which we thus come to regard as the qualities of the body filling it. Yet such simultaneous and coincident projection would avail but little unless the constituent impressions were again and again repeated in like order so as to prompt anew the same grouping, and unless, further, this constancy in the one group was present along with changes in other groups and in the general field. There is nothing in its first experience to tell the infant that the song of the bird does not inhere in the hawthorn whence the notes proceed, but that the fragrance of the may-flower does. It is only where a group, as a whole, has been found to change its position relatively to other groups, and —apart from causal relations—to be independent of changes of position among them, that such complexes can become distinct unities and yield a world of things. Again, because things are so often a world within themselves, their several parts or members not only having distinguishing qualities but moving and changing with more or less independence of the rest, it comes about that what is from one point of view one thing becomes from another point of view several,—like a tree with its separable branches and fruits, for example. Wherein, then, more precisely, does the unity of a thing consist Î This question, so far as it here admits of answer, carries us over to temporal continuity.

(d) Amidst all the change above described there is one thing comparatively fixed: our own body is both constant as a group and a constant item in every field of groups; and not only so, but it is beyond all other things an object of constant and peculiar interest, inasmuch as our earliest pleasures and pains depend solely upon it and what affects it. The body becomes, in fact, the earliest form of self, the first datum for our later conceptions of permanence and individuality. A continuity like that of self is then transferred to other bodies which resemble our own, so far as our direct experience goes, in passing continuously from place to place and undergoing only partial and gradual changes of form and quality. As we have existed—or, more exactly, as the body has been continuously presented—during the interval between two encounters with some other recognized body, so this is regarded as having continuously existed during its absence from us. However permanent we suppose the conscious subject to be, it is hard to see how, without the continuous presentation to it of such a group as the bodily self, we should ever be prompted to resolve the discontinuous presentations of external things into a continuity of existence. It might be said: “Since the second presentation of a particular group would, by the mere workings of psychical laws, coalesce or become identical with the image of the first, this coalescence suffices to ‘ generate ’ the conception of continued existence.” But such assimilation is only the ground of an intellectual identification and furnishes no motive, one way or the other, for resolving two like things into the same thing: between a second presentation of A and the presentation at different times of two A’s there is so far no difference. Real identity no more involves exact similarity than exact similarity involves sameness of things; on the contrary, we are wont to find the same thing alter with time, so that exact similarity after an interval, so far from suggesting one thing, is often the surest proof that there are two concerned. Of such real identity, then, it would seem we must have direct experience; and we have it in the continuous presentation of the bodily self; apart from this it could not be “generated” by association among changing presentations. Other bodies being in the first instance personified, that then is regarded as one thing—from whatever point of view we look at it, whether as part of a larger thing or as itself compounded of such parts—which has had one beginning in time. But what is it that has thus a beginning and continues indefinitely 1 This leads to our last point.

(e) So far we have been concerned only with the combination of sensory and motor presentations into groups and with the differentiation of group from group; the relations to each other of the constituents of each group still for the most part remain. To these relations in the main must be referred the correlative conceptions of substance and attribute, the distinction in substances of qualities and powers, of primary qualities and secondary, and the like.

Of all the constituents of things only one is universally present, that above described as physical solidity, which presents itself according to circumstances as impenetrability, resistance, or weight. Things differing in temperature, colour, taste, and smell agree in resisting compression, in filling space. Because of this quality we regard the wind as a thing, though it has neither shape nor colour, while a shadow, though it has both but not resistance, is the very type of nothingness. This constituent is invariable, while other qualities are either absent or change,—form altering, colour disappearing with light, sound and smells intermitting. Many of the other qualities—colour, temperature, sound, smell—increase in intensity until we reach and touch a body occupying space; with the same movement too its visual magnitude varies. At the moment of contact an unvarying tactual magnitude is ascertained, while the other qualities and the visual magnitude reach a fixed maximum; then first it becomes possible by effort to change or attempt to change the position and form of what we apprehend. This tangible plenum we thenceforth regard as the seat and source of all the qualities we project into it. In other words, that which occupies space is psychologically the substantial; the other real constituents are but its properties or attributes, the marks or manifestations which lead us to expect its presence.

Imagination or Ideation.

Before the intuition of things has reached a stage so complete and definite as that just described, imagination or ideation as distinct from perception has well begun. In passing to the consideration of this higher form of mental life we have to note the distinction between impressions and images or ideas, to which Hume first gave general currency. Hume did not think it “necessary to employ many words in explaining this distinction. Every one of himself will readily perceive the difference . . .; though it is not impossible but in particular instances they may very nearly approach to each other. Thus in sleep, in a fever, in madness, or in any very violent emotions of soul, our ideas may approach to our impressions; as, on the other hand, it sometimes happens our impressions are so faint and low that we cannot distinguish them from our ideas.” In most cases, no doubt, the obvious difference in intensity, or, as Hume puts it, “in the force or liveliness with which they strike upon the mind,” is a sufficient characteristic, but we must examine a good deal further and pay more attention to his uncertain cases if this important distinction is ever to be in any sense psychologically “explained.”

To begin with, it is very questionable whether Hume was right in applying Locke’s distinction of simple and complex to ideas in the narrower sense as well as to im pressions. “That idea of red,” says Hume, “which we form in the dark and that impression which strikes our eyes in the sunshine differ only in degree, not in nature.” But what he seems to overlook is that, whereas there can be a mere sensation red—and such a presentation may for present purposes be regarded as simple—we can only have an image or representation of a red thing or a red form, i.e., of red in some way ideally projected or intuited. In other words, there are no ideas answering to simple or isolated impressions: what are revived in memory and imagination are percepts, not unlocalized sensations and movements. It is not only that we cannot now directly observe such representations,—because, for that matter, we can no longer directly observe even the original presentations as merely elementary impressions; the point rather is that ideas as such are from the first complex, and do not begin to appear in consciousness apart from the impressions which they are said to reproduce till after these impressions have been frequently attended to together, and have been more or less firmly synthesized into percepts or intuitions.

The effects of even the earliest of these syntheses or “associations” of impressions must of course in some way persist, or progress in perception would be impossible. On this account it has been usual to say that “perception” implies both “memory” and “imagination”; but such a statement can be allowed only so long as these terms are vaguely used. The dog’s mouth waters only at the sight of food, but the gourmand’s mouth will also water at the thought of it. We recognize the smell of violets as certainly as we recognize the colour when the spring brings them round again; but few persons, if any, can recall the scent when the flower has gone, so as to say with Shelley—

“Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken ’’—

though most can recall the colour with tolerable clearness. In like manner everybody can perform innumerable complex voluntary movements which only a few can mentally rehearse or describe without the prompting of actual execution. And not only does such reproduction as suffices for perception fall short of that involved in reminiscence or memory in the narrower sense, but the manner in which the constituent elements in a perception are combined differs materially from what is strictly to be called the association of ideas. To realize this difference we need only to observe first how the sight of a suit of polished armour, for example, instantly reinstates and steadily maintains all that we retain of former sensations of its hardness and smoothness and coldness, and then to observe how this same sight gradually calls up ideas now of tournaments, now of crusades, and so through all the changing imagery of romance. Though the percept is complex, it is but a single whole, and the act of perception is single too; but, where, as is the case in memory and imagination, attention passes, whether voluntarily or non - voluntarily, from one representation to another, it is obvious that these several objects of attention are still distinct and that it is directed in turn to each. The term “association” seems only appropriate to the latter. To the connexion of the partial presentations in a complex, whether perception or idea, it would be better to apply the term “complication,” which was used in this sense by Herbart, and has been so used by many psychologists since. When we perceive an orange by sight we may say that its taste or feel is represented, when we perceive it by touch we may in like manner say that its colour is represented, symbolizing the whole complex in the first case sufficiently for our present purpose as Ctf, in the second as F c t. We might also symbolize the idea of an orange as seen by d tf and the idea of an orange as felt by f' c t, using the accented letter to signify that different constituents are dominant in the two cases. What we have, then, to observe is briefly (1) that the processes by which the whole complex c' tf or f' ct is brought into consciousness differ importantly from the process by which C or F reinstates and maintains tf ov ct, and (2) that c, t, and /never have that distinct existence as representations which they had as presentations or impressions.

The mental synthesis which has taken place in the evolution of the percept can only partially fail in the idea, and never so far as to leave us with a chaotic “manifold” of mere sensational remnants. On the contrary, we find that in “constructive imagination” a new kind of effort is often requisite in order to dissociate these representational complexes as a preliminary to new combinations. But it is doubtful whether the results of such an analysis are ever the ultimate elements of the percept, that is, merely isolated impressions in a fainter form. We may now try to ascertain further the characteristic marks which distinguish what is imaged from what is perceived.

The most obvious, if not the most invariable, difference is that which, as we have seen, Hume calls the superior force or liveliness of primary presentations as compared with secondary presentations. But what exactly are we to understand by this somewhat figurative language? A simple difference of intensity cannqt be all that is meant, for, though we may be momentarily confused, we can perfectly well distinguish the faintest impression from an image, and yet can hardly suppose the faintest impression to be intenser than the most lively image. Moreover, we can reproduce such faintest impressions in idea, so that, if everything depended on intensity, we should be committed to the gratuitous supposition that secondary presentations can secure attention with a less intensity than is required for primary presentations. The whole subject of the intensity of representations awaits investigation. Between moonlight and sunlight or between midday and dawn we could discriminate many grades of intensity; but it does not appear that there is any corresponding variation of intensity between them when they are not seen but imagined. Many persons suppose they can imagine a waxing or a waning sound or the gradual abatement of an intense pain; but what really happens in such cases is probably not a rise and fall in the intensity of a single representation, but a change in the complex represented. In the primary presentation there has been a change of quality along with change of intensity, and not only so, but most frequently a change in the muscular adaptations of the sense-organs too, to say nothing of organic sensations accompanying these changes. A representation of some or all of these attendants is perhaps what takes place when variations of intensity are supposed to be reproduced. Again, hallucinations are often described as abnormally intense images which simply, by reason of their intensity, are mistaken for percepts. But such statement, though supported by very high authority, is almost certainly false, and would probably never have been made if physiological and epistemological considerations had been excluded as they ought to have been. Hallucinations, when carefully examined, seem just as much as percepts to contain among their constituents some primary presentation—either a so-called subjective sensation of sight and hearing or some organic sensation due to deranged circulation or secretion. Now we have noticed already incidentally in a preceding paragraph that primary presentations reinstate and maintain the representational constituents of a percept in a manner very different from that in which what are unmistakably ideas reproduce each other. The intensity and steadiness of the impressional elements are, as it were, shared by the ideational elements in a complex containing both. Intensity alone, then, will not suffice to discriminate, neither will extremes of intensity alone lead us to confuse, impressions and images.

The superior steadiness just mentioned is perhaps a more constant and not less striking characteristic of percepts. Ideas are not only in a continual flux, but even when we attempt forcibly to detain one it varies continually in clearness and completeness, reminding one of nothing so much as of the illuminated devices made of gas jets, common at fêtes, when the wind sweeps across them, momentarily obliterating one part and at the same time intensifying another. There is not this perpetual flow and flicker in what we perceive; for this, unlike the train of ideas, has at the outset neither a logical nor a psychological continuity. The impressions entering consciousness at any one moment are psychologically independent of each other; they are equally independent of the impressions and images presented the moment before —independent, i.e., as regards their order and character, not, of course, as regards the share of attention they secure. Attention to be concentrated in one direction must be withdrawn from another, and images may absorb it to the exclusion of impressions as readily as a first impression to the exclusion of a second. But, when attention is secured, a faint impression has a fixity and definiteness lacking in the case of even vivid ideas. One ground for this definiteness and independence lies in the localization or projection which accompanies all perception. But why, if so, it might be asked, do we not confound percept and image when what we imagine is imagined as definitely localized and projected? Because we have a contrary percept to give the image the lie; where this fails, as in dreams, or where, as in hallucination, the image obtains in other ways the fixity characteristic of impressions, such confusion does in fact result. But in normal waking life we have the whole presentation-continuum, as it were, occupied and in operation: we are distinctly conscious of being embodied and having our senses about us.

This contrariety between impression and image suggests, however, a deeper question: we may ask, not how it is resolved, but how it is possible. With eyes wide open, and while clearly aware of the actual field of sight and its filling, one can recall or imagine a wholly different scene: lying warm in bed one can imagine oneself out walking in the cold. It is useless to say the terms are different, that what is perceived is present and what is imaged is past or future. The images, it is true, have certain temporal marks—of which more presently—by which they may be referred to past or future; but as imaged they are present, and, as we have just observed, are regarded as both actual and present in the absence of correcting impressions. We cannot at once see the sky red and blue; how is it we can imagine it the one while perceiving it to be the other? When we attempt to make the field of sight at once red and blue, as in looking through red glass with one eye and through blue glass with the other, either the colours merge and we see a purple sky or we see the sky first of the one colour and then of the other in irregular alternation. That this does not happen between impression and image shows that, whatever their connexion, images altogether are distinct from the presentation-continuum and cannot with strict propriety be spoken of as revived or reproduced impressions. This difference is manifest in another respect, viz., when we compare the effects of diffusion in the two cases. An increase in the intensity of a sensation of touch entails an increase in the extensity; an increase of muscular innervation entails irradiation to adjacent muscles; but when a particular idea becomes clearer and more distinct there rises into consciousness an associated idea qualitatively related probably to impressions of quite another class, as when the smell of tar calls up memories of the sea-beach and fishing-boats. Since images are thus distinct from impressions, and yet so far continuous with each other as to form a train in itself unbroken, we should be justified, if it were convenient, in speaking of images as changes in a representation-or memory-continuum; and later on we may see that this is convenient.

Impressions, then, have no associates to whose presence their own is accommodated and on whose intensity their own depends. Each bids independently for attention, so that often a state of distraction ensues, such as the train of ideas left to itself never occasions. The better to hear we listen; the better to see we look; to smell better we dilate the nostrils and sniff; and so with all the special senses: each sensory impression sets up nascent movements for its better reception. In like manner there is also an adjustment for images which can be distinguished from sensory adjustments almost as readily as these are distinguished from each other. We become most aware of this, as, mutatis mutandis, we do of them, when we voluntarily concentrate attention upon particular ideas instead of remaining mere passive spectators, as it were, of the general procession. To this ideational adjustment may be referred most of the strain and “head-splitting” connected with recollecting, reflecting, and all that people call headwork; and the “absent look” of one intently thinking or absorbed in reverie seems directly due to the absence of sensory adjustment that accompanies the concentration of attention upon ideas.

But, distinct as they are, impressions and images are still closely connected. In the first place, there are two or three well-marked intermediate stages, so that, though we cannot observe it, we seem justified in assuming a steady transition from the one to the other. As the first of such intermediate stages, it is usual to reckon what are often, and—so far as psychology goes—inaccurately, styled after-images. They would be better described as aftersensations, except perlaps when the sense of sight is specially in question, inasmuch as they are due either (1) to the persistence of the original peripheral excitation after the stimulus is withdrawn, or (2) to the effects of the exhaustion or the repair that immediately follows this excitation. In the former case they are qualitatively identical with the original sensation and are called “positive,” in the latter they are complementary to it and are called “negative” (see Eye, vol. viii. p. 823). These last, then, of which we have clear instances only in connexion with sight, are obviously in no sort re-presentations of the original impression, but a sequent presentation of diametrically opposite quality; while positive after-sensations are, psychologically regarded, nothing but the original sensations in a state of evanescence. It is this continuance and gradual waning after the physical stimulus has completely ceased that give after-sensations their chief title to a place in the transition from impression to image. There is, however, another point of resemblance: aftersensations are less affected by movement. If we turn away our eyes we cease to see the flame at which we have been looking, but the after-image remains and is projected upon the wall, and continues still localized in the dark field of sight even if we close our eyes altogether. But the fact that movement affects their localization, though it does not exclude them, and the fact also that we are distinctly aware of our sense-organs being concerned in their presentation, both serve to mark them off as primary and not secondary presentations. The after-sensation is in reality more elementary than either the preceding percept or its image. In both these, in the case of sight, objects appear in space of three dimensions, i.e., with all the marks of solidity and perspective; appear as if they were in juxtaposition in the same plane; and, though—when my eyes are open—I seem to see the white bed in its entire length, the after-image—when my eyes are shut—presents instead only a narrow black stripe owing to the fact that the bed is seen considerably foreshortened. But the memory-image on the other hand completely reproduces the pictorial illusion as it appears when the eyes are open ,k {Elemente der Psychophysik, ii. p. 473). ] but the so-called after-image lacks all these. Still further removed from normal sensations (i.e., sensations determined by the stimuli appropriate to the sense-organ) are the “recurrent sensations” often unnoticed but probably experienced more or less frequently by everybody—cases, that is, in which sights or sounds, usually such as at the time were engrossing and impressive, suddenly reappear several hours or even days after the physical stimuli, as well as their effects on the terminal senseorgan, seem entirely to have ceased. Thus workers with the microscope often see objects which they have examined during the day stand out clearly before them in the dark; it was indeed precisely such an experience that led the anatomist Henle first to call attention to these facts. But he and others have wrongly referred them to what he called a “sense-memory”; all that we know is against the supposition that the eye or the ear has any power to retain and reproduce percepts. “Recurrent sensations” have all the marks of percepts which after-images lack; they only differ from what are more strictly called “hallucinations” in being, as regards form and quality, exact reproductions of the original impression and in being independent of all subjective suggestion determined by emotion or mental derangement.

In what Fechner has called the “memory-after-image,” or primary memory-image, as it is better termed, we have the ordinary image in its earliest form. As an instance of what is meant may be cited the familiar experience that a knock at the door, the hour struck on the clock, the face of a friend whom we have passed unnoticed, may sometimes be recognized a few moments later by means of the persisting image, although the actual impression was entirely disregarded. But the primary memory-image can always be obtained, and is obtained to most advantage, by looking intently at some object for an instant and then closing the eyes or turning them away. The object is then imaged for a moment very vividly and distinctly, and can be so recovered several times in succession by an effort of attention. Such reinstatement is materially helped by rapidly opening and closing the eyes, or by suddenly moving them in any way. In this respect a primary memory-image resembles an after-sensation, which can be repeatedly revived in this manner when it would otherwise have disappeared. But in other respects the two are very different: the aftersensation is necessarily presented if the intensity and direction of the original excitation suflice for its production, and cannot be presented, however much we attend, if they do not. Moreover, the after-sensation is only for a moment positive, and then passes into the negative or complementary phase, when, so far from even contributing towards the continuance of the original percept, it directly hinders it. Primary memory-images, on the other hand, and indeed all images, depend mainly upon the attention given to the impression; provided that was sufficient the faintest impression may be long retained, and without it very intense ones will soon leave no trace. The primary memoryimage retains so much of its original definiteness and intensity as to make it possible with great accuracy to compare two physical phenomena, one of which is in this way remembered while the other is really present; for the most part this is indeed a more accurate procedure than that of dealing with both together. But this is only possible for a very short time. From Weber’s experiments with weights and lines it would appear that even after 10 seconds a considerable waning has taken place, and after 100 seconds all that is distinctive of the primary image has probably ceased.

On the whole, then, it appears that the ordinary memoryimage is a joint effect; it is not the mere residuum of changes in the presentation-continuum, but an effect of these only when there has been some concentration of attention upon them. It has the form of a percept, but is not constituted of “revived impressions,” for the essential marks of impressions are absent; there is no localization or projection, neither is there the motor adaptation, nor the tone of feeling, incident to the réception of impressions. Ideas do not reproduce the intensity of these original constituents, but only their quality and complication. What we call the vividness of an idea is of the nature of intensity, but it is an intensity very partially and indirectly determined by that of the original impression; it depends much more upon the state of the memory-continuum and the attention the idea receives. The range of vividness in ideas is probably comparatively small; what are called variations in vividness are often really variations in distinctness and completeness. Where we have great intensity, as in hallucinations, primary presentations may be reasonably supposed to enter into the complex.

It is manifest that the memory-continuum has been in some way formed out of or differentiated from the presentation-continuum by the movements of attention, but the precise connexion of the two continua is still very difficult to determine. We see perhaps the first distinct step of this evolution in the primary memory-image: here there has been no cessation in presentation and yet the characteristic marks of the impression are gone, so much so, indeed, that superposition without “fusion” with an exactly similar impression is possible. In this manner we. seem to have several primary images in the field of consciousness together, as when we cwunt up the strokes of the clock after it has ceased striking. But, though the image thus first arises in the field of consciousness as a sort of απόρροια or emanation from the presentation-continuum, its return (at which stage it first becomes a proper re-presentation) is never determined directly and solely by a second presentation like that which first gave it being. Its “revival” is not another birth. With a second impression exactly like the first we should have assimilation or simple recognition—an identity of the indiscernible which precludes the individual distinctness required in representation. But how, then, was this distinctness in the first instance possible in the series of primary images just referred to as being due to the repetition of the same presentation? Seemingly to differences in the rest of that field of consciousness in which each in turn occurred and to some persistence of these differences. If the whole field which the second impression entered had been just like the field of the first it is hard to see what ground for distinctness there would have been. When such second impression does not occur till after the primary memory-image has ceased, a representation is still possible provided the new impression can reinstate sufficient of the mental framing of the old to give the image individual distinctness. This is really what happens in what is ordinarily called “association by similarity,”—similarity, that is, in the midst of some diversity. Our inquiry into the connexion between presentations and representations has thus brought us to the general consideration of mental association.

Mental Association and the Memory-continuum.

Only a very brief treatment of this important subject is permissible here, as it has already been handled at length under Association of Ideas (q.v.'). Great confusion has been occasioned, as we have seen incidentally, by the lax use of the term “association”; this confusion has been increased by a further laxity in the use of the term “association by similarity.” In so far as the similarity amounts to identity, as in assimilation, we have a process which is more fundamental than association by contiguity, but then it is not a process of association. Yet, when the reviving presentation is only partially similar to the presentation revived, the nature of the association does not appear to differ from that operative when one “contiguous” presentation revives another. In the one case we have, say, ab X recalling a b y and in the other a b c recalling def. Now anybody λvho will reflect must surely see that the similarity between a b x and a b y, as distinct from the identity of their partial constituent a b, cannot be the means of recall; for this similarity is nothing but the state of mind—to be studied presently—which results when a b x and ab y, having been recalled, are in consciousness together and then compared. But, if a b, having concurred with y before and being now present in a b x, again revives y, the association, so far as that goes, is manifestly one of contiguity, albeit the state of mind immediately incident as soon as the revival is complete be what Dr Bain loves to style “the flash of similarity.” So far as the mere revival itself goes, there is no more similarity in this case than there is when a b c revives def. For the very a b c that now operates as the reviving presentation was obviously never in time contiguous with the def that is revived; if all traces of previous experiences of a b c were obliterated there would be no revival. In other words, the a b c now present must be “automatically associated,” or, as we prefer to say, must be assimilated to those residua of a b c which were “contiguous” with def before its representation can occur. And this, and nothing more than this, we have seen, is all the “similarity” that could be at work when a b x “brought up” a b y .

On the whole, then, we may assume that the only principle of association we have to examine is the so-called “association by contiguity,” which, as ordinarily formulated, runs :—Any presentations whatever, which are in consciousness together or in close succession, cohere in such a way that when one recurs it tends to revive the rest, such tendency increasing with the frequency of the conjunction. But such a statement is liable to all the objections already urged against what we may call atomistic psychology. Presentations do not really crowd into Mansoul by the avenues of Eyegate, Eargate, &c., there to form bonds and unions as in Bunyan’s famous allegory. It has been often contended that any investigation into the nature of association must be fruitless. But, if association is thus a first principle, it ought at least to admit of such a statement as shall remove the necessity for inquiry. So long, however, as we are asked to conceive presentations originally distinct and isolated becoming eventually linked together, we shall naturally feel the need of some explanation of the process, for neither the isolation nor the links are clear,—not the isolation, for we can only conceive two presentations separated by other presentations intervening; nor the links, unless these are also presentations, and then the difficulty recurs. But, if for contiguity we substitute continuity and regard the associated presentations as parts of a new continuum, the only important inquiry is how this new whole was first of all integrated.

To ascertain this point we must examine each of the two leading divisions of contiguous association—that of simultaneous presentations and that of presentations occurring in close succession. The last, being the clearer, may be taken first. In a series of associated presentations, A B C DE, such as the movements made in writing, the words of a poem learned by heart, or the simple letters of the alphabet themselves, we find that each member recalls its successor but not its predecessor. Familiar as this fact is, it is not perhaps easy to explain it satisfactorily. Since C is associated both with B and D, and apparently as intimately with the one as with the other, why does it revive the later only and not the earlier? B recalls C; why does not C recall Bl We have seen that any reproduction at all of A or B or C depends primarily upon its having been the object of special attention so as to occupy at least momentarily the focus of consciousness. Now we can in the first instance only surmise that the order in which they are reproduced is determined by the order in which they were thus attended to when first presented. The next question is whether the association of objects simultaneously presented can be resolved into an association of objects successively attended to. Whenever we try to recall a scene we saw but for a moment there are always a few traits that recur, the rest being blurred and vague, instead of the whole being revived in equal distinctness or indistinctness. On seeing the same scene a second time our attention is apt to be caught by something unnoticed before, as this has the advantage of novelty; and so on, till we have “lived ourselves into” the whole, which may then admit of simultaneous recall. Dr Bain, who is rightly held to have given the best exposition of the laws of association, admits something very like this in saying that “coexistence is an artificial growth formed from a certain peculiar class of mental successions.” But, while it is easy to think of instances in which the associated objects were attended to successively, and we are all perfectly aware that the surest —not to say the only—way to fix the association of a number of objects is by thus concentrating attention on each in turn, 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.

The only case, then, that now remains to be considered is that—to take it in its simplest form—of two primary presentations A and X, parts of different special continua or distinct— i.e., non-adjacent—parts of the same, and occupying the focus of consciousness in immediate succession. This constitutes their integration; for the result of this occupation may be regarded as a new continuum in which A and X become adjacent parts. For it is characteristic of a continuum that an increase in the intensity of any part leads to the intenser presentation of adjacent parts; and in this sense A and X, which were not originally continuous, have come to be so. We have here, then, some justification for the term secondary or memory-continuum when applied to this continuous series of representations to distinguish it from the primary or presentation-continuum from which its constituents are derived. The most important peculiarity of this continuum, therefore, is that it is a series of representations integrated by means of the movements of attention out of the differentiations of the primary or presentationcontinuum, or rather out of so much of these differentiations as pertain to what we know as the primary memoryimage. These movements of attention, if the phrase may be allowed, come in the end to depend mainly upon interest, but at first appear to be determined entirely by mere intensity. To them it is proposed to look for that continuity which images lose in so far as they part with the local signs they had as impressions and cease to be either localized or projected. Inasmuch as it is assumed that these movements form the connexion between one representation and another in the memory-train they may be called “temporal signs.” The evidence for their existence can be more conveniently adduced presently; it must suffice to remark here that it consists almost wholly of facts connected with voluntary attention and the voluntary control of the flow of ideas, so that temporal signs, unlike local signs, are fundamentally motor and not sensory. And, unlike impressions, representations can have each but a single sign, the continuum of which, in contrast to that of local signs, is not rounded and complete but continuously advancing.

But in saying this we are assuming for a moment that the memory-continuum forms a perfectly single and unbroken train. If it ever actually became so, then, in the absence of any repetition of old impressions and apart from voluntary interference with the train, consciousness, till it ceased entirely, would consist of a fixed and mechanical round of images. Some approximation to such a state is often found in uncultured persons who lead uneventful lives, and still more in idiots, who can scarcely think at all.

In actual fact, however, the memory-train is liable to change in two respects, which considerably modify its structure, viz., (1) through the evanescence of some parts, and (2) through the partial recurrence of like impressions, which produces reduplications of varying amount and extent in other parts. As regards the first, we may infer that the waning or sinking towards the threshold of consciousness which we can observe in the primary mental image continues in subconsciousness after the threshold is past. For the longer the time that elapses before their revival the fainter, the less distinct, and the less complete are the images when revived, and the more slowly they rise. All the elements of a complex are not equally revivable, as we have seen already: tastes, smells, and organic sensations, though powerful as impressions to revive other images, have little capacity for ideal reproduction themselves, while muscular movements, though perhaps of all presentations the most readily revived, do not so readily revive other presentations. Idiosyncrasies are, however, frequent; thus we find one person has an exceptional memory for sounds, another for colours, another for forms. Still it is in general true that the most intense, the most impressive, and the most interesting presentations persist the longest. But the evanescence, which is in all cases comparatively rapid at first, deepens sooner or later into real or apparent oblivion. In this manner it comes about that parts of the memory-continuum lose all distinctness of feature and, being without recognizable content, shrivel up to a dim and meagre representation of life that has lapsed—a representation that just suffices, for example, to show us that “our earliest recollections” are not of our first experiences, or to save them from being not only isolated but discontinuous. Such discontinuity can, of course, never be absolute; we must have something represented even to mark the gap. Oblivion and the absence of all representation are thus the same, and the absence of all representation cannot psychologically constitute a break. The terms “evolution” and “involution” have in this respect been happily applied to the rising and falling of representations. When we recall a particular period of our past life or what has long ceased to be a familiar scene, events and features gradually unfold and, as it were, spread out as we keep on attending. A precisely opposite process may then be supposed to take place when they are left in undisturbed forgetfulness; with loss of distinctness in the several members of a whole or series, there is a loss of individuality and of individual differences. And such loss is not a mere latency, as some psychologists, on metaphysical grounds or from a mistaken use of physical analogies, have been led to suppose. There is no real resemblance between the action, or rather inaction, of a particle obedient to the first law of motion and the persistence of a presentation, which is not even the psychical equivalent of an atom.

More important changes are produced by the repetition of parts of the memory-train. The effect of this is not merely to prevent the evanescence of the particular image or series of images, but by partial and more or less frequent reduplications of the train upon itself to convert it into a partially new continuum, which we might perhaps call the “ideational continuum.” The reduplicated portions of the train are strengthened, while at the points of divergence it becomes comparatively weakened, and this apart from the effects of obhviscence. One who had seen the queen but once would scarcely be likely to think of her without finding the attendant circumstances recur as well; this could not happen after seeing her in a hundred different scenes. The central representation of the whole complex would have become more distinct, whereas the several diverging lines would tend to dissipate attention and, by involving opposing representations, to neutralize each other, so that probably no definite background would be reinstated. Even this central representation would be more or less generalized. It has been often remarked that one’s most familiar friends are apt to be mentally pictured less concretely and vividly than persons seen more seldom and then in similar attitudes and moods; in the former case a “generic image” has grown out of such more specific representations as the latter affords. Still further removed from memory-images are the images that result from such familiar percepts as those of horses, houses, trees, &c.

Thus as the joint effect of obliviscence and reduplication we are provided with a flow of ideas distinct from the memory-train and thereby with the material, already more or less organized, for intellectual and volitional manipulation. We do not experience this flow—save very momentarily and occasionally—altogether undisturbed; even in dreams and reverie it is continually interrupted and diverted. Nevertheless it is not difficult to ascertain that, so far as it is left to itself, it takes a very different course from that which we should have to retrace if bent on reminiscence and able to recollect perfectly. The readiness and steadiness of this flow are shown by the extremely small effort necessary in order to follow it. Nevertheless from its very nature it is liable, though not to positive breaches of continuity from its own working, yet to occasional blocks or impediments to the smooth succession of images at points where reduplications diverge, and either permanently or at the particular time neutralize each other.

The flow of ideas is, however, exposed to positive interruptions from two distinct sides,—by the intrusion of new presentations and by voluntary interference. The only result of such interruptions which we need here consider is the conflict of presentations that may ensue. Herbart and his followers have gone so far as to elaborate a complete system of psychical statics and dynamics, based on the conception of presentations as forces and on certain more or less improbable assumptions as to the modes in which such forces interact. Since our power of attention is limited, it continually happens that attention is drawn off by new presentations at the expense of old ones. But, even if we regard this non-voluntary redistribution of attention as implying a struggle between presentations, still such conflict to secure a place in consciousness is very different from a conflict between presentations that are already there. Either may be experienced to any degree possible without the other appearing at all; as, absorbed in watching a starry sky, one might be unaware of the chilliness of the air, though recognizing at once, as soon as the cold is felt, that, so far from being incompatible, the clearness and the coldness are causally connected. This difference between a conflict of presentations to enter consciousness, if we allow for a moment the propriety of the expression, and that opposition or incompatibility of presentations which is only possible when they are in consciousness has been strangely confused by the Herbartians. In the former the intensity of the presentation is primarily alone of account; in the latter, on the contrary, quality and content are mainly concerned. Only the last requires any notice here, since such opposition arises when the ideational continuum is interrupted. in the ways just mentioned, and apparently arises in no other way. Certainly there is no such opposition between primary presentations: there we have the law of incopresentability preventing the presentation of opposites with the same local sign; and their presentation with different local signs involves, on this level at all events, no conflict. But what has never been presented could hardly be represented, if the ideational process were undisturbed: even in our dreams white negroes or round squares, for instance, never appear. In fact, absurd and bizarre as dream-imagery is, it never at any moment entails overt contradictions, though contradiction may be implicit.

But between ideas and percepts actual incompatibility is frequent. In the perplexity of Isaac, e.g.—“ The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau ”—we have such a case in a familiar form. There is here not merely mental arrest but actual conflict: the voice perceived identifies Jacob, at the same time the hands identify Esau. The images of Esau and Jacob by themselves are different, but do not conflict; neither is there any strain, quite the contrary, in recognizing a person partly like Jacob and partly like Esau. For there is no direct incompatibility between smooth and rough, so long as one pertains only to voice and the other only to hands, but the same hands and voice cannot be both smooth and rough. Similar incompatibilities may arise without the intrusion of percepts, as when, in trying to guess a riddle or to solve a problem, or generally to eliminate intellectual differences, we have images which in themselves are only logically opposite, psychologically opposed, or in conflict, because each strives to enter the same complex. In all such conflicts alike we find, in fact, a relation of presentations the exact converse of that which constitutes similarity. In the latter we have two complete presentations, abx and aby, as similar, each including the common part ab ; in the former we have two partial presentations, x and y, as contraries, each excluding the other from the incomplete ab — . And this ab, it is to be noted, is not more essential to the similarity than to the conflict. But in the one case it is a generic image (and can logically be predicated of two subjects); in the other it is a partially determined individual (and cannot be subject to opposing predicates). Except as thus supplementing a b, x and y do not conflict; black and white are not incompatible save as attributes of the same thing. The possibility of most of these conflicts—of all, indeed, that have any logical interest—lies in that reduplication of the memory-continuum which gives rise to these new complexes, generic images, or general ideas.

Having thus attempted to ascertain the formation of the ideational continuum out of the memory-train, the question arises: How now are we to distinguish between imagining and remembering, and again, between imagining and expecting? It is plainly absurd to make the difference depend on the presence of belief in memory and expectation and on its absence in mere imagination; for the belief itself depends on the difference instead of constituting it. One real and obvious distinction, however, which Hume pointed out as regards memory, is the fixed order and position of the ideas of what is remembered or expected as contrasted with “the liberty” of the imagination to transpose and change its ideas. This order and position in the case of memory are, of course, normally those of the original impressions, but it seems rather naive of Hume to tell us that memory “is tied down to these without any power of variation,” while imagination has liberty to transpose as it pleases, as if the originals sat to memory for their portraits, while to imagination they were but studies. Such correspondence being out of the question— as Hume takes care to state as soon as it suits him—all we have, so far, is this fixity and definiteness as contrasted with the kaleidoscopic instability of ideation. In this respect what is remembered or expected resembles what is perceived: the grouping not only does not change capriciously and spontaneously, but resists any mental efforts to change it. But, provided these characteristics are there, we should be apt to believe that we are remembering, just as, mutatis mutandis, with like characteristics we might believe that we were perceiving: hallucination is possible in either case.

This fixity of order and position is, however, not sufficient to constitute a typical remembrance where the term is exactly used. But remembering is often regarded as equivalent to knowing and recognizing, as when on revisiting some once familiar place one remarks, “How well I remember it !” What is meant is that the place is recognized, and that its recognition awakens memories. Memory includes recognition · recognition as such does not include memory. In human consciousness, as we directly observe it, there is, perhaps, no pure recognition: here the new presentation is not only assimilated to the old, but the former framing of circumstance is reinstated, and so perforce distinguished from the present. It may be there is no warrant for supposing that such redintegration of a preceding field is ever absolutely nil, still we are justified in regarding it as extremely vague and meagre, both where mental evolution is but slightly advanced and where frequent repetition in varying and irrelevant circumstances has produced a blurred and neutral zone. The last is the case with a great part of our knowledge; the writer happens to know that bos is the Latin for “ox” and bufo the Latin for “toad,” and may be said to remember both items of knowledge, if “remember” is only to be synonymous with “retain.” But if he came across bos in reading he would think of an ox and nothing more; bufo would immediately call up not only “toad” but Virgil’s Georgies, the only place in which he has seen the word, and which he never read but once. In the former there is so far nothing but recognition (which, however, of course rests upon retentiveness); in the latter there is also remembrance of the time and circumstances in which that piece of knowledge was acquired. Of course in so far as we are aware that we recognize we also think that remembrance is at any rate possible, since what we know we must previously have learned,—recognition excluding novelty. But the point here urged is that there is an actual remembrance only when the recognition is accompanied by a reinstatement of portions of the memory-train continuous with the previous presentation of what is now recognized. Summarily stated, we may say that between knowing and remembering on the one hand and imagining on the other the difference primarily turns on the fixity and completeness of the grouping in the former; in the latter there is a shifting play of images more or less “generic,” reminding one of “dissolving views.” Hence the first tλvo approximate in character to perception, and are rightly called recognitions. Between them, again, the difference turns primarily on the presence or absence of temporal signs. In what is remembered these are still intact enough to ensure a localization in the past of what is recognized; in what is known merely such localization is prevented, either because of the obliviscence of temporal connexions or because the reduplications of the memory-train that have consolidated the central group have entailed their suppression. There is further the difference first mentioned, which is often only a difference of degree, viz., that remembrances have more circumstantiality, so to say, than mere recognitions have: more of the collateral constituents of the original concrete field of consciousness are reinstated. But of the two characteristics of memory proper—(a) concreteness or circumstantiality, and (ό) localization in the past—the latter is the more essential. It sometimes happens that we have the one with little or nothing of the other. For example, we may have but a faint and meagre representation of a scene, yet if it falls into and retains a fixed place in the memory-train we have no doubt that seme such experience was once actually ours. On the other hand, as in certain so-called illusions of memory, we may suddenly find ourselves reminded by what is happening at the moment of a preceding experience exactly like it— some even feel that they know from what is thus recalled what will happen next; and yet, because we are wholly unable to assign such representation a place in the past, instead of a belief that it happened, there arises a most distressing sense of bewilderment, as if one were haunted and had lost one’s personal bearings. It has been held by some psychologists that memory proper includes the representation of one’s past self as agent or patient in the event or situation recalled. And this is true as regards all but the earliest human experience, at any rate; still, whereas it is easy to see that memory is essential to any development of self-consciousness, the converse is not at all clear, and would involve us in a needless circle.

Intimately connected with memory is expectation. We may as the result of reasoning conclude that a certain event will happen; we may also, in like manner, conclude that a certain other event has happened. But as we should not call the latter memory, so it is desirable to distinguish such indirect anticipation as the former from that expectation which is directly due to the interaction of ideas. Any man knows that he will die, and may make a variety of arrangements in anticipation of death, but he cannot with propriety be said to be expecting it unless he has actually present to his mind a series of ideas ending in that of death, such series being due to previous associations, and unless, further, this series owes its representation at this moment to the actual recurrence of some experience to which that series succeeded before. And as familiarity with an object or event in very various settings may be a bar to recollection, so it may be to expectation: the average Englishman, e.g., is continually surprised without his umbrella, though only too familiar with rain, since in his climate one not specially attentive to the weather obtains no clear representation of its successive phases. But after a series of events ABCDE . . . has been once experienced we instinctively expect the recurrence of B C . . . on the recurrence of A, i.e., provided the memory-train continues so far intact. Such expectation, at first perhaps slight—a mere tendency easily overborne— becomes strengthened by every repetition of the series in the old order, till eventually, if often fulfilled and never falsified, it becomes certain and, as we commonly say, irresistible. To have a clear case of expectation, then, it is not necessary that we should distinctly remember any previous experience like it, but only that we should have actually present some earlier member of a series which has been firmly associated by such previous experiences, the remaining members, or at least the next, if they continue serial, being revived through that which is once again realized. This expectation may be instantly checked by reflexion, just as it may of course be disappointed in fact; but these are matters which do not concern the inquiry as to the nature of expectation while expectation lasts.

We shall continue this inquiry to most advantage by now widening it into an examination of the distinction of present, past, and future. To a being whose presentations never passed through the transitions which ours undergo—first divested of the strength and vividness of impressions, again reinvested with them and brought back from the faint world of ideas—the sharp contrasts of “now” and “then,” and all the manifold emotions they occasion, would be quite unknown. Even we, so far as we confine our activity and attention to ideas, are almost without them. Time-order, succession, antecedence and consequence, of course, there might be still, but in that sense of events as “past and gone for ever,” which is one of the melancholy factors in our life; and in the obligation to wait and work in hope or dread of what is “still to come” there is much more than time-order. It is to presentations in their primary stage, to impressions, that we owe what real difference we find between now and then, whether prospective or retrospective, as it is to them also that we directly owe our sense of the real, of what is and exists as opposed to the non-existent that is not. But the present alone and life in a succession of presents, or, in other words, continuous occupation with impressions, give us no knowledge of the present as present. This we first obtain when our present consciousness consists partly of memories or partly of expectations as well. An event expected differs from a like event remembered chiefly in two ways—in its relation to present impressions and images and in the active attitude to which it leads. The diverse feelings that accompany our intuitions of time and contribute so largely to their colouring are mainly consequences of these differences. Let us take a series of simple and familiar events ABC DE, representing ideas by small letters and perceptions by capitals whenever it is necessary to distinguish them. Such series may be present in consciousness in such wise that abed are imaged while E is perceived anew, i.e., the whole symbolized as proposed would be abcdE∙, such would be, e.g., the state of a dog which had just finished his daily meal. Again, there may be a fresh impression of A which revives bcde∙, we should have then (1) A bcde— the state of our dog when he next day gets sight of the dish in which his food is brought to him. A little later we may have (2) a b C d e. Here ab are either after-sensations or primary memoryimages, or have at any rate the increased intensity due to recent impression; but this increased intensity will be rapidly on the wane even while C lasts, and a b will pale still further when C gives place to D, and we have (3) abcD e. But, returning to (2), we should find de to be increasing in intensity and definiteness, as compared with their state in (1), now that C, instead of A, is the present impression. For, when A occupied this position, not only was e raised less prominently above the threshold of consciousness by reason of its greater distance from A in the memory-continuum, but, owing to the reduplications of this continuum, more lines of possible revival were opened up, to be successively negatived as B succeeded to A and C to B -, even dogs know that “there is many a slip ’ twixt the cup and the lip.” But, where A B C D E is a series of percepts such as we have here supposed—and a series of simpler states would hardly afford much ground for the distinctions of past, present, and future—there would be a varying amount of active adjustment of sense-organs and other movements supplementary to full sensation. In (2), the point at which we have ab C de, for instance, such adjustments and movements as were appropriate to b would cease as B lapsed and be replaced by those appropriate to C. Again, as C succeeded to B, and d in consequence increased in intensity and definiteness, the movements adapted to the reception of D would become nascent, and so on. Thus, psychologically regarded, the distinction of past and future and what we might call the oneness of direction of time depend, as just described, (1) upon the continuous sinking of the primary memory-images on the one side, and the continuous rising of the ordinary images on the other side, of that member of a series of percepts then repeating which is actual at the moment; and (2) on the prevenient adjustments of attention, to which such words as “expect,” “await,” “anticipate,” all testify by their etymology. These conditions in turn will be found to depend upon all that is implied in the formation of the memory-train and upon that recurrence of like series of impressions which we attribute to the “uniformity of nature.” If we never had the same series of impressions twice, knowledge of time would be impossible, as indeed would knowledge of any sert.

This is perhaps the fittest point at which to inquire into the character and origin of our knowledge of succession and duration, so far, that is, as such an inquiry belongs to psychology. We have not to ask how time itself comes to be; but, assuming it to be, we ask how the individual comes to know it. Time is often figuratively represented as a line, and we may perhaps utilize this figure to make clear the relation of our intuition of time to what we call time itself. Time, then, we say, stretches backwards and forwards from the present moment. But the present, though a point of time, is still such that we can and do in that moment attend to a plurality of presentations to which we might otherwise have attended severally in successive moments. Granting this implication of simultaneity and succession, we may, if we represent succession as a line, represent simultaneity as a second line at right angles to the first; empty time—or time-length without time-breadth, 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 sense-impressions, A B C D E . . . the presence of B means the absence of A and of C, but the presentation of this succession involves the simultaneous presence, in some mode or other, of two or more of the presentations ABCD. In presentation, as we have seen, all that corresponds to the differences of past, present, and future is in consciousness simultaneously. This truism —or paradox—that all we know of succession is but an interpretation of what is really simultaneous or coexistent, we may then concisely express by saying that we are aware of time only through time-perspective, and experience shows that it is a long step from a succession of presentations to such presentation of succession. The first condition is that we should have represented together presentations that were in the first instance attended to successively, and this we have both in the persistence of primary memory-images and in the simultaneous reproduction of longer or shorter portions of the memory-train. In a series thus secured there may be time-marks, though no time, and by these marks the series must be distinguished from other simultaneous series. To ask which is first among a number of simultaneous presentations is unmeaning; one might be logically prior to another, but in time they are together and priority is excluded. Nevertheless after each distinct representation α, b, c, d there probably follows, as we have supposed, some trace of that movement of attention of which we are aware in passing from one presentation to another. In our present reminiscences we have, it must be allowed, little direct proof of this interposition, though there is strong indirect evidence of it in the tendency of the flow to follow the order in which the presentations were first attended to. With the movements themselves we are familiar enough, though the residua of such movements are not ordinarily conspicuous. These residua, then, are our temporal signs, and, together with the representations connected by them, constitute the memory-continuum. But temporal signs alone will not furnish all the pictorial exactness of the time-perspective. They give us only a fixed series; but the working of obliviscence, by insuring a progressive variation in intensity and distinctness as we pass from one member of the series to the other, yields the effect which we call time-distance. By themselves such variations 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; and, as a matter of fact, where the memory-train is imperfect such mistakes continually occur. On the other hand, where these variations are slight and imperceptible, though the memory-continuum preserves the order of events intact, we have still no such distinct appreciation of comparative distance in time as we have nearer the present where these perspective effects are considerable.

, When in retrospect we note that a particular presentation X has had a place in the field of consciousness, while a series of objects Λ B C D . . . have succeeded each other, then we may be said in observing this relation of the two to perceive the duration of X. And it is in this way that we do subjectively estimate longer periods of time. But first, it is evident that we cannot apply this method to indefinitely short periods without passing beyond the region of distinct presentation; and, since the knowledge of duration implies a relation between distinguishable presentations ABC D and X, the case is one in which the hypothesis of subconsciousness can hardly help any but those who confound the fact of time with the knowledge of it. Secondly, if we are to compare different durations at all, it is not enough that one of them should last out a series ABC D, and another a series L Μ N 0; we also want some sort of common measure of those series. Locke was awake to this point, though he expresses himself vaguely {Essay, ii. 14, §§ 9-12). He 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 we have called a temporal sign ; or, in other words, it is the movement of attention from A to B. But we must endeavour here to get a more exact notion of this movement. 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, or 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 overestimated, and longer periods underestimated. This we may perhaps take to be evidence of the time occupied in accommodating or fixing attention. Whether the “point of indifference” is determined by the rate of usual bodily movement, as Spencer asserts and Wundt conjectures, or conversely, is a question we need not discuss just now. But, though the fixation of attention does of course really occupy time, 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 time-perceptions which has no place in our abstract conception of time. In time conceived as physical there is no trace of intensity; in time psychically experienced duration is primarily an intensive magnitude, witness the comparison of times when we are “bored” with others when we are amused. It must have struck every one as strange who has reflected upon it that a period of time which seems long in retrospect—such as an eventful excursion—should have appeared short in passing; while a period, on the contrary, which in memory has dwindled to a wretched span seemed everlasting till it was gone. But, if we consider that in retrospect length of time is represented primarily and chiefly by impressions that have survived, we have an explanation of one-half; and in the intensity of the movements of attention we shall perhaps find an explanation of the other. What tells in retrospect is the series abcde, &c.; what tells in the present is the intervening i 1 i 2 i 3 , &c., or rather the original accommodation of which these temporal signs are the residuum. For, as we have seen elsewhere, the intensity of a presentation does not persist, so that in memory the residuum of the most intense feeling of tedium may only be so many t’s in a memory-continuum whose surviving members are few and uninteresting. But in the actual experience, say, of a wearisome sermon, when the expectation of release is continually balked and attention forced back upon a monotonous dribble of platitudes, the one impressive fact is the hearer’s impatience. On the other hand, so long as we are entertained, attention is never involuntary, and there is no continually deferred expectation. Just as we are said to walk with least effort when our pace accords with the rate of swing of our legs regarded as pendulums, so in pastimes impressions succeed each other at the rate at which attention can be most easily accommodated, and are such that we attend willingly. We are absorbed in the present without being unwillingly confined to it; not only is there no motive for retrospect or expectation, but there is no feeling that the present endures. Each impression lasts as long as it is interesting, but does not continue to monopolize the focus of consciousness till attention to it is fatiguing, because uninteresting. In such facts, then, we seem to have proof that our perception of duration rests ultimately upon quasi-motor objects of varying intensity, the duration of which we do not directly experience as duration at all. They do endure and their intensity is a function of their duration; but the intensity is all that we directly perceive. In other words, it is here contended that what Locke called an instant or moment—“the time of one idea in our minds without the succession of another, wherein therefore we perceive no succession at all”—is psychologically not “a part in duration” in that sense in which, as he says, “we cannot conceive any duration without succession” {Essay, ii. 16, 12).

How do we know that the distance between our ideas cannot vary beyond certain bounds Î This is not altogether a psychological question; but we are perhaps entitled to note some interesting facts bearing upon it which may also serve to connect the perceptions of duration and succession. If we make a Savart’s wheel with a single tooth revolve slowly, say in three-quarters of a second, it will be found that in the long-run we estimate this interval correctly,—slight overestimates and slight underestimates occurring indifferently. If we next place a second tooth opposite the first, letting the wheel revolve as before, so as to divide the three-quarters of a second into two intervals, we shall on the average overestimate it, and must increase the whole period to reach a new point of indifference. With two other teeth at right angles to the first two, the three-quarters of a second will appear longer still, and the time of a revolution must be still more increased before we shall cease to overestimate it. If we next employ, say, six teeth, 60° apart, the wheel revolving as at first, we shall detect ourselves attending to the alternate strokes, say to the first, third, and fifth, or perhaps to the third and the sixth; in this way, though we continue to overestimate the total period, we can note the number and regularity of the subdivisions. If these, however, be yet further increased, we can no longer reproduce them, though still aware that the whole period is divided into parts. But by the time we have introduced about fifteen equidistant teeth, although there is physically an alternation of noise and silence as before, we perceive only a continuous hum, which steadily changes in quality as the number of teeth is further increased. Facts like these not only show that we estimate duration primarily by the effects of attention, but also make it probable that such estimate is fairly constant, since it is always approximately the same physical interval that becomes blurred. Further, we see that, where the distance between successive presentations is too short for a separate fixation of attention upon each, we proceed to take them in groups. This procedure is facilitated by differences in the quality and intensity of the objects as well as by differences in the intervals between them; hence among other things the aesthetic properties of modulation and rhythm.

But, if our experience of time depends primarily upon acts of attention to a succession of distinct objects, it would seem that time, subjectively regarded, must be discrete and not continuous. This, which is the view steadily maintained by the psychologists of Herbart’s school, was implied if not stated by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Locke hopelessly confuses time as perceived and time as conceived, and can only save himself from pressing objections by the retort, “It is very common to observe intelligible discourses spoiled by too much subtlety in nice divisions.” But Berkeley and Hume with the mathematical discoveries of Newton and Leibnitz before them could only protest that there was nothing answering to mathematical continuity in our experience. And, whereas Locke had tried to combine with his general psychological account the inconsistent position that ‘ ‘ none of the distinct ideas we have of either [space or time] is without all manner of composition,” Berkeley declares, “For my own part, whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties. I have no notion of it at all, only I hear others say it is infinitely divisible, and speak of it in such a manner as leads me to harbour odd thoughts of my existence. . . . Time therefore being nothing, abstracted from the succession of ideas in our minds, it follows that the duration of any finite spirit must be estimated by the number of ideas or actions succeeding each other in that same spirit or mind” {Principles of Knowledge, i. § 98). Hume, again, is at still greater pains to show that “the idea which we form of any finite quality is not infinitely divisible, but that by proper distinctions and separations we may run this idea up to inferior ones, which will be perfectly simple and indivisible . . . that the imagination reaches a minimum, and may raise up to itself an idea of which it cannot conceive any subdivision, and which cannot be diminished without a total annihilation” {Human Nature, pt. ii. § 1, Green’s ed., p. 335).

At the first blush we are perhaps disposed to accept this account of our time-perception, as Wundt, e.g., does, and to regard the attribution of continuity as wholly the result of after-reflexion. But it may be doubted if this is really an exact analysis of the case. Granted that the impressions to which we chiefly attend are distinct and discontinuous in their occupation of the focus of consciousness, and that, so far, the most vivid element in our timeexperience is discrete; granted further that in recollection and expectation such objects are still distinct—all which seems to imply that time is a mere plurality—yet there is more behind. The whole field of consciousness is not occupied by distinct objects, neither are the changes in this field discontinuous. The experimental facts above-mentioned illustrate the transition from a succession the members of which are distinctly attended to to one in which they are indistinctly attended to, i.e., are not discontinuous enough to be separately distinguished. Attention does not move by hops from one definite spot to another, but, as Wundt himself allows, by alternate diffusion and concentration, like the foot of a snail, which never leaves the surface it is traversing. We have a clear presentation discerned as A or B when attention is gathered up; and, when attention spreads out, we have confused presentations not admitting of recognition. But, though not recognizable, such confused presentations are represented, and so serve to bridge over the comparatively empty interval during which attention is unfocused. Thus our perception of a period of time is not comparable to so many terms in a series of finite units any more than it is to a series of infinitesimals. When attention is concentrated in expectation of some single impression, then, no doubt, it is brought to a very fine point (“zugespitzt,” as Herbart would say); and a succession of such impressions would be represented as relatively discrete compared with the representation of the scenery of a day-dream. But absolutely discrete it is not and cannot be. In this respect the truth is rather with Herbert Spencer, who, treating of this subject from another point of view, remarks, “When the facts are contemplated objectively, it becomes manifest that, though the changes constituting intelligence approach to a single succession, they do not absolutely form one” {Psychology, i. § 180, p. 403).

On the whole, then, we may conclude that our concrete time-experiences are due to the simultaneous representation of a series of definite presentations both accompanied and separated by more or fewer indefinite presentations more or less confused; that, further, the definite presentations have certain marks or temporal signs due to the movements of attention; that the rate of these movements or accommodations is approximately constant; and that each movement itself is primarily experienced as an intensity.

Feeling.

Such summary survey as these limits allow of the more elementary facts of cognition is here at an end; so far the most conspicuous factors at work have been those of what might be termed our ideational mechanism. In the higher processes of thought we have to take more account of mental activity and of the part played by language. But it seems preferable, before entering upon this, to explore also the emotional and active constituents of mind in their more elementary phases.

In our preliminary survey we have seen that psychical life consists in the main of a continuous alternation of receptive and reactive consciousness, i,e., in its earliest form, of alternations of sensation and movement. At a later stage we find that in the receptive phase ideation is added to sensation, and that in the active phase thought and fancy, or the voluntary manipulation and control of the ideational trains, are added to the voluntary manipulation and control of the muscles. At this higher level also it is possible that either form of receptive consciousness may lead to either form of active: sensations may lead to thought rather than to action in the restricted sense, and ideas apart from sensations may prompt to muscular exertion. There is a further complication still: not only may either sensations or ideas lead to either muscular or mental movements, but movements themselves, whether of mind or limb, may as mere presentations determine other movements of either kind. In this respect, however, movements and thoughts either in themselves or through their sensational and ideational accompaniments may be regarded as pertaining to the receptive side of consciousness. With these provisos, then, the broad generalization may hold that receptive states lead through feeling to active states, and that presentations that give neither pleasure nor pain meet with no responsive action. But first the objection must be met that presentations that are in themselves purely indifferent lead continually to very energetic action, often the promptest and most definite action. To this there are two answers. First, on the higher levels of Ssychical life presentations in themselves indifferent are often in-irectly interesting as signs of, or as means to, other presentations that are more directly interesting. It is enough for the present, therefore, if it be admitted that all such indifferent presentations are without effect as often as they are not instrumental in furthering the realization of some desirable end. Secondly, a large class of movements, such as those called sensori-motor and. ideo-motor, are initiated by presentations that are frequently, it must be allowed, neither pleasurable nor painful. In all such cases, however, there is probably only an apparent exception to the principle of subjective selection. They may all be regarded as instances of another important psychological principle which we have to deal with more fully by and by, viz., that voluntary actions, and especially those that either only avert pain or are merely subsidiary to pleasure-giving actions, tend at length, as the effect of habit in the individual and of heredity in the race, to become “secondarily automatic,” as it has been called. Such mechanical or instinctive dexterities make possible a more efficient use of present energies in securing pleasurable and interesting experiences, and, like the rings of former growths in a tree, afford a basis for further advance, as old interests pall and new ones present themselves. Here, again, it suffices for our present purpose if it be granted that there is a fair presumption in favour of supposing all such movements to have been originally initiated by feeling, as certainly very many of them were.

Of the feeling itself that intervenes between these sensory and motor presentations there is but little to be said. The chief points have been already insisted upon, viz., that it is not itself a presentation, but a purely subjective state, at once the effect of a change in receptive consciousness and the cause of a change in motor consciousness; hence its continual confusion either with the movements, whether ideational or muscular, that are its expression, or with the sensations or ideas that are its cause. For feeling as such is, so to put it, matter of being rather than of direct knowledge; and all that we know about it we know from its antecedents or consequents in presentation.

Pure feeling, then, ranging solely between the opposite extremes of pleasure and pain, we are naturally led to inquire whether there is any corresponding contrast in the causes of feeling on the one hand, and on the other in its manifestations and effects. To begin with the first question, which we may thus formulate: What, if any, are the invariable differences characteristic of the presentations or states of mind we respectively like and dislike; or, taking account of the diverse sources of feeling—sensuous, aesthetic, intellectual, active—is there anything that we can predicate alike of all that are pleasurable and deny of all that are painful, and vice versa 1 It is at once evident that at least in presentations objectively regarded no such common characters will be found; if we find them anywhere it must be in some relation to the conscious subject, i.e., in the fact of presentation itself. There is one important truth concerning pleasures and pains that may occur at once as an answer to our inquiry, and that is often advanced as such, viz., that whatever is pleasurable tends to further and perfect life, and whatever is painful to disturb or destroy it. The many seeming exceptions to this law of self-conservation, as it has been called, probably all admit of explanation in conformity with it, so as to leave its substantial truth unimpeached. But this law, however stated, is too teleological to serve as a purely psychological principle, and, as generally formulated and illustrated, it takes account of matters quite outside the psychologist’s ken. We are not now concerned to know why a bitter taste, e.g., is painful or the gratification of an appetite pleasant, but what marks distinctive of all painful presentations the one has and the other lacks. From a biological standpoint it may be true enough that the final cause of sexual and parental feelings is the perpetuation of the species; but this does not help us to ascertain what common character they have as actual sources of feeling for the individual. From the biological standpoint even the senile decadence and death of the individual may be shown to be advantageous to the race; but it would certainly be odd to describe this as advantageous to the individual, so different are the two points of view. What we are in search of, although a generalization, has reference to something much more concrete than conceptions like race or life, and does not require us to go beyond the consciousness of the moment to such ulterior facts as they imply.

Were it possible it would be quite unnecessary to examine in detail every variety of pleasurable and painful consciousness in connexion with a general inquiry of this sort. It will be best to enumerate at the outset the only cases that specially call for investigation. Feeling may arise mainly from (1) single sensations or movements, including in these what recent psychologists call their tone ; or it may be chiefly determined by (2) some combination or arrangement of these primary presentations,—hence what might be styled the lower aesthetic feelings. We have thus among primary presentations a more material and a more formal cause or ground of feeling. The mere representation of these sources of feeling involves nothing of moment: the idea of a bright colour or a bitter taste has not definiteness or intensity enough to produce feeling; and the ideal presentation of a harmonious arrangement of sounds or colours does not in itself differ essentially as regards the feeling it occasions from the actual presentation. When we advance to the level at which there occur ideas more complex and more highly representative—or re-representative, as Mr Spencer would say—than any we have yet considered we can again distinguish between material and formal grounds of feeling. To the first we might refer, e.g., (3) the egoistic, sympathetic, and religious feelings; this class will probably require but brief notice. The second, consisting of (4) the intellectual and (5) the higher aesthetic feelings, is more important. There is a special class of feelings, which might be distinguished from all the preceding as reflex, since they arise from the memory or expectation of feelings; but in fact these are largely involved in all the higher feelings, and this brief reference to them will suffice; of such hope, fear, regret, are examples.

1. The quality and intensity as well as the duration and frequency of a sensation or movement all have to do with determining to what feeling it gives rise. It will be best to leave the last two out of account for a time. Apart from these, the pleasantness or painfulness of a movement appears to depend solely upon its intensity, that is to say, upon the amount of effort necessary to effect it, in such wise that a certain amount of exertion is agreeable and any excess disagreeable. Some sensations also, such as light and sound, are agreeable if not too intense, their pleasantness increasing with their intensity up to a certain point, on nearing which the feeling rapidly changes and becomes disagreeable or even painful. Other sensations, as bitter tastes, e.g., are naturally unpleasant, however faint,—though we must allow the possibility of an acquired liking for moderately bitter or pungent flavours. But in every case such sensations produce unmistakable manifestations of disgust, if at all intense. Sweet tastes, on the other hand, however intense, are pleasant to an unspoiled palate, though apt before long to become mawkish, like “sweetest honey, loathsome in his own deliciousness,” as confectioners’ apprentices are said soon to find. The painfulness of all painful sensations or movements increases with their intensity without any assignable maximum being reached.

A comparison of examples of this kind, which it would be tedious to describe more fully and which are indeed too familiar to need much description, seems to show (1) that, so far as feeling is determined by the intensity of a presentation, there is pleasure so long as attention can be adapted or accommodated to the presentation, and pain so soon as the intensity is too great for this; and (2) that, so far as feeling is determined by the quality of a presentation, those that are pleasurable enlarge the field of consciousness and introduce or agreeably increase in intensity certain organic sensations, while those that are painful contract the field of consciousness and introduce or disagreeably increase in intensity certain organic sensations. There are certain other hedonic effects due to quality the examination of which we must for the present defer. Meanwhile as to the first point it may be suggested, as at any rate a working hypothesis, that in itself any and every simple sensation or movement is pleasurable if there is attention forthcoming adequate to its intensity. In the earliest and simplest phases of life, in which the presentationcontinuum is but little differentiated, it is reasonable to suppose that variation in the intensity of presentation preponderates over changes in the quality of presentation, and that to the same extent feeling is determined by the former and not by the latter. And, whereas this dependence on intensity is invariable, there is no ground for supposing the quality of any primary presentation, when not of excessive intensity, to be invariably disagreeable; the changes above-mentioned in the hedonic effects of bitter tastes, sweet tastes, or the like tend rather to prove the contrary. This brings us to the second point, and it requires some elucidation. We need here to call to mind the continuity of our presentations and especially the existence of a background of organic sensations or somatic consciousness, as it is variously termed. By the time that qualitatively distinct presentations have been differentiated from this common basis it becomes possible for any of these, without having the intensity requisite to affect feeling directly, to change it indirectly by means of the systemic sensations accompanying them, or, in other words, by their tone. The physiological concomitants of these changes of somatic tone are largely reflex movements or equivalents of movements, such as alterations in circulatory, respiratory, and excretory processes. Such movements are psychologically movements no longer, and are rightly regarded as pertaining wholly to the sensory division of presentations. But originally it may have been otherwise. To us now, these organic reflexes seem but part and parcel of the special sensation whose tone they form, and which they accompany even when that sensation, so far as its mere intensity goes, might be deemed indifferent. But perhaps at first the special qualities that are now throughout unpleasant may have been always presented with an excessive intensity that would be painful on this score alone, and the reflexes that at present pertain to them may then have been psychologically the expression of this pain. At anv rate it is manifestly unfair to refuse either to seek out the primitive effects of the sensations in question and allow for the workings of heredity, or to reckon this accompanying systemic feeling as part of them. The latter seems the readier and perhaps, too, the preferable course. A word will now suffice to explain what is meant by enlarging and contracting the field of consciousness and agreeably increasing or decreasing certain elements therein.

The difference in point is manifest on comparing the flow of spirits, buoyancy, and animation which result from a certain duration of pleasurable sensations with the lowness or depression of spirits, the gloom and heaviness of heart, apt to ensue from prolonged physical pain. Common language, in fact, leaves us no choice but to describe these contrasted states by figures which clearly imply that they differ in the range and variety of the presentations that make up consciousness, and in the quickness with which these succeed each other. It is not merely that in hilarity as contrasted with dejection the train of ideas takes a wider sweep and shows greater liveliness, but as it were at the back of this, on the lower level of purely sensory experience, certain organic sensations which are ordinarily indifferent acquire a gentle intensity, which seems by flowing over to quicken and expand the ideational stream, as we see, for instance, in the effects of mountain air and sunshine. Or, on the other hand, these sensations become so violently intense as to drain off and ingulf all available energy in one monotonous corroding care, an oppressive weight which leaves no place for free movement, no life or leisure to respond to what are wont to be pleasurable solicitations.

As regards the duration and the frequency of presentation, it is in general true that the hedonic effect soon attains its maximum, and then, if pleasant, rapidly declines, or even changes to its opposite. Pains in like manner decline, but more slowly, and without in the same sense changing to pleasures. The like holds of too frequent repetition. Physiological explanation of these facts, good as far as it goes, is, of course, at once forthcoming: sensibility is blunted, time is required for restoration, and so forth; but at least we want the psychological equivalent of all this. In one respect we find nothing materially new · so far as continued presentation entails diminished intensity we have nothing but diminished feeling as a consequence; so far as its continued presentation entails satiety the train of agreeable accompaniments ceases in which the pleasurable tone consisted. But in another way long duration and frequent repetition produce indirectly certain characteristic effects on feeling in consequence of habituation and accommodation. We may get used to a painful presentation in such wise that we cease to be conscious of it as positively disagreeable, though its cessation is at once a source of pleasure; in like manner we come to require things simply because it is painful to be without them, although their possession has long ceased to be a ground of positive enjoyment. This loss (or gain) consequent on accommodation has a most important effect in changing the sources of feeling: it helps to transfer attention from mere sensations to what we may distinguish as interests.

2. Certain sensations or movements not separately unpleasant become so when presented together or in immediate succession; and contrariwise, some combinations of sensations or of movements may be such as to afford pleasure distinct from, and often greater than, any that they separately yield. Here again we find that in some cases the effect seems mainly to depend on intensity, in others mainly on quality, (i.) As instances of the former may be mentioned the pleasurableness of a rhythmic succession of sounds or movements, of symmetrical forms and curved outlines, of gentle crescendos and diminuendos in sound, and of gradual variations of shade in colour, and the painfulness of flickering lights, “beats” in musical notes, false time, false steps, false quantities, and the like. In all these, whenever the result is pleasurable, attention can be readily accommodated,—is, so to say, economically meted out; and, whenever the result is painful, attention is surprised, balked, wasted. Thus we can make more movements and with less expenditure of energy when they are rhythmic than when they are not, as the performances of a ballroom or of troops marching to music amply testify. Of this economy we have also a striking proof in the ease with which rhythmic language is retained, (ii.) As instances of the latter may be cited those arrangements of musical tones and of colours that are called harmonious or the opposite. Harmony, however, must be taken to have a different meaning in the two cases. When two or three tones harmonize there results, as is well known, a distinct pleasure over and above any pleasure due to the tones themselves. On the other hand, tones that are discordant are unpleasant in spite of any pleasantness they may have singly. Besides the negative condition of absence of beats, a musical interval to be pleasant must fulfil certain positive conditions, sufficiently expressed for our purpose by saying that two tones are pleasant when they give rise to few combination-tones, and when among these there are several that coincide, and that they are unpleasant when they give rise to many combination-tones, and when among these there are few or none that coincide. Too many tones together prevent any from being distinct. But where tones coincide the number of tones actually present is less than the number of possible tones, and there is a proportionate simplification, so to put it: more is commanded and with less effort. A recent writer on harmony, in fact, compares the confusion of a discord to that of “trying to reckon up a sum in one’s head and failing because the numbers are too high.” A different explanation must be given of the so-called harmonies of colour. The pleasurable effect of graduations of colour or shade—to which, as Ruskin tells us, the rose owes its victorious beauty when compared with other flowers—has been already mentioned: it is rather a quantitative than a qualitative effect. What we are now concerned with are the pleasurable or painful combinations of different ungraduated colours. A comparison of these seems to justify the general statement that those colours yield good combinations that are far apart in the colour circle, while those near together are apt to be discordant. The explanation given, viz., that the one arrangement secures and the other prevents perfect retinal activity, seems on the whole satisfactory,—especially if we acknowledge the tendency of all recent investigations and distinguish sensibility to colour and sensibility to mere light as both psychologically and physiologically two separate facts. Thus, when red and green are juxtaposed, the red increases the saturation of the green and the green that of the red, so that both colours are heightened in brilliance. But such an effect is only pleasing to the child and the savage; for civilized men the contrast is excessive, and colours less completely opposed, as red and blue, are preferred, each being a rest from the other, so that as the eye wanders to and fro over their border different elements are active by turns. Red and orange, again, are bad, in that both exhaust in a similar manner and leave the remaining factors out of play.

3. The more or less spontaneous workings of imagination, as well as that direct control of this working necessary to thinking in the stricter sense, are always productive of pain or pleasure in varying degrees. Though the exposition of the higher intellectual processes has not yet been reached, there will be no inconvenience in at once taking account of their effects on feeling, since these are fairly obvious and largely independent of any analysis of the processes themselves. It will also be convenient to include under the one term “intellectual feelings,” not only the feelings connected with certainty, doubt, perplexity, comprehension, and so forth, but also what the Herbartian psychologists—whose work in this department of psychology is classical—have called par excellence the formal feelings,—that is to say, feelings which they regard as entirely determined by the form of the flow of ideas, and not by the ideas themselves. Thus, be the ideas what they may, when their onward movement is checked by divergent or obstructing lines of association, and especially when in this manner we are hindered, say, from recollecting a name or a quotation (as if, e.g. i the names of Archimedes, Anaximenes, and Anaximander each arrested the clear revival of the other), we are conscious of a certain strain and oppressiveness, which give way to momentary relief when at length what is wanted rises into distinct consciousness and our ideas resume their flow. Here again, too, as in muscular movements, we have the contrast of exertion and facility, when “thoughts refuse to flow” and we work “invita Minerva,” or when the appropriate ideas seem to unfold and display themselves before us like a vision before one inspired. To be confronted with propositions we cannot reconcile— i.e., with what is or appears inconsistent, false, contradictory—is apt to be painful; the recognition of truth or logical coherence, on the other hand, is pleasurable. The feeling in either case is, no doubt, greater the greater our interest in the subjectmatter; but the mere conflict of ideas as such is in itself depressing, and the discernment of agreement, of the one in the many, in like manner a distinct satisfaction. Now in the one case we are conscious of futile efforts to comprehend as one ideas which the more distinctly we apprehend them for the purpose only prove to be the more completely and diametrically opposed; we can only affirm and mentally envisage the one by denying and suppressing the representation of the other, and yet we have to strive to predicate both and to embody them together in the same mental image. Attention is like a house divided against itself: there is effort but it is not effective, for the field of consciousness is narrowed and the flow of ideas arrested. When, on the other hand, we discern a common principle among diverse and apparently disconnected particulars, instead of all the attention we can command being taxed in the separate apprehension of these “disjecta membra,” they become as one, and we seem at once to have at our disposal resources for the command of an enlarged field and the detection of new resemblances.

4. Closely related to these formal intellectual feelings are certain of the higher aesthetic feelings. A reference to some of the commonplaces of aesthetical writers may be sufficient briefly to exhibit the leading characteristics of these feelings. There is a wide agreement among men in general as to what is beautiful and what is not, and it is the business of a treatise on empirical aesthetics from an analysis of these matters of fact to generalize the principles of taste,—to do, in fact, for one source of pleasure and pain what we are here attempting in a meagre fashion for all. And these principles are the more important in their bearing upon the larger psychological question, because among aesthetic effects are reckoned only such as are pleasing or otherwise in themselves, apart from all recognition of utility, of possession, or of ulterior gratification of any kind whatever. Thus, if it should be objected that the intellectual satisfaction of consistency is really due to its utility, to the fact that what is incompatible and incomprehensible is of no avail for practical guidance, at least this objection will not hold against the aesthetic principle of unity in variety. In accordance with this primary maxim of art criticism, at the one extreme art productions are condemned for monotony, as incapable of sustaining interest because “empty,” “bald,” and “poor”; at the other extreme they are condemned as too incoherent and disconnected to furnish a centre of interest. And those are held as so far praiseworthy in which a variety of elements, be they movements, forms, colours, or incidents, instead of conflicting, all unite to enhance each other and to form not merely a mass but a whole. Another principle that serves to throw light on our inquiry is that which has been called the principle of economy, viz., that an effect is pleasing in proportion as it is attained by little effort and simple means. The brothers Weber in their classic work on human locomotion discovered that those movements that are aesthetically beautiful are also physiologically correct; grace and ease, in fact, are wellnigh synonymous, as Herbert Spencer points out, and illustrates by apt instances of graceful attitudes, motions, and forms. The same writer, again, in seeking for a more general law underlying the current maxims of writers on composition and rhetoric is led to a special formulation of this principle as applied to style, viz., that “economy of the recipient’s attention is the secret of effect.”

Perhaps of all aesthetical principles the most wide-reaching, as well as practically the most important, is that which explains aesthetic effects by association. Thus, to take one example where so many are possible, the croaking of frogs and the monotonous ditty of the cuckoo owe their pleasantness, not directly to what they are in themselves, but entirely to their intimate association with spring-time and its gladness. At first it might seem, therefore, that there is nothing fresh in this principle relevant to our present inquiry, since a pleasure that is only due to association at once carries back the question to its sources, so that in asking why the spring, for example, is pleasant we should be returning to old ground. But this is not altogether true; aesthetic effects call up not merely ideas but ideals. A great work of art improves upon the real in two respects: it intensifies and it transfigures. It is for art to gather into one focus, cleared from dross and commonplace, the genial memories of a lifetime, the instinctive memories of a race; and, where theory can only classify and arrange what it receives, art— in a measure free from “the literal unities of time and place ”—creates and glorifies. Still art eschews the abstract and speculative; however plastic in its hands, the material wrought is always that of sense. We have already noticed more than once the power which primary presentations have to sustain vivid re-presentations, and the bearing of this on the aesthetic effects of works of art must be straightway obvious. The notes and colours, rhymes and rhythms, forms and move∏ιents, which produce the lower aesthetic feelings also serve as the means of bringing into view, and maintaining at a higher level of vividness, a wider range and flow of pleasing ideas than we can ordinarily command.

5. When we reach the level at which there is distinct self-consciousness (comp. p. 84), we have an important class of feelings determined by the relation of the presentation of self to the other contents of consciousness. And as the knowledge of other selves advances pari passu with that of one’s own self, so along with the egoistic feelings appear certain social or altruistic feelings. The two have much in common; in pride and shame, for example, account is taken of the estimate other persons form of us and of our regard for them; while, on the other hand, when we admire or despise, congratulate or pity another, we have always present to our mind a more or less definite conception of self in like circumstances. It will therefore amply serve all the ends of our present inquiry if we briefly survey the leading characteristics of some contrasted egoistic feelings, such as self-complacency and disappointment. When a man is pleased with himself, his achievements, possessions, or circumstances, such pleasure is the result of a comparison of his present position in this respect with some former position or with the position of some one else. Without descending to details, we may say that two prospects are before him, and the larger and fairer is recognized as his own. Under disappointment or reverse the same two pictures may be present to his mind, but accompanied by the certainty that the better is not his or is his no more. So far, then, it might be said that the contents of his consciousness are in each case the same, the whole difference lying in the different relationship to self. But this makes all the difference even to the contents of his consciousness, as we shall at once see if we consider its active side. Even the idlest and most thoughtless mind teems with intentions and expectations, and in its prosperity, like the fool in the parable, thinks to pull down its barns and build greater, to take its ease, eat, drink, and be merry. The support of all this pleasing show and these far-reaching aims is, not the bare knowledge of what abundance will do, but the reflexion—These many goods are mine. In mind alone final causes have a place, and the end can produce the beginning; the prospect of a summer makes the present into spring. But action is paralysed or impossible when the means evade us—

“Now drops at once the pride of awful state, The golden canopy, the glittering plate,”

and a bleak and wintry barrenness is filled with the emptiness of despair. In so far as a man’s life consists in the abundance of the things he possesseth, we see then why it dwindles with these. The like holds where self-complacency or displicency rests on a sense of personal worth or on the honour or affection of others.

We are now at the end of our survey of certain typical pleasurable and painful states. The answer to our inquiry which it seems to suggest is that there is pleasure in proportion as a maximum of attention is effectively exercised, and pain in proportion as such effective attention is frustrated by distractions, shocks, or incomplete and faulty adaptations, or fails of exercise, owing to the narrowness of the field of consciousness and the slowness and smallness of its changes. Something must be said in explication of this formula, and certain objections that might be made to it must be considered. First of all, it implies that feeling is determined partly by quantitative, or, as we might say,, material, conditions, and partly by conditions that are formal or qualitative. As regards the former, both the intensity or concentration of attention and its diffusion or the extent of the field of consciousness have to be taken into account. Attention, whatever else it is, is a limited quantity—

Pluribus intentus minor est ad singula sensus—

to quote Hamilton’s pet adage. Moreover, as we have seen, attention requires time. If, then, attention be distributed over too wide a field, there is a corresponding loss of intensity, and so of distinctness: we tend towards a succession of indistinguishables—indistinguishable, therefore, from no succession. We must not have more presentations in the field of consciousness than will allow of some concentration of attention: a maximum diffusion will not do. A maximum concentration, in like manner— even if there were no other objection to it—would seem to conflict with the general conditions of consciousness, inasmuch as a single simple presentation, however intense, would admit of no differentiation, and any complex presentation is in some sort a plurality. The most effective attention, then, as regards its quantitative conditions, must lie somewhere between the two zeros of complete indifference and complete absorption. If there be an excess of diffusion, effective attention will increase up to a certain point as concentration increases, but beyond that point will decrease if this intensification continues to increase; and vice versa, if there be an excess of concentration. But, inasmuch as these quantitative conditions involve a plurality of distinguishable presentations or changes in consciousness, the way is open for formal conditions as well. Since different presentations consort differently when above the threshold of consciousness together, one field may be wider and yet as intense as another, or intenser and yet as wide, owing to a more advantageous arrangement of its constituents.

The doctrine here developed, viz., that feeling depends on efficiency, is in the main as old as Aristotle; all that has been done is to give it a more accurately psychological expression, and to free it from the implications of the faculty theory,'in which form it was expounded by Hamilton. Of possible objections there are at least two that we must anticipate, and the consideration of which will help to make the general view clearer. First, it may be urged that, according to this view, it ought to be one continuous pain to fall asleep, since in this state consciousness is rapidly restricted both as to intensity and range. This statement is entirely true as regards the intensity and substantially true as regards the range, at least of the higher consciousness: certain massive and agreeable organic sensations pertain to falling asleep, but the variety of presentations at all events grows less. But then the capacity to attend is also rapidly declining: even a slight intruding sensation entails an acute sense of strain in one sense, in place of the massive pleasure of repose throughout; and any voluntary concentration either in order to move or to think involves a like organic conflict, futile effort, and arrest of balmy ease. There is as regards the more definite constituents of the field of consciousness a close resemblance between natural sleepiness and the state of monotonous humdrum we call tedium or ennui; and yet the very same excitement that would relieve the one by dissipating the weariness of inaction would disturb the other by renewing the weariness of action: the one is commensurate with the resources of the moment, the other is not. Thus the maximum of effective attention in question is, as Aristotle would say, a maximum “relative to us.” It is possible, therefore, that a change from a wider to a narrower field of consciousness may be a pleasurable change, if attention is more effectively engaged. Strictly speaking, however, the so-called negative pleasures of rest do not consist in a mere narrowing of the field of consciousness so much as in a change in the amount of concentration. Massive organic sensations connected with restoration take the place of the comparatively acute sensations of jaded powers forced to work. We have, then, in all cases to bear in mind this subjective relativity of all pleasurable or painful states of consciousness.

But there is still another and more serious difficulty to face. It has long been a burning question with theoretical moralists whether pleasures differ only quantitatively or differ qualitatively as well, whether psychological analysis will justify the common distinction of higher and lower pleasures or force us to recognize nothing but differences of degree, of duration, and so forth,—as expounded, e.g., by Bentham, whose cynical mot, ti Pushpin is as good as poetry provided it be as pleasant,” was long a stumbling-block in the way of utilitarianism. The entire issue here is confused by an ambiguity in terms that has been already noticed: pleasure and pleasures have not the same connotation. By a pleasure or pleasures we mean some assignable presentation or presentations which are pleasant,— i.e., afford pleasure; by pleasure simply is meant this subjective state of feeling itself. The former, like other objects of knowledge, admit of classification and comparison: we may distinguish them as coarse or as noble, or, if we will, as cheap and wholesome. But, while the causes of feeling are manifold, the feeling itself is a subjective state, varying only in intensity and duration. The best evidence of this lies in the general character of the actions that ensue through feeling,—the matter which has next to engage us. Whatever be the variety in the sources of pleasure, whatever be the moral or conventional estimate of their worthiness, if a given state of consciousness is pleasant we seek to retain it, if painful to be rid of it: we prefer greater pleasure before less, less pain before greater. This is, in fact, the whole meaning of preference as a psychological term. Wisdom and folly prefer each the course which the other rejects. Both courses cannot, indeed, be objectively preferable; that, however, is not a matter for psychology. But, as soon as reflexion begins, exceptions to this primary principle of action seem to arise continually, even though we regard the individual as a law to himself. Such exceptions, however, we may presently find to be apparent only. At any rate the principle is obviously true before reflexion begins,—true so long as we are dealing with actually present sources of feeling, and not with their re-presentations. But to admit this is psychologically to admit everything, at least if mind is to be genetically explained. Assuming, then, that we start with only quantitative variations of feeling, we have to attempt to explain the development of formal and qualitative differences in the grounds of feeling. But, if aversions and pursuits result from incommensurable states of pain and pleasure, there seems no other way of saving the unity and continuity of the subject except by a speculative assumption,—the doctrine known as the freedom of the will. The one position involves the other, and the more scientific course is to avoid both as far as we can.

The question, then, is: How, if action depends in the last resort on a merely quantitative difference, could it ever come about that what we call the higher sources of feeling should supersede the lower? If it is only quantity that turns the scales, where does quality come in, for we cannot say, e.g., that the astronomer experiences a greater thrill of delight when a new planet rewards his search than the hungry savage in finding a clump of pig-nuts 1 Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in Ulis contains the answer in brief. We shall understand this answer better if we look at a parallel case, or what is really our own from another point of view. We distinguish between higher and lower forms of life: we might say there is more life in a large oyster than in a small one, other things being equal, but we should regard a crab as possessing not necessarily more life—as measured by waste of tissue— but certainly as manifesting life in a higher form. How, in the evolution of the animal kingdom, do we suppose this advance to l· ave been made? The tendency at any one moment is simply towards more life, simply growth; but this process of self-preservation imperceptibly but steadily modifies the self that is preserved. The creature is bent only on filling its skin; but in doing this as easily as may be it gets a better skin to fill, and accordingly seeks to fill it differently. Though cabbage and honey are what they were before, they have changed relatively to the grub now it has become a butterfly. So, while we are all along preferring a more pleasurable state of consciousness before a less, the content of our consciousness is continually changing; the greater pleasure still outweighs the less, but the pleasures to be weighed are either wholly different, or at least are the same for us no more. What we require, then, is not that the higher pleasures shall always afford greater pleasure than the lower did, but that to advance to the level of life on which pleasure is derived from higher objects shall on the whole be more pleasurable and less painful than to remain behind. And this condition seems provided in the fact of accommodation above referred to (p. 69) and in the important fact that attention can be more effectively expended by what we may therefore call improvements in the form of the field of consciousness. But when all is said and done a certain repugnance is apt to arise against any association of the differences between the higher and lower feelings with differences of quantity. Yet such repugnance is but another outcome of the common mistake of supposing that the real is obtained by pulling to pieces rather than by building up.

“Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy ?”

But no logical analysis—nay, further, no logical synthesis —is adequate to the fulness of things. For the rest, such aversion is wholly emotional, and has no more an intellectual element in it than has the disgust we feel on first witnessing anatomical dissections. Emotional and Conative Action.

We turn now from the causes of feeling to its manifestations or effects, and have here in like manner to inquire whether there is in these also any contrast corresponding to the opposing extremes of pleasure and pain. We have already seen reasons for dismissing reflex movements or movements not determined by feeling as psychologically secondary, the effects of habit and heredity, and for regarding those diffusive movements that are immediately expressive of feeling as primordial,—such movements as are strictly purposive being gradually selected or elaborated from them. But some distinction is called for among the various movements expressive of emotion; for there is more in these than the direct effect of feeling regarded as merely pleasure or pain. It has been usual with psychologists to confound emotions with feeling, because intense feeling is essential to emotion. But, strictly speaking, a state of emotion is a complete state of mind, a psychosis, and not a psychical element, if we may so say. Thus in anger we have over and above pain a more or less definite object as its cause, and a certain characteristic reactive display—frowns, compressed lips, erect head, clenched fists, in a word, the combative attitude—as its effect, and similarly of other emotions; so that generally in the particular movements indicative of particular emotions the primary and primitive effects of feeling are overlaid by what Darwin has called serviceable associated habits. The purposive actions of an earlier stage of development become, though somewhat atrophied as it were, the emotive outlet of a later stage: in the circumstances in which our ancestors worried their enemies we only show our teeth. We must, therefore, leave aside the more complex emotional manifestations and look only to the simplest effects of pleasure and of pain, if we are to discover any fundamental contrast between them.

Joy finds expression in dancing, clapping the hands, and meaningless laughter, and these actions are not only pleasurable in themselves but such as increase the existing pleasure. Attention is not drafted off or diverted; but rather the available resources seem reinforced, so that the old expenditure is supported as well as the new. To the pleasure on the receptive side is added pleasure on the active side. The violent contortions due to pain, on the other hand, are painful in themselves, though less intense than the pains from which they withdraw attention: they are but counter-irritants that arrest or inhibit still more painful thoughts or sensations. Thus, according to Darwin, “sailors who are going to be flogged sometimes take a piece of lead into their mouths in order to bite it with their utmost force, and thus to bear the pain.” When in this way we take account of the immediate effects as well as of the causes of feeling, we find it still more strikingly true that only in pleasurable states is there an efficient expenditure of attention. It is needless now to dwell upon this point, although any earlier mention of it would hardly have been in place. But we should fail to realize the contrast between the motor effects of pleasure and of pain if we merely regarded them as cases of diffusion. The intenser the feeling the intenser the reaction, no doubt, whether it be smiles or tears, jumping for joy, or writhing in agony; but in the movements consequent on pleasure the diffusion is the result of mere exuberance, an overflow of good spirits, as we sometimes say, and these movements, as already remarked, are always comparatively purposeless or playful. Even the earliest expressions of pain, on the contrary, seem but so many efforts to escape from the cause of it; in them there is at least the blind purpose to flee from a definite ill, but in pleasure only the enjoyment of present fortune.

From Plato downwards psychologists and moralists have been fond of discussing the relation of pleasure and pain. It has been maintained that pain is the first and more fundamental fact, and pleasure nothing but relief from pain; and, again, on the other side, that pleasure is prior and positive, and pain only the negation of pleasure. So far as the mere change goes, it is obviously true that the diminution of pain is pro tanto pleasant, and the diminution of pleasure pro tanto unpleasant; and if relativity had the unlimited range sometimes assigned to it this would be all we could say. But we must sooner or later recognize the existence of a comparatively fixed neutral state, deviations from which, of comparatively short duration and of sufficient intensity, constitute distinct states of pleasure or pain. Such states, if not of liminal intensity, may then be further diminished without reversing their pleasurable or painful character. The turning-point here implied may, of course, gradually change too,—as a result, in fact, of the law of accommodation. Thus a long run of pleasure would raise “the hedonistic zero,” while—to the small extent to which accommodation to pain is possible—a continuance of pain would lower it. But such admission makes no material difference where the actual feeling of the moment is alone concerned and retrospect out of the question. On the whole it seems, therefore, most reasonable to regard pleasure and pain as emerging out of a neutral state, which is prior to and distinct from both,—not a state of absolute indifference, but of simple contentment, marked by no special active display. But it is by reference to such state of equilibrium or άπαθία that we see most clearly the superior volitional efficacy of pain upon which pessimists love to descant. “Nobody,” says Von Hartmann, “who had to choose between no taste at all for ten minutes or five minutes of a pleasant taste and then five minutes of an unpleasant taste, would prefer the last.” Most men and all the lower animals are content “to let ιvell alone.”

To ascertain the origin and progress of purposive action it seems, then, that we must look to the effects of pain rather than to those of pleasure. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all things are full of labour. It is true that psychologists not unfrequently describe the earliest purposive movements as appetitive; or at least they treat appetitive and aversive movements as co-ordinate and equally primitive, pleasures being supposed to lead to actions for their continuance as much as pains to actions for their removal. No doubt, as soon as the connexion between a pleasurable sensation and the appropriate action is completely established, as in the case of imbibing food, the whole process is then self-sustaining till satiety begins. But the point is that such facility was first acquired under the teaching of pain,—the pain of unsatisfied hunger. The term “appetite” is apt both by its etymology and its later associations to be misleading. What are properly called the “instinctive” appetites are—when regarded from their active side—movements determined by some existing uneasy sensation. So far as their earliest manifestation in a particular individual is concerned, this urgency seems almost entirely of the nature of a vis a tergo; and the movements are only more definite than those simply expressive of pain because of inherited pre-adaptation, on which account, of course, they are called “instinctive.” But what one inherits another must have acquired, and we have agreed here to leave heredity on one side and consider only the original evolution.

But if none but psychological causes were at work this evolution would be very long and in its early stages very uncertain. At first, when only random movements ensue, we may fairly suppose both that the chance of at once making a happy hit would be small and that the number of chances, the space for repentance, would also be small. Under such circumstances natural selection would have to do almost everything and subjective selection almost nothing. So far as natural selection worked, we should have, not the individual subject making a series of tries and perfecting itself by practice, as in learning to dance or swim, but we should have those individuals whose stuff or structure happened to vary for the better surviving, increasing, and displacing the rest. How much natural selection, apparently unaided, can accomplish in the way of complicated adjustment we see in the adaptation of the form and colour of plants and animals to their environment. Both factors, in reality, operate at once, and it would be hard to fix a limit to either, though to our minds natural selection seems to lose in comparative importance as we advance towards the higher stages of life.

But psychologically we have primarily to consider subjective selection, i.e., first of all, the association of particular movements with particular sensations through the mediation of feeling. The sensations here concerned are mainly painful excitations from the environment, the recurring pains of innutrition, weariness, &c., and pleasurable sensations due to the satisfaction of these organic wants—pleasures which, although not a mere “filling up,” as Plato at one time contended, are still preceded by pain, but imply over and above the removal of this a certain surplus of positive good. There seem only a few points to notice, (a) When the movements that ensue through pleasure are themselves pleasurable there is ordinarily no ground for singling out any one; such movements simply enhance the general enjoyment, which is complete in itself and so far contains no hint of anything beyond, (δ) Should one of these spontaneous movements of pleasure chance to cause pain, no doubt such movement is speedily arrested. Probably the most immediate connexion possible between feeling and purposive action is that in which a painful movement leads through pain to its own suppression. But such connexion is not very fruitful of consequences, inasmuch as it only secures what we may call internal training and does little to extend the relation of the individual to its environment, (c) Out of the irregular, often conflicting movements which indirectly relieve pain some one may chance to remove the cause of it altogether. Upon this movement, the last of a tentative series, attention, released from the pain, is concentrated; and in this way the evil and the remedy become so far associated that on a recurrence of the former the many diffused movements become less, and the one purposive movement more, pronounced; the one effectual way is at length established and the others, which were but palliatives, disappear. (<Z) When things have advanced so far that some one definite movement is definitely represented along with the painful sensation it remedies, it is not long before a still further advance is possible and we have preventive movements. Thanks to the orderliness of things, dangers have their premonitions. After a time, therefore, the occurrence of some signal sensation revives the image of the harm that has previously followed in its wake, and a movement—either like the first, or another that has to be selected from the random tries of fear—occurs in time to avert the impending ill. (e) In like manner, provided the cravings of appetite are felt, any signs of the presence of pleasurable objects prompt to movements for theiι∙ enjoyment or appropriation. In these last cases we have action determined by perceptions. The cases in which the subject is incited to action by ideas as distinct from perceptions require a more detailed consideration; such are the facts mainly covered by the term “desire.”

By the time that ideas are sufficiently self-sustaining to form trains that are not wholly shaped by the circumstances of the present, entirely new possibilities of action are opened up. We can desire to live again through experiences of which there is nothing actually present to remind us, and we can desire a new experience which as yet we only imagine. We often, no doubt, apply the term to the simpler states mentioned under (e) in the last ]∙aragraph: the fox in the fable is said to have desired the grapes he vilified because out of his reach. Again, at the other extreme it is usual to speak of a desire for honour·, or for wealth, and the like; but such are not so much single states of mind as inclinations or habitual desires. Moreover, abstractions of this kind belong to a more advanced stage of development than that at which desire begins, and of necessity imply more complicated grounds of action than we can at present examine. The essential characteristics of desire will be more apparent if we suppose a case somewhere between these extremes. A busy man reads a novel at the close of the day, and finds himself led off by a reference to angling or tropical scenery to picture himself with his rods packed en route for Scotland, or booked by the next steamer for the fairyland of the West Indies. Presently, while the ideas of Jamaica or fishing are at least as vividly imagined as before, the fancied preparations receive a rude shock as the thought of his work recurs. Some such case we may take as typical and attempt to analyse it.

First of all it is obviously true, at least of such more concrete desires, that what awakens desire at one time fails to do so at another, and that we are often so absorbed or content with the present as not to be amenable to (new) desires at all. A given X or Y cannot, then, be called desirable per se, it is only desirable by relation to the contents of consciousness at the moment. Of what nature is this relation? (1) At the level of psychical life that we have now reached very close and complete connexions have been formed between ideas and the movements necessary for their realization, so that when the idea is vividly present these movements are apt to be nascent. This association is the result of subjective selection— i.e., of feeling—but, being once established, it persists like other associations independently of it. (2) Those movements are especially apt to become nascent which have not been recently executed, which are therefore fresh and accompanied by the organic sensations of freshness, but also those which are frequently executed, and so from habit readily aroused. The latter fact, which chiefly concerns habitual desires, may be left aside for a time. (3) At times, then, when there is a lack of present interests, or when these have begun to wane, or when there is positive pain, attention is ready to fasten on any new suggestion that calls for more activity, requires a change of active attitude, or promises relief. Such spontaneous concentration of attention ensures greater vividness to the new idea, whatever it be, and to its belongings. In some cases this greater vividness may suffice. This is most likely to happen when the new idea affords intellectual occupation, and this is at the time congenial, or with indolent and imaginative persons who prefer dreaming to doing. (4) But when the new idea does not lead off the pent-up stream of action by opening out fresh channels, when, instead of this, it is one that keeps them intent upon itself in an attitude comparable to expectation, then we have desire. In such a state the intensity of the re-presentation is not adequate to the intensity of the incipient actions it has aroused. This is most obvious when the latter are directed towards sensations or percepts, and the former remains only an idea. If it were possible by concentrating attention to convert ideas into percepts, there would be an end of most desires: “if wishes were horses beggars would ride.” (5) But our voluntary power over movements is in general of this kind: here the fiat may become fact. When we cannot hear we can at least listen, and, though there be nothing to fill them, we can at least hold out our hands. It would seem, then, that the source of desire lies essentially in this excess of the active reaction above the intensity of the re-presentation (the one constituting the “impulse,” the other the “object” of desire, or the desideratum), and that this disparity rests ultimately on the fact that movements have, and sensations have not, a subjective initiative. (6) The impulse or striving to act will, as already hinted, be stronger the greater the available energy, the fewer the present outlets, and, habits apart, the fresher the new opening for activity. (7) Finally, it is to be noted that, when such inchoate action can be at once consummated, desire ends where it begins: to constitute a definite state of desire there must be not only an obstacle to the realization of the desideratum—if this were all we should rather call the state one of wishing—but an obstacle to its realization by means of the actions its representation has aroused.

However the desire may have been called forth, its intensity is primarily identical with the strength of this impulse to action, and has no definite or constant relation to the amount of pleasure that may result from its satisfaction. The feeling directly consequent on desire as a state of want and restraint is one of pain, and the reaction which this pain sets up may either suppress the desire or prompt to efforts to avoid or overcome the obstacles in its way. To inquire into these alternatives would lead us into the higher phases of voluntary action; but we must first consider the relation of desire to feeling more closely.

Instances are by no means wanting of very imperious desires accompanied by the clear knowledge that their gratification will be positively distasteful. On the other hand it is possible to recollect or picture circumstances known or believed to be intensely pleasurable without any desire for them being awakened at all: we can regret or admire without desiring. Yet there are many psychologists who maintain that desire is excited only by the prospect of the pleasure that may arise through its gratification, and that the strength of the desire is proportional to the intensity of the pleasure thus anticipated. Quidquid petitur, petitur sub specie boni is their main formula. The plausibility of this doctrine rests partly upon a seemingly imperfect analysis of what strictly pertains to desire and partly on the fact that it is substantially true both of what we may call “presentation-prompted” action, which belongs to an earlier stage than desire, and of the more or less rational action that comes later. In the very moment of enjoyment it may be fairly supposed that action is sustained solely by the pleasure received and is proportional to the intensity of that pleasure. But there is here no re-presentation and no seeking; the conditions essential to desire, therefore, do not apply. Again, in rational action, where both are present, it may be true —to quote the words of an able advocate of the view here controverted—that “our character as rational beings is to desire everything exactly according to its pleasure value.” But consider what such conceptions as the good, pleasure value, and rational action involve. Here we have foresight and calculation, regard for self as an object of permanent interest,—Butler’s cool self-love; but desire as such is blind, without either the present certainty of sense or the assured prevision of reason. Pleasure in the past, no doubt, has usually brought about the association between the representation of the desired object and the movement for its realization; but neither the recollection of this pleasure nor its anticipation is necessary to desire, and even when present they do not determine what urgency it will have. The best proof of this lies in certain habitual desires. Pleasures are diminished by repetition, whilst habits are strengthened by it; if the intensity of desire, therefore, were proportioned to the “pleasure value” of its gratification, the desire for renewed gratification should diminish as this pleasure grows less; but, if the present pain of restraint from action determines the intensity of desire, this should increase as the action becomes habitual. And observation seems to show that, unless prudence suggest the forcible suppression of belated desires or the active energies themselves fail, desires do in fact become more imperious, although less productive of positive pleasure, as time goes on.

In this there is, of course, no exception to the general principle that action is consequent on feeling,—a greater pleasure being preferred before a less, a less pain before a greater; for, though the feeling that follows upon its satisfaction be less or even change entirely, still the pain of the unsatisfied desire increases as the desire hardens into habit. It is also a point in favour of the position here taken that appetites, which may be compared to inherited desires, certainly prompt to action by present pain rather than by prospective pleasure.

Intellection.

Desire naturally prompts to the search for the means to its satisfaction and frequently to a mental rehearsal of various possible courses of action, their advantages and disadvantages. Thus, by the time the ideational continuum has become, mainly by the comparatively passive working of association, sufficiently developed to furnish thinking material, motives are forthcoming for thinking to begin. It is obviously impossible to assign any precise time for this advance; like all others, it is gradual. Fitfully, in strange circumstances and under strong excitement, the lower animals give unmistakable signs that they can understand and reason. But thought as a permanent activity may be fairly said to originate in and even to depend upon the acquisition of speech. This indispensable instrument, which more than anything else enables our psychological individual to advance to the distinctly human or rational stage, consists of gestures and vocal utterances, which were originally—and indeed are still to a large extent— emotional expressions. It is a question of the highest interest to ascertain the general mode of its elaboration; but as to this the reader must consult the article Philology (vol. xviii. p. 766 s^.). Our space will only allow us to note in what way language, when it already exists, is instrumental in the development as distinct from the communi cation of thought. But, first of all, what in general is thinking, of which language is the instrument 1

In entering upon this inquiry we are really passing one of the hardest and fastest lines of the old psychology,—that between sense and understanding. So long as it was the fashion to assume a multiplicity of faculties the need was less felt for a clear exposition of their connexion. A man had senses and intellect much as he had eyes and ears; the heterogeneity in the one case was no more puzzling than in the other. But for psychologists who do not cut the knot in this fashion it is confessedly a hard matter to explain the relation of the two. The contrast of receptivity and activity hardly avails, for all presentation involves activity and essentially the same activity, that of attention. Nor can we well maintain that the presentations attended to differ in kind, albeit such a view has been held from Plato downwards. Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit prius in sensu : the blind and deaf are necessarily without some concepts that we possess. If pure being is pure nothing, pure thought is equally empty. Thought consists of a certain elaboration of sensory and motor presentations and has no content apart from these. We cannot even say that the forms of this elaboration are psychologically a priori ; on the contrary, what is epistemologically the most fundamental is the last to be psychologically realized. This is not only true as a fact; it is also true of necessity, in so far as the formation of more concrete concepts is an essential preliminary to the formation of others more abstract, —those most abstract, like the Kantian categories, &c., being thus the last of all to be thought out or understood. And though this formative work is substantially voluntary, yet, if we enter upon it, the form at each step is determined by the so-called matter, and not by us; in this respect “the spontaneity of thought” is not really freer than the receptivity of sense. It is sometimes said that thought is synthetic, and this is true; but imagination is synthetic also; and the processes which yield the ideational train are the only processes at work in intellectual synthesis. Moreover, it would be arbitrary to say at what point the mere generic image ceases and the true concept begins,—so continuous are the two. No wonder, therefore, that English psychology has been prone to regard thought as only a special kind of perception—perceiving the agreement or disagreement of ideas—and the ideas themselves as mainly the products of association. Yet this is much like confounding observation with experiment or invention,—the act of a cave-man in betaking himself to a drifting tree with that of Noah in building himself an ark. In reverie, and even in understanding the communications of others, we are comparatively passive spectators of ideational movements, non-voluntarily determined. But in thinking or “intellection,” as it has been conveniently termed, there is always a search for something more or less'vaguely conceived, for a clue which will be known when it occurs by seeming to satisfy certain conditions. Thinking may be broadly"described as solving a problem,—finding an AX that is B. In so doing we start from a comparatively fixed central idea or intuition and work along the several diverging lines of ideas associated with it,—hence far the aptest and in fact the oldest description of thought is that it is discursive. Emotional excitement—and at the outset the natural man does not think much in cold blood—quickens the flow of ideas: what seems relevant is at once contemplated more closely, while what seems irrelevant awakens little interest and receives little attention. At first the control acquired is but very imperfect; the actual course of thought of even a disciplined mind falls far short of the clearness, distinc tness, and coherence of the logician’s ideal. Familiar associations hurry attention away from the proper topic, and thought becomes not only discursive but wandering; in place of concepts of fixed and crystalline completeness, such as logic describes, we may find a congeries of ideas but imperfectly compacted into one generic idea, subject to continual transformation and implicating much that is irrelevant and confusing.

Thus, while it is possible for thought to begin without language, just as arts may begin without tools, yet language enables us to carry the same process enormously farther. In the first place it gives us an increased command of even such comparatively concrete generic images as can be formed without it. The name of a thing or action becomes for one who knows the name as much an objective mark or attribute as any quality whatever can be. The form and colour of what we call an “orange” are perhaps even more intimately combined with the sound and utterance of this word than with the taste and fragrance which we regard as strictly essential to the thing. But, whereas its essential attributes often evade us, we can always command its nominal attribute, in so far as this depends upon movements of articulation. By uttering the name (or hearing it uttered) we have secured to us, in a greater or less degree, that superior vividness-and definiteness that pertain to images reinstated by impressions: our idea approximates to the fixity and independence of a percept (comp. p. 57 above). With young children and uncultured minds—who, by the way, commonly “think aloud ”—the gain in this respect is probably more striking than those not confined to their mother-tongue or those used to an analytical handling of language at all realize. When things are thus made ours by receiving names from us and we can freely manipulate them in idea, it becomes easier mentally to bring together facts that logically belong together, and so to classify and generalize. For names set us free from the cumbersome tangibility and particularity of perception, which is confined to just what is presented here and now. But as ideas increase in generality they diminish in definiteness and unity; they not only become less pictorial and more schematic, but they become vague and unsteady as well, because formed from a number of concrete images only related as regards one or two constituents, and not assimilated as the several images of the same thing may be. The mental picture answering to the word “horse” has, so to say, body enough to remain a steady object when under attention from time to time; but that answering to the word “animal” is perhaps scarcely twice alike. The relations of things could thus never be readily recalled or steadily controlled if the names of those relations, which as words always remain concrete, did not give us a definite hold upon them,— make them comprehensible. Once these “airy nothings” have a name, we reap again the advantages a concrete constituent affords: by its means that which is relevant becomes more closely associated, and that which is irrelevant—abstracted from—falls off. When what answers to the logical connotation or meaning of a concept is in this way linked with the name, it is no longer necessary that such “matter or content” should be distinctly present in consciousness. It takes time for an image to raise its associates above the threshold; and, when all are there, there is more demand upon attention in proportion. There is thus a manifest economy in what Leibnitz happily styled “symbolic,” in contrast to “intuitive” thinking. Our power of efficient attention is limited, and with words for counters we can, as Leibnitz remarks, readily perform operations involving very complex presentations, and wait till these operations are concluded before realizing and spreading out the net result in sterling coin.

But this simile must not mislead us. In actual thinking there never is any complete separation between the symbol and the ideas symbolized: the movements of the one are never entirely suspended till those of the other are complete. “Thus,” says Hume, “if, instead of saying, that in war the weaker have always recourse to negotiation, we should say, that they have always recourse to conquest, the custom which we have acquired of attributing certain relations to ideas still follows the words and makes us immediately perceive the absurdity of that proposition.” How intimately the two are connected is shown by the surprises that give what point there is to puns, and by the small confusion that results from the existence of homo-nymous terms. The question thus arises—What are the properly ideational elements concerned in thought? Over this question psychologists long waged fight as either nominalists or conceptualists. The former maintain that what is imaged in connexion with a general concept, such as triangle, is some individual triangle “taken in a certain light,” while the latter maintain that an “abstract idea” is formed embodying such constituents of the several particulars as the concept connotes, but dissociated from the specific or accidental variations that distinguish one particular from another. As often happens in such controversies, each party saw the weak point in the other. The nominalists easily showed that there was no distinct abstract idea representable apart from particulars; and the conceptualists could as easily show that a particular presentation “considered in a certain light” is no longer merely a particular presentation nor yet a mere crowd of presentations. The very thing to ascertain is what this consideration in a certain light implies. Perhaps a speedier end might have been put to this controversy if either party had been driven to define more exactly what was to be understood by image or idea. Such ideas as are possible to us apart from abstraction are, as we have seen, revived percepts, not revived sensations, are complex total re-presentations made up of partial re-presentations (comp. p. 57). Reproductive imagination is so far but a faint rehearsal of actual perceptions, and constructive imagination but a faint anticipation of possible perceptions. In either case we are busied with elementary presentations complicated or synthesized to what are tantamount to intuitions, in so far as the forms of intuition remain in the idea, though the fact, as tested by movement, <fcc., is absent. The several partial re-presentations, however, which make up an idea might also be called ideas, not merely in the wide sense in which every mental object may be so called, but also in the narrower sense as secondary presentations, i.e., as distinguished from primary presentations or impressions. But such isolated images of an impression, even if possible, would no more be intuitions than the mere impression itself would be one: taken alone the one would be as free of space and time as is the other. Till it is settled, therefore, whether the ideational elements concerned in conception are intuitive complexes or something answering to the ultimate elements of these, nothing further can be done.

In the case of what are specially called “concrete” as distinct from “abstract” conceptions—if this rough-and-ready, but unscientific, distinction maybe allowed—the idea answering to the concept differs little from an intuition, and we have already remarked that the generic image (Gemeinbild of German psychologists) constitutes the connecting link between imagination and conception. But even concerning these it is useless to ask what does one imagine in thinking, e.g., of triangle or man or colour. We never—except for the sake of this very inquiry— attempt to fix our minds in this manner upon some isolated conception; in actual thinking ideas are not in consciousness alone and disjointedly but as part of a context. When the idea “man” is present, it is present in some proposition or question, as—Man is the paragon of animals; In man there is nothing great but mind; and so on. It is quite clear that in understanding or mentally verifying such statements very different constituents out of the whole complex “man” are prominent in each. Further, what is present to consciousness when a general term is understood will differ, not only with a different context, but also the longer we dwell upon it: we may either analyse its connotation or muster its denotation, as the context or the cast of our minds may determine. Thus what is relevant is alone prominent, and the more summary the attention we bestow the less the full extent and intent of the concept are displayed. To the nominalist’s objection, that it is impossible to imagine a man without imagining him as either tall or short, young or old, dark or light, and so forth, the conceptualist might reply that at all events percepts may be clear without being distinct, that we can recognize a tree without recognizing what kind of tree it is, and that, moreover, the objection proves too much: for, if our image is to answer exactly to fact, we must represent not only a tall or a short man but a man of definite nature,—one not merely either light or dark, but of a certain precise complexion. But the true answer rather is that in conceiving as such we do not necessarily imagine a man or a tree at all, any more than—if such an illustration may serve—in writing the equation to the parabola we necessarily draw a parabola as well.

The individuality of a concept is thus not to be confounded with the sensible concreteness of an intuition either distinct or indistinct, and “the pains and skill” which Locke felt were required in order to frame what he called an abstract idea are not comparable to the pains and skill that may be necessary to discriminate or decipher what is faint or fleeting. The material “framed” consists no doubt of ideas, if by this is meant that in thinking we work ultimately with the ideational continuum, but what results is never a mere intuitive complex nor yet a mere group of such. The concept or “abstract idea” only emerges when a certain intelligible relation is established among the members of such a group; and the very same intuition may furnish the material for different concepts as often as a different geistiges Band is drawn between them. The stuff of this bond, as we have seen, is the word, and this brings into the foreground of consciousness when necessary those elements—whether they form an intuition or not—which are relevant to the concept. Conception, then, is not identical with imagination, although the two terms are still often, and were once generally, regarded as synonymous. The same ultimate materials occur in each; but in the one they start with and retain a sensible form, in the other they are elaborated into the form which is called “intelligible.”

The distinctive character of this intellectual synthesis lies, we have seen, in the fact that it is determined entirely by what is synthesized, whether that be the elementary constituents of intuitions or general relations of whatever kind among these. It differs, therefore, in being selective from the synthesis of ideation, which rests upon contiguity and unites together whatever occurs together. It differs also from any synthesis, though equally voluntary in its initiation, which is determined by a purely subjective preference, in that intellection depends upon objective relations alone. Owing to the influence of logic, which has long been in a much more forward state than psychology, it has been usual to resolve intellection into comparison, abstraction, and classification, after this fashion: ABCM and ABCN are compared, their differences Μ and N left out of sight, and the class notion ABC formed including both; the same process repeated with ABC and ABD yields a higher class notion AB; and so on. But our ideational continuum is not a mere string of ideas of concrete things, least of all such concrete things as this view implies. Not till our daily life resembles that of a museum porter receiving specimens will our higher mental activity be comparable to that of the savant who sorts such specimens into cases and compartments. What we perceive is a world of things in continual motion, waxing, waning, the centres of manifold changes, affecting us and apparently affected by each other, amenable to our action and, as it seems, continually interacting among themselves. Even the individual thing, as our brief analysis of perception attempts to show (comp. pp. 55, 56), is not a mere sum of properties which can be taken to pieces and distributed like type, but a whole combined of parts very variously related. To understand intellection we must look at its actual development under the impetus of practical needs, rather than to logical ideals of what it ought to be. Like other forms of purposive activity, thinking is primarily undertaken as a means to an end, and especially the end of economy. It is often easier and always quicker to manipulate ideas than to manipulate real things; to the common mind the thoughtful man is one who “uses his head to save his heels.” In all the arts of life, in the growth of language and institutions, in scientific explanation, and even in the speculations of philosophy, we may remark a steady simplification in the steps to a given end or conclusion, or—what is for our present inquiry the same thing—the attainment of better results with the same means. The earliest machines are the most cumbrous and clumsy, the earliest speculations the most fanciful and anthropomorphic. Gradually imitation yields to invention, the natural fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc to methodical induction, till what is essential and effective is realized and appreciated and what is accidental and inert is discarded and falls out of sight. In this way man advances in the construction of a complete mental clue or master-key to the intricacies of the real world, but this key is still the counterpart of the world it enables us to control and explain.

To describe the process by which such insight is attained as a mere matter of abstraction deserves the stigma of “soulless blunder” which Hegel applied to it. Of course if attention is concentrated on X it must pro tanto be abstracted from Y, and such command of attention may require “some pains and skill.” But to see in this invariable accompaniment of thinking its essential feature is much like the schoolboy’s saying that engraving consists in cutting fine shavings out of a hard block. The great thing is to find out what are the light-bearing and fruitbearing combinations. Moreover, thinking does not begin with a conscious abstraction of attention from recognized differences in the way logicians describe. The actual process of generalization, for the most part at all events, is much simpler. The same name is applied to different things or events because only their more salient features are perceived at all. Their differences, so far from being consciously and with effort left out of account, often cannot be observed when attention is directed to them: to the inexperienced all is gold that glitters. Thus, and as an instance of the principle of progressive differentiation already noted (p. 42), we find genera recognized before species, and the species obtained by adding on differences, not the genus by abstracting from them. Of course such vague and indefinite concepts are not at first logically general: they only become so when certain common elements are consciously noted as pertaining to presentations in other respects qualitatively different, as well as numerically distinct. But actually thinking starts from such more potential generality as is secured by the association of a generic image with a name. So far the material of thought is always general,—is freed, that is, from the local and temporal and other defining marks of percepts.

The process of thinking itself is psychologically much better described as (1) an analysis and (2) a re-synthesis of this material already furnished by the ideational trains. The logical resolution of thought into hierarchies of concepts arranged like Porphyry’s tree, into judgments uniting such concepts by means of a logical copula, <fcc , is the outcome of later reflexion—mainly for technical purposes— upon thought as a completed product, and entirely presupposes all that psychology has to explain. The logical theory of the formation of concepts by generalization (or abstraction) and by determination (or concretion)— i.e., by the removal or addition of defining marks—assumes the previous existence of the very things to be formed, for these marks or attributes—X’s and .Y⅛, A’s and B’s— are themselves already concepts. Moreover, the act of generalizing or determining is really an act of judgment, so that the logician’s account of conception presupposes judgment, while at the same time his account of judgment presupposes conception. But this is no evil; for logic does not essay to exhibit the actual genesis of thought but only an ideal for future thinking. Psychologically—that is to say, chronologically—the judgment is first. The growing mind, we may suppose, passes beyond simple perception when some striking difference in what is at the moment perceived is the occasion of a conflict of presentations (comp. p. 62). The stalking hunter is not instantly recognized as the destroying biped, because he crawls on all fours; or the scarecrow looks like him, and yet not like him ; for, though it stands on two legs, it never moves. There is no immediate assimilation: percept and idea remain distinct till, on being severally attended to and compared, what is there is known in spite of the differences. Recognition under such circumstances is in itself a judgment; but of more account is the further judgment involved in it or accompanying it—that which connects the new fact with the old idea. Though actually complex, as the result of a combination of impressions, generic images are not necessarily known as complexes when they first enter into judgments; as the subjects of such judgments they are but starting-points for predication,—It crawls; It does not move; and the like. Such impersonal judgments, according to most philologists, are in fact the earliest; and we may reasonably suppose that by means of them our generic images have been partially analysed, and have attained to something of the distinctness and constancy of logical concepts. But the analysis is rarely complete: a certain confused and fluctuating residuum remains behind. The psychological concept merges at sundry points into those cognate with it,—in other words, the continuity of the underlying memory-train still operates; only the ideal concepts of logic are in all respects totus, teres, atque rotun dus. Evidence of this, if it seem to any to require proof, is obtainable on all sides, and, if we could recover the first vestiges of thinking, would be more abundant still.

But, if we agree that it is through acts of judgment which successively resolve composite presentations into elements that concepts first arise, it is still very necessary to inquire more carefully what these elements are. On the one side we have seen logicians comparing them to so many letters, and on the other psychologists enumerating the several sensible properties of gold or wax—their colour, weight, texture, &c. —as instances of such elements. In this way formal logic and sensationalist psychology have been but blind leaders of the blind. Language, which has enabled thought to advance to the level at which reflexion about thought can begin, is now an obstacle in the way of a thorough analysis of it. A child or savage would speak only of “red” and “hot,” but we of “redness” and “heat.” They would probably say, “Swallows come when the days are lengthening and snipe when they are shortening”; we say, “Swallows are spring and snipe are winter migrants.” Instead of “The sun shines and plants grow,” we should say, “Sunlight is the cause of vegetation.” In short, there is a tendency to resolve all concepts into substantive concepts; and the reason of this is not far to seek. Whether the subject or starting-point of our discursive thinking be actually what we perceive as a thing, or whether it be a quality, an action, an effectuation {i.e.. a transitive action), a concrete spatial or temporal relation, or finally, a resemblance or difference in these or in other respects, it becomes by the very fact of being the central object of thought pro tanto a unity, and all that can be affirmed concerning it may so far be regarded as its property or attribute. It is, as we have seen, the characteristic of every completed concept to be a fixed and independent whole, as it were, crystallized out of the still-fluent matrix of ideas. Moreover, the earliest objects of thought and the earliest concepts must naturally be those of the things that live and move about us; hence, then—to seek no deeper reason for the present— this natural tendency, which language by providing distinct names powerfully seconds, to reify or personify not only things but every element and relation of things which we can single out, or, in other words, to concrete our abstracts. It is when things have reached this stage that logic begins. But ordinary, so-called formal, logic, which intends to concern itself not with thinking but only with the most general structure of thought, is debarred from recognizing any difference between concepts that does not affect their relations as terms in a proposition. As a consequence it drifts inevitably into that compartmental logic or logic of extension which knows nothing of categories or predicables, but only of the one relation of whole and part qualitatively considered. It thus pushes this reduction to a common denomination to the utmost: its terms, grammatically regarded, are always names and symbolize classes or compartments of things. From this point of view all disparity among concepts, save that of contradictory exclusion, and all connexion, save that of partial coincidence, are at an end.

Of a piece with this are the logical formula for a simple judgment, X is Y, and the corresponding definitions of judgment as the comparison of two concepts and the recognition of their agreement or disagreement. It certainly is possible to represent every judgment as a comparison, although the term is strictly adequate to only one kind and is often a very artificial description of what actually happens. But for a logic mainly concerned with inference— i.e., with explicating what is implicated in any given statements concerning classes—there is nothing more to be done but to ascertain agreements or disagreements; and the existence of these, if not necessarily, is at least most evidently represented by spatial relations. Such representation obviously implies a single ground of comparison only and therefore leaves no room for differences of category. The resolution of all concepts into class concepts and that of all judgments into comparisons thus go together. On this view if a concept is complex it can only be so as a class combination; and, if the mode of its synthesis could be taken account of at all, this could only be by treating it as an element in the combination like the rest :—iron is a substance, &c., virtue a quality, &c., distance a relation, &c., and so on. There is much of directly psychological interest in this thoroughgoing reduction of thought to a form which makes its consistency and logical concatenation conspicuously evident. But of the so-called matter of thought it tells us nothing. And, as said, there are many forms in that matter of at least equal moment, both for psychology and for epistemology; these formal logic has tended to keep out of sight.

It has generally been under the bias of such a formal or computational logic that psychologists, and especially English psychologists, have entered upon the study of mind. They have brought with them an analytic scheme which affords a ready place for sensations or “simple ideas” as the elements of thought, but none for any differences in the combinations of these elements. Sensations being in their very nature concrete, all generality becomes an affair of names; and, as Sigwart has acutely remarked, sensationalism and nominalism always go together. History would have borne him out if he had added that a purely formal logic tends in like manner to be nominalistic (see Logic, vol. xiv. p. 791).

If we are still to speak of the elements of thought, we must extend this term so as to include not only the sensory elements we are said to receive but three distinct ways in which this pure matter is combined :—(1) the forms of intuition, ·—Time and Space; (2) the real categories,— Substance, Attribute, State, Act, Effect, End or Purpose, &c.—the exact determination of which is not here in place; and (3) certain formal (logical and mathematical) categories, —as Unity, Difference, Identity, Likeness. These can no more be obtained by such a process of abstraction and generalization as logicians and psychologists alike have been wont to describe than the melody could be obtained by suppressing all the several notes in a tune. They are not primarily concepts more general than all others in the sense in which animal is more general than man, but rather distinct methods of relating or synthesizing presentations. Kant, though he accepted almost unquestioned the logic and psychology current in his day, has yet been the occasion, in spite of himself, of materially advancing both, and chiefly by the distinction he was led to make between formal and transcendental logic. In his exposition of the latter he brings to light the difference between the “functions of the understanding” in synthesizing—or, as we might say, organizing—percepts into concepts and the merely analytic subsumption of abc and abd under ab, —a, b, c, and d being what they may. Unlike other concepts, categories as such do not in the first instance signify objects of thought however general, but these functions of the understanding in constituting objects. In fine, they all imply some special process, and into these processes it is the business of psychology to inquire. But only the briefest attempt at such inquiry is here possible.

To begin with what are par excellence formal categories, and among these with that which is the most fundamental and formal of all—How do we come by the conception of unity Ί “Amongst all the ideas we have,” says Locke, “as there is none suggested to the mind by more ways, so there is none more simple than that of unity, or one. It has no shadow of variety or composition in it; every object our senses are employed about, every idea in our understandings, every thought of our minds, brings this idea along with it.” And the like with painful iteration has been said by almost all English psychologists since. Such consensus notwithstanding, to assign a sensible origin to unity is certainly a mistake,—one of a class of mistakes already more than once referred to, which consist in transferring to the data of sense all that is implied in the language necessarily used in speaking of them. The term “a sensation” no doubt carries along with it the idea of unity, but the bare sensation as received brings along with it nothing but itself. And, if we consider sensory consciousness merely, we do not receive a sensation, and then another sensation, and so on seriatim ; but we have always a continuous diversity of sensations even when these are qualitatively sharply differentiated. Moreover, if unity were an impression of sense and passively received, it would, in common with other impressions, be unamenable to change. We cannot see red as blue, but we can resolve many (parts) into one (whole), and vice versa. Unity, then, is the result of an act the occasions for which, no doubt, are at first non-voluntarily determined; but the act is still as distinct from them as is attention from the objects attended to. It is to that movement of attention already described in dealing with ideation (p. 61) that we must look as the source of this category. This same movement, in like manner, yields us temporal signs; and the complex unity formed by a combination of these is what we call number. When there is little or no difference between the field and the focus of attention, unifying is an impossibility, whatever the impressions received may be. On the other hand, as voluntary acts of concentration become more frequent and distinct the variegated continuum of sense is shaped into intuitions of definite things and events. Also, as soon as words facilitate the control of ideas, it becomes possible to single out special aspects and relations of things as the subjects or starting-points of our discursive thinking. Thus the forms of unity are manifold: every act of intuition or thought, whatever else it is, is an act of unifying.

It is obvious that the whole field of consciousness at any moment can never be actually embraced as one. What is unified becomes thereby the focus of consciousness and so leaves an outlying field; so far unity may be held to imply plurality. But it cannot with propriety be said that in a simple act of attention the field of consciousness is analysed into two distinct parts, i.e., two unities,— this (now attended to) and the other or the rest (abstracted from). For the not-this is but the rest of a continuum and not itself a whole; it is left out but not determined, as the bounding space is left out when a figure is drawn. To know two unities we must connect both together; and herein comes to light the difference between the unity which is the form of the concept or subject of discourse and the unity of a judgment. The latter is of necessity complex; the former may or may not be. But in any case the complexity of the two is different. If the subject of thought is not only clear but distinct— i.e., not merely defined as a whole but having its constituents likewise more or less defined—such distinctness is due to previous judgments. At any future time these may of course be repeated; such are the analytical or explicative judgments of logic. As the mere subject of discourse it is, however, a single unity simultaneously apprehended · the relation ascertained between it and its predicate constitutes the unity of judgment, a unity which is comprehended only when its parts are successively apprehended.

But, though a judgment is always a complex unity, the 1 extent of this complexity seems at first sight to vary as ’ the form of synthesis varies. Formal logic, as we have 1 seen, by throwing the form of synthesis into the predicate i has no difficulty in reducing every judgment to an S is P. But, if we at all regard the matter thought, it is certain, for example, that “It is an explosion” is less complex than “The enemy explodes the mine.” The first answers one question; the second answers three. But as regards the more complex judgment both the process of ascertaining the fact and the language in which it is expressed show that the three elements concerned in it are not synthesized at once. Suppose we start from the explosion,—and changes or movements are not only apt to attract attention first, but, when recognized as events and not as abstracts personified, they call for some supplementing beyond themselves—then in this case we may search for the agent at work or for the object affected, but not for both at once. Moreover, if we find either, a complete judgment at once ensues: “The enemy explodes,” or “The mine is exploded.” The original judgment is really due to a synthesis of these two. But, when the results of former judgments are in this manner taken up into a new judgment, a certain “condensation of thought” ensues. Of this condensation the grammatical structure of language is evidence, though logical manipulation—with great pains—obliterates it. Thus our more complex judgment would take the form— “The enemy is now mine - exploding” or “The mine is enemy-exploded,” according as one or other of the simpler judgments was made first. An examination of other cases would in like manner tend to show that intellectual synthesis is always—in itself and apart from implications—a binary synthesis. Wundt, to whom belongs the merit of first explicitly stating this “law of dichotomy or duality” as the cardinal principle of discursive thinking, contrasts it with synthesis by mere association. This, as running on continuously, he represents thus—A - B^C - D~ . . .: the synthesis of thought, on the other hand, he symbolizes by forms such as the following :— [table]

In explanation of this law as a law oi intellection it is hardly sufficient to rest it ultimately on the fact “that in a given moment of time only a single act of apperception is possible.” This applies to all syntheses alike. . The point surely is that the one thing attended to in an intellective act is the synthesis of two things, and of two things only, because, as only one movement of attention is possible at a time, only two things at a time can be synthesized. In that merely associative synthesis by which the memorycontinuum is produced attention moves from A to B and thence to C without any relation between A and B being attended to at all, although they must have relations, that of sequence, e.g., at least. The intellective synthesis which follows upon this first resolves the A - B into its elements, and then, if there be any ground for so doing, re-synthesizes them with a consciousness of what the synthesis means.

Passing now to the remaining formal categories—Difference, Likeness, Identity—all of which come under the law of duality so far as they imply not a single presentation but some relation between two presentations, we have to seek out the characteristics of the states of mind in which these relations become objects of consciousness. The so-called fundamentum relationis, of course, can be nothing but the two presentations concerned. Just as certain, however, is it that the relation itself involves something more than these. Two equal triangles may be made to coincide, but are not necessarily coincident: Dromio of Ephesus might be mistaken for Dromio of Syracuse, but at least they never mistook each other. And this brings us to the point. As Lotze puts it, “Two impressions a and b are never to be regarded as more than stimuli which, by affecting the conscious subject—in its very nature individual and sui generis— incite to reaction that activity by means of which there arise the new presentations, such as similarity, equality, contrast, &c.” The activity thus stimulated is what in other words we call the voluntary concentration of attention; to ascertain, then, what these “new presentations” of difference, likeness, and so forth are, we must analyse carefully what takes place when two impressions a and b are expressly compared.

“Difference,” says Hume, “I consider rather as a negation of relation than as anything real or positive. Difference is of two kinds, as opposed either to identity [unity?] or resemblance. The first is called a difference of number, the other of kind.” The truth seems rather to be that difference in the sense of numerical difference is so far an element in all relations as all imply distinct correlatives. To this extent even identity—or at least the recognition of it—rests on difference, that form of difference, viz., which is essential to plurality. But absolute difference of kind may be considered tantamount not, indeed, to the negation, but at least to the absence, of all formal relation. That this absolute difference—or disparateness, as we may call it—affords no ground for relations becomes evident when we consider (1) that, if we had only a plurality of absolutely different presentations, we should have no consciousness at all (comp. p. 45); and (2) that we never compare—although we distinguish, i.e., recognize, numerical difference—where presentations seem absolutely or totally different, as are, e.g., a thunderclap and the taste of sugar, or the notion of free trade and that of the Greek accusative. All actual comparison of what is qualitatively different rests upon opposition or contrariety, i.e., upon at least partial likeness (comp. p. 46). This being understood, it is noteworthy that the recognition of such unlikeness is, if anything, more “real or positive” than that of likeness, and is certainly the simpler of the two. In the comparison of sensible impressions—as of two colours, two sounds, the lengths or the directions of two lines, &c.—we find it easier in some cases to have the two impressions that are compared presented together, in others to have first one presented and then the other. But either way the essential matter is to secure the most effective presentation of their difference, which in every case is something positive and, like any other impression, may vary in amount from bare perceptibility to the extremest distance that the continuum to which it belongs will admit. Where no difference or distance at all is perceptible, there we say there is likeness or equality. Is the only outcome, then, that when we pass from ab to ac there is a change in consciousness, and that when ab persists there is none? To say this is to take no account of the operations (we may symbolize them as ac - ab = cb, ab - ab = 0) by which the difference or the equality results. The change of presentation (δc) and absence of change (0) are not here what they are when merely passive occurrences, so to put it. This is evident from the fact that the former is but a single presentation and the latter no presentation at all. The relation of unlikeness, then, is distinguished from the mere “position” of change by (1) the voluntary concentration of attention upon ab and ac with a view to the detection of this change as their difference, and by (2) the act, relating them through it, in that they are judged unlike to that extent. The type of comparison is such superposition of geometrical lines or figures (as, e.g., in Euclid I. iv.): if they coincide we have concrete equality; if they do not their difference is a line or figure. All sensible comparisons conform essentially to this type. In comparing two shades we place them side by side, and passing from one to the other seek to determine not the absolute shade of the second but its shade relative to the first,—in other words, we look out for contrast. We do not say of one “It is dark,” for in the scale of shades it may be light, but “It is darker or vice versa. Where there is no distance or contrast we simply have not two impressions, and, as said—if we consider the difference by itself—no impression at all. Two coincident triangles must be perceived as one. The distinction between the one triangle thus formed by two coinciding and the single triangle rests upon something extraneous to this bare presentation of a triangle that is one and the same in both cases. The marks of this numerical distinctness may be various: they may be different temporal signs, as in reduplications of the memory-continuum; or they may be constituents peculiar to each, from which attention is for the moment abstracted, any one of which suffices to give the common or identical constituent a new setting. In general, it may be said (1) that the numerical distinctness of the related terms is secured in the absence of all qualitative difference solely by the intellectual act which has so unified each as to retain what may serve as an individual mark; and (2) that they become related as “like” either in virtue of the active adjustment to a change of impression which their partial assimilation defeats, or in virtue of an anticipated continuance of the impression which this assimilation confirms.

It is in keeping with this analysis that we say in common speech that two things in any respect similar are so far the same: that, e.a., the two Dromios—

“The one so like the other

As could not be distinguished but by names” — had the same complexion and the same stature just as we say they had the same mother. This ambiguity in the word “same,” whereby it means either individual identity or indistinguishable resemblance, has been often noticed, and from a logical or objective point of view justly complained of as “engendering fallacies in otherwise enlightened understandings.” But apparently no one has inquired into its psychological basis, although more than one writer has admitted that the ambiguity is one “in itself not always to be avoided.” It is not enough to trace the confusion tσ .the existence of common names and to cite the forgotten controversies of scholastic realism. We are not now concerned with the conformity of thought to things or with logical analysis, but with the analysis of a psychological process. The tendency to treat presentations as if they were copies of things—the objective bias, as we may call it—is the one grand obstacle to psychological observation. Some only realize with an effort that the idea of extension is not extended; no wonder, then, if it should seem “unnatural” to maintain that the idea of two like things does not consist of two like ideas. But, assuming that both meanings of identity have a psychological justification, it will be well to distinguish them and to examine their connexion. Perhaps we might term the one “material identity” and the other “individual identity,”— following the analogy of expressions such as “different things but all made of the same stuff,” “the same person but entirely changed.” Thus there is unity and plurality concerned in both, and herein identity or sameness differs from singularity or mere oneness, which entails no relation. But the unity and the plurality are different in each, and each is in some sort the converse of the other. In the one, two different individuals partially coincide; in the other, one individual is partially different; the unity in the one case is an individual presentation, in the other is the presentation of an individual.

In material identity the unity is that of a single presentation, whether simple or complex, which enters as a common constituent into two or more others. It may be possible of course to individualize it, but as it emerges in a comparison it is a single presentation and nothing more. On account of this absence of individual marks this single presentation is what logicians call “abstract”; but this is not psychologically essential. It may be a generic image which has resulted from the neutralization of individual marks, but it may equally well be a simple presentation, like red, to which such marks never belonged. We come here from a new side upon a truth which has been already expounded at length, viz., that presentations are not given to us as individuals but as changes in a continuum. Time and space—the instruments, as it were, of individualization, which are presupposed in the objective sciences—are psychologically later than this mere differentiation.

The many vexed questions that arise concerning individual identity are metaphysical rather than psychological. But it will serve to bring out the difference between the two forms of identity to note that an identification cannot be established solely by qualitative comparison; an alibi or a breach of temporal continuity will turn the flank of the strongest argument from resemblance. Moreover, resemblance itself may be fatal to identification when the law of being is change. But, while temporal and spatial determinations are essential to individual identity, they have, strictly speaking, no individual identity of their own. When we speak of two impressions occurring at the same time, or localize or project them into the same place, a careful analysis shows only that we detect no difference of-temporal and local signs respectively,—in other words, have only special cases of comparison.

As regards the real categories, it may be said generally that these owe their origin in large measure to the anthropomorphic or mythical tendency of human thought,— to ofj.oi.ov τω ό/ζοίφ γιvdxrκeσθaι. Into the formation of these conceptions two very distinct factors enter—(1) the facts of what in the stricter sense we call “self-consciousness,” and (2) certain spatial and temporal relations among our presentations themselves. On the one hand, it has to be noted that these spatial and temporal relations are but the occasion or motive—and ultimately perhaps, we may say, the warrant—for the analogical attribution to things of selfness, efficiency, and design, but are not directly the source of the forms of thought that thus arise. On the other hand, it is to be noted also that such forms, although they have an independent source, would never apart from suitable material come into actual existence. If the followers of Hume err in their exclusive reliance upon “associations naturally and even necessarily generated by the order of our sensations” (J. S. Mill), the disciple of Kant errs also who relies exclusively on “the synthetic unity of apperception.” The truth is that we are on the verge of error in thus sharply distinguishing the two at all; if we do so momentarily for the purpose of exposition it behoves us here again to remember that mind grows and is not made. The use of terms like “innate,” “a priori,” “necessary,” “formal,” &c., without further qualification leads only too easily to the mistaken notion that all the mental facts so named are alike underived and original, independent not only of experience but of each other; whereas but for the forms of intuition the forms of thought would be impossible,—that is to say, we should never have a self-consciousness at all if we had not previously learnt to distinguish occupied and unoccupied space, past and present in time, and the like. But, again, it is equally true that, if we could not feel and move as well as receive impressions, and if experience did not repeat itself, we should never attain even to this level of spatial and temporal intuition. Kant shows a very lame and halting recognition of this dependence of the higher forms on the lower both in his schematism of the categories, and again in correcting in his Analytic the opposition of sense and understanding as respectively receptive and active with which he set out in his Aesthetic. Still, although what are called the subjective and objective factors of real knowledge advance together, the former is in a sense always a step ahead. We find again without us the permanence, individuality, efficiency, and adaptation we have found first of all within (comp. p. 56, b and <Z). But such primitive imputation of personality, though it facilitates a first understanding, soon proves itself faulty and begets the contradictions which have been one chief motive to philosophy. We smile at the savage who thinks a magnet must need food and is puzzled that the horses in a picture remain for ever still; but few consider that underlying all common-sense thinking there lurks the same natural precipitancy. We attribute to extended things a unity which we know only as the unity of an unextended subject; we attribute to changes among these extended things what we know only when we act and suffer ourselves; and we attribute further both to them and their changes a striving for ends which we know only because we feel. In asking what they are, how they act, and why they are thus and thus, we assimilate them to ourselves, in spite of the differences which lead us by and by to see a gulf between mind and matter. Such instinctive analogies have, like other analogies, to be confirmed, refuted, or modified by further knowledge, i.e., by the very insight into things which these analogies have themselves made possible. That in their first form they were mythical, and that they could never have been at all unless originated in this way, are considerations that make no difference to their validity,—assuming, that is, that they admit, now or hereafter, of a logical transformation which renders them objectively valid. This legitimation is of course the business of philosophy; we are concerned only with the psychological analysis and origin of the conceptions themselves.

As it must here suffice to examine one of these categories, let us take that which is the most important and central of the three, viz., causality or the relation of cause and effect, as that will necessarily throw some light upon the constitution of the others. To begin, we must distinguish three things, which, though very different, are very liable to be confused. (1) Perceiving in a definite case, e.g., that on the sun shining a stone becomes warm, we may say the sun makes the stone warm. This is a concrete instance of predicating the causal relation. In this there is, explicitly at all events, no statement of a general law or axiom, such as we have when we say (2) “Every event must have a cause,”—a statement commonly known as the principle of causality. This again is distinct from what is on all hands allowed to be an empirical generalization, viz., (3) that such and such particular causes have invariably such and such particular effects. With these last psychology is not directly concerned at all: it has only to analyse and trace to its origin the bare conception of causation as expressed in (1) and involved in both these generalizations. Whether only some things have causes, as the notion of chance implies, whether all causes are uniform in their action or some capricious and arbitrary, as the unreflecting suppose,—all this is beside the question for us.

One point in the analysis of the causal relation Hume may be said to have settled once for all: it does not rest upon or contain any immediate intuition of a causal nexus. The two relations that Hume allowed to be perceived (or “presumed to exist”), viz., contiguity in space of the objects causally related and priority in time of the cause before the effect, are the only relations directly discernible. We say indeed “The sun warms the stone” as readily as we say “The sun rises and sets,” as if both were matters of direct observation then and there. But that this is not so ⅛ evident from the fact that only in some cases when one change follows upon another do we regard it as following from the other: casual coincidence is at least as common as causal connexion. Whence the difference, then, if not from perception? Hume’s answer, repeated in the main by English psychologists since, is, as all the world knows, that the difference is the result of association, that when a change β in an object B has been frequently observed to succeed a change a in another object A, the frequent repetition determines the mind to a transition from the one to the other. It is this determination, which could not be present at first, that constitutes “the third relation betwixt these objects.” This “internal impression” generated by association is then projected; “for’tis a common observation that the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects.”

The subjective origin and the after-projection we must admit, but all else in Hume’s famous doctrine seems glaringly at variance with facts. In one respect it proves too much, for all constant sequences are not regarded as causal, as according to his analysis they ought to be; again, in another respect it proves too little, for causal connexion is continually predicated on a first occurrence. The natural man has always distinguished between causes and signs or portents; but there is nothing to show that he produced an effect many times before regarding himself as the cause of it. J. S. Mill has indeed obviated the first objection epistemologically by adding to constant conjunction the further characteristic of “unconditionality.” But this is a conception that cannot be psychologically explained from Hume’s premisses, unless perhaps by resolving it into the qualification that the invariability must be complete and not partial, whereupon the second objection applies. “Unconditional” is a word for which we can find no meaning as long as we confine our attention to temporal succession. It will not do to say both that an invariable succession generates the idea, and that such invariable succession must be not only invariable but also unconditional in order to generate it. We may here turn the master against the disciple: “the same principle,” says Hume, “cannot be both the cause and the effect of another, and this is perhaps the only proposition concerning that relation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain” (op. cit., p. 391). Unconditionality is then part of the causal relation and yet not the product of invariable repetition.

Perhaps the source of this element in the relation will become clear if we examine more closely the internal impression of the mind which according to Hume constitutes the whole of our idea of power or efficacy. To illustrate the nature of this impression Hume cites the instant passage of the imagination to a particular idea on hearing the word commonly annexed to it, when “’twill scarce be possible for the mind by its utmost efforts to prevent that transition” (op. cit., p. 393). It is this determination, then, which is felt internally, not perceived externally, that we mistakenly transfer to objects and regard as an intelligible connexion between them. But, if Hume admits this, must he not admit more? Can it be pretended that it is through the workings of association among our ideas that we first feel a determination which our utmost efforts can scarce resist, or that we feel such determination under no other circumstances? If it be allowed that the natural man is irresistibly determined to imagine an apple when he hears its name or to expect thunder when he sees lightning, must it not also be allowed that he is irresistibly determined much earlier and in a much more impressive way when overmastered by the elements or by his enemies? But further, such instances bring to light what Hume’s “determination” also implies, viz., its necessary correlative, effort or action. Even irresistible association can' only be known as such by efforts to resist it. Hume allows this when he says that his principles of association “are not infallible causes; for one may fix his attention during some time on any one object without looking farther” (op. cit., p. 393). But the fact is, we know both what it is to act and what it is to suffer, to go where we would and to be carried where we would not, quite apart from the workings of association. And, had Hume not confused the two different inquiries, that concerning the origin of the idea of causation and that concerning the ground of causal inference or law of causation, it could never have occurred to him to offer such an analysis of the former as he does.

Keeping to the former and simpler question, it would seem that when in ordinary thinking we say A causes this or that in B we project or analogically attribute to A what we experience in acting, and to B what we experience in being acted on; and the structure of language shows that such projection was made long before it was suspected that what A once did and B once suffered must happen in like manner again. The occasions suitable for this projection are determined by the temporal and spatial relations of the objects concerned, which relations are matter of intuition. These are of no very special interest from a psychological point of view, but the subjective elements we shall do well to consider further. First of all, we must note the distinction of immanent action and transitive action; the former is what we call action simply, and implies only a single thing, the agent; the latter, which we might with advantage call effectuation, implies two things, i.e., a patient distinct from the agent. In scientific language the agent in an intransitive act is called a cazιsa immanens and so distinguished from the agent in effectuation or causa transiens. Common thought, however, does not regard mere action as caused at all; and we shall find it, in fact, impossible to resolve action into effectuation. But, since the things with which we ordinarily deal are complex, have many parts, properties, members, phases, and in consequence of the analytic procedure of thought, there ensues, indeed, a continual shifting of the point of view from which we regard any given thing, so that what is in one aspect one thing, is in another many (comp. p. 56 c). So it comes about that, when regarding himself as one, the natural man speaks of himself as walking, shouting, &c.; but, when distinguishing between himself and his members, he speaks of raising his voice, moving his legs, and so forth. Thus no sooner do we resolve any given action into an effectuation, by analytically distinguishing within the original agent an agent and a patient, than a new action appears. Action is thus a simpler notion than causation and inexplicable by means of it. It is certainly no easy problem in philosophy to determine where the resolution of the complex is to cease, at what point we must stop, because in the presence of an individual thing and a simple activity. At any rate, we reach such a point psychologically in the conscious subject, and that energy in consciousness we call attention. If this be allowed, Hume’s critique of the notion of efficacy is really wide of the mark. “Some,” he says, “have asserted that we feel an energy or power in our own mind; and that, having in this manner acquired the idea of power, we transfer that quality to matter, where we are not able immediately to discover it . . . But to convince us how fallacious this reasoning is, we need only consider that the will, being here consider’d as a cause, has no more a discoverable connexion with its effects than any material cause has with its proper effect. . . . The effect is there [too] distinguishable and separable from the cause, and cou’d not be foreseen without the experience of their constant conjunction” (op. cit,,p. 455). This is logical analysis, not psychological; the point is that the will is not considered as a cause and distinguished from its effects, nor in fact considered at alL It is not a case of sequence between two separable impressions; for we cannot really make the indefinite regress that such logical distinctions as that between the conscious subject and its acts implies. Moreover, our activity as such is not directly presented at all: we are, being active; and further than this psychological analysis will not go. There are, as we have seen, two ways in which this activity is manifested, the receptive or passive and the motor or active in the stricter sense—(comp. p. 44) and our experience of these we project in predicating the causal relation. But two halves do not make a whole; so we have no complete experience of effectuation, for the simple reason that we cannot be two things at once. We are guided in piecing it together by the temporal and spatial relations of the things concerned. Hence, perhaps, some of the antinomies that beset this conception. In its earliest form, then, the so-called necessary connexion of cause and effect is perhaps nothing more than that of physical constraint. To this, no doubt, is added the strength of expectation—as Hume supposed—when the same effect has been found invariably to follow the same cause. Finally, when upon a basis of associated uniformities of sequence a definite intellectual elaboration of such material ensues, the logical necessity of reason and consequent finds a place, and so far as deduction is applicable cause and reason become interchangeable ideas.

The mention of logical necessity brings up a topic already incidentally noticed, viz., the objectivity of thought and cognition generally (comp. pp. 55,77). The psychological treatment of this topic is tantamount to an inquiry into the characteristics of the states of mind we call certainty, doubt, belief—all of which centre round the one fact of evidence. Between the certainty that a proposition is true and the certainty that it is not there may intervene continuous grades of uncertainty. We may know that A is sometimes B, or sometimes not; or that some at least of the conditions of B are present or absent ; or the presentation of A may be too confused for distinct analysis. This is the region of probability, possibility, more or less obscurity. Leaving this aside, it will be enough to notice those cases in which certainty may be complete. With that certainty which is absolutely objective, i.e., with knowledge, psychology has no direct concern; it is for logic to furnish the criteria by which knowledge is ascertained.

Emotion and desire are frequent indirect causes of subjective certainty, in so far as they determine the constituents and the grouping of the field of consciousness at the moment—“pack the jury” or “suborn the witnesses,” as it were. But the ground of certainty is in all cases some quality or some relation of these presentations inter se. In a sense, therefore, the ground of all certainty is objective—in the sense, that is, of being something at least directly and immediately determined for the subject and not by it. But, though objective, this ground is not itself—at least is not ultimately —an object or presentation. Where certainty is mediate, one judgment is often spoken of as the ground of another; but a syllogism is still psychologically a single, though not a simple, judgment, and the certainty of it as a whole is immediate. Between the judgment A is B and the question Is A B? the difference is not one of content nor scarcely one of form: it is a difference which depends upon the effect of the proposition on the subject judging, (i.) We have this effect before us most clearly if we consider what is by common consent regarded as the type of certainty and evidence, the certainty of present sense-impressions whence it is said, “Seeing is believing.” The evident is here the actual, and the ‘ ‘ feeling or consciousness” of certainty is in this case nothing but the sense of being taken fast hold of and forced to apprehend what is there, (ii. ) The like is true of memory and expectation: in these also there is a sense of being tied down to what is given, whereas in mere imagination, however lively, this non-voluntary determination is absent (comp, p. 63). Hume saw this at times clearly enough, as, e.g., when he says, “An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea that the fancy alone presents to us.” But unfortunately he not only made this difference a mere difference of intensity, but spoke of belief itself as “an operation of the mind” or “manner of conception that bestowed on our ideas this additional force or vivacity.” In short, Hume confounded one of the indirect causes of belief with the ground of it, and again, in describing this ground committed the υστeρov πp6τepov of making the mind determine the ideas instead of the ideas determine the mind, (iii.) In speaking of intellection he is clearer: “The answer is easy with regard to propositions that are prov’d by intuition or demonstration. In that case, the person who assents not only conceives the ideas according to the proposition, but is necessarily determin’d to conceive them in that particular manner” (op. cit. , p. 395). It has been often urged—as by J. S. Mill, for example—that belief is something “ultimate and primordial.” No doubt it is; but so is the distinction between activity and passivity, and it is not here maintained that certainty can be analysed into something simpler, but only that it is identical with what is of the nature of passivity—

objective determination. As Dr Bain puts it, “The leading fact in belief . . . is our primitive credulity. We begin by believing everything: whatever is is true” (Emotions and Will, 3d ed., p. 511). But the point is that in this primitive state there is no act answering to “believe” distinct from the non-voluntary attention answering to “perceive,” and no reflexion such as a modal term like “true” implies. With eyes open in the broad day no man says, “lam certain there is light”: he simply sees. He may by and by come absolutely to disbelieve much that he sees— e.g., that things are nearer when viewed through a telescope—just as he will come to disbelieve his dreams, though while they last he is certain in these too. The limits of this article forbid any attempt to deal specially with the intellectual aspects of such conflicts of presentations (comp. p. 62) or with their resolution and what is meant by saying that reason turns out superior to sense. The consistency we find it possible to establish among certain of our ideas becomes an ideal, to which we expect to find all our experience conform. Still the intuitive evidence of logical and mathematical axioms is psychologically but a new form of the actual; we are only certain that two and two make four and we are not less certain that we see things nearer through a telescope. Presentation of Self Self-Consciousness, and Conduct.

The conception of self we have just seen underlying and to a great extent shaping the rest of our intellectual furniture; on this account it is at once desirable and difficult to analyse it and ascertain the conditions of its development. In attempting this we must carefully distinguish between the bare presentation of self and that reference of other presentations to it which is often called specially self-consciousness, “inner sense,” or internal perception. Concerning all presentations whatever—that of self no less than the rest—it is possible to reflect, “This presentation is mine; it is my object; I am the subject attending to it.” Self, then, is one presentation among others, the result, like them, of the differentiation of the original continuum. But it is obvious that this presentation must be in existence first before other presentations can be related to it. On the other hand, it is only in and by means of such relations that the conception of self is completed. We begin, therefore, with self simply as an object, and end with the conception of that object as the subject or “myself” that knows itself. Self has, in contradistinction from all other presentations, first of all (a) a unique interest and (δ) a certain inwardness; (c) it is an individual that (<Z) persists, (e) is active, and finally (∕) knows itself. These several characteristics of self are intimately involved; so far as they appear at all they advance in definiteness from the lowest level of mere sentience to those moments of highest self-consciousness in which conscience approves or condemns volition.

The earliest and to the last the most important element in self— what we might perhaps term its root or material element—is that variously styled the organic sensations, vital sense, coenaesthesis, or somatic consciousness. This largely determines the tone of the special sensations and enters, though little suspected, into all our higher feelings. If, as sometimes happens in serious nervous affections, the whole body or any part of it should lose common sensibility, the whole body or that part is at once regarded as strange and even as hostile. In some forms of hypochondria, in λvhich this extreme somatic insensibility and absence of zest leave the intellect and memory unaffected, the individual doubts his own existence or denies it altogether. Ribot cites the case of such a patient who, declaring that he had been dead for two years, thus expressed his perplexity:—“J’existe, mais en dehors de la vie réelle, matérielle, et, malgré moi, rien ne m’ayant donné la mort. Tout est mécanique chez moi et se fait inconsciemment.” It is not because they accompany physiological functions essential to the efficiency of the organism as an organism, but simply because they are the most immediate and most constant sources of feeling, that these massive but ill-defined organic sensations are from the first the objects of the directest and most unreflecting interest. Other objects have at the outset but a mediate interest through subjective selection in relation to these, and never become so instinctively and inseparably identified with self, never have the same inwardness. This brings us to a new point. As soon as definite perception begins, the body as an extended thing is distinguished from other bodies, and such organic sensations as can be localized at all are localized within it. At the same time the actions of other bodies upon it are accompanied by pleasures and pains, while their action upon each other is not. The body also is the only thing directly set in motion by the reactions of these feelings, the purpose of such movements being to bring near to it the things for which there is appetite and to remove from it those towards which there is aversion. It is thus not merely the type of occupied space and the centre from which all positions are reckoned, but it affords us an unfailing and ever-present intuition of the actually felt and living self, to which all other things are external, more or less distant, and at times absent altogether. The body then first of all gives to self a certain measure of individuality, permanence, and inwardness.

But with the development of ideation there arises within this what we may call an inner zone of self, having still more unity and permanence. We have at this stage not only an intuition of the bodily self doing or suffering here and now, but also memories of what it has been and done under varied circumstances in the past. External impressions have by this time lost in novelty and become less absorbing, while the train of ideas, largely increased in number, distinctness, and mobility, diverts attention and often shuts out the things of sense altogether. In all such reminiscence or reverie a generic image of self is the centre, and every new image as it arises derives all its interest from relation to this; and so apart from bodily appetites new desires may be quickened and old emotions stirred again when all that is actually present is dull and unexciting. But desires and emotions, it must be remembered, though awakened by what is only imaginary, invariably entail actual organic perturbations, and with these the generic image of self comes to be intimately combined. Hence arises a contrast between the inner self, which the natural man locates in his breast or φρήν, the chief seat of these emotional disturbances, and the whole visible and tangible body besides. Although from their nature they do not admit of much ideal representation, yet, when actually present, these organic sensations exert a powerful and often irresistible influence over other ideas; they have each their appropriate train, and so heighten in the very complex and loosely compacted idea of self those traits they originally wrought into it, suppressing to an equal extent all the rest. Normally there is a certain equilibrium to which they return, and which, we may suppose, determines the so-called temperament, naturel, or disposition, thus securing some tolerable uniformity and continuity in the presentation of self. But even within the limits of sanity great and sudden changes of mood are possible, as, e.g., in hysterical persons or those of a “mercurial temperament,” or among the lower animals at the onset of parental or migratory instincts. Beyond those limits—as the concomitant apparently of serious visceral derangements or the altered nutrition of parts of the nervous system itself—complete “alienation” may ensue. A new self may arise, not only distinct from the old and devoid of all save the most elementary knowledge and skill that the old possessed, but diametrically opposed to it in tastes and disposition,—obscenity, it may be, taking the place of modesty and cupidity or cowardice succeeding to generosity or courage. The most convincing illustrations of the psychological growth and structure of the presentation of self on the lower levels of sensation and ideation are furnished by these melancholy spectacles of minds diseased; but it is impossible to refer to them in detail here.

Passing to the higher level of intellection, we come at length upon the concept which every intelligent being more or less distinctly forms of himself as a person, Μ. or N., having such and such a character, tastes, and convictions, such and such a history, and such and such an aim in life. The main instrument in the formation of this concept, as of others, is language, and especially the social intercourse that language makes possible. Up to this point the presentation of self has shaped that of nôt-self,—that is to say, external things have been comprehended by the projection of its characteristics. But now the order is in a sense reversed: the individual advances to a fuller self-knowledge by comparing the self within with what is first discernible in other persons without So far avant l'homme est la société ; it is through the “us” that we learn of the “me” (comp. p. 75 note 1). Collective action for common ends is of the essence of society, and in taking counsel together for the good of his tribe each one learns also to take counsel with himself for his own good on the whole; with the idea of the common weal arises the idea of happiness as distinct from momentary gratification. The extra-regarding impulses are now confronted by a reasonable self-love, and in the deliberations that thus ensue activity attains to its highest forms, those of thought and volition. In the first we have a distinctly active manipulation of ideas as compared with the more passive spectacle of memory and imagination. Thereby emerges a contrast between the thinker and these objects of his thought, including among them the mere generic image of self, from which is now formed this conception of self as a person. A similar, even sharper, contrast also accompanies the exercise of what is very misleadingly termed “self-control,” i.e., control by this personal self of “the various natural affections,” to use Butler’s phrase, which often hinder it as external objects hindered them. It is doubtful whether the reasoning, regulating self is commonly regarded as definitely localized. The effort of thinking and concentrating attention upon ideas is no doubt referred to the brain, but this is only comparable with the localization of other efforts in the limbs; when we think we commonly feel also, and the emotional basis is of all the most subjective and inalienable. If we speak of this latest phase of self as par excellence “the inner self” such language is then mainly figurative, inasmuch as the contrasts just described are contrasts into which spatial relations do not enter.

The term “reflexion” or internal perception is applied to that state of mind in which some particular presentation or group of presentations (ic or y) is not simply in the field of consciousness but there as consciously related to self, which is also presented at the same time. Self here may be symbolized by Μ, to emphasize the fact that it is in like manner an object in the field of consciousness. The relation of the two is commonly expressed by saying, “This (x or y) is my (M’s) percept, idea, or volition; I (Μ) it is that perceive, think, will it.” Self-consciousness, in the narrowest sense, as when we say, “I know myself, I am conscious that I am,” &c., is but a special, though the most important, instance of this internal perception: here self (Μ) is presented in relation to self (with a difference, M'); the subject itself—at least so we say—is or appears as its own object.

It has been often maintained that the difference between consciousness and reflexion is not a real difference, that to know and to know that you know are “the same thing considered in different aspects.” But different aspects of tae same thing are not the same thing, for psychology at least. Not only is it not the same thing to feel and to know that you feel; but it might even be held to be a different thing still to know that you feel and to know that you know that you feel,—such being the difference perhaps between ordinary reflexion and psychological introspection. ® The difficulty of apprehending these facts and keeping them distinct seems obviously due to the necessary presence of the earlier along with the later; that is to say, we can never know that we feel without feeling. But the converse need not be true. How distinct the two states are is shown in one way by their notorious incompatibility, the direct consequence of the limitation of attention: whatever we have to do that is not altogether mechanical is ill done unless we lose ourselves in the doing of it. This mutual exclusiveness receives a further explanation from the fact so often used to discredit psychology, viz., that the so-called introspection and indeed all reflexion are really retrospective. It is not while we are angry or lost in reverie that we take note of such states, but afterwards, or by momentary side glances intercepting the main interest, if this be not too absorbing.

But we require an exacter analysis of the essential fact in this retrospect—the relation of the presentation x or y to that of self or Μ. What we have to deal with, it will be observed, is, implicitly at least, a judgment. First of all, then, it is noteworthy that we are never prompted to such judgments by every-day occurrences or acts of routine, but only by matters of interest, and, as said, generally when these are over or have ceased to be all-engrossing. Now in such cases it will be found that some effect of the preceding state of objective absorption persists, like wounds received in battle unnoticed till the fight is over,—such, e.g., as the weariness of muscular exertion or of long concentration of attention; some pleasurable or painful after-sensation passively experienced, or an emotional wave subsiding but not yet spent; ‘ ‘ the jar of interrupted expectation,” or the relief of sudden attainment after arduous striving, making prominent the contrast of contentment and want in that particular; or, finally, the quiet retrospect and mental rumination in which we note what time has wrought upon us and either regret or approve what we were and did. All such presentations are of the class out of which, as we have seen, the presentation of self is built up, and so form in each case the concrete bond connecting the generic image of self with its object. In this way and in this respect each is a concrete instance of what we call a state, act, affection, &c., and the judgments in which such relations to the standing presentation of self are recognized are the original and the type of all real predications (comp. p. 81). The opportunities for reflexion are at first few, the materials being as it were thrust upon attention, and the resulting “percepts” are but vague. By the time, however, that a clear conception of self has been attained the exigencies of life make it a frequent object of contemplation, and as the abstract of a series of instances of such definite self-consciousness we reach the purely formal notion of a subject or pure ego. For empirical psychology this notion is ultimate; its speculative treatment falls altogether—usually under the heading “rational psychology”—to metaphysics.

The growth of intellection and self-consciousness reacts powerfully upon the emotional and active side of mind. To describe the various sources of feeling and of desire that thus arise—aesthetic, social and religious sentiments, pride, ambition, selfishness, sympathy, &c.—is beyond the scope of systematic psychology and certainly quite beyond the limits of an article like the present. But at least a general résumé of the characteristics of activity on this highest or rational level is indispensable. If we are to gain any oversight in a matter of such complexity it is of the first importance to keep steadily in view, as a fundamental principle, that as the causes of feeling become more complex, internal, and representative the consequent actions change in like manner. We have noted this connexion already in the case of the emergence of desires, and seen that desire in prompting to the search for means to its end is the primum movens of intellection (pp. 73-75). But intellect does much more than devise and contrive in unquestioning subservience to the impulse of the moment, like some demon of Eastern fable; even the brutes, whose cunning is on the whole of this sort, are not without traces of self-control. As motives conflict and the evils of hasty action recur to mind, deliberation succeeds to mere invention and design. In moments of leisure, the more imperious cravings being stilled, besides the rehearsal of failures or successes in the past, come longer and longer flights of imagination into the future. Both furnish material for intellectual rumination, and so we have at length (1) conceptions of general and distant ends, as wealth, power, knowledge, and—self-consciousness having arisen— the conception also of the happiness or perfection of self, and (2) maxims or practical generalizations as to the best means to these ends. Instead of actions determined by the vis a tergo of blind passion we have conduct shaped by what is literally prudence or foresight, the pursuit of ends that are not esteemed desirable till they are judged to be good. The good, it is truly urged, is not to be identified with the pleasant, for the one implies a standard and a judgment and the other nothing but a bare fact of feeling; thus the good is often not pleasant and the pleasant not good; in talking of the good, in short, we are passing out of the region of nature into that of character. It is so, and yet this progress is itself so far natural as to admit of psychological explication. As already urged (p. 72), the causes of feeling change as the constituents of consciousness change and depend more upon the form of that consciousness as that increases in complexity. When we can deliberately range to and fro in time and circumstances, the good that is not directly pleasant may indeed be preferred to what is only pleasant while attention is confined to the seen and sensible; but then the choice of such good is itself pleasant, —pleasanter than its rejection would have been. Freedom of will in the sense of absolute arbitrariness or “causeless volition,” then, is at least without support from experience. The immediate affirmation of self-consciousness that in the moment of action we are free must be admitted indeed, but it does not prove what it is supposed to prove—the existence of a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae — but only that the relation of the end approved to the empirical self as then presented was the determining motive. This freedom of this empirical self is in all cases a relative freedom; hence at a later time we often come to see that in some past act of choice we were not our true selves, not really free. Or perhaps we hold that we were free and could have acted otherwise; and this also is true if we suppose the place of the purely formal and abstract conception of self had been occupied by some other mood of that empirical self which is continuously, but at no one moment completely, presented. It must, however, be admitted that psychological analysis in such cases is not only actually incomplete but in one respect must necessarily always remain so; and that for the simple reason that all we discern by reflexion must ever be less than all we are. That empirical self that the subject sees and even fashions is after all only its object and workmanship, not itself. If this be so, the indeterminist position, that particular acts are not fully determined by aught in consciousness, can neither be certainly established nor finally overthrown on scientific grounds; but the presumption is against it. In another sense, however, it may be allowed that freedom is possible, if not actual, viz., as synonymous with self-rule or autonomy. Freedom applies not to the ultimate source of an activity but to execution; that man is free “externally” who can do what he pleases, and when we talk of internal freedom the same meaning holds. Bibliography. —A. Historical.— There are few good works on the history of psychology; the only one in English (R. Blakey, History of the Philosophy of Mind from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, London, 1848) is said to be worthless. F. A. Carus’s Geschichte der Psychologie (Leipsic, 1808) is at least useful for reference. A work bearing the same title by H. Siebeck, of which only the first part has yet appeared (consisting of two divisions—(i.) Die Psychologie von Aristoteles, (ii.) Die Psychologie von Aristoteles bis zu Thomas von Aquino, Gotha, 1880 and 1884) is thoroughly and carefully done. Die Philosophie in ihrer Geschichte {I. Psychologie'), by the late Professor Harms (Berlin, 1878), is also good. Ribot’s La Psychologic Anglaise contemporaine (2d ed., Paris, 1875) and La Psychologie Allemande contemporaine (Paris, 1879) are lucid and concise in style, though the latter work in places is superficial and inaccurate.

B. Positive,— The most useful and complete work as an introduction, and for the English reader, is Mr Sully’s well-arranged and well-written Outlines of Psychology (2d ed., London, 1885). Of more advanced text-books the late Professor Volkmann’s Lehrbuch der Psychologie (2 vols., 3d ed., Köthen, 1885, edited by Cornelius) is a monument worthy the lifelong labours it entailed. Written in the main from a Herbartian standpoint, it is still the work of one who not only had read and thought over all that was worth reading by psychologists of every school but was unusually gifted with the qualities that make a good investigator and a good expositor. The importance of the Herbartian psychology to English students has been too long overlooked; while it has much in common with the English preference for empirical methods, it is in aim, if not in attainment, greatly in advance of English writers in exactness and system. Other excellent works of the same school are Μ. W. H. Drobisch’s Empirische Psychologie (Leipsic, 1842), T. Waitz’s Lehrbuch der Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft (Brunswick, 1849), and Steinthal’s Einleitung in die Psychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Berlin, 1871). To the honoured name of Lotze belongs a distinguished place in any enumeration of recent productions in philosophy; his Medizinische Psychologie (Göttingen, 1852) is still valuable; but it is out of print and scarce. A large part of his Mikrokosmos (3 vols., 3d ed., 1876-80; translated into English, 2 vols., 1885) and one book of his Metaphysik (2d ed., 1884; also translated into English) are, however, devoted to psychology. The close connexion between the study of mind and the study of the organism has been more and more recognized as the present century has advanced, and the doctrine of evolution in particular has been as fruitful in this study as in other sciences that deal with life. In this respect Mr Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology (2 vols., 2d ed., 1870) and Data of Ethics (1879) occupy a foremost place. Dr Bain’s standard volumes, The Senses and the Intellect (3d ed., 1873) and The Emotions and the Will (3d ed., 1875), contain a good deal of “physiological psychology,” but no adequate recognition of the importance of the modern theory of development; still, with the exception of Locke, perhaps no English writer has made equally important contributions to the science of mind. It is very questionable whether the time has yet come for a systematic treatment of the connexions of mind and body. Wundt’s Physiologische Psychologie (2 vols., 2d ed., 1880) is rather a physiology added to a psychology than an attempt at such a systematic treatment. It is, however, a thoroughly able work by one who is both a good psychologist and a good physiologist. (J. W *. )