THE Principles 



OF 



PSYCHOLOGY 



BY 



WILLIAM JAMES 

TBOFBBSOR OF P8TCHOLOGT IN'HARYABD UNiyERfilTT 





CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

Sensation, 1 

Its distinction from perception, 1. Its cognitive function— 
acquaintance with qualities, 8. No pure sensations after ttie first 
days of life, 7. The * relativity of knowledge,' 9. The law of 
contrast, 18. The psychological and the physiological theories 
of it, 17. Bering's experiments, 20. The * eccentric projection ' 
of sensations, 81. 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

Imagination, 44 

Our images are usually vague. 45. Vague images not neces- 
sarily general notions, 48. Individuals differ in imagination; 
Galton's researches, 50 The 'visile* tjrpe, 68. The 'audile' 
type, 60. The ' motile ' type, 61. Tactile images. 65. The neural 
process of imagination, 68. Its relations to that of sensation, 72. 

CHAPTER XIX. 

The Perception OF 'Things/ . -n- . . . 76 

Perception and sensation. 76. Perception is of definite and 
probable things, 82. Illusiona. 85 ;— of the first type, 86 ;— of 
the second type, 95. The neural process in perception, 108. 
'Apperception,' 107. Is perception an unconscious inference? 
111. Hallucinations, 114. The neural process in hallucination, 
122. Binet's theory, 129. * Perception -time,' 181. 

CHAPTER XX. 
The Perception of Space, 134 

The feeling of crude extensity, 134. Tiie perception of spatial 
order, 145. Space-' relations,' 148. The nienning of lo(;AlizHtion, 
158. 'Local signs.' 155. The construction of ' real ' 8i)ace, 166. 
The subdivision of the original sense-spaces, 167. The sensation 

iU 



IV CONTENTS, 

PAOB 

of motion over surfaces, 171. The measurement of the sense- 
spaces by each other, 177. Their summation, 181. Feelings of 
movement in joints, 189. Feelings of muscular contraction, 197. 
Summary so far, 202. How the blind perceive space, 203. 
Visual space, 211. Uelmholtz and Reid on the test of a sensation, 
216. The theory of identical points, 222. The theory of projection, 
22b. Ambiguity of retinal impressions, 231 ; — of eye- movements, 
284 The choice of the visual reality, 237. Sensations which 
we ignore, 240. Sensations which seem suppressed, 243. Dis- 
cussion of Wundt's and Helmholtz's reasons for denying that 
retinal sensations are of extension, 248. Summary, 268. His- 
torical remarks, 270. 

CHAPTER XXI. 

The Perception of Reality, 283 

Belief and its opposites, 283. The v arious orders of reality, 
287. * Practical' realities, 293. The sense of our own bodily 
existen^:^ the nucleus of all reality, 297. The paramount reality 
of sensations, 299. The influence of emotion and active impulse 
on belief, 307. Belief in theories, 311. Doubt, 318. Relations 
of belief and will, 320. 

CHAPTER XXII. 

Reasoning, 323 

' Recepts,' 327. In reasoning, we pick out essential qualities, 
329. What is meant by a mode of conceiving, 332. What is 
involved in the existence of general proposition8| 337. The two 
factore jif reasoning, 340. Sagacity, 343. The part played by 
association by similarity. 845. The intellectual contrast between 
brute and man : association by similarity the fundamental human 
distinction, 348. Different orders of human genius, 360. 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

The Production of Movement, 373 

The diffusive wave, 373. Every sensation produces reflex 
effects on the whole organism, 874. 

CHAPTER XXIV. 
Instinct, . 383 

Its definition. 383 Instincts not always blind or invariable. 
389. Two principles of non -uniformity in instincts: 1) Their 
inhibition by habits, 394 ; 2) Their transitoriness, 398. Man has 



CONTENTS. 



more InstiDcts than any other mammal, 408. Reflex impulses, 
404.^mitation, 408. Emulation, 409. Pugnacity, 409. Sym- 
patl^ 410. The hunting in9tinct, 411. Fear, 415. Acquisitive- 
ne», 422. Constructiveness, 426. Play, 427. Curiosity, 429. 
Sociability and shyness, 480. Secretiveness, 482. Cleanliness, 
484. Shame, 485. Love, 487. Maternal love, 489. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

The Emotions, 442 

Instinctive .xfiaction and emotional expression shade imper- 
ceptibly into each other, 442. The expression of grief, 448 ; of 
fear, 446 ; of hatred, 449. Emotion J8 a consequence, not the 
cause, of the bodily expression, 449. Difficulty of testing this 
view, 454. Olijections to it discussed, 456. The subtler emotions, 
468. No special brain-centres for emotion, 472. Emotional dif- 
ferences between individuals, 474. The genesis of the various 
emotions, 477. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 
Will, 486 

Voluntary movements : they presuppose a memory of invol- 
untary movements. 487. Kinsesthetic impressions, 488. No need 
to assume feelings of innervation, 503. The * mental cue ' for a 
movement may be an image of its visual or auditory effects as 
well as an image of the way it feels, 518. Ideo motor action, 522. 
Action after deliberation, 528. Five types of decision, 531. The 
feeling of effort, 535. Unheal thiness of will: 1) The ex- 
plosive type. 537 ; 2) The obstructed type, 546. Pleasure and 
pain are not the only springs of action, 549. All consciousness is 
impulsive, 551. What wo will depends on what idea dominates 
in our mind, 559. The idea's outward elTecls follow from the 
cerebral machinery, 560. Effort of intention to a naturally 
repugnant idea is the essential foalure of willing, 562. The 
free-will controversy. 571. P.sychology, as ii science, ran safely 
postulate delerniinism, even if free-will be true, 076. The edu- 
cation of the Will, 579. Hypothetical brain-schemes, 582. 



CHAPTER XXVII. ' - 

Hypnotism, 594-616 

Modes of operating and susceptibility, 594. Theories about 
the hypnotic state, 596. The symptoms of the trance, 601. 



Tl 00NTENT8. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

PAGK 

Neobssaby Tbuths and the Effects of Experience, . 617 

Programme of the chapter, 617. Elementary feelings are 
innate, 618. The question refers to their combinations, 619. 
What is meant by 'experience/ 620. Spencer on ancestral ex- 
perience, 620. Two ways in which new cerebral structure arises : 
the * back-door ' and the * front-door * way, 625. The genesis of 
the elementary mental categories, 681. The genesis of the 
natural sciences, 688. Scientific conceptions arise as accidental 
variations, 686. The genesis of the pure sciences, 641. Series of 
evenly increasing terms, 644. The principle of mediate compari- 
son, 645. That of skipped intermediaries, 646. Classification, 
646. Predication, 647. Formal logic, 648. Mathematical 
propositions, 652. Arithmetic, 658. Geometry, 656. Our doc- 
trine is the same as Locke's, 661. Relations of ideas v. couplings 
of things. 668. The natural sciences are inward ideal schemes 
with which the order of nature proves congruent, 666. Meta- 
physical principles are properly only postulates, 669. JSsthetic 
and moral principles are quite incongruent with the order of 
nature, 672. Summary of what precedes, 675. The origin of 
instincts, 678. Insufficiency of proof for the transmission to the 
next generation of acquired habits, 681. Weismann's views, 688. 
Conclusion, 688. 



PSYCHOLOGY. 



CHAPTEB XVn. 

SENSATION. 

Afteb inner perception, outer perception I The next 
three chapters will treat of the processes by which we cog- 
nize at all times the present world of space and the mate- 
rial things which it contains. And first, of the process 
called Sensation. 

SIQS'SATION AND TJSSBXJBSPTIOJSI DISTINGTJISHBD. 

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

Sensation, then, so long as ice take the ancdylic point of 



2 PBTGHOLOGT. 

vieWf differs from Perception only in the extreme simplicity of its 
object or content* Its function is that of mere acquaintance 
with a fact. Perception's function, on the other hand, is 
knowledge abovt f a fact ; and this knowledge admits of 
numberless degrees of complication. But in both sensa- 
tion and perception we perceive the fact as an immediately 
present outioard reality ^ and this makes them diflfer from 
* thought ' and * conception,' whose objects do not appear 
present in this immediate physical way. From the physio^ 

* Some persons will say that we never have a really simple object or 
content. My definition of sensation does not require the simplicity to be 
absolutely, but only relatively, extreme. It is worth while in passing, 
however, to warn the reader against a couple of inferences that are often 
made. One is that because we gradually learn to analyze so many quali- 
ties we ought to conclude that there are no really indecomposable feelings 
in the mind. The other is that because the processes that produce our sen- 
sations are multiple, the sensations regarded as subjective facts must also 
be compound. To take an example, to a child the taste of lemonade comes 
at first as a simple quality. He later learns both that many stimuli and 
many nerves are involved in the exhibition of this taste to his mind, and 
he also learns to perceive se^ftirately the sourness, the coolness, the sweet, 
the lemon aroma, etc. , and the several degrees of strength of each and all 
of these things, — ^the experience falling into a large number of aspects, 
each of which is abstracted, classed, named, etc., and all of which appear 
to be the elementary sensations into which the original ' lemonade flavor ' 
is decomposed. It is argued from this that the latter never was tne simple 
thing which it seemed. I have already criticised this sort of reasoning 
in Chapter YI (see pp. 170 ff.). The mind of the child enjoying the simple 
lemonade flavor and that of the same child grown up and analyzing it are 
in two entirely different conditions. Subjectively considered, the two 
states of mind are two altogether distinct sorts of fact. The later mental 
state says ^ this is the same fla^xyr {or fluid) which that earlier state per- 
ceived as simple/ but that does not make the two states themselves identical. 
It is nothing but a case of learning more and more about the same topics 
of discourse or things.— Many of these topics, however, must be confessed 
to resist all analysis, the various colors for example. He who sees blue and 
yellow * in ' a certain green means merely that when green is oonfrouted 
with these other colors he sees relations of similarity. He who sees abstract 
' color ' in it means merely that he sees a similarity between it and all the 
other objects known as colors. (Similarity itself cannot ultimately be ac- 
counted for by an identical abstract element buried in all the similars, as 
has been already shown, p. 492 ff.) He who sees abstract paleness, inten- 
sity, purity, in the green mean's other similarities still. These are all out- 
ward determinations of that special green, knowledges a6(W^ it, zufdUige An-^ 
sichten, as Herbart would say. not elements of its composition. Compare 
the article by Meinong in the Yierteljahrachrif t f Or wiss. Phil. . xu. 324. 

t See above, p. 221. 



SENSATION. 3 

logical point of view both sensations and perceptions differ from 
* thoughts ' (in the narrower sense of the word) in the fact that 
nerve-currents coming in from the periphery are involved in their 
prodvction. In perception these nerve-currents arouse vdumi- 
nous associative or reproductive processes in the cortex; but when 
sensation occurs alone, or with a minimum of perception, the ac- 
companying reproductive processes are at a minimum too. 

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

THE COGNinVlS VJTNCTION OF SUNSATION. 

A pure sensation is an abstraction; and when we adults 
talk of our * sensations ' we mean one of two things : either 
certain objects, namely simple qualities or attributes like 
hard, hot, pain; or else those of our thoughts in which 
acquaintance with these objects is least combined with 
knowledge about the relations of them to other things. As 
we can only think or talk about the relations of objects 
with which we have acquaintance already, we are forced to 
postulate a function in our thought whereby we first become 
aware of the bare immediate natures by which our several 
objects are distinguished. This function is sensation. 
And just as logicians always point out the distinction 
between substantive terms of discourse and relations found 
to obtain between them, so psychologists, as a rule, are 
ready to admit this function, of the vision of the terms or 
matters meant, as something distinct from the knowledge 
about them and of their relations inter se. Thought with 
the former function is sensational, with the latter, intellec- 
tuaL Our earliest thoughts are almost exclusively sensa- 
tionaL They merely give us a set of thuts, or its, of subjects 

* Those who wish a fuller treatment than Martin's Human Body affords 
may be recommended to Bernstein's ' Five Senses of Man/ in the Interna- 
tional Scientific Series, or to Ladd's or Wundt's Physiological Psychology. 
Hie completeat compendium is L. Hermann's Handbuch der Physiologies 
fol. ra. 



4 PaTCHOLOQT, 

of discourse, with their relations not brought out The first 
time we see lighty in Condillac's phrase we are it rather 
rather than see it But all our later optical knowledge is 
about what this experience gives. And though we were 
struck blind from that first moment, our scholarship in the 
subject would lack no essential feature so long as our mem- 
ory remained. In training-institutions for the blind they 
teach the pupils as much about light as in ordinary schools 
Beflection, refraction, the spectrum, the ether-theory, etc., 
are all studied. But the best taught born-blind pupil of 
such an establishment yet lacks a knowledge which the 
least instructed seeing baby has. They can never show him 
what light is in its * first intention ' ; and the loss of that 
sensible knowledge no book-learning can replace. All this 
is so obvious that we usually find sensation * postulated ' 
as an element of experience, even by those philosophers who 
are least inclined to make much of its importance, or to 
pay respect to the knowledge which it brings.* 



♦ ** The sensations which ^e postulate as the signs or occasions of our 
perceptions" (A. Seth: Scottish Philosophy, p. 89). "Their existence is 
mippased only because, without them, it would be impossible to account 
for the complex phenomena which are directly present in consciousness " 
(J. Dewey: Psychology, p. 84). Even as great an enemy of Sensation as 
T. H. Green has to allow it a sort of hypothetical existence under protest. 
*• Perception presupposes feeling " (Coutemp. Review, vol. xxxi. p. 747). 
Cf. also such passages as those in his Prolegomena to Ethics, §§ 48, 49. — 
Physiologically, the sensory and the reproductive or associative processes 
may wax and wane independently of each other. Where the part directly 
due to stimulation of the sense-organ preponderates, the thought has a 
sensational character, and differs from other thoughts in the sensational 
direction. Those thoughts which lie farthest in that direction we call sen- 
sations, for practical convenience, just as we call conceptiom those which 
lie nearer the opposite extreme. But we no more have conceptions pure 
than we have pure sensations. Our most rarefied intellectual states involve 
some bodily sensibility, just as our dullest feelings have some intellectual 
scope. Common -sense and common psychology express this by sjiyiug 
that the mental state is com|)osed of distinct fractional parts, one of which 
is sensation, the other conception. We, however, who believe ^very 
mental state to be an integral thing (p. 276) cannot talk thus, but must 
speak of the degree of sensational or intellectual character, or function, oL 
the mental state. Professor Hering puts, as usual, his finger better upon 
the truth than anyone else. Writing of visual perception, he says: ''It 
is inadmissible in the present state of our knowledge to assert that first 
and last the same retinal picture arouses exactly the sam^ pure sensation. 



SENSATION. 5 

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

Take the pain called toothache for example. Again 
and again we feel it and greet it as the same real item in 
the universe. We must therefore, it is supposed, have a 
distinct pocket for it in our mind into which it and nothing 
else will fit This pocket, when filled, is the sensation of 
toothache ; and must be either filled or half-filled whenever 
and under whatever form toothache is present to our 
thought, and whether much or little of the rest of the 
mind be filled at the same time. Thereupon of course 
comes up the paradox and mystery : If the knowledge of 
toothache be pent up in this separate mental pocket, how 
can it be known cum alio or brought into one view with 
anything else ? This pocket knows nothing else ; no other 
part of the mind knows toothache. The knowing of tooth- 
ache cum alio must be a miracle. And the miracle must 
have an Agent And the Agent must be a Subject or Ego 
* out of time,' — and all the rest of it, as we saw in Chapter 
X. And then begins the well-worn round of recrimination 
between the sensationalists and the spiritualists, from which 
we are saved by our determination from the outset to accept 
the psychological point of view, and to admit knowledge 
whether of simple toothaches or of philosophic systems as 
an ultimate fact. There are realities and there are • states 
of mind,' and the latter know the former ; and it is just as 
wonderful for a state of mind to be a * sensation ' and know 
a simple pain as for it to be a thought and know a system 



but that this sensation, in consequence of practice and experience, is differ- 
ently interpreted the last time, and elaborated into a different perception 
from the first. For the only real daUi are, on the one hand, the physical 
picture on the retina, — and that is both times the same: and, on the other 
band, the resultant state of consciousness {ausgeloste Ernpfindungscamplex) 
— and that is both times distinct. Of any third thing, namely, a pure sen- 
sation thrust between the retinal and the mental pictures, we know nothing. 
We can then, if we wish to avoid all hypothesis, only say that the nervous appa- 
ratus reacts upon the same stimulus differently the last time from the first, and 
that in consequence the consciousness is different too. " (Hermann's Hdbcb., 
ni. I. 567-8.) 



6 PBTCHOLOQT. 

of related things.* But there is no reason to suppose that 
when different states of mind know different things about 
the same toothache, they do so by virtue of their all con- 
taining faintly or vividly the original pain. Quite the re- 
verse. The by-gone sensation of my gout was painful, as 
Beid somewhere says ; the tJiovght of the same gout as by- 
gone is pleasant, and in no respect resembles the earlier 
mental state. 

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

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

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

**It is not in the power of the most exalted wit or enlarged under- 
standing, by any quickness or variety of thoughts, to invent or frame 

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

t By simple ideas of sensation Locke merely means sensations. 

^ Essay c. H. U.. bk. n. ch. xxiii. § 29 ; ch. xxv. § 9. 



8EN8ATI0K 7 

one new simple idea [i.e. sensation] in the mind. ... I would have 
any one try to fancy any taste which had never affected his palate, or 
frame the idea of a scent he had never smelt ; and when he can do this, 
I will also conclude that a blind man hath ideas of colors, and a deaf 
man true distinct notions of sounds. ^^ * 

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

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

Pure sensations can only he realized in the earliest days of life. 
They are all but impossible to adults with memories and 
stores of associations acquired. Prior to all impressions 
on sense-organs the brain is plunged in deep sleep and con- 
sciousness is practically non-existent. Even the first weeks 

♦ Op, cii. bk. II. ch. ii. § 2. 



8 P8T0H0L0QT. 

after birth are passed in almost unbroken sleep bj human 
infants. It takes a strong message from the sense-organs to 
break this slumber. In a new-bom brain this gives rise to 
an absolutely pure sensation. But the experience leaves 
its ' unimaginable touch ' on the matter of the convolutions, 
and the next impression which a sense-organ transmits 
produces a cerebral reaction in which the awakened vestige 
of the last impression plays its part. Another sort of feel- 
ing and a higher grade of cognition are the consequence ; 
and the complication goes on increasing tiU the end of life, 
no two successive impressions falling on r^ identical brain, 
and no two successive thoughts being exactly the same. 
(See above, p. 230 ff.) 

The first sensation which an infant gets is for him the Uni- 
verse. And the Universe which he later comes to know is 
nothing but an amplification and an implication of that first 
simple germ which, by accretion on the one hand and in- 
tussusception on the other, has grown so big and complex 
and articulate that its first estate is unrememberable. In 
his dumb awakening to the consciousness of something there, 
a mere this as yet (or something for which even the term 
this would perhaps be too discriminative, and the intellec- 
tual acknowledgment of which would be better expressed 
by the bare interjection ' lo ! '), the infant encounters an ob- 
ject in which (though it be given in a pure sensation) all 
the ' categories of the understanding' are contained. It has 
objectivity y unity, svbstantiolUy, causality y in the fuU sense in 
which any later object or system of objects Jias these things. 
Here the young knower meets and greets his world ; and 
the miracle of knowledge bursts forth, as Voltaire says, as 
much in the infant's lowest sensation as in the highest 
achievemeDt of a Newton's brain. The physiological con- 
dition of this first sensible experience is probably nerve- 
currents coming in from many peripheral organs at once. 
Later, the one confused Fact which these currents cause to 
appear is perceived to be many facts, and to contain many 
qualities.* For as the currents vary, and the brain-paths 

* *• So far is it from being true that we necessarily have as many feel- 
ings in consciousness at one time as there are inlets to the sense then played 
upon, that it is a fundamental law of pure sensation that each momentary 



SENSATION. 9 

Are moulded by them, other thoughts with other ' objects ' 
<M>me, and the ' same thing ' which was apprehended as a 
present this soon figures as a past thaty about which many 
unsuspected things have come to light. The principles of 
this development have been laid down already in Chapters 
Xn and XIII, and nothing more need here be added to 
that account 

"THE BEIiATIVITY OF KNOWUBDGB." 

To the reader who is tired of so much Erkenrdnisstheoric 
I can only say that I am so myself, but that it is indispen- 
sable, in the actual state of opinions about Sensation, to try 
to clear up just what the word means. Locke's pupils seek 
to do the impossible with sensations, and against them we 
must once again insist that sensations ' clustered together ' 
<;annot build up our more intellectual states of mind. 
Plato's earlier pupils used to admit Sensation's existence, 
grudgingly, but they trampled it in the dust as something 
corporeal, non-cognitive, and vile.* His latest followers 

«tate of the organism yields but one feeling, however numerous may be its 
parts and its exposures. ... To this original Unity of consciousness it makes 
no difference that the tributaries to the siugle feeling are beyond the organ, 
ism instead of within it, in an outside object with several sensible proper- 
ties, instead of in the living body with its several sensitive functions. . . . 
The unity therefore is not made by ' association ' of several components; 
but the plurality is formed by dissociation of unsuspected varieties within 
the unity ; the substantive thing being no product of synthesis, but the 
residuum of differentiation." (J. Martineau : A Study of Religion (1888), 
p. 192-4.) Compare also F. H. Bradley, Logic, book i. chap. ii. 

* Such passages as the following abound in an ti -sensationalist literature: 
*• Sense is a kind of dull, confused, and stupid perception obtruded upon 
the soul from without, whereby it perceives the alterations and motions 
within its own body, and takes cognizance of individual bodies existing 
round about it, but does not clearly comprehend what they are nor pene- 
tmte into the nature of them, it bcinj^ intended by nature, as Plotinus speaks, 
iioi so properly for knowledge as for the use of the body. For the soul suf- 
fering under that which it perceives by way of passion cannot master or 
Conquer it, that is to say, know or understand it. For so Anaxagoras in Aris- 
taile very fitly expresses the nature of knowledge and intellection under 
ilie notion of Conquering. Wherefore it is necessary, since the mind under- 
stands all things, that it should be free from mixture and passion, for this 
end, as Anaxagoras speaks, that it may be able to master and conquer its 
objects, that is to say, to know and understand them. In like manner Plo- 
tinus, in his book of Sense and Memory, makes to suffer and to be conquered 
all one, as also to know and to conquer; for which reason he concludes thai 



10 PSTCHOLOQT, 

seem to seek to crowd it out of existence altogether. The 
only reals for the neo-Hegelian writers appear to be rda-- 
tumsj relations without terms, or whose terms are only 
speciously such and really consist in knots, or gnarls of 
relations finer still in infinitum. 

** Exclude from what we have considered real all qualities consti- 
tuted by relation, we find that none are left." *' Abstract the many 
relations from the one thing and there is nothing. . . . Without the 
relations it would not exist at all." * **The single feeling is nothing 



that which suffers doth not know. . . . Sense that suffers from external 
objects lies as it were prostrate under them, and is overcome by them. 
. . . Sense therefore is a certain kind of drowsy and somnolent percep- 
tion of that passive part of the soul which is as it were asleep in the body, 
and acts concretely with it. . . . It is an energy arising from the body and 
a certain kind of drowsy or sleeping life of the soul blended together 
with it. The perceptions of which compound, or of the soul as it were half 
asleep and half awake, are confused, indistinct, turbid, and encumbered 
cogitations very different from the energies of the noetical part, . . . which 
are free, clear, serene, satisfactory, and awakened cogitations. That isto* 
say, knowledges." Etc., etc., etc. (R. Cudworth: Treatise concerning 
Eternal and Immutable Morality, bk iii. chap, ii.) Similarly Male- 
branche: ' * ThIjodork. — Oh, oh, Ariste! God knows pain, pleasure, warmth, 
and the rest. But he does not feel these things. He knows pain, since he 
knows what that modification of the soul is in which pain consists. He 
knows it because he alone causes it in us (as I shall presently prove), and he 
knows what he does. In a word, he knows it because his knowledge has 
no bounds. But he does not feel it. Tor if so he would be unhappy. To 
know pain, then, is not to feel it. Ariste. — That is true. But to feel it 
is to know it, is it not ? Theodore.— No indeed, since God does not feel 
it in the least, and yet he knows it perfectly. But in order not to quibble 
about terms, if you will have it that to feel pain is to know it, agree at least 
that it is not to know it clearly, that it is not to know it by light and by 
evidence— in a word, that it is not to know its nature; in other words and to 
speak exactly, it is not to know it at all. To feel pain, for example, is ta 
feel ourselves unhappy without well knowing either what we are or what 
is this modality of our being which makes us unhappy. . . . Impose silence 
on your senses, your imagination, and your passions, and you will hear the 
pure voice of inner truth, the clear and evident replies of our common mas- 
ter. Never confound the evidence which results from the comparison of 
ideas with the liveliness of the sensations which touch and thrill you. The 
livelier our sensations and feelings (sentiments) are, the more darkness do 
they shed. The more terrible or agreeable are our phantoms, and the more 
body and reality they appear to have, the more dangerous are they and fit 
to lead us astray." (Entretiens sur la Metaphysique, 8me Entretien, od 
init.) Malebranche's Theodore prudently does not try to explain how 
God's ' infinite felicity ' Is compatible with his not feeling joy. 
♦ Green: Prolegomena, §§ 20, 28. 



SENSATION, 11 

real'' '* On the recognition of relations as constituting the nature of 
Vleas, rests the possibility of any tenable theory of their reality/' 

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

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

♦ Introd. to Hume, §§ 146, 188. It is hard to tell just what this aposto- 
lic human being but strenuously feeble writer means by relation. Some- 
times it seems to stand for system of related fact. The ubiquity of the 
' psychologist's fallacy ' (see p. 196) in his pages, his incessant leaning on 
the confusion between the thing known, the thought that knows it, audthe 
farther things known about that thing and about that thought by later and 
additional thoughts, make it impossible to clear up his meaning. Compare, 
however, with the utterances in the text such others as these: ** The wak- 
ing of Self-consciousness from the sleep of sense is an absolute new begin- 
ning, and nothing can come within the ' crystal sphere ' of intelligence 
except as it is determined by intelligence. What sense is to sense is noth- 
ing for thought. What sense is to thought, it is as determined by thought. 
There can, therefore, be no 'reality' in sensjition to which the world of 
thought can be referre<i." (Edward ('aird's Philosophy of Kant, 1st ed. 
pp. 393-4.) **When," says Green ae^ain, ** feeling a pain or pleasure of 
heat, I perceive it to be connected with the action of approaching the fire, 
am I not perceiving a relation of which one constituenU at any rate, m a 
9impU sensation f The true anmcer w, No.*' "Perception, in its simplest 
form . . . — perception as the first sight or touch of an object in which 
nothing but what is seen or touched is recognized — neitJier is nor contains 
Mnsation" (Contemp. Rev., xxxi. pp. 746, 750.) "Mere sensation is in 
truth a phrase thai represents no reality." " Mere feeling, then, as a mat. 
ter unformed by thought, has no place in the world of facts, in the cosmos 
of possible experience." (Prolegomena to Ethics, §§ 46, 50.)— I have ex- 
pressed myself a little more fully on this subject in Mind, x. 27 ff. 

t Stumpf: Tonpsychologie, i. pp. 7, 8. Hobbes's phrase, seniire semper 
idem et mm seniire ad idem recidunt, is generally treated as the original state- 
ment of the relativity doctrine. J. b. Mill (Examn. of Hamilton, p. 6) 



12 P8TCH0L0GT, 

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

1) The paychclogixxd fact that so much of our actual 
knowledge is of the relations of things — even our simplest 
sensations in adult life are habitually referred to classes 
as we take them in ; and 

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

Neither of these facts proves anything about the 
presence or non-presence to our mind of absolute quali- 
ties with which we become sensibly acquainted. Surely 
not the psychological fact ; for our inveterate love of 
relating and comparing things does not alter the intrin- 
sic qualities or nature of the things compared, or undo 
their absolute givenness. And surely not the physio- 
logical fact ; for the length of time during which we can 
feel or attend to a quality is altogether irrelevant to the 
intrinsic constitution of the quality felt. The time, more- 
over, is long enough in many instances, as sufferers from 
neuralgia know.* And the doctrine of relativity, not proved 
by these facts, is flatly disproved by other facts even more 
patent. So far are we from not knowing (in the words of 
Professor Bain) " any one thing by itself, but only the dif- 
ference between it and another thing," that if this were true 
the whole edifice of our knowledge would collapse. If all 
we felt were the difference between the G and 2), or c and d, 
on the musical scale, that being the same in the two pairs 
of notes, the pairs themselves would be the same, and lan- 
guage could get along without substantives. But Professor 
Bain does not mean seriously what he says, and we need 
spend no more time on this vague and popular form of the 
doctrine.t The facts which seem to hover before the minds 

and Bain (Senses and Intellect, p. 321; Emotions and Will, pp. 550. 570-2; 
Logic, I. p. 2; Body and Mind, p. 81) are subscribers to this doctrine. Cf. 
also J. Miirs Analysis, J. S. Mill's edition, ii. 11, 12. 

* We can steadily bear a note for half an hour. The differences be- 
tween the senses are marked. Smell and taste seem soon to get fatigued. 

\ In the popular mind it is mixed up with that entirely different doc- 
trine of the * Relativity of Knowledge ' preached by Hamilton and Spencer. 
This doctrine says that our knowledge is relative to us, and is not of the 



BBNBATION. . 13 

of its champions are those which are best described nnder 
the head of a physiological law. 

THE liA'W OF CONTRAST. 

I will first enumerate the main facts which fall nnder 
this law, and then remark upon what seems to me their sig* 
nificance for psychology.* 

[}4owhere are the phenomena of contrast better exhib- 
ited, and their laws more open to accurate study, than in 
connection with the sense of sight Here both kinds — 
simultaneous and successive — can easily be observed, for 
they are of constant occurrence. Ordinarily they remain 
unnoticed, in accordance with the general law of economy 
which causes us to select for conscious notice only such 
elements of our object as will serve us for aesthetic or prac- 
tical utility, and to neglect the rest ; just as we if^nore the 
double images, the mouches volantes, etc., which exist for 
everyone, but which are not discriminated without careful 
attention. But by attention we may easily discover the 
general facts involved in contrast. We find that in general 
the color and brightness of one object altoays apparently affedt the 
odor and brightness of any other object seen simvUaneously with 
it or immediately after. 

In the first place, if we look for a moment at any surface 
and then turn our ejes elsewhere, the complementary color 
and opposite degree of brightness to that of the first surface 
tend to mingle themselves with the color and the brightness 
of the second. This is successive contrast. It finds its ex- 
planation in the fatigue of the organ of sight, causing it to 
respond to any pai-ticular stimulus less and less readily the 
longer such stimulus continues to act This is shown clearly 
in the very marked changes which occur in case of contin- 
ued fixation of one particular point of any field. The field 
darkens slowly, becomes more and more indistinct, and 
finally, if one is practised enough in holding the eye per- 

object as the latter is in itself. It has nothing to do with the question 
which we have been discussing, of whether our objects of knowledge con- 
tain absolute terms or consist altogether of relations. 

♦ What follows in brackets, as far as p. 27, is from the pen of my friend 
and pupil Mr. £. B. Delabarre. 



14 P87CH0L0OT. 

fectly steady, slight differences in shade and color may 
entirely disappear. If we now turn aside the eyes, a nega- 
tive after-image of the field just fixated at once forms, and 
mingles its sensations with those which may happen to 
come from anything else looked at. This influence is dis- 
tinctly evident only when the first surface has been * fixated * 
without movement of the eyes. It is, however, none the 
less present at all times, even when the eye wanders from 
point to point, causing each sensation to be modified more 
or less by that just previously experienced. On this ac- 
count successive contrast is almost sure to be present in 
cases of simultaneous contrast, and to complicate the 
phenomena. 

A visual image is modified not only by other sensations just 
previously experienced, but also by aU those experienced simul- 
taneously with it, and especially by such as proceed from con- 
tiguous portions of the retina. This is the phenomenon of 
simultaneous contrast In this, as in successive contrast, both 
brightness and hue are involved. A bright object appears 
still brighter when its surroundings are darker than itself, 
and darker when they are brighter than itself. Two colors 
side by side are apparently changed by the admixture, with 
each, of the complement of the other. And lastly, a gray 
surface near a colored one is tinged with the complement 
of the latter.* 

The phenomena of simultaneous contrast in sight are so 
complicated by other attendant phenomena that it is diffi* 

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



8EN8ATI0K 16 

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

Not only must we recognize and eliminate the effects of 
successive contrast, of temporal changes due to fixation, 
and of simultaneous induction, in analyzing the phenomena 
of simultaneous contrast, but we must also take into account 
various other ivfluences tvhich modify its effects. Under favor- 
able circumstances the contrast-effects are very striking, 
and did they always occur as strongly they could not fail 
to attract the attention. But they are not always clearly 
apparent, owing to various disturbing causes which form no 
exception to the laws of contrast, but which have a modi- 
fying effect on its phenomena. When, for instance, the 
ground observed has many distinguishable features — a 
coarse grain, rough surface, intricate pattern, etc. — the con- 
trast effect appears weaker. This does not imply that the 
effects of contrast are absent, but merely that the resulting 
sensations are overpowered by the many other stronger seu- 



16 P8TCn0L0QT. 

sations which entirely occupy the attention. On such a 
ground a faint negative after-image — undoubtedly due ta 
retinal modifications — may become invisible ; and even 
weak objective differences in color may become imper- 
ceptible. For example, a faint spot or grease-stain on 
woollen cloth, easily seen at a distance, when the fibres are 
not distinguishable, disappears when closer examination 
reveals the intricate nature of the surface. 

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

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

To obtain the best contrast-effects, there/ore, the contrasting 
fidds should be near together, should not be separated by shadovos 
or Uack lines, should be of homogeneous texture, and should be of 
about equal brightness and medium intensity of coloi\ Such 
conditions do not often occur naturally, the disturbing in- 
fluences being present in case of almost all ordinary objects^ 
thus making the effects of contrast far less evident To 
eliminate these disturbances and to produce the conditions 
most favorable for the appearance of good contrast-effects, 



, 8EN8ATI0N) 17 

yarious experiments have been devised, which will be ex- 
plained in comparing the rival theories of explanation. 

There are two theories — the psychological and the physio- 
loguxH — which attempt to explain the phenomena of con- 
tntsi 

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

** CJolors have their greatest importance for us in so far as they are 
properties of bodies and can serve as signs for the recognition of 
bodies. ... We have become accustomed, in forming a judgment in 
regard to the colors of bodies, to eliminate the varying brightness and 

♦ Helmholtz, Physiolog. Optik. p. 392. 
t Loc. cii. p. 407. 



18 PSYCHOLOQT. 

color of the illumination. We have sufficient opportunity to investigate 
the same colors of objects in full sunshine, in the blue light of the clear 
sky, in the weak white light of a cloudy day, in the reddish-yeUow light 
of the sinking sun or of the candle. Moreover the colored reflections 
of surrounding objects are involved. Since we see the same colored 
objects under these varying illuminations, we learn to form a correct 
conception of the color of the object in spite of the difference in iUumi- 
nation, i.e. to judge how such an object would appear in white illumi- 
nation ; and since only the constant color of the object interests us, 
we do not become conscious of the particular sensations on which our 
judgment rests. So also we are at no loss, when we see an object 
through a colored covering, to distinguish what belongs to the color of 
the covering and what to the object. In the experiments mentioned we 
do the same also where the covering over the object is not at all colored, 
because of the deception into which we fall, and in consequence of which 
we ascribe to the body a false color, the color complementary to the 
colored portion of the covering." * 

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

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

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

In opposition to this theory has been developed one 
which attempts to explain all cases of contrast as depend- 

* Loc. cit. p 408. 
f Loc. cit. p. 406. 



aENSATION. 19 

ing purely on physiological action of the terminal apparatus of 
vision. Hering is the most prominent supporter of this view. 
By great originality in devising experiments and by insist- 
ing on rigid care in conducting them, he has been able to 
detect the faults in the psychological theory and to practi- 
cally establish the validity of his own. Every visual sensa- 
tion, he maintains, is correlated to a physical process in the 
nervous apparatus. Contrast is occasioned, not by a false 
idea resulting from unconscious conclusions, but by the 
fact that the excitation of any portion of the retina — and 
the consequent sensation — depends not only on its own 
illumination, but on that of the rest of the retina as welL 

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

When a limited portion of the retina is aroused by ex- 
ternal stimuli, the rest of the retina, and especially the 
immediately contiguous parts, tends to react also, and in 
such a way as to produce therefrom the sensation of the 
opposite degree of brightness and the complementary color 
to that of the directly-excited portion. When a gray spot 
is seen alone, and again when it appears colored through 
contrast, the objective light from the spot is in both cases 
the same. Helmholtz maintains that the neural process 
and the corresponding senscdion also remain unchanged, but 
are differently interpreted^ ; Hering, that the neural process 
and the sensation are themselves changed, and that the 
* interpretation ' is the direct conscious correlate of the 
altered retinal conditions. According to the one, the con- 
trast is psychological in its origin ; according to the other, 
it is purely physiological. In the cases cited above where 
the contrast-color is no longer apparent — on a ground with 
many distinguishable features, on a field whose borders are 
traced with black lines, etc., — the psychological theory, as 
we have seen, attributes this to the fact that under these 
circumstances we judge the smaller patch of color to be an 



* E. Hering, in Hermann's Handbuch d. Phyaiologie, iii. 1, p. 565. 



20 ParCROLOGT. 

independent object on the surface, and are no longer de- 
ceived in judging it to be something over which the color 
of the ground is drawn. The physiological theory, on the 
other hand, maintains that the contrast-eflfect is still pro- 
duced, but that the conditions are such that the slight 
changes in color and brightness which it occasions become 
imperceptible. 

The two theories, stated thus broadly, may seem equally 
plausible. Hering, however, has conclusively proved, by 
experiments with after-images, that the process on one part 
of the retina does modify that on neighboring portions, 
under conditions where deception of judgment is impossi- 
ble.* A careful examination of the facts of contrast will 
show that its phenomena must be due to this cause. In aU 
the cases which one may investigate it wiU be seen that the up- 
holders of the psychological theory have failed to conduct their 
experiments with sujicient care. They have not excluded 
successive contrast, have overlooked the changes due to 

* Hering : 'Zur Lehre vom Licbtsinne.'— Of these experiments the fol- 
lowing (found on p. 24 £f.) may be cited as a typical one : "From dark 
gray paper cut two strips 3-4 cm. long and ^ cm. wide, and lay them on a 
backgioundof which one half is white and the other half deep black, in 
such a way that one strip lies on each side of the border-line and parallel 
to it, and at least 1 cm. distant from it. Fixate i to 1 minute a point on 
the border-line between the strips. One strip appears much brighter than 
the other. Close and cover the eyes, and the negative after-image appears. 
. . . The difference in brightness of the strips in the after-image is in gen- 
eral much greater than it appeared in direct vision. . . . This difference 
in brightness of the strips by no means always increases and decreases with 
the difference in brightness of the two halves of the background. ... A 
phase occurs in which the difference in brightness of the two halves of 
the background entirely disappears, and yet both after-images of the strips 
are still vei^ clear, one of them brighter and one darker than the back- 
ground, which is equally bright on both halves. Here can no longer be 
any question of contrast- effect, because the conditio »ine qua non of con- 
trast, namely, the differing brightness of the ground, is no longer pres- 
ent. This proves that the different brightness of the after-images of the 
strips must have its ground in a different state of excitation of the corre- 
sponding portions of the retina, and from this follows further that botii 
these portions of the retina were differently stimulated during the original 
observation ; for the different after-effect demands here a different fore- 
effect. ... In the original arrangement, the objectively similar strips 
appeared of different brightness, because both corresponding portions of 
the retina were truly differently excited." 



8EN8AT10K 21 

steady fixation, and have failed to properly account for the 
various modifying influences which have been mentioned 
Sbbove. We can easily establish this if we examine the most 
striking experiments in simultaneous contrast 

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

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

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

Hering t shows clearly that this interpretation is incor- 
rect, and that the disturbing factors are to be otherwise 
explained. In the first place, the experiment can be so 
arranged that we could not possibly be deceived into be- 
lieving that we see the gray through a colored medium. 
Out of a sheet of gray paper cut strips 5 mm. wide in such 
a way that there will be alternately an empty space and a 
bar of gray, both of the same Avidtli, the bars being held to- 
gether by the uncut edges of the gray sheet (thus presenting 
an appearance like a gridiron). Lay this on a colored back- 
ground — e.g. green — cover both with transparent paper, 
and above all put a black frame which covers all the edges, 
leaving visible only the bars, which are now alternately 

* Helmholtz, Pbysiolog. Oplik, p. 407. 

f In Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. XLI. 8. Iff. 



22 PSYCHOLOGY. 

green and gray. The gray bars appear strongly colored 
by contrast, although, since they occupy as much space as 
the green bars, we are not deceived into believing that we 
see the former through a green medium. The same is true 
if we weave together into a basket pattern narrow strips of 
green and gray and cover them with the transparent paper. 

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

The same may be proved in the case of holding above the 
tissue paper a second gray scrap and comparing it with that 
underneath. To avoid the disturbances caused by using 
papers of different brightness, the second scrap should 
be made exactly like the first by covering the same gray 
with the same tissue paper, and carefully cutting a piece 
about 10 mm. square out of both together. To thoroughly 
guard against successive contrast, which so easily compli- 
cates the phenomena, we must carefully prevent all previ 
ous excitation of the retina by colored light. This may be 
done by arranging thus : Place the sheet of tissue paper 



8EN8ATI0N, 23 

on a glass pane, wliich rests on four supports ; under the 
paper put the first gray scrap. By means of a wire, fasten 
the second gray scrap 2 or 3 cm. above the glass plate. 
Both scraps appear exactly alike, except at the edges 
Gaze now at both scraps, with eyes not exactly accommo- 
dated, so that they appear near one another, with a very 
narrow space between. Shove now a colored field (green) 
underneath the glass plate, and the contrast appears at 
once on both scraps. If it appears less clearly on the 
upper scrap, it is because of its bright and dark edges, its 
inequalities, its grain, etc. When the accommodation is 
exact, there is no essential change, although then on the 
upper scrap the bright edge on the side toward the light, 
and the dark edge on the shadow side, disturb somewhat. 
By continued fixation the contrast becomes weaker and 
finally yields to simultaneous induction, causing the scraps 
to become indistinguishable from the ground. Kemove 
the green field and both scraps become green, by succes- 
sive induction. If the eye moves about freely these last- 
named phenomena do not appear, but the contrast continues 
indefinitely and becomes stronger. When Helmholtz found 
that the contrast on the lower scrap disappeared, it was 
evidently because he then really held the eye fixed. This 
experiment may be disturbed by holding the upper scrap 
wrongly and by the diflFerences in briglitness of its edges, 
or by other inequalities, but not by that recognizing of it 
* as an independent body lying above the colored ground,' 
on which the psychological explanation rests. 

In like manner the claims of the psychological explana- 
tion can be shown to be inadequate in other cases of con- 
trast. Of frequent use are revolving disks, which are 
especially efficient in showing good contrast-phenomena, 
because all inequalities of the ground disappear and leave 
a perfectly homogeneous surface. On a white disk are ar- 
ranged colored sectors, which are interrupted midway by 
narrow black fields in such a way that when the disk is re- 
volved the white becomes mixed with the color and the 
black, forming a colored disk of weak saturation on which 
appears a gray ring. The latter is colored by contrast with 



24 parcHOLOQT. 

the field which surrounds it. Helmholtz explains the fact 
thus : 

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

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



Helmholtz, loc cit. p. 412. 



8EN8ATI0N, 25 

moved. The contrast at once appears clearly, and its dis- 
appearance through continued fixation can be accurately 
watched. 

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

Colored shadows have long been thought to aflford a con- 
vincing proof of the fact that simultaneous contrast is 
psychological in its origin. They are formed whenever an 
opaque object is illuminated from two separate sides by 
lights of different colors. When the light from one source 
is white, its shadow is of the color of the other light, and 
the second shadow is of a color complementary to that of 
the field illuminated by both lights. If now we take a tube, 
blackened inside, and through it look at the colored shadow, 
none of the surrounding field being visible, and then have 
the colored light removed, the shadow still appears colored, 
although * the circumstances which caused it have disap- 
peared.' This is regarded by the psychologists as con- 
clusive evidence that the color is due to deception of judg- 
ment. It can, however, easily be shown that the persistence 
of the color seen through the tube is due to fatigue of the 
retina through the prevailing light, and that when the 
colored light is removed the color slowly disappears as the 

♦ See Hering : Archiv. f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. xli. S. 858 ff. 



26 PaTCHOLOQY. 

eqnilibrinm of the retina becomes gradnally restored. When 
successive contrast is carefully guarded against, the simul- 
taneous contrast, whether seen directly or through the tube, 
never lasts for an instant on removal of the colored field. 
The physiological explanation applies throughout to all the 
phenomena presented by colored shadows. * 

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

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

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

The above cases show clearly that physiological processes^ 
and not deception of judgment^ are responsible for contrast of 
odor. To say this, however, is not to maintain that our 
perception of a color is never in any degree modified by 
our judgment of what the particular colored thing before us 
may be. We have unquestionable illusions of color due to 
wrong inferences as to what object is before us. Thus Von 
Kries:!: speaks of wandering through evergreen forests cov- 
ered with snow, and thinking that through the interstices of 
the boughs he saw the deep blue of pine-clad mountains, cov- 



*Hering: Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. XL. S. 172 ff. ; Delabwrer 
American Journal of Psychology, ii. 686. 

t Hering : Archiv f . d. ges. Physiol., Bd. xli. 8. 91 ft. 
X Dfe Qeslchtsempfindungen u. ihre Analyse, p. 128. 



8EN8ATI0K 27 

ered with snow and lighted by brilliant sunshine ; whereas 
what he really saw was the white snow on trees near by> 
lying in shadow]. * 

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

1 have dwelt upon the facts of color-contrast at such 
great length because they form so good a text to comment 
on in my struggle against the view that sensations are im- 
mutable psychic things which coexist with higher mental 
functions. Both sensationalists and intellectualists agree 
that such sensations exist. They /w^e, say the pure sen- 
sationalists, and make the higher mental function ; they 
are combined by activity of the Thinking Principle, say the 
intellectualists. I myself have contended that they do not 
exist in or alongside of the higher mental function when 
that exists. The things which arouse them exist ; and the 
higher mental function also knows these sj^me things. But 
just as its knowledge of the things supersedes and displaces, 
their knowledge, so it supersedes and displaces them,, 
when it comes, being as much as they are a direct result- 
ant of whatever momentary brain-conditions may obtain. 
The psychological theory of contrast, on the other hand> 
holds the sensations still to exist in themselves unchanged 
before the mind, whilst the * relating activity' of the latter 

* Mr. Delabarre's coDtrihulion ends here. 



28 P8TCH0L00T, 

deals with them freely and settles to its own satisfaction 
what each shall be, in view of what the others also are. 
Wundt says expressly that the Law of Relativity is " not a 
law of sensation but a law of Apperception ;" and the word 
Apperception connotes with him a higher intellectual spon- 
taneity.* This way of taking things belongs with the phi- 
losophy that looks at the data of sense as something earth- 
bom and servile, and the * relating of them together ' as 
something spiritual and free. Lo! the spirit can even 
change the intrinsic quality of the sensible facts themselves 
if by so doing it can relate them better to each other ! But 
(apart from the difficulty of seeing how changing the sen- 
sations should relate them better) is it not manifest that 
the relations are part of the * content' of consciousness, 
part of the 'object,' just as much as the sensations are? 
Why ascribe the former exclusively to the knotver and the 
latter to the hwion ? The knotoer is in every case a unique 
pulse of thought corresponding to a unique reaction of the 
brain upon its conditions. AH that the facts of contrast 
show us is that the same real thing may give us quite 
diflferent sensations when the conditions alter, and tnat we 
must therefore be careful which one to select as the thing's 
truest representative. 

There are many other facts beside the phenomena of contrast 
which prove that when two objects act together on vs the 
sensation which either tvovld give alone becomes a different 
sensation, A certain amount of skin dipped in hot water 
gives the perception of a certain heat. More skin immersed 
makes the heat much more intense, although of course the 
water's heat is the same. A certain extent as well as in- 
tensity, in the quantity of the stimulus is requisite for any 
quality to be felt. Fick and Wunderli could not distin- 
guish heat from touch when both were applied through a 



♦ Physiol. Psych., i. 851, 458-60. The full inanity of the law of rela- 
tivity is best to be seen in Wundt's treatment, where the great * allgemeiner 
Qetetz del' Beziehung,* invoked lo account for Weber's law as well as for 
the phenomena of contrast and many other matters, can only be defined as 
a tendency to feel all things in relation I/O each other I Bless its little soul I 
But why does it change the things so, when it thus feels them in relatioo? 



SEmATION. 29 

bole in a card, and so confined to a small part of the skin. 
Similarly there is a chromatic minimum of size in objects. 
The image they cast on the retina must needs have a cer- 
tain extent, or it will give no sensation of color at all. In- 
versely, more intensity in the outward impression may 
make the subjective object more extensive. This happens, 
as will be shown in Chapter XIX, when the illumination 
is increased : The whole room expands and dwindles ac- 
cording as we raise or lower the gas-jei It is not easy 
to explain any of these results as illusions of judgment 
due to the inference of a wrong objective cause for the sen- 
sation which we get No more is this easy in the case of 
Weber's observation that a thaler laid on the skin of the 
forehead feels heavier when cold than when warm ; or of 
Szabadfoldi's observation that small wooden disks when 
heated to 122° Fahrenheit often feel heavier than those 
which are larger but not thus warmed;* or of Hall's ob- 
servation that a heavy point moving over the skin seems 
to go faster than a lighter one moving at the same rate of 
speed, t 

Bleuler and Lehmann some years ago called attention 
to a strange idiosyncrasy found in some persons, and con- 
sisting in the fact that impressions on the eye, skin, etc., 
were accompanied by distinct sensations of sound.X Colored 
hearing is the name sometimes given to the phenomenon, 
which has now been repeatedly described. Quite lately the 
Viennese aurist Urbantschitsch has proved that these cases 
are only extreme examples of a very general law, and that 
all our sense-organs influence each other's 8ensations.§ 
The hue of patches of color so distant as not to be recog- 
nized was immediately, in U.'s patients, perceived when a 
tuning-fork was sounded close to the ear. Sometimes, on 
the contrary, the field was darkened by the souud. The 
acuity cf vision was increased, so that letters too far off to 
be read could be read when the tuning-fork was heard. 
Urbantschitsch, varying his experiments, found that their 

♦ Ladd : Physiol. Psych., p. 848. 

t Mind, X. 567. 

X Zwangsmassige LichtempfinduDg durch Schall (Leipzig, 1881). 

% PflUger's Archiv, xi-n. 1.54. 



80 PaTCHOLOQT. 

results were mntual, and that sounds which were on the 
limits of audibility became audible when lights of various 
colors were exhibited to the eye. Smell, taste, touch, sense 
of temperature, etc., were all found to fluctuate when lights 
were seen and sounds were heard. Individuals varied much 
in the degree and kind of effect produced, but almost every 
one experimented on seems to have been in some way 
affected. The phenomena remind one somewhat of the 

* dynamogenic ' effects of sensations upon the strength of 
muscular contraction observed by M. Fer^, and later to be 
described. The most familiar examples of them seem to be 
the increase of pain by noise or light, and the increase of 
nausea by all concomitant sensations. Persons suffering in 
any way instinctively seek stillness and darkness. 

Probably every one will agree that the best way of for- 
mulating all such facts is physiological : it must be that the 
cerebral process of the first sensation is reinforced or other- 
wise altered by the other current which comes in. No one, 
surely, will prefer a psychological explanation here. Well, 
it seems to me that all cases of mental reaction to a plural- 
ity of stimuli must be like these cases, and that the phy- 
siological formulation is everywhere the simplest and the 
best. When simultaneous red and green light make us see 
yellow, when three notes of the scale make us hear a chord, 
it is not because the sensations of red and of green and of 
each of the three notes enter the mind as such, and there 

* combine ' or * are combined by its relating activity ' into 
the yellow and the chord, it is because the larger sum of 
light-waves and of air-waves arouses new cortical processes, 
to which the yellow and the chord directly correspond. 
Even when the sensible qualities of things enter into the 
objects of our highest thinking, it is surely the same. Their 
several sensations do not continue to exist there tucked 
away. They are replaced by the higher thought which, 
although a different psychic unit from them, knows the 
same sensible qualities which they know. 

The principles laid down in Chapter VI seem then to 
be corroborated in this new connection. You cannot build 
up one thought or one sensation out of many: and only direct 



8EN8ATI0K 81 

tooperimefnt can inform us of what ive ahaU perceive when we 
get many stimuli at once, 

THE ' BCCSirTBIC FBO JECTION ' OF SENSATIONS. 

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

'* Sensations ... are psychical states whose place-^so far as they can 
be said to have one— t^f the mind. The transference of these sensations 
from mere mental states to physical processes located in the periphery 
of the body, or to qualities of things projected in space external to the 
body, is a mental act. It may rather be said to be a mental ochieveTnent 
(cf. Cud worth, above, as to knowledge being conquering], for it is an act 
which in its perfection results from a long and intricate process of de- 
velopment. . . . Two noteworthy stages, or * epoch-making' achieve- 
ments in the process of elaborating the presentations of sense, require 
a special consideration. These are * localization,^ or the transference 
of the composite sensations from mere states of the mind to processes 
or conditions recognized as taking place at more or less definitely fixed 
points or areas of the body; and ' eccentric projection'' (sometimes called 
'eccentric perception') or the giving to these sensations an objective 
existence (in the fullest sense of the word ' objective ') as qualities of 
objects situated within a field of space and in contact with, or more or 
less reraotely distant from, the body.'' * 

It seems to me that there is not a vestige of evidence for 
this \'iew. It hangs together with the opiuion that our sen- 
sations are originally devoid of all spatial content, t an 
opinion which I confess that I am wholly at a loss to under- 
stand. As I look at my bookshelf opposite I cannot frame 
to myself an idea, however imaginary, of any feeling which 
I could ever possibly have got from it except the feeling of 

* Physiological Psychology, 385, 387. See also such passsges as that in 
Bain ; The Seuses and the Intellect, pp. 364-6. 

f * • Especially must we avoid all attempts, whether avowed or concealed, 
to account for the spatial qualities of the presentations of sense by merely 
describing the qualities of the simple sensations and the modes of their 
combmation. It is position and extension in space which constitutes the 
very peculiarity of the objects as no longer mere sensations or affections of 
the mind. As sensations, they are neither out of ourselves nor possessed of 
the qualities indicated by the word spread-out." (Ladd. op. eit. p. 391.) 



32 PaTCHOLOQT. 

the same big extended sort of outward fact whicli I now 
perceive. So far is it from being true that our first way of 
feeling things is the feeling of them as subjective or men- 
tal, that the exact opposite seems rather to be the truth. 
Our earliest, most instinctive, least developed kind of con- 
sciousness is the objective kind ; and only as reflection be- 
comes developed do we become aware of an inner world at 
all. Then indeed we enrich it more and more, even to the 
point of becoming idealists, with the spoils of the outer 
world which at first was the only world we knew. But 
subjective consciousness, aware of itself as subjective, does 
not at first exist Even an attack of pain is surely felt at 
first objectively as something in space which prompts to 
motor reaction, and to the very end it is located, not in the 
mind, but in some bodily part. 

** A Bensation which should not awaken an impulse to move, nor 
any tendency to produce an outward effect, would manifestly be use- 
less to a living creature. On the principles of evolution such a sensa- 
tion could never be developed. Therefore every sensation originally 
refers to something external and independent of the sentient creature. 
Rhizopods (according to Engeimann's observations) retract their pseudo- 
podia whenever these touch foreign bodies, even if these foreign bodies 
are the pseudopodia of other individuals of their own species, whilst 
the mutual contact of their own pseudopodia is followed by no such 
contraction. These low animals can therefore already feel an outer 
world — even in the absence of innate ideas of causality, and probably 
without any clear consciousness of space. In truth the conviction that 
something exists outside of ourselves does not come from thought. It 
comes from sensation; it rests on the same ground as our conviction of 
our own existence. ... If we consider the behavior of new-bom 
animals, wo never find them betraying that they are first of all con- 
scious of their sensations as purely subjective excitements. We far 
more readily incline to explain the astonishing certainty with which 
they make use of their sensations (and which is an effect of adaptation 
and inheritance) as the result of an inborn intuition of the outer world. 
. . . In8::3ad of starting from an original pure subjectivity of sensa- 
tion, and seeking how this could possibly have acquired an objectii . 
signification, womust. on the contrary, begin by the possession of objec 
tivity by the sensation and then show how for reflective consciousness 
the latter becomes interpreted as an effect of the object, how in short 
the original immediate objectivity becomes changed into a remote 
one."* 

* A. Riehl: Der Philosopbischer Kriticismus, Bd. n. Theil ii. p. 64. 



8EN8ATI0N. 33 

Another confusion, much more common than the denial 
of all objective character to sensations, is the assumption 
that they are all originally located inside the body and are pro- 
jected outward by a secondary act. This secondary judg- 
ment is always false, according to M. Taine, so far as the 
place of the sensation itself goes. But it happens to hit a 
real object which is at the point towards which the sensation 
is projected ; so we may call its result, according to this 
author, a veridical hallucination,* The word Sensation, to 

* On Intelligence, part u. bk. ii. chap. n. §§ vn, vni. Compare such 
statements as these : " The consequence is that when a sensation has for 
its usual condition the presence of an object more or less distant from our 
bodies, and experience has once made us acquainted with this distance, we 
shall situate our sensation at this distance.— This, in fact, is the case 
with sensations of hearing and sight. The peripheral extremity of the 
acoustic nerve is in the deep-seated chamber of the ear. That of the 
optic nerve is in the most inner recess of the eye. But still, in our 
present state, we never situate our sensations of sound or color in these 
places, but without us, and often at a considerable distance from us. . . . 
All our sensations of color are thus projected out of our body, and clothe 
more or less distant objects, furniture, walls, houses, trees, the sky, and the 
rest. This is why, when we afterwards reflect on them, we cease to at- 
tribute them to ourselves; they are alienated and detached from us, so far 
as to appear different from us. Projected from the nervous surface in 
which we localize the majority of the others, the tie which connected 
them to the others and to ourselves is undone. . . . Thus all our sensa- 
tions are wrongly situated, and the red color is no more extended on the 
arm chair than the sensation of tingling is situated at my fingers' ends. 
TLey are all situated in the sensory centres of the encephalon; all appear 
situated elsewhere, and a common law allots to each of them its apparent 
situation." (Vol. n. pp. 47-68.) — Similarly Schopenhauer: "I will now 
show the same by the sense of sight. The immediate datum is here 
limited to the sens*ition of the retina which, it is true, admits of con- 
siderable diversity, but at bottom reverts to the impression of light 
and dark with their shades, and that of colors. Ihis sensjition is 
through and through subjective, that is, inside of the organism and 
under the skin." (Schopenhauer: Salz vom Grunde, p. 58.) This philoso- 
pher then enumerates seriatim what the Intellect does to make the origi- 
nally subjective sensation objective: 1) it turns it bottom side up; 2) it 
I educes its doubleness to singleness; 8) it changes its flatness to solidity; and 
i) it projects it to a distance from the eye. Again: '* 8ensatw7is are 
what we call the impressions on our senses, in so far as they come to our 
consciousness as states of our own body, especially of our nervous 
apparatus; we call them perceptiotis when we form out of them the repre- 
sentation of outer objects." (Helmholtz: Tonempfindungen, 1870, p. 101.) 
— Once more : " Sensation is always accomplished in the psychic centres, 
but it manifests itself at the excited part of the periphery, in other words. 



84 P8YCH0L0QY. 

begin with, is constantly, in psychological literature, used 
as if it meant one and the same thing with the physical im- 
pression either in the terminal organs or in the centres, 
which is its antecedent condition, and this notwithstanding 
that by sensation we mean a mental, not a physical, fact 
But those who expressly mean by it a mental fact still 
leave to it a physical place, still think of it as pbjectively 
inhabiting the very neural tracts which occasion its appear- 
ance when they are excited ; and then (going a step farther) 
they think that it must place itself where they place it, or be 
subjectively sensible of that place as its habitat in the 
first instance, and afterwards have to be moved so as to 
appear elsewhere. 

All this seems highly confused and unintelligible. Con* 
sciousness, as we saw in an earlier chapter (p. 214) canno« 
properly be said to inhabit any place. It has dynamic re- 
lations with the brain, and cognitive relations with every- 
thing and anything. From the one point of view we may 
say that a sensation is in the same place with the brain (if 
we like), just as from the other point of view we may say 
that it is in the same place with whatever quality it may be 
cognizing. But the supposition that a sensation primi- 
tively /f?eZ5 either itself or its object to be in the same place imth 
the brain is absolutely groundless, and neither a priori 
probability nor facts from experience can be adduced to 
show that such a deliverance forms any part of the original 
cognitive function of our sensibility. 

Where, then, do we feel the objects of our original sensa- 
tions to be ? 

Certainly a child newly born in Boston, who gets a sen- 
sation from the candle-flame which lights the bedroom, or 
from his diaper-pin, does not feel either of these objects to 



one is conscious of the phenomenon in the nervous centres, . . . but one 
perceives it in the peripheric organs. This phenomenon depends on the 
experience of the sensations themselves, in which there is a nflection of 
the subjective phenomenon and a tendency on the part of perception to 
return as it were to the external cause which has roused the mental state 
because the latter is connected with the former." (Sergi : Psychologie 
Physiologi(iue (Paris, 1888), p. 189 )- The clearest and best passage I know 
is in Liebmuun: Der Objective Anblick (1869), pp. 67-72, but it is unfortu- 
nately too long to quote. 



SENSATION. 86 

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

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

This (it seems to me) will be admitted, and will (I trust) 
be made still more plausible in the chapter on the Percep- 
tion of Space. But the later developments of this percep- 
tion are so complicated that these simple principles get 



86 P8TCH0L0Q7, 

easily overlooked. One of the complications comes from 
the fact that things movey and that the original object which 
we feel them to be splits into two parts, one of which re- 
mains as their whereabouts and the other goes off as their 
quality or nature. We then contrast where they tvere with 
where they are. If toe do not move, the sensation of where 
they tvere remains unchanged ; but we ourselves presently 
move, so that that also changes ; and * where they were ' 
becomes no longer the actual sensation which it was origi- 
nally, but a sensation which we merely conceive as possible. 
Gradually the system of these possible sensations, takes 
more and more the place of the actual sensations. ' Up ' 
and * down ' become ' subjective ' notions ; east and west 
grow more * correct ' than * right * and ' left ' etc.; and things 
get at last more * truly * located by their relation to certain 
ideal fixed co-ordinates than by their relation either to 
our bodies or to those objects by which their place was 
originally defined. Now this revision of our original locali- 
zaiions is a complex affair; and contains some /acts which may 
very naturally come to be described as translocations whereby 
sensations get shoved farther off than they originally appeared. 
Few things indeed are more striking than the change- 
able distance which the objects of many of our sensations 
may be made to assume. A fly's humming may be taken 
for a distant steam-whistle ; or the fly itself, seen out of 
focus, may for a moment give us the illusion of a distant 
bird. The same things seem much nearer or much farther, 
according as we look at them through one end or another of 
an opera-glass. Our whole optical education indeed is 
largely taken up with assigning their proper distances to the 
objects of our retinal sensations. An infant will grasp at the 
moon ; later, it is said, he projects that sensation to a dis- 
tance which he knows to be beyond his reach. In the 
much quoted case of the * 3'oung gentleman who was bom 
blind,' and who was 'couched' for the cataract by Mr. 
Chesselden, it is reported of the patient that " when he first 
saw, he was so far from making any judgment about dis- 
tances, that he thought all objects whatever touched his 
eyes (as he expressed it) as what he felt did his skin." 
And other patients born blind, but relieved by surgical op- 



SENSATION. 39 

eration, have been described as bringing their hand close 
to their eyes to feel for the objects which they at first saw, 
and only gradually stretching out their hand when they 
found that no contact occurred. Many have concluded 
from these facts that our earliest visual objects must seem 
in immediate contact with our eyes. 

But tactile objects also may be affected with a like am- 
biguity of situation. 

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

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

From this case to that of a hard body not organically 
connected with the surface, but only accidentally in contact 
with it, the transition is immediate. With the point of a 
cane we can trace letters in the air or on a wall just as with 
the finger-tip ; and in so doing feel the size and shape of 
the path described by the cane's tip just as immediately as, 
\^'ithout a cane, we should feel the path described by the 
tip of our finger. Similarly the draughtsman's immediate 
perception seems to be of the point of his pencil, the sur- 

♦ Tbls Is proved by Weber's device of causing the head to be firmly 
pressed against a support by another person, whereupon the direction of 
traction ceases to be perceived. 



38 PSTCHOLOOy, 

geon's of the en^ of his knife, the duellist's of the tip of hift 
rapier as it plunges through his enemy's skin. When on 
the middle of a vibrating ladder, we feel not only our feet 
on the round, but the ladder's feet against the ground far 
below« If we shake a locked iron gate we feel the middle^ 
on which our hands rest, move, but we equally feel the sta- 
bility of the ends where the hinges and the lock are, and 
we seem to feel all three at once.* And yet the place 
where the contact is received is in all these cases the skin, 
whose sensations accordingly are sometimes interpreted a» 
objects on the surface, and at other times as objects a long 
distance off. 

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

'* I recently faradized," says Dr. Mitchell, ** a case of disarticulated 
shoulder without warning my patient of the possible result. 1 'or two 
years he had altogether ceased to feel the limb. As the current affected 
the brachial plexus of nerves he suddenly cried aloud, * Oh the liand,— 
the hand ! ' and attempted to seize the missing member. The pliantom 



* Lotze: Med. Psych.. 428-433; Lipps: Grundtatsachen dts Seelenle 
bens, 582. 



SENSATION, 39 

I had conjnred up swiftly disappeared, but no spirit could haye more 
amazed the man, so real did it seem/' * * * 

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

**lo8t his leg at the age of eleven, and remembers that the foot by 
degrees approached, and at last reached the knee. When he began to 
wear an artificial leg it reassumed in time its old position, and he is 
never at present aware of tha leg as shortened, unless for some time he 
talks and thinks of the stump, and of the missing leg, when . . . the 
direction of attention to the part causes a feeling of discomfort, and the 
subjective sensation of active and unpleasant movement of the toes. 
With these feelings returns at once the delusion of the foot as being 
placed at the knee/' 

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

The objectivity tvith which each of our sensations originally 
comes to us, the roomy and, spatial character tvhich is a primi- 
tive part of its content ^ is not in the first instance relative to any 
other sensalion. The first time we open our eyes we get an 
optical object which is a place, but which is not yet placed in 
relation to any other object, nor identified with any place 
otherwise known. It is a place with which so far we are 
only ocquainted. When later we know that this same place 
is in * front * of us, that only means that we have learned 
Something about it, namely, that it is congruent tvith that 

♦ lDJur?es to Nerves (Philadelphia. 1872), p. 360 ff. 



40 PBYCHOLOOT. 

other place, called 'front,' which is given us by certain sen-, 
sations of the arm and hand or of the head and body. But 
at the first moment of our optical experience, even though 
we already had an acquaintance with our head, hand, and 
body, we could not possibly know anything about their 
relations to this new seen object. It could not be immedi- 
ately located in respect of them. How its place agrees with 
the places which their feelings yield is a matter of which 
only later experience can inform us; and in the next 
chapter we shall see with some detail how later experience 
does this by means of discrimination, association, selection, 
and other constantly working functions of the mind. When, 
therefore, the baby grasps at the moon, that does not mean 
that what he sees fails to give him the sensation which he 
afterwards knows as distance ; it means only that he has 
not learned at what tactile or iminval distance things which ap- 
pear at that visual distance are.* And when a person just 
operated for cataract gropes close to his face for far-off 
objects, that only means the same thing. All the ordinary 
optical signs of differing distances are absent from the poor 
creature's sensation anyhow. His vision is monoerular 
(only one eye being operated at a time); the lens is gone, 
and everything is out of focus; he feels photophobia, lachry- 
mation, and other painful resident sensations of the eyeball 
itself, whose place he has long since learned to know in 
tactile terms ; what wonder, then, that the first tactile reac- 
tion which the new sensations provoke should be one 
associated with the tactile situation of the organ itself? 
And as for his assertions about the matter, what wonder, 
again, if, as Prof. Paul Janet says, they are still expressed 
in the tactile language which is the only one he knows. 
" To be tovehed. means for him to receive an impression with- 
out first making a movement." His eye gets such an 
impression now ; so he can only say that the objects are 
'touching it.* 

** All his language, borrowed from touch, but applied to the objects 
of his sight, make us think that he perceives differently from ourselves, 

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



SEN8ATI0N. 41 

whereas, at bottom, it is only his different way of talking about the same 
experience."* 

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

Just so when we feel the tip of our cane against the 
ground. The peculiar sort of movement of the hand (im- 
possible in one direction, but free in every other) which 
we experience when the tip touches ' the ground,' is a sign 
to us of the visual and tactile object which we already 

* Revue Philosopbique, vii. p. 1 fif., an admirable critical article, in the 
course of which M. Janet gives a bibliography of the cases in question. 
See also Dunan: tbid. xxv. 165-7. They are also discussed »nd similarly 
interpreted by T. K. Abbot : Sight and Touch (1864), chapter x. 



42 P8TOH0L0OY. 

know under that name. We think of ^ the ground ' as being 
there and giving us the sensation of this kind of movement 
The sensation, we say, comes/rom the ground. The ground's 
place seems to be its place; although at the same time, 
and for very similar practical reasons^ we think of another 
optical and tactile object, ' the hand ' namely, and consider 
that its place cdao must be the place of our sensation. In 
other words, we take an object or sensible content A, and 
confounding it with another object otherwise known, B, or 
with two objects otherwise known, B and C, we identify its 
place with their places. But in all this there is no ^project- 
ing ' (such as the extradition-philosophers talk of) of A out 
of an original place; no primitive location which it first 
occupied, away from these other sensations, has to be con- 
tradicted ; no natural * centre,* from which it is expelled, 
exists. That would imply that A aboriginally came to us 
in definite local relations with other sensations, for to be 
ovi of B and C is to be in local relation with them as much 
as to be twthem is so. But it was no more out of B and O 
than it was in them when it first came to us. It simply 
had nothing to do with them. To say that we feel a sen- 
sation's seat to be * in the brain ' or * against the eye ' or 
* under the skin * is to say as much about it and to deal 
with it in as non-primitive a way as to say that it is a mile 
off. These are all secondary perceptions, ways of defining 
the sensation's seat per aliud. They involve numberless 
associations, identifications, and imaginations, and admit a 
great deal of vacillation and uncertainty in the result.* 

I conclude y then, that there is no truth in the * eccentric pro- 
jection' theory. It is due to the confused assumption that 
the bodily processes which cause a sensation must also be 
its seat f But sensations have no seat in this sense. They 



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

f It is from this confused assumption that the time-honored riddle 
comes, of how, with an upside-down picture on the retina, we can see 
things right-side up. Our consciousness is naively supposed to inhabit the 



8EN8ATI0K 43 

heoome seats for each other, as fast as experience associates 
them together; but that violates no primitive seat possessed 
by any one of them. And though our sensations cannot 
then so analyze and talk of themselves, yet at their very 
first appearance quite as much as at any later date are they 
cognizant of all those qualities which we end by extracting 
and conceiving under the names of objectivity , eocteriority^ 
and extent. It is surely subjectivity and interiority which 
are the notions latest acquired by the human mind. * 



picture and to feel the picture's position as related to other objects of space. 
But the truth is that the picture is non-existent either as a habitat or as any- 
thing else, for inunediate consciousness. Our notion of it is an enormous- 
ly late conception. The outer object is given immediately with all those 
qualities which later are named and determined in relation to other sensa- 
tions. The * bottom * of this object is where we see what by touch we 
afterwards know as out feet, the ' top * is the place in which we see what 
we know as other people's heads, etc., etc. Berkeley long ago made this 
matter perfectly clear (see his Essay towards a new Theory of Vision, 
§§9»-98, 118-118). 

* For full justification the reader must see the next chapter. He may 
object, against the summary account given now, that in a babe's immediate 
field of vision the various things which appear arc located relatively to each 
other from the outset. I admit that if discriminated, they would appear so 
located. But they are parts of the content of one sensation, not sensations 
separately experienced, such as the text is concerned with. The fully de- 
veloped ' world/ in which all our sensations ultimately find location, is 
nothing but an imaginary object framed after the pattern of the field of 
vision, by the addition and continuation of one sensation upon another in 
an orderly and systematic way. In corroboration of my text I must refer 
to pp. 57-dO of Riehl's book quoted above on page 82, and to Uphues: 
Wahmehmung und Empfindung (1888), especially the Einleitung and 
pp. 51-61. 



CHAPTER XVnX 

IMAGINATION. 

Sensations, once experienced, modify the nervous organism^ ' 
%o thai copies of them arise again in the mind after the orig- 
inal outxjoard stimvlris is gone. No mental copy, however, 
can arise in the mind, of any kind of sensation which has 
never been directly excited from without. 

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

After-images belong to sensation rather than to imagi- 
nation ; so that the most immediate phenomena of imagi- 
nation would seem to be those tardier images (due to what 
the Germans call Sinnesgeddchtniss) which were spoken of 
in Vol. I, p. 647, — coercive hauntings of the mind by echoes 
of unusual experiences for hours after the latter have taken 
place. The phenomena ordinarily ascribed to imagination, 
however, are those mental pictures of possible sensible 



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

44 



IMAGINATION. 45 

experiences, to which the ordinary processes of associa- 
tive thought give rise. 

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

CUB IMAGES ABE USUAIiliT VAGUE. 

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

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

**The mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality, without 
forming a precise notion of the degrees of each," for *"t is confessed 
that no object can appear to the senses : or in other words, that no im- 
pression* can become present to the mind, without being determined in 
its degrees both of quantity and quality. The confusion in which im- 
pressions are sometimes involved proceeds only from their faintness 
and unsteadiness, not from any capacity in the mind to receive any im- 
pression, which in its real existence has no particular degree nor pro- 
portion. That is a contradiction in terms; and even implies the flattest 

* Impression means sensation for Hume. 



46 PSTCHOLOOT, 

of all contradictions, viz., that 'tis possible for the same thing both to 
be and not to be. Now since all ideas are derived from impressions, 
and are nothing but copies and representations of them, whatever is 
true of the one must be acknowledged concerning the other. Impres- 
sions and ideas differ only in their strength and vivacity. The forego- 
ing conclusion is not founded on any particular degree of vivacity. It 
cannot therefore be affected by any variation in that particular. An 
idea is a weaker impression ; and as a strong impression must neces- 
sarily have a determinate quantity and quality, the case must be the 
same with its copy or representative." * 

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

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

**Now, when several complex impressions which are more or less 
different from one another— let us say that out of ten impressions in 
each, six are the same in all, and four are different from all the rest — 
are successively presented to the mind, it is easy to see what must be 
the nature of the result. The repetition of the six similar impressions 
will strengthen the six corresponding elements of the complex idea, 

* Treatise on Human Nature, part i. § vii. 



IMAGINATION. 47 

#hich will therefore acquire greater yividness ; while the four differing 
impressions of each will not only acquire no greater strength than they 
had at first, but, in accordance with the law of association, they will 
all tend to appear at once, and will thus neutralize one another. 

*'This mental operation may be rendered comprehensible by consid- 
ering what takes place in the formation of compound photographs — 
when the images of the faces of six sitters, for example, are each re- 
ceived on the same photographic plate, for a sixtn of the time requisite 
to take one portrait. The final result is that all those points in which 
the six faces agree are brought out strongly, while all those in which 
they differ are left vague ; and thus what may be termed a generic por- 
trait of the six, in contradistinction to a specific portrait of any one, is 
produced. 

''Thus our ideas of single complex impressions are incomplete in 
one way, and those of numerous, more or less similar, complex im- 
pressions are incomplete in another way ; that is to say, they are gen- 
eric, not specific. And hence it follows that our ideas of the impres- 
sions in question are not, in the strict sense of the word, copies of those 
impressions ; while, at the same tiine^ they may exist in the mind in- 
dependently of language. 

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

** I may venture to express a doubt whether he has succeeded in his 
object ; but the subject is an abstruse one ; and I must content my- 
self with the remark, that though Berkeley's view appears to be largely 
applicable to such general ideas as are formed after language has been 
acquired, and to all the more abstract sort of conceptions, yet that gen- 
eral ideas of sensible objects may nevertheless be produced in the way 
indicated, and may exist independently of language. In dreams, one 
sees houses, trees, and other objects, which are perfectly recognizable as 
such, but which remind one of the actual objects as seen ' out of the 
corner of the eye,' or of the pictures thrown by a badly-focussed magic 
lantern. A man addresses us who is like a figure seen in twilight ; or 
we travel through countries where every feature of the scenery is vague ; 
the outlines of the hills are ill-marked, and the rivers have no defined 
banks. They are, in short, generic ideas of many past impressions of 
men, hills, and rivers. An anatomist who occupies himself intently 
with the examination of several specimens of some new kind of animal, 
in course of time acquires so vivid a conception of its form and struc- 



48 PSrCHOLOOY, 

tare that the idea may take visible shape and become a sort of waking 
dream. But the figure which thus presents itself is generic, not spe- 
cific. It is no copy of any one specimen, but, more or less, a mean of 
the series ; and there seems no reason to doubt that the minds of chil- 
dren before they learn to speak, and of deaf-mutes, are peopled wi»h 
similarly generated generic ideas of sensible objects." * 

Are Vague Images * Abstract Ideas ' ? 
The only point which I am tempted to criticise in this 
account is Prof. Huxley's identi/ication of these generic images 
with ' abstract or general ideas ' in the sense of universal concep- 
tions, Taine gives the truer view. He writes : 

**8ome years ago I saw in England, in Kew Gardens, for the first 
time, araucarias, and I walked along the beds looking at these strange 
plants, with their rigid bark and compact, short, scaly leaves, of a 
sombre green, whose abrupt, rough, bristling form cut in upon the fine 
softly-lighted turf of the fresh grass-plat. If I now inquire what this 
experience has left in me, I find, first, the sensible representation of an 
araucaria ; in fact, I have been able to describe almost exactly the form 
and color of the plant. But there is a difference between this represen- 
tation and the former sensations, of which it is the present echo. The 
internal semblance, from which I have just made my description, is 
vague, and my past sensations were precise. For, assuredly, each of 
the araucarias I saw then excited in me a distinct visual sensation ; 
there are no two absolutely similar plants in nature ; I observed perhaps 
twenty or thirty araucarias ; without a doubt each one of them differed 
from the others in size, in girth, by the more or less obtuse angles of its 
branches, by the more or less abrupt jutting out of its scales, by the style 
of its texture ; consequently, my twenty or thirty visual sensations were 
different. But no one of these sensations has completely survived in its 
echo ; the twenty or thirty revivals have blunted one another ; thus 
upset and agglutinated by their resemblance they are confounded 
together, and ray present representation is their residue only. This is 
the product, or rather the fragraent, which is deposited in us, when we 
have gone through a series of sirailar facts or individuals. Of our 
numerous experiences there remain on the following day four or tive 
more or less distinct recollections, which, obliterated themselves, leave 
behind in us a simple colorless, vague representation, into which enter 
as components various reviving sensations, in an utterly feeble, incom- 
plete, and abortive state. — But thU representation is not the general aiid 
abstract idea. It is but its accompaniment^ and, if I may say so, the 
ore from which it is extracted. For the representation, though badly 
sketched, is a sketch, the sensible sketch of a distinct individual. . . . 
But my abstract idea corresponds to the whole class ; it differs, then, 
from the representation of an individual.— Moreover, my abstract idea 

♦ Huxley's Hume. pp. 92-04. 



IMAGINATION. 49 

is perfectly dear and determinate ; now that I pofisees it, I never fail 
to recognize an araucaria among the various plants which-may be shown 
me ; it differs then from the confused and floating representation I have 
of some particular araucaria.^' * 

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

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

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

Until very recent years it was supposed by all philoso- 
phers that there was a typical human mind which all indi- 
vidual minds were like, and that propositions of universal 
validity could be laid down about such faculties as ' the 

♦ On Intelligence (N. Y.), vol. ii. p. 189. 

t Principles, Introd. g 18. Compare also the passage quoted above. 
p. 469 



60 



PBTOHOLOGT. 



ImaginatioiL' Lately, however, a mass of revelations liave 
poured in, which make us see how false a view this is. 
There are imaginations, not 'the Imagination,* and they 
must be studied in detail 

INDIVrDUAIiS DUVEB in mAQINATION. 

The first breaker of ground in this direction was Fechner, 
in 1860. Fechner was gifted with unusual talent for sub- 
jective observation, and in chapter xuv of his * Psychophy- 
sik* he gave the results of a most careful comparison of his 
own optical after-images, with his optical memory-pictures, 
together with accounts by several other individuals of their 
optical memory-pictures.* The result was to show a great 

* The differences noted by Fechner between after-images and imagei 
of imagination proper are as follows : 



Afier-imageB, 

Feel coercive ; 

Seem unsubstantial, vaporooB ; 

Are sharp in outline ; 

Are bright ; 

Are almost colorless ; 

Are continuously enduring ; 



Cannot be voluntarily changed. 
Are exact copies of origiDal& 



Are more easily got with shut than 
with open eyes ; 

Seem to move when the head or eyes 
move ; 

The field within which they appear 
(with closed eyes) is dark, con- 
tracted, flat, close to the eyes, in 
front, and the images have no 
perspective ; 

The attention seems directed for- 
wards towards the sense-organ, in 
observing after-images. 



ImaginaUon-imageB, 

Feel subject to our spontaneity ; 

Have, as it were, more body ; 

Are blurred ; 

Are darker than even the darkeflt 
black of the after-images ; 

Have lively coloration ; 

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

Can be exchanged at will for others. 

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

Are more easily had with open than 
with shut eyes ; 

Need not follow movements of head 
or eyes. 

The field is extensive in three dimen- 
sions, and objects can be imagined 
in it above or behind almost as 
easily as in front. 

In imagining, the attention feels ak 
if drawn backwards towards th« 
brain. 



Finally, Fechner speaks of the impossibility of attending to both after 



IMAGINATION. 61 

personal diversity. " It would be interesting," he writes, 
" to work up the subject statistically ; and I regret that 
other occupations have kept me from fulfilling my earlier 
intention to proceed in this way." 

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

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

** The first group of the ratbei long series of queries related to the 
illumination, definition, and violoring of the mental image, and were 
framed thus : 

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

* * * 1 . lllu mination. — Is the image dim or fairly clear ? Is its bright- 
ness comparable to that of the actual scene ? 

** * 2. Definition. — Are all the objects pretty well defined at the same 
time, or is the place of sharpest definition at any one moment more con- 
tracted than it is in a real scene ? 

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

** The earliest results of my inquiry amazed me. I had begun by 
questioning friends in the scientific world, as they were the most likely 
class of men to give accurate answers concerning this faculty of visual- 
images and imagination -images at once, even when they are of the same 
object and might be expected to combine. All these differences are true of 
Fechner ; but many of them would be untrue of other persons. I quote 
them as a type of observation which any reader with sufllcient patience 
may repeat. To them may be added, as a universal proposition, that after- 
images seem larger if we project them on a distant screen, and smaller if 
we project them on a near one, whilst no such change takes place in mental 
liictures. 



62 PBYCEOLOQT, 

izing, to which novelists and poets continually allude, which has left 
an abiding mark on the vocabularies of every language, and which 
supplies the material out of which dreams and the well-known halluci- 
nations of sick people are built. 

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

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

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

** On the other hand, when I spoke to persons whom I met in gen- 
eral society, I found an entirely different disposition to prevail. Many 
men and a yet larger number of laomen, and many hoys and girls, 
declared that they habitually saw mental imagery, and that it teas 
perfectly distinct to them and full of color. The more I pressed and 
crossed-questioned them, professing myself to be incredulous, the more 
obvious was the truth of their first assertions. They described 
•their imagery in minute detail, and they spoke in a tone of surprise at 
my apparent hesitation in accepting what they said. I felt that I my- 
self should have spoken exactly as they did if I had been dc^icribing a 
scene that lay before my eyes, in broad daylight, to a blina man who 
persisted in doubting the reality of vision. Reassured by this happier 
experience, 1 recommenced to inquire among scientific men, and soon 
found scattered instances of what I sought, though in by no means the 
same abundance as elsewhere. I then circulated my questions more 
generally among my friends and through their hands, and obtained re- 
plies . . . from persons of both sexes, and of various ages, and in the 
end from occasional correspondents in nearly every civilized country. 

** I have also received batches of answers from various educational 
establishments both in England and America, which were made after 
the masters had fully explained the meaning of the <|uestions, and in- 
terested the boys in them. These have the merit of returns derived 
from a general census, which my other data lack, because I cannot for 



IMAGINATION. 63 

s moment suppose that the writers of the latter are a haphazard pro^ 
portion of those to whom they were sent. Indeed I know of some who, 
disavowing all possession of the power, and of many others who, pos' 
aessing it in too faint a degree to enable them to express what their 
experiences really were, in a manner satisfactory to themselves, sent no 
returns at all. Considerable statistical similarity was, however, ob- 
served between the sets of returns furnished by the schoolboys and 
those sent by my separate correspondents, and I may add that they ac- 
cord in this respect with the oral information I have elsewhere obtained. 
The conformity of replies from so many different sources which was 
clear from the first, the fact of their apparent trustworthiness being on 
the whole much increased by cross-examination (though I could give 
one or two amusing instances of break-down), and the evident eflbft 
made to give accurate answers, have convinced me that it is a much 
easier matter than I had anticipated to obtain trustworthy replies to 
psychological questions. Many persons, especially women and intelli- 
gent children, take pleasure in introspection, and strive their very best! 
to explain their mental processes. I think that a delight in self-dissee* 
tion must be a strong ingredient in the pleasure that many are said to 
take in confessing themselves to priests. 

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

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



54 PBTCHOLOGY. 

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

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

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

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

**Thi8 power of comprehension is practically attained in many cases 
by indirect methods. It is a common feat to take in the whole sur- 
roundings of an imagined room with such a rapid mental sweep as to 
leave some doubt whether it has not been viewed simultaneously. Some 
persons have the habit of viewing objects as though they were partly 
transparent ; thus, if they so dispose a globe in their imagination as to 
see both its north and south poles at the same time, th<3y will not be 
able to see its equatorial parts. They can also perceive all the rooms of 
an imaginary house by a single mental glance, the walls and floors being 
as if made of glass. A fourth chiss of {Persons have the habit of recall- 
ing scenes, not from the point of view whence they were observed, but 
from a distance, and they visualize their own selves as actors on the 
mental stage. By one or other of th(«e ways, the power of seeing the 
whole of an object, and not merely one as|)ect of it, is possessed by 
many persons. 

**The place where the image appears to lie differs much. Most per- 
sons see it in an indefinable sort of way, others see it in front of the eye, 
others at a distance corresponding to reality. There exists a power 
which is rare naturally, but can, I believe, be acquired without much 
difficulty, of projecting a mental picture upon a piece of paper, and of 



IMAGINATION. 55 

holding it fast there, so that it can be outlined with a pencil. To this 
I shall recur. 

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

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

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

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



*' I have many cases of persons mentally reading off scores when 
playing the pianoforte, or manuscript when they are making speeches. 
One statesman has assured me that a certain hesitation in utterance 
which he has at times is due to his being plagued by the image of his 



66 PaTCHOLOQT. 

manuscript speech with its original erasures and corrections. He catt- 
not lay the ghost, and he puzzles in trying to decipher it. 

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

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

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

**I can look down the mentally seen page and see the words that 
commence all the lines, and from any one of these words I can continue 



* See also McCoah and Osborne, Princeton Review, Jan. 1884. There 
are some good examples of high development of the Faculty in the London 
Spectator, Dec. 28, 1878, pp. 1681, 1684, Jan. 4, 11, 25. and March 18. 1879. 



IMAGINATION. 67 

the line. I find this much easier to do if the words begin in a straight 
line than if there are breaks. Example : 

jStatUfait 

Ibtts 

Ades 

Que fit 

CSres 

Avec 

Unfleur 

Comme 

(La Fontaine 8. iv.)** 

The poor yisualizer says : 

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

A person whose visual imagination is strong finds it 
hard to understand how those who are without the faculty 
can think at all. Some people undovbtedly have no visual 
images at aU tvorthy of the name* and instead of seeing their 
breakfast-table, they tell you that they remember it or know 
what was on it. This knowing and remembering takes 

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



68 P8YCH0L00T. 

place andoubtedlj by means of verbal images, as was ex« 
plained already in Chapter IX, pp. 265-6. 

The study qf Aphasia (see p. 54) has of late years shown 
how unexpectedly great are the differences bettveen indimdvals in 
respect of imagination. And at the same time the discrepan- 
cies between lesion and symptom in diflferent cases of 
the disease have been largely cleared up. In some indi- 
viduals the habitual * thought-stuff,' if one may so call it, 
is visual ; in others it is auditory, articulatory, or motor ; 
in most, perhaps, it is evenly mixed. The same local cerebral 
injury must needs work different practical results in per- 
sons who differ in this way. In one it will throw a much- 
used brain-tract out of gear; in the other.it may affect an 
unimportant region. A particularly instructive case was 
published by Charcot in 1883.* The patient was 

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

His auditory memory was always deficient, or at least secondary- 
He had no taste for music. 

* Progrds Medical, 21 juillet. 1 abridge from the German report d 
the case in Wilbrana: Die Seelenblindlieit (1887). 



IMAGINATION. 69 

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

Every time he returns to A., from which place business often calls 
him, he seems to himself as if entering a strange city. He views the 
monuments, houses, and streets with the same surprise as if he saw 
them for the first time. Gradually, however, his memory returns, and 
he finds himself at home again. When asked to describe the principal 
public place of the town, he answered, *' I know that it is there, but it 
is impossible to imagine it, and 1 can tell you nothing about it. " He has 
often drawn the port of A. To-day he vainly tries to trace its principal 
outlines. Asked to draw a minaret, he reflects, says it is a square 
tower, and draws, rudely, four lines, one for ground, one for top, and 
two for sides. Asked to draw an arcade, he says, ** I remember that it 
contains semi-circular arches, and that two of them meeting at an angle 
make a vault, but how it looks I am absolutely unable to imagine." The 
profile of a man which he drew by request was as if drawn by a little 
child; and yet he confessed that he had been helped to draw it by look- 
ing at the bystanders. Similarly he drew a shapeless scribble for a 
tree. 

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

No other disturbances but this loss of visual images. Now when he 
seeks something in his correspondence, he must rummage among the 
letters like other men, until he meets the passage. He can recall only 
the first few verses of the Iliad, and must yrope to read Homer, VirgiU 
and Horace. Figures which he adds he must now whisper to himself. 
He realizes clearly that he must help his memory out with auditory 
images, which he does with effort. Tlie words and exjyressions which 
he recalls seem now to echo in his ear^ an altogether novel sensation firr 
him. If he wishes to learn by heart anything, a series of phrases for 
example, he must read them several times aloiul, so as to Impress his 
ear. When later he repeats the thing in question, the sensation of in- 



60 parcHOLOor. 

ward hearing which precedes articulation rises up in his mind. This 
feeling was formerly unknown to him. He speaks French fluently ; but 
affirms that he can no longer think in French; but must get his French 
words by translating them from Spanish or German, the languages of 
his childhood. He dreams no more in visual terms, but only in words, 
usually Spanish words. A certain degree of verbal blindness affects 
him — he is troubled by the Greek alphabet, etc.* 

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

** Tfie avditory type,^^ says M. A. Binet,t ** appears to be rarer than 
the visual. Persons of this type imagine what they think of in the 
language of sound. In order to remember a lesson they impress upon 
their mind, not the look of the page, but the sound of the words. 
They reason, as well as remember, by ear. In performing a mental ad- 
dition they repeat verbally the names of the figures, and add, as it 
were, the sounds, without any thought of the graphic signs. Imag- 
ination also takes the auditory form. *When I writ« a scene,' said 
Legouv6 to Scribe, * I hear ; but you see. In each phrase which I write, 
the voice of the personage who speaks strikes my ear. Vous, qui ites le 
th&Ure inimej your actors walk, gesticulate before your eyes ; I am a 
listener^ you a spectator,'' — * Nothing more true,' said Scribe ; * do you 
know where I am when I write a piece ? In the middle of the parterre.' 
It is clear that the pure audile, seeking to develop only a single one of 
his faculties, may, like the pure visualizer, perform astounding feats 
of memory — Mozart, for example, noting from memory the Miserere of 
the Sistine Chapel after two hearings ; the deaf Beethoven, composing 
and inwardly repeating his enormous symphonies. On the other hand, 
the man of auditory type, like the visual, is exposed to serious dangers ; 
for if he lose his auditory images, he is without resource and breaks 
down completely. 

*' It is possible that persons with hallucinations of hearing, and in- 



* In a letter to Charcot this interesting patient adds that his character 
also is changed : *' 1 was formerly receptive, easily made enthusiastic, and 
possessed a rich fancy. Now I am quiet and cold, and fancy never carriei 
my thoughts away. ... 1 am much less susceptible than formerly to 
anger tr sorrow. I lately lost my dearly-beloved mother; but fell far leas 
grief at the bereavement than if 1 had been able to see in my mind's eye 
her physiognomy and the phases of her suffering, and especially less than 
if 1 had been able to witness in imagination the outward effects of her un> 
timely loss upon the members of the family. " 

t Psychologic du Ralsonnement (1886), p. 25. 



IMAGINATION. 61 

dividaals afflicted with the mania that they are victims of persecution, 
may all belong to the auditory type ; and that the predominance of a 
certain kind of imagination may predispose to a certain order of hal« 
Incinations, and perhaps of delirium. 

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

** There are persons who remember a drawing better when they have 
followed its outlines with their finger. Lecoq de Boisbaudran used this 
means in his artistic teaching, in order to accustom his pupils to draw 
from memory. He made them follow the outlines of figures with a 
pencil held in the air, forcing them thus to associate muscular with 
visual memory. Galton quotes a curious corroborative fact. Colonel 
Moncrieff often observed in North America young Indians who, visit- 
ing occasionally his quarters, interested themselves greatly in the 
engravings which were shown them. One of them followed with care 
with the point of his knife the outline of a drawing in the Illustrated 
London News, saying that this was to enable him to carve it out the 
better on his return home. In this case the motor images were to 



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



62 P8TCH0L0QT. 

reinforce the visual ones. The young savage was a motor,* . . . When 
one^s motor images are destroyed, one loses one^s remembrance of move- 
ments, and sometimes, more curiously still, one loses the power of exe- 
cuting them. Pathology gives us examples in motor aphasia, agraphia, 
etc. Take the case of agraphia. An educated man, knowing how to 
write, suddenly loses this power, as a result of cerebral injury. His 
hand and arm are in no way paralytic, yet he cannot write. Whence 
this loss of power ? He tells us himself : he no longer knows how. He 
has forgotten how to set about it to trace the letters, he has lost the 
memory of the movements to be executed, he has no longer the motor 
images which, when formerly he wrote, directed his hand. . . . Other 
patients, affected with word-blindness, resort to these motor images 
precisely to make amends for their other deficiency. . . . An individ- 
ual affected in this way cannot read letters which are placed before his 
eyes, even although his sight be good enough for the purpose. This loss 
of the power of reading by sight may, at a certain time, be the only 
trouble the patient has. Individuals thus mutilated succeed in reading 
by an ingenious roundabout way which they often discover themselves : 
it is enough that they should trace the letters with their finger to under* 
stand their sense. What happens in such a case ? How can the hand 
supply the place of the eye? The motor image gives the key to the 
problem. If the patient can read, so to speak, with his fingers, it ia 
because in tracing the letters he gives himself a certain number of mus- 
cular imjiressions which are those of writing. In one word, the patient 
reads by writing (Charcot): the feeling of the graphic movements sug- 
gests the sense of what is being written as well as sight would." f 

The imagination of a blind-deaf mute like Laura Bridg- 
man must be confined entirely to tactile and motor materiaL 
AU Uind persons viust belong to the * tactile ' and ^motile' types of 
the French authors. When the young man whose cataracts 
were removed by Dr. Franz was shown diflferent geometric 
figures, he said he " had not been able to form from them 
the idea of a square and a disk until he perceived a sensa- 
tion of what he saw in the points of his fingers, as if he 
really touched the objects." % 

Professor Strieker of Vienna, who seems to have the 
motile form of imagination developed in unusual strength, 

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

t See an interesting case of a similar sort, reported by F&rges, in l'Sn< 
c6phale. 7me Ann6e, p. 545. 

X Philosophical Transactions, 1841, p. 66. 



IMAOINATION. 63 

has given a very careful analysis of liis own case in a 
couple of monographs with which all students should be- 
come familiar.* His recollections both of his own move- 
ments and of those of other things are accompanied 
invariably by distinct muscular feelings in those parts of 
his body which would naturally be used in efifecting or in 
following the movement In thinking of a soldier march- 
ing, for example, it is as if he were helping the image to 
march by marching himself in his rear. And if he sup- 
presses this sympathetic feeling in his own legs, and con- 
centrates all his attention on the imagined soldier, the latter 
becomes, as it were, paralyzed. In general his imagined 
movements, of whatsoever objects, seem paralyzed the 
moment no feelings of movement either in his own eyes or 
in his own limbs accompany them.t The movements of 
articidate speech play a predominant part in his mental 
life. 

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

Most persons, on being asked in what sort of terms they 
imagine ivords, will say * in terms of hearing.' It is not until 
their attention is expressly drawn to the point that they 
find it difficult to say whether auditory images or motor 
images connected with the organs of articulation predomi- 
nate. A good way of bringing the difficulty to consciousness 
is that proposed by Strieker : Partly open yout" mouth and 
then imagine any word with labials or dentals in it, such as 
* bubble,' * toddle.' Is your image under these conditions 
distinct ? To most people the image is at first * thick,* as 
the sound of the word would be if they tried to pronounce 
it with the lips parted. Many can never imagine the words 

• Studien Uber die SprachvorstellungeD (1880), and Studien Uber die 
Bewegungsvorstellungen (1882). 

t Prof. Strieker admits that by practice he has succeeded in making 
his eye-movements 'act vicariously' for his leg-movements in imagining 
men walking. 

t Bewegungsvorstellungen, p. 6. 



84 P8T0E0L0Q7. 

clearly with the month open ; others sncceed after a few 
preliminary trials. The experiment proves how dependent 
our verbal imagination is on actual feelings in lips, tongne^ 
throat, larynx, etc. 

^* When we recall the imflressioii of a word or sentence, if we do not 
speak it ont, we feel the witter of the organs just about to come to 
that po'nt. The articulating parts— the larynx, the tongue, the lips- 
are all sensibly excited ; a suppressed articulation is in fact the mate" 
rial cf our reooUection, the intellectual manifestation; the idea of 
speech."* 

The open mouth in Strieker's experiment not only pre- 
vents actual articulation of the labials, but our feeling of 
its openness keeps us from imagining their articulation, 
just as a sensation of glaring light will keep us from 
strongly imagining darkness. In persons whose auditory 
imagination is weak, the articulatory image seems to con* 
stitute the whole material for verbal thought. Professor 
Strieker says that in his own case no auditory image enters 
into the words of which he thinks, t Like most psycholo- 
gists, however, he makes of his personal peculiarities a rule, 
and says that verbal thinking is normally and univer- 
sally an exclusively motor representation. / certainly get 
auditory images, both of vowels and of consonants, in 
addition to the articulatory images or feelings on which 
this author lays such stress. And I find that numbers of 
my students, after repeating his experiments, come to this 
conclusion. There is at first a difficulty due to the open 
mouth. That, however, soon vanishes, as does also the 
difficulty of thinking of one vowel whilst continuously 
sounding another. What probably remains true, however, 
is that most men have a less auditory and a more articu- 
latory verbal imagination than they are apt to be aware of. 

* Baia : Senses and Intellect, p. 839. 

t Stiulien aber Sprachvorstellungen, 28, 31, etc. Cf. pp. 49-50, etc. 
Against Strieker, see Stumpf, Tonpsychol., 155-162, and Revue Phi 
losophique, xx. 617. See also Paulhan, Rev. Philosophique, xvi. 40S 
Strieker replies to Paulhan in vol. xviii. p. 685. P. retorts in vol. xix 
p. 118. Strieker reports that out of 100 persons questioned he found odI> 
one who had no feeling in his lips when silently thinking the letters M B^ 
P; and out of 60 only two who were conscious of no internal articulation 
whilst reading (pp. 59-60). 



IMAQIHiATlON. 65 

Professor Strieker himself has acoustio images, and can 
imagine the sounds of musical instruments, and the pecul- 
iar voice of a friend. A statistical inquiry on a large scale, 
into the variations of acoustic, tactile, and motor imagina- 
tion, would probably bear less fruit than Galton's inquiry 
into visual images. A few monographs by competent ob- 
servers, like Strieker, about their own peculiarities, would 
give much more valuable information about the diversities 
which prevail* 

T(yuchrimajge8 are very strong in some people. The most 
vivid touch-images come when we ourselves barely escape 
local injury, or when we see another injured. The place 

* I think it must be admitted that some people have no vivid substan- 
tive images in any department of tlieir sensibility. One of my students, 
an intelligent youth, denied so pertinaciously that there was anything in his 
mind at all when he thought, that I was much perplexed by his case. I my- 
self certainly have no such vivid play of nascent movements or motor images 
as Professor Strieker describes. When I seek to represent a row of soldiers 
marching, all I catch is a view of stationary legs first in one phase of 
movement and then in another, and these views are extremely imperfect 
and momentary. Occasionally (especially when I try to stimulate my 
imagination, as by repeating Victor Hugo's lines about the regiment, 
** Leur pas est si correct, sans tarder ni courir, 
Qu*on croit voir des clseauz se fermer et s'ouvrir,") 
I seem to get an instantaneous glimpse of an actual movement, but it is to 
the last degree dim and uncertaiu. All these images seem at tirst as if 
purely retinal. 1 think, however, thut rapid eye-movements accompany 
them, though these latter give rise to such sliglit feelings that they are 
almost impossible of detection. Absolutely no leg-movements of my own 
are there ; in fact, to call such up arrests my imagination of the soldiers. 
My optical images are in general very dim. dark, fugitive, and contracted. 
It would be utterly impossible to draw from them, and yet I perfectly well 
distinguish one from the other. My auditory images are excessively inade- 
quate reproductions of their originals. I have no images of taste or smell. 
Touch-imagination is fairly distinct, but comes very little into play with 
most objects thought of. Neither is all my thought verbalized: for I have 
shadowy schemes of relation, as apt to terminate in a nod of the head or an 
expulsion of the breath as in a definite word. On the whole, vague images 
or sensations of movement inside of my head towards the various parts of 
space in which the terms I am thinking of either lie or are momentarily sym- 
bolized to lie together with movements of the breath through my pharynx 
and nostrils, form a by no means inconsiderable part of my thought-stuff, 
I doubt whether my difficulty in giving a clearer account is wholly a mat- 
ter of inferior power of introspective attention, though that doubtless plays 
its part. Attention, ceteris paribus^ must always be inferior in proportion 
lo the feebleness of the internal images which are offered it to hold on to^ 



66 PSTCffOLoor. 

may then actaally tingle with tlie imaginary sensation — 
perhaps not altogether imaginary, since goose-flesh, pal- 
ing or reddening, and other evidences of actual mnscnlar 
contraction in the spot may result. 

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

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

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

Meyer's account of his oxen visfial images is very interest- 
ing ; and with it we may close our survey of diflferences be- 
tween the normal powers of imagining in different indi- 
viduals. 

** With much practice,^ he says, ** I have succeeded in making it 
possible for me to call up subjective visual sensations at will. I tried 
all my experiments by day or at night with closed eyes. At first it 
was very difficult. In the first experiments which succeeded the whole 
picture was luminous, the shadows being given in u somewhat less stronat 
bluish light. In later experiments I saw the objects dark, witn 
bright outlines, or rather I saw outline drawings of them, bright on a 
ilark ground. I can compare these drawinj^ less to chalk drawings on 
a blackboard than to drawings made with phosphorus on a dark wr.U 
at night, though the phosphorus would show luminous vapors whicb 
were absent from my lines. If 1 wished, for example, to see a face, 
without intending that of a particular person, 1 saw the outline of a 
profile against the dark background. When I tried to repeat an ex- 

* Geo. Herm. Meyer, Untersuchiingcn iib. d. Physiol, d. Ner\'enfa8er 
(1843) , J). 233. For other cases see Tuke's Influence of Mind upon Body, 
chaps. II. and vii. 

t Meyer, op. cU. p. 238. 



niAOINATlON. 97 

perimeDt of the elder Darwin I saw only the edges of the die as bright 
lines on a dark ground. Sometimes, however, I saw the die really white 
and its edges black ; it was then on a paler ground. I could soon at 
will change between a white die with black borders on a light field, and 
a black die with white borders on a dark field ; and I can do this at any 
moment now. After long practice . . . these experiments succeeded 
better still. I can now call before my eyes almost any object which I 
please, as a subjective appearance, and this in its own natural color and 
illumination. I see them almost always on a more or less light or dark, 
mostly dimly changeable ground. Even known faces I can see quite 
sharp, with the true color of hair and cheeks. It is odd that I see 
these faces mostly in profile, whereas those described [in the previous 
extract] were all full-face. Here are some of the final results of these 
experiments : 

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

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

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

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

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

*' These experiments succeeded best when I lay quietly on my back 
and closed my eyes. I could bear no noise about me, as this kept the 
vision from attainin«5 the requisite intensity. The experiments succeed 
with me now so easily that I am surprised they did not do so at first, 
and I feel as though they ought to succeed with everyone. The im- 
portant point in them is to get the image sufficiently intense by the ex- 
clusive direction of the attention upon it, and by the removal of all 
disturbing impressions.^^ * 

The negative after-images tvhich succeeded upon Meyer's 
imagination ivhen he opened his eyes are a highly interest- 
ing, though rare, phenomeuou. So far as I know there is 



Meyer, op, cii. pp. 238-41. 



68 P8T0H0L0QY. 

only one other published report of a similar experience.* It 
would seem that in such a case the neural process corre- 
sponding to the imagination must be the entire tract con- 
cerned in the actual sensation, even down as far as the 
retina. This leads to a new question to which we may 
now turn — of what is 

THB NEUBAL FBOCBSS WHICH UNDEBUES IMAaiNATIOB' f 

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

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



♦ That of Dr. Ch. Fer§ in the Revue Philosophique, xx. 364. Johannes 
H(lller*s account of hypnagogic hallucinations floating before the eyes for 
a few moments after these had been opened, seems to belong more to the 
category of spontaneous hallucinations (see his Physiology, London, 1842, 
p. 1894). It is impossible to tell whether the words in Wundt's Vorle- 
Bungen, i. 887, refer to a personal experience of his own or not ; probably 
not. 11 va sans dire that an inferior visunlizer like myself can get no such 
after-images. Nor have I as yet succeeded in getting report of any from 
my students. 



IMAGINATION. 69 

hypothesis that wonid have occurred to them. For where shonld a 
past feeling be embodied, if not in the same organs as the feeling when, 
present ? It is only in this way that its identity can be preserved ; a 
feeling differently embodied would be a different feeling."* 

It is not plain from Professor Bain's text whether by 
the ' same parts ' he means only the same parts inside the 
hrain^ or the same peripheral parts also, as those occupied by 
the original feeling. The examples which he himself pro- 
ceeds to give are almost all cases of imagination of move- 
ment, in which the peripheral organs are indeed affected, 
for actual movements of a weak sort are found to accom- 
pany the idea. This is what we should expect. All cur- 
rents tend to run forward in the brain and discharge into 
the muscular system ; and the idea of a movement tends to 
do this with peculiar faciliiy. But the question remains : 
Do currents run hackvxird, so that if the optical centres 
(for example) are excited by * association ' and a visual ob- 
ject is imagined, a current runs down to the retina also, 
and excites that sympathetically with the higher tracts ? 
In other words, can peripheral sense-organs be excited from 
€xbove, or only from ivithout ? Are they excited in imagi- 
nation ? Professor Bain's instances are almost silent as to 
this point All he says is this : 

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

If I may judge from my own experience, all feelings of 
this sort are consecutive upon motor currents invading the 
skin and producing contraction of the muscles there, the 
muscles whose contraction gives ' goose-flesh ' when it takes 
place on an extensive scale. I never get a feding in the 
skin, however strongly I imagine it, until some actual 
change in the condition of the skin itself has occurred. 
The laruth seems to be that the cases where peripheral 

* Senses and Intellect, p. 888. 



70 PSYCHOLOGY. 

sense-organs are directly excited in consequence of imag^ 
• nation are exceptional rarities, if they exist at alL In oam^ 
mon cases of imagination it tvotild seem more natural to suppose 
that the seat of the process is purely cerebral^ and that the sense-- 
organ is left out. Beasons for such a conclusion would be 
briefly these : 

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

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

To these reasons the following objections may be made : 
To 1) : The current demonstrably does flow backward 

* See above. Vol. II. p. 50, uote. 

t V. Kandinsky (Krilische u. klinische Betrachtungen im Gebiete der 
SinnesUluschungen (Berlin, 1885). p. 135 ff.) insists that in even the live- 
liest pseudo-hallucinations (see below, Chapter XX), whic h may be re- 
garded as the intensest possible results of the imaginative process, there 
is no outward objectivity perceived in the thing represented, and that a 
gamer Abgrund separates these • ideas' from true hallucination and objeo 
tive perception. 



IMAGINATION. 71 

down the optic nerve in Meyer's and F^r^*s negative after- 
image. Therefore it can flow backward ; therefore it may 
flow backward in some, however slight, degree, in all imag- 
ination.* 

To 2) : The difference alleged is not absolute, and sensa- 
tion and imagination are hard to discriminate where the 
sensation is so weak as to be just perceptible. At nif2cht 
hearing a very faint striking of the hour by a far-off clock, 
our imagination reproduces both rhythm and sound, and it 
is often difficult to tell which was the last real stroke. So 
of a baby crying in a distant part of the house, we are un- 
certain whetiier we still hear it, or only imagine the sound 
Certain violin-players take advantage of this in diminuendo 
terminations. After the pianissimo has been reached 
they continue to bow as if still playing, but are careful not 
to touch the strings. The listener hears in imagination a 



* It seems to also flow backwards in certain hypnotic hallucinations. 
Suggest to a ' Subject' in the hypnotic trance that a sheet of paper has a 
red cross upon it, then pretend to remove the imaginary cross, whilst you 
tell the Subject to look fixedly at a dot upon the paper, and he will pres- 
ently tell you that he sees a ' bluish-green ' cross. The genuineness of the 
result has been doubted, but there seems no good reason for rejecting M 
Binet's account (Le Maguetisme Animal, 1887, p. 188). M. Biuet, following 
M. Parinaud, and on the faith of a certain experiment, al one time believed, 
the optical brain-centres and not the retina to be the seat of ordinary nega- 
tive after-images. The experiment is this: Look fixedly, wiih one eye 
open, at a colored spot on a white background. Then close that eye and 
look fixedly with the other eye at a plain surface. A negative after-image 
of the colored spot will presently appear. (Psychologie du Raisonnement, 
1886, p. 45.) But Mr. Delabarre has proved (American Journal of Psy- 
chology, II. 826) that this afterimage is due, not to a higher cerebral pro- 
cess, but to the fact that the retinal process in the closed eye affects 
consciousness at certain moments, and that its object is ilu?n projected 
into the field seen by the eye which is open. M. Biuet informs me that 
he is converted by the proofs given by Mr. Delabarre. 

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



72 P8TCH0L0OT. 

degree of sound fainter still than the preceding pianissimo 
This phenomenon is not confined to hearing : 

*' If we slowly approach our finger to a surface of waj^r, we often 
deceive ourselves about the moment in which the wetting occora. The 
apprehensive patient believes himself to feel the knife of the surgeon 
whilst it is still at some distance/' "^ 

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

The imagination-process can then pass over into the sensO' 
tion-process. In other words, genuine sensations can be 
centrally originated. When we come to study hallucina- 
tions in the chapter on Outer Perception, we shall see that 
this is by no means a thing of rare occurrence. At present, 
however, we must admit that normally the tioo processes do 
KOT pass over into each other; and we must inquire why. 
One of two things must be the reason. Either 

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

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

It seeins almost certain (after what was said in Chapter 
II. pp. 49-51) that the imagination-process differs from the 
sensation-process by its intensity rather than by its locality. 
However it may be with lower animals, the assumption that 

♦ Lotze, Med. Psych, p. 509. 



IMAGINATION. 73 

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

* See an important article by Binet in the Revue Pbilosophique, xxvi. 
481 (1888) ; also Dufour, in Revue Med. de la Suisse Romande, 1889, No 
8. cite<l in the N enrol ogisches Centralblalt, 1890. p. 48. 



74 PBTCHOLOQT. 

Now if we admit that sensation and imagination are due 
to the activity of the same centres in the cortex, we can see a 
very good teleological reason why they should correspond 
to discrete kinds of process in these centres, and why the 
process which gives the sense that the object is really there 
ought normally to be arousable only by currents entering 
from the periphery and not by currents from the neighbor- 
ing cortical parts. We can see, in short, why the senscUional 
fyroceas ought to be discontimuyus tvUh aU normal ideational 
processes, hotoever intense. For, as Dr. Miinsterberg justly 
observes : 

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

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

Now how shall we conceive of the * resistance ' which 
prevents this sort of disintegration from taking place, this 
sort of intensity in the process from being attained, so 
much of the time ? It must be either an intrinsic resist- 
ance, some force of cohesion in the neural molecules them- 
selves ; or an extrinsic influence, due to other cortical cells. 
When we come to study the process of hallucination we 
shall see that both factors must be taken into account 
There is a degree of inward molecular cohesion in our 
brain-cells which it probably takes a sudden inrush of 

♦Die Willensbandlung (1888). pp. 120-40. 



IMAOiyATION. 76 

destmctiye energy to spring apart Incoming peripheral 
currents possess this energy from the outset Currents 
from neighboring cortical regions might attain to it if they 
could cuxumvlate within the centre which we are supposed 
to be considering. But since during waking hours every 
centre communicates with others by association-paths, 
no such accumulation can take place. The cortical cur- 
rents which run in run right out again, awakening the next 
ideas ; the level of tension in the cells does not n'se to the 
higher explosion-point ; and the latter must be gained by a 
sadden current from the periphery or not at alL 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE PERCEPTION OF 'THINGS.' 
FBBCEPTION AND SENSATION COMPABBD. 

A PURE sensation we saw above, p. 7, to be an abstrac- 
tion never realized in adult life. Any quality of a thing 
which aflFects our sense-organs does also more than that : 
it arouses processes in the hemispheres which are due to 
the organization of that organ by past experiences, and the 
result of which in consciousness are commonly described 
as ideas which the sensation suggests. The first of these 
ideas is that of the thing to which the sensible quality 
belongs. The consciousness of particular inateriol things 
present to sense is nowadays called perception,* The con- 
sciousness of such things may be more or less complete ; 
it may be of the mere name of the thing and its other essen- 
tial attributes, or it may be of the thing's various remoter 
relations. It is impossible to draw any sharp line of dis- 
tinction between the barer and the richer consciousness, 
because the moment we get beyond the first crude sensa- 
tion all our consciousness is a matter of suggestion, and 
the various suggestions shade gradually into each other, 
being one and all products of the same j^sychological 
machinery of association. In the directer consciousness 
fewer, in the remoter more, associative processes are 
brought into play. 



* The word Perception, however, has been variously used. For histor- 
ical notices, see Hamilton's Lectures on Metaphysics, ii. 96. For Hamil- 
ton perception is the consciousness of external objects ' {ib. 28). Spencer 
defines it oddly enough as "a discerning of the relation or relations be- 
tween states of connciousness partly presentative and partly representative ; 
which states of consciousness must be themselves known to the extent in- 
volved in the knowledge of their relations " (Psychol., g 355). 

76 



THB PERCEPTION OF THINQS, Tl 

Perception thus differs from sensation by the consciovsness 
of farther facts associated tvUh the object of the sensation : 

** When 1 lift my eyes from the paper on which I am writing I see 
the chairs and tables and walls of my room, each of its proper shape 
and at its proper distance. I see, from my window, trees and mead- 
ows, and horses and oxen, and distant hills. I see each of its proper 
size, of its proper form, and at its proper distance ; and these particu- 
lars appear as immediate informations of the eye, as the colors which I 
see by means of it. Yet philosophy has ascertained that we derive noth- 
ing from the eye whatever but sensations of color. . . . How, then, is it 
that we receive accurate information, by the eye, of size and shape and 
distance ? By association merely. The colors upon a body are different, 
according to its figure, its shape, and its size. But the sensations of 
color and what we may here, for brevity, call the sensations of ex- 
tension, of figure, of distance, have been so often united, felt in con- 
junction, that the ^nsation of the color is never experienced without 
raising the ideas of the extension, the figure, the distance, in such inti- 
mate union with it, that they not only cannot be separated, but are ac- 
tually supposed to be seen. The sight, as it is called, of figure, or dis- 
tance, appearing as it does a simple sensation, is in reality a complex 
state of consciousness— a sequence in which the antecedent, a sensation 
of color, and the consequent, a number of ideas, are so closely com- 
bined by association that they appear not one idea, but one sensation." 

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

* Analysis, i. 97. 

f Theory of Vision, 51. 



78 PsrcHOLOOT, 

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

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



* The educative process is particularly obvious in the case of the ear, 
for all sudden sounds seem alarming to babies. The familiar noises of 



THB PERCEPTION OF THINGS, TO 

Perception may then be d^/ined, in Mr. Sully's words, as 
that process by which the mind 

'* supplements a sense-impression by an accompaniment oi* escort of re- 
Tived sensations, the whole aggregate of actual and reTived sensations 
being solidified or ' integrated ^ into the form of a percept, that is, an 
apparently immediate apprehension or cognition of an object now 
present in a particular locality or region of space/' * 

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

The first point is relative to that * solidificatiop * or * in- 
tegration,' whereof Mr. Sully speaks, of the present with 
the absent and merely represented sensations. Cerebrally 
taken, these words mean no more than this, that the pro- 
cess aroused in the sense-organ has shot into various 
paths which habit has already organized in the hemi- 
spheres, and that instead of our having the sort of con- 
sciousness which would be correlated with the simple sen- 
sorial process, we have that which is correlated with this 
more complex process. This, as it turns out, is the con- 
sciousness of that more complex * object,' the whole * thing,' 
instead of being the consciousness of that more simple 
object, the few qualities or attributes which actually im- 
press our peripheral nerves. This consciousness must have 
the unity which every * section ' of our stream of thought 
retains so long as its objective content does not sensibly 



house and street keep them in constant trepidation until such time as they 
have either learned the objects which emit them, or have become blunte</ 
to them by frequent experience of their innocuity. 
♦ Outlines, p. 153. 



80 PS7CH0L007. 

change. More than this we cannot say ; we certainly 
ought not to say what usually is said by psychologists, and 
treat the perception as a sum of distinct psychic entities, 
the present sensation namely, plus a lot of images from the 
past, all ' integrated ' together in a way impossible to de- 
scribe. The perception is one state of mind or nothing — as 
I have already so often said. 

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

This is probably the reason why, if we look at an isolated 
printed word and repeat it long enough, it ends by assuming 
an entirely unnatural aspect. Let the reader try this with 



THB PERCEPTION OF THINGS, 81 

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

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

On a later page other instances will meet us. For the 
present these are enough to prove our point Once more 
we find ourselves driven to admit that when qualities of an 
object impress our sense and we thereupon perceive the 
object, the sensation as such of those qualities does not 

* Cf. Helmholtz, Optlk, pp. 488, 728, 728, 772 ; and Spencer. Psychol- 
ogy, vol. u. p. 249, note. 



82 P87CH0L007. 

Btill exist inside of the perception and form a constituent 
thereof. The sensation is one thing and the perception 
another, and neither can take place at the same time with 
the other, because their cerebral conditions are not the 
same. They may resemble each other, but in no respect are 
they identical states of mind. 

FEBCEPTION IS OF DEFINITE AND PBOBABLB THIN08. 

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

In these ambiguous cases it is interesting to note that 
perception is rarely abortive ; some perception takes place. 
The two discrepant sets of associates do not neutralize each 
other or mix and make a blur. What we more commonly 
get is first one object in its completeness, and then the other 
in its completeness. In other words, all brain-processes are 
such as give rise to what ive may call figured consciousness. If 
paths are irradiated at all, they are irradiated in consistent 
systems, and occasion thoughts of definite objects,.not mere 
hodge-podges of elements. Even where the brain's func- 
tions are half thrown out of gear, as in aphasia or dropping 
asleep, this law of figured consciousness holds good. A 
person who suddenly gets sleepy whilst reading aloud will 
read wrong ; but instead of emitting a mere broth of sylla- 
bles, he will make such mistakes as to read ' supper-time ' 
instead of * sovereign,* * overthrow ' instead of * opposite,' 
or indeed utter entirely imaginary phrases, composed of 
several definite words, instead of phrases of the book. So 
in aphasia : where the disease is mild the patient's mi&* 



THE PERCEPTION OF THINQ8, 83 

takes coDsist in using entire wrong words instead of right 
ones. Only in the gravest lesions does he become quite in- 
articulate. These facts show how subtle is the associative 
link ; how delicate yet how strong that connection among 
brain-paths which makes any number of them, once excited 
together, thereafter tend to vibrate as a systematic whole. A 
small group of elements, * <Aw,' common to two systems, A 
and B, may touch off A or B according as accident decides 
the next step (see Fig. 47). If it happen that a single point 
leading from * thia * to B is momentarily a little more per- 
vious than any leading from * thia ' to A, then that little 
advantage will upset the equilibrium in favor of the entire 
system B.* The currents will sweep first through that point 



Fio. 47. 

and thence into all the paths of B, each increment of ad- 
vance making A more and more impossible. The thoughts 
correlated with A and B, in such a case, will have objects 
different, though similar. The similarity will, however, 
consist in some very limited feature if the ' this ' be small. 
Thus the faintest sensations iviU give rise to the perception 
of definite things if only they resemble those which the things 
are wont to arouse. In fact, a sensation must be strong and 
distinct in order not to suggest an object and, if it is a non- 
descript feeling, really to seem one. The aurje of epilepsy, 
globes of light, fiery vision, roarings in the ears, the sensa- 
tions which electric currents give rise to when passed through 
the head, these are unfigured because they are strong. 
Weaker feelings of the same sort would probably suggest 
objects. Many years ago, after reading Maury's book, Le 
Sommeil et les ESves, I began for the first time to observe 
those ideas which faintly flit through the mind at all times, 
words, visions, etc., disconnected with the main stream of 
thought, but discernible to an attention on the watch for 



84 PSYCHOLOGY. 

them. A horse's head, a coil of rope, an anchor, are, for 
example, ideas which have come to me unsolicited whilst I 
have been writing these latter lines. They can often be 
explained by subtle links of association, often not at alL 
But I have not a few times been surprised, after noting 
some such «idea, to find, on shutting my eyes, an after- 
image left on the retina by some bright or dark object 
recently looked at, and which had evidently suggested 
the idea. * Evidently,' I say, because the general shape, 
size, and position of object thought-of and of after-image 
were the same, although the idea had details which the 
retinal image lacked. We shall probably never know just 
what part retinal after-images play in determining the train 
of our thoughts. Judging by my own experiences I should 
suspect it of being not insignificant* 



*The more or less geometrically regular phantasms which are pro- 
duced by pressure on the eyeballs, congestion of the head, inhalation of 
anaesthetics, etc., might again be cited to prove that faint and vague excite- 
ments of sense-organs are transformed into figured objects by the brain, 
only the facts are not quite clearly interpretable ; and the figuring may 
possibly be due to some retinal peculiarity, as yet unexplored. Beautiful 
patterns, which would do for wall-papers, succeed each other when the 
eyeballs are long pressed. Goethe's account of his own phantasm of a 
flower is well known. It came in the middle of his visual field whenever 
he closed his eyes and depressed his head, "unfolding itself and develop- 
ing from its interior new flowers, formed of colored or sometimes green 
leaves, not natural but of fantastic forms, and symmetrical as the rosettes 
of sculptors," etc. (quoted in MllUer's Physiology. Baly's ir., p. 139T). The 
fortification- and zigzag-paiterna, which are well-known appearances in the 
field of view in certain functional disorders, have characteristics (steadiness, 
coerciveness, blotting out of olher objects) suggestive of a retinal origin — 
this is why the entire class of phenomena treated of in ihis note seem to me 
still doubtfully connected with the cerebral factor in perception of which 
the text trejits.— I copy from Taiue's book on Intelligence (vol. i. p. 61) 
the translation of an interesting observation by Prof. M. Lazarus, in which 
the same effect of an after-image is seen. Lazarus himself proposes the 
name of * visionary illusions ' for such modifications of ideal pictures by 
peripheral stimulations (Lehre von den Sinncstttuschungen, 1867. p. 19). 
" I was on the Kaltbad terrace at Rigi, on a very clear afternoon, and 
attempting to make out the Waldbruder, a rock which stands out from 
the midst of the gigantic wall of mountains suiTounding it, on whose sum- 
mits we see like a crown the glaciers of Titlis, Uri-Rothsdock, etc. I was 
looking alternately with the naked eye and with a spy-glass ; but could not 
distinguish it with the naked eye. For the space of six to ten minutes I 
had gazed steadfastly upon the mountains, whose color varied according 



TUB PERCEPTION OF THINGS 86 

HiLITSIONS. 

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



to their several altitudes or declivities between violet, brown, and dark 
green« and I bad fatigued myself to no purpose, when I ceased looking 
and turned away. At that moment I saw before me (I cannot recollect 
whether my eyes were shut or open) the figure of an absent friend, like a 
corpse. ... 1 asked myself at once how I had come to think of my absent 
friend.— In a few seconds I regained the thread of my thoughts, which 
my looking for the Waldbruder had Interrupted, and readily found that the 
idea of my friend had by a very simple necessity introduced itself among 
them. My recollecting him was thus naturally accounted for. — But In 
addition to this, he had appeared as a corpse. How was this ? — At this 
moment, whether through fatigue or in order to think, I closed my eyes, 
and found at once the whole field of sight, over a conBiderable extent, 
covered with the same corpse-like hue, a greenish yellow gray. I thought 
at once that I had here the principle of the desired explanation, and 
attempted to recall to memory the forms of other persons And, iu fact, 
these forms too appeared like corpses ; standing or sitting, as I wished, all 
had a corpse-like tint. The persons whom I wished to see did not nil ap- 
pear to me as sensible phantoms ; and again, when my eyes were open. I 
did not see phantoms, or at all events only saw them faintly, of no deter- 
mined color. — 1 then inquired how it was that phantoms of persons were 
aflfeoled by and colored like the visual field surrounding them, how their 
outlines were traced, and if their faces and clothes were of the same color. 
But it was then too late, or perhaps the influence of reflection and exami- 
nation had been too powerful. All grew suddenly pale, and the subjective 
phenomenon, which might have lasted some minutes longer, had disap- 
peared — It is plain that here an inward reminiscence, arising in accordance 
with the laws of association, had combined with an optical after image. 
The excessive excitation of the periphery of the optic nerve. I mean the 
long-continued preceding sensation of my eyes when contemplating the 
color of the mountain, had indirectly provoked a subjective and durable 
sensation, that of the complemenatry color ; and my reminiscence, incor- 
porating itself with this subjective sensation, became the corpse-like phan 
tom I have described. " 



86 



PSYCHOLOGY. 



Note that in every illusion what is false is what is in- 
ferred, not what is immediately given. The 'this,' if it 
were felt by itself alone, would be all right, it only becomes 
misleading by what it suggests. If it is a sensation of 
sight, it may suggest a tactile object, for example, which 
later tactile experiences prove to be not there. The so-called 
^fallacy of the senses,' of which the ancient scqi>tic8 made so 
much account, is not fallacy of the senses proper, but rather of 
the intellect, tvhich interprets tvrongly what the senses give,* 

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

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

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

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

Illusions of the First Type, 

One of the oldest instances dates from Aristotle. Cross 
two fingers and roll a pea, pen- 
holder, or other small object be- 
tween them. It will seem double. 
Professor Groom Kohertson has 
given the clearest analysis of this 
illusiou. He observes that if 
the object be brought into con- 
tact first with the forefinger and uext with the second finger, 
the two contacts seem to come in at difierent points of space. 

* Cf. Th. Reid's Intellectual Powers, essay ii. chap, xxii, and A. Binet, 
in Mind, ix. 20G. M. Binet points out the fact that what is fallaciously 
inferred is always an object of some other sense than the ' this.' * Optical 
illusions ' are general ly errors of touch and muscular sensibility, and the 
fallaciously perceived object and the experiences which correct it are both 
tactile in these cases. 




Fig. 48. 



THE PERCEPTION OF THINGS. 87 

The forefinger-touch seems higher, though the finger is 
really lower ; the second-finger-touch seems lower, though 
the finger is really higher. " We perceive the contacts as 
double because we refer them to two distinct parts of 
space." The touched sides of the two fingers are normally 
not together in space, and customarily never do touch one 
thing ; the one thing which now touches them, therefore, 
seems in two places, ie. seems two things.*^ 

There is a whole batch of illusions which come from 
optical sensations interpreted by us in accordance with our 
usual rule, although they are now produced by an unusual 
object The stereoscope is an example. The eyes see a 
picture apiece, and the two pictures are a little disparate, 
the one seen by the right eye being a view of the object 
taken from a point slightly to the right of that from which 
the left eye's picture is taken. Pictures thrown on the two 
eyes by solid objects present this identical disparity. 
Whence we react on the sensation in our usual way, and 
perceive a solid. If the pictures be exchanged we perceive 
a hollow mould of the object, for a hollow mould would 
cast just such disparate pictures as these. Wheatstone's 
instrument, the pseitdoscope, allows us to look at solid 
objects and see with each eye the other eye's picture. We 
then perceive the solid object hollow, if it be an object which 
might probaUy be hoUoto, but not otherwise. A human face, 
e.g., never appears hollow to the pseudoscope. In this 
irregularity of reaction on different objects, some seem 
hollow, others not ; the perceptive process is true to its 
law, which is always to react on the sensation in a deter- 
minate and figured fashion if possible, and in as probable 
a fashion as the case admits. To couple faces and hollow 

* The converse illusion is hard to bring about. The points a and b, 
being normally in contact, mean to us the same space, and hence it might 
be supposed that when simultaneously touched, us by a pair of callipers, 
we should feel but one object, whilst as a matter of fact we feci two. It 
should be remarked in explanation of this that an object placed between 
the two fingers in their normal uncrossed position always awakens the sense 
of two coniaeU. When the fingers are pressed together we feel one object to 
be between them. And when the fingers are crossed, and their correspond- 
ing points a and b simultaneously prM«frf, we do get something like tha 
illusion of singleness — that is, we get a very doubtful doubleness. 



88 PSYCHOLOGY, 

ness violates all our habits of association. For the same 
reason it is very easy to make an intaglio cast of a face, or 
the painted inside of a pasteboard mask, look convex, in- 
stead of concave as they are. 

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

Curious illusions of movement in objects occur whenever 
the eyeballs move without our intending it. We shall learn 
in the following chapter that the original visual feeling of 
movement is produced by any image passing over the retina. 
Originally, however, this sensation is definitely referred 
neither to the object nor to the eyes. Such definite refer- 
ence grows up later, and obeys certain simple laws. We 
believe objects to move : 1) whenever we get the retinal 
movement-feeling, but think our eyes are still ; and 2) when- 



TUB PERCEPTION OF THINGS. 89 

ever we think that our eyes move, but fail to get the retinal 
movement-feeling. We believe objects to be still, on the 
contrary, 1) whenever we get the retinal movement-feeling, 
but think 5ur eyes are moving ; and 2) whenever we neither 
think our eyes are moving, nor get the retinal movement- 
feeling. Thus the perception of the object's state of motion 
or rest depends on the notion we frame of our own eye's 
movement. Now many sorts of stimulation make our eyes 
move without our knowing it. If we look at a waterfall, 
river, railroad train, or any body which continuously passes 
in front of us in the same direction, it carries our eyes with 
it. This movement can be noticed in our eyes by a by- 
stander. If the object keep passing towards our left, our 
eyes keep following whatever moving bit of it may have 
caught their attention at first, until that bit disappears 
from view. Then they jerk back to the right again, and 
catch a new bit, which again they follow to the left, and so 
on indefinitely. This gives them an oscillating demeanor, 
slow involuntary rotations leftward alternating with rapid 
voluntary jerks rightward. But the oscillations continve for 
a while after the object has come to a standstill, or the 
eyes are carried to a new object, and this produces the illu- 
sion that things now move in the opposite direction. For 
we are unaware of the slow leftward automatic movements 
of our eyeballs, and think that the retinal movement-sen- 
sations thereby aroused must be due to a rightward motion 
of the object seen; whilst the rapid voluntary rightward 
movements of our eyeballs we interpret as attempts to pur- 
sue and catch again those parts of the object which have 
been slipping away to the left. 

Exactly similar oscillations of the eyeballs are produced 
in giddiness, with exatly similar results. Giddiness is easi- 
est produced by whirling on our heels. It is a feeling of 
the movement of our own head and body through space, 
and is now pretty well understood to be due to the irrita- 
tion of the semi-circular canals of the inner ear.* When, 

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



90 PSrCHOLOGT. 

after whirling, we stop, we seem to be spinning in the reverse 
direction for a few Seconds, and then objects appear to con- 
tinue whirling in the same direction in which, a moment 
previous, our body actually whirled. The reason is that 
our eyes normally tend to maintain their field of view. If we 
suddenly turn our head leftwards it is hard to make the 
eyes follow. They roll in their orbits rightwards, by a 
sort of compensating inertia. Even though we falseiy 
think our head to be moving leftwards, this consequence 
occurs, and our eyes move rightwards — as may be observed 
in any one with vertigo after whirling. As these move- 
ments are unconscious, the retinal movement-feelings which 
they occasion are naturally referred to the objects seen. 
And the intermittent voluntary twitches of the eyes towards 
the left, by which we ever and anon recover them from the 
extreme rightward positions to which the reflex movement 
brings them, simply confirm and intensify our impression 
of a leftward-whirling field of view : we seem to ourselves 
to be periodically pursuing and overtaking the objects in 
their leftward flight The w:hole phenomenon fades out 
after a few seconds. And it often ceases if we voluntarily 
fix our eyes upon a given point. ^ 

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

There is an illusion of movement of the opposite son, 
with which every one is familiar at raUtvay stations. Habit- 
ually, when we ourselves move forward, our entire field of 
view glides backward over our retina. When our move- 
ment is due to that of the windowed carriage, car, or boat 

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



THE PERCEPTION OF THINOa, 91 

in which we sit, all stationary objects visible through the 
window give us a sensation of gliding in the opposite 
direction. Hence, whenever we get this sensation, of a 
window with oR objects visible through it moving in one 
direction, we react upon it in our customary way, and per- 
ceive a stationary field of view, over which the window, and 
we ourselves inside of it, are passing by a motion of our 
own. Consequently when another train comes alongside 
of ours in a station, and fills the entire window, and, after 
standing still awhile, begins to glide away, we judge that it 
is our train which is moving, and that the other train is still. 
If, however, we catch a glimpse of any part of the station 
through the windows, or between the cars, of the other train, 
the illusion of our own movement instantly disappears, and 
we perceive the other train to be the one in motion. This, 
again, is but making the usual and probable inference from 
our sensation.* 

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

4r 

Other illusions are due to the feeling of convergence being 
wrongly interpreted. When we converge our eyeballs we 
perceive an approximation of whatever thing we may be 
looking at Whatever things do approach whilst we look 

* We never, so far as I know, get the converse illusion at a railroad sta- 
tion and believe the other train to move v;hen it is still, 
t Helmholtz : Physiol. Optik, 365. 



92 PSYCHOLOOT, 

at them oblige us, so long as they are not very distant, to 
converge our eyes. Hence approach of the thing is the prdb- 
aUe objective fact when we feel our eyes converging. Now in 
most persons the internal recti muscles, to which converg- 
ence is due, are weaker than the others ; and the entirely 
passive position of the eyeballs, the position which they 
assume when covered and looking at nothing in particular, 
is either that of parallelism or of slight divergence* Make 
a person look with both eyes at some near object, and then 
screen the object from one of his eyes by a card or book, 
The chances are that you will see the eye thus screened 
turn just a little outwards. Remove the screen, and you 
will now see it turn in as it catches sight of the object again. 
The other eye meanwhile keeps as it was at first To most 
persons, accordingly, all objects seem to come r^earer when, 
after looking at them with one eye, both eyes aire used ; 
and they seem to recede during the opposite change. With 
persons whose external recti muscles are insufficient, the 
illusions may be of the contrary kind. 

The size of the retinal image is a fruitful source of illusions. 
Normally, the retinal image grows larger as the object draws 
near. But the sensation yielded by this enlargement is 
also given by any object which really grows in size with- 
out changing its distance. Enlargement of retinal image 
is therefore an ambiguous sign. An opera-glass enlarges 
the moon. But most persons will tell you that she looks 
smaller through it, only a great deal nearer and brighter. 
They read the enlargement as a sign of approach ; and the 
perception of approach makes them actually reverse the 
sensation which suggests it — by an exaggeration of our 
habitual custom of making allowance of the apparent en- 
largement of whatever object approaches us, and reducing 
it in imagination to its natural size. Similarly, in the theatre 
the glass brings the stage near, but hardly seems to mag- 
nify the people on it. 

The well-known increased apparent size of the moon on the 
horizon is a result of association and probability. It is seen 
through vaporous air, and looks dimmer and duskier than 
when it rides on high; and it is seen over fields, trees. 



THE PERCEPTION OF THINQ8. 93 

hedges, streams, and the like, which break up the interven- 
ing space and make us the better realize the latter's extent 
Both these causes make the moon seem more distant from 
ns when it is low ; and as its visual angle grows no less, we 
deem that it must be a larger body, and we so perceive it 
It looks particularly enormous when it comes up directly 
behind some well-known large object, as a house or tree, 
distant enough to subtend an angle no larger than that of 
the moon itsell* 

The feding of accommodation also gives rise to false per- 
ceptions of size. Usually we accommodate our eyes for an 
object as it approaches us. Usually under these circum- 
stances the object throws a larger retinal image. But 
believing the object to remain the same, we make allowance 
for this and treat the entire eye-feeling which we receive 
as significant of nothing but approach. When we relax our 
accommodation and at the same time the retinal image 
grows smaller, the probable cause is always a receding 
object The moment we put on convex glasses, however, 
the accommodation relaxes, but the retinal image grows 
larger instead of less. This is what would happen if our 
object, whilst receding, grew. Such a probable object we 
accordingly perceive, though with a certain vacillation as 
to the recession, for the growth in apparent size is also a 
probable sign of approach, and is at moments interpreted 
accordingly. — ^Atropin paralyzes the muscles of accommo- 
dation. It is possible to get a dose which will weaken 
these muscles without laming them altogether. When a 
known near object is then looked at we have to make the 
same voluntary strain to accommodate, as if it were a great 
deal nearer ; but as its retinal image is not enlarged in pro- 
portion to this suggested approach, we deem that it must 
have grown smaller than usual. In consequence of this 
so-called micropsy, Aubert relates that he saw a man ap- 
parently no larger than a photograph. But the small size 
again made the man seem farther off. The real distance 



♦ Cf. Berkeley's Theory of Vision, §8 67-79 ; Helmholtz : Physiol ogische 
Optik, pp. 680-1 ; Lechalas in Reuve Philosophique, xxvi. 49. 



»4: PSYCHOLOGY. 

was two or three feet, and he seemed against the wall of 
the room.''^ Of these vacillations we shall have to speak 
again in the ensuing chapter.t 

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

** In Fig. 50 the lines are all drawn so as to pass through a common 
point. With a little trouble one eye can be put into the position of this 
point — it is only necessary that the paper be held so that, with one eye 
shut, the other eye sees all the lines leaning neither to the right nor to 
the left. After a moment one can fancy the lines to be vertical staflfs 
standing out of the plane of the paper. . . . This illusion [says Mrs. 
Franklin] I take to be of purely mental origin. When a line lies any- 
where in a plane passing through the apparent vertical meridian of one 
eye, and is looked at with that eye only. ... we have no very good 
means of knowing how it is direete<l in that plane. . . . Now of the 
lines in nature which lie anywhere within such a plane, by far the 



♦ Physiol. Optik, p. 602. 

f It seems likely that the straius in the re^iti muscles have something to 
do with the vacillating judgment in these airopin cases. The internal recti 
contract whenever we accommodate. They wpiint and produce double 
vision when the innervation for accommodation is excessive. To see 
singly, when straining the atropinized accommodation, the contraction of 
our internal recti must be neutnilized by a correspondingly excessive con- 
traction of the external recti. But this is a sign of the object's recession, eta 

\ American Journal of Psychology, i. 101 ff. 



THB PEBCBPTION OF TRINOS. 



9S 



greater nnmber are yertioal lines. Hence we are peculiarly inclined to 
think that a line which we perceive to be in such a plane is a yertical 
line. But to see a lot of lines at once, all ready to throw their images 




Fio. 60. 

iiI)on the yertioal meridian, is a thing that has hardly ever happened to 
us, except when they all have been yertical lines. Hence when that 
happens we have a still stronger tendency to think that what we see* 
before us is a group of vertical lines." 

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

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

lUuaions of the Second Type, 

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

**If a sportsman, while shooting woodcock in cover, sees a bird 
about the size and color of a woodcock get up and fly through the foli- 



96 PSYCHOLOGY. 

age, not having time to see more than that it is a bird of such a size 
and color, he immediately supplies by inference the other qualities of a 
woodcock, and is afterwards disgusted to find that he has shot a thrash. 
I have done so myself, and could hardly believe that the thrush was the 
bird I had fired at, so complete was my mental supplement to my visual 
perception."* 

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

The Proof-reader^ 8 Illusion, I remember one night in 
Boston, whilst w aiting for a * Mount Auburn ' car to bring 
me to Cambridge, reading most distinctly that name upon 
the signboard of a car on wh^ch (as I afterwards learned) 
* North Avenue ' was painted. The illusion was so vivid 
that 1 could hardly believe my eyes had deceived me. All 
reading is more or less performed in this way. 

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



* Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals, d. S24. 



THB PERCEPTION OF THINGS. 97 

Hebrew in a gymnasium ; and when he called the other to help correct 
his pupils* exercises, it turned out that he could find out all sorts of 
little errors better than his friend, because the latter's perception of the 
words as totals was too swift'* * 

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

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

** We know that a weak smell or taste may be very diversely inter- 
preted by us, and that the same sensation will now be named as one 
thing and the next moment as another. Suppose an agreeable smell of 
flowers in a room : A visitor will notice it, seek to recognize what it is. 



♦ M. Lazarus : Das Leben d. Seele, ii (1857). p. 82. In the ordinary 
hearing of speech half the words we seem to hear are supplied out of our 
own head. A language with which we are perfectly familiar is under- 
8too<l, even when spoken in low tones and far off. An unfamiliar language 
is unintelligible under these conditions. If we do not get a very good seat 
at a foreign theatre, we fail to follow the dialogue ; and what gives trouble 
to most of us when abroad is not only that the natives speak so fast, but 
that they speak so indistinctly and so low. The verbal objects for inter- 
preting the sounds by are not alert and ready made in our minds, as they 
are in our familiar mother-tongue, and do not start up at so faint a cue. 



98 parcHOLOOT. 

and at last perceive more and more distinctly that it is the perfume of 
roses — until after all he discovers a bouquet of violets. Then suddenly 
he recognizes the violet-smell, and wonders how he could possibly have 
hit upon the roses.— Just so it is with taste. Try some meat whose 
visible characteristics are disguised by the mode of cooking, and you 
will perhaps begin by taking it for venison, and end by being quite 
certain that it is venison, until you are told that it is mutton ; where- 
upon you get distinctly the mutton flavor. — In this wise one may make 
a person taste or smell what one will, if one only makes sure that he 
shall conceive it beforehand as we wish, by saying to him : * Doesnt 
that taste just like, etc.?* or ^Doesn't it smell just like, etc.?* One 
can cheat whole companies in this way ; announce, for instance, at a 
meai, that the meat tastes *high,' and almost every one who is not 
animated by a spirit of opposition will discover a flavor of putrescence 
which in reality is not there at all. 

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

High authorities have doubted this power of imagination 
to falsify present impressions of sense.t Yet it unquestion- 
ably exists. Within the past fortnight I have been annoyed 
by a smell, faint but unpleasant, in my library. My annoy- 
ance began by an escape of gas from the furnace below 
stairs. This seemed to get lodged in my imagination as a 
sort of standard of perception; for, several lays after the 
furnace had been rectified, I perceived the 'same smell' 
again. It was traced this time to a new pair of India rubber 
shoes which had been brought in from the shop and laid on 
a table. It persisted in coming to me for several days, 
however, in spite of the fact that no other member of the 
family or visitor noticed anything unpleasant My impres- 
sion during part of this time was one of uncertainty whether 

♦ G. H. Meyer, Untersuchungen, etc., pp. 242-3. 
t Helmholtz, P. O. 488. The question will soon come before us again 
in the chapter on the Perception of Space. 



THB PERCEPTION OF THINGS. 99 

the smell was imaginary or real ; and at last it faded out 
Eyerjone must be able to give instances like this from the 
smell-sense. When we have paid the faithless plumber for 
pretending to mend our drains, the intellect inhibits the 
nose from perceiving the same unaltered odor, until per- 
haps several days go by. As regards the ventilation or 
heating of rooms, we are apt to feel for some time as we 
think we ought to feeL If we believe the ventilator is shut, 
we feel the room close. On discovering it open, the oppres- 
sion disappears. 

An extreme instance is given in the following extracts 

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

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

Weight or muscular feeling is a sensation ; yet who has 
not heard the anecdote of some one to whom Sir Humphry 
Davy showed the metal sodium which he had just dis- 
covered? "Bless me, how heavy it is!" said the man; 



' C. F Taylor. Sensation and Pain, p. 87 (N. Y., 1882). 



100 PBTCHOLOQY. 

showing that his idea of what metals as a class ought to be 
had falsified the sensation he derived from a very light 
substance. 

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

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

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

Delboeuf s story is as follows : 

'*The illustrious P. J. van Beneden, senior, was walking one evening 
with a friend along a woody hill near Chaudfontaine. * Don't you 



TUB PBHCBPTION OF THINQB. 101 

hear,- said the friend, * the noise of a hunt on the mountain?' M. van 
Beneden listens and distinguishes in fact the giving-tongueof the dogs. 
They listen some time, expecting from one moment to anotiier to see a 
deer bound by; but the voice of the dogs seems neither to recede nor 
approach. At last a countryman comes by, and they ask him who it is 
that can be hunting at this lat« hour. But he, pointing to some puddles 
of water near their feet, replies: * Yonder little animals are what you 
hear.' And there there were in fact a number of toads of the species 
Bomhinator igneus. . . . This batracbian emits at the pairing season a 
silvery or rather crystalline note. . . . Sad and pure, it is a voice in 
nowise resembling that of hounds giving chase." * 

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

Of accidental and occasional illusions of sight many 
amusing examples might be given. Two will suffice. One 
is a reminiscence of my own. I was lying in my berth in 
a steamer listening to the sailors holystone the deck out- 
side ; when, on turning my eyes to the window, I perceived 
with perfect distinctness that the chief-engineer of the ves- 
sel had entered my state-room, and was standing looking 
through the window at the men at work upon the guards. 
Surprised at his intrusion, and also at his intentness and 



* Exauien Critique de la Loi Psychopbysique (1883), p. 61. 

t Compare A. W Volkmann's essay ' Ueber UrsprQnglicbes und Erwor- 
benes in den Raumanschauungen,' on p. 189 of bis Untersuchungen im 
Gebiete tier Optik ; and Chapter xiii of Hering's contribution to Her- 
mann's Uandbuch der Physiologie, vol. iii. 



1U2 P87CH0L0QT. 

immobility, I remained watching him and wondering how 
long he would stand thus. At last I spoke ; but getting no 
reply, sat up in my berth, and then saw that what I had 
taken for the engineer was my own cap and coat hanging 
on a peg beside the window. The illusion was complete ; 
the engineer was a peculiar-looking man ; and I saw him 
unmistakably ; but after the illusion had vanished 1 found 
it hard voluntarily to make the cap and coat look like him 
at all. 

The following story, 5vhich I owe to my friend Prof. 
Hyatt, is of a probably not uncommon class : 

** During the winter of 1858, while in Venice, I had the somewhat 
peculiar illusion which you request me to relate. I remember the cir- 
cumstances very accurately because I have often repeated the story, 
and have made an effort to keep all the attendant circumstances clear 
of exaggeration. I was travelling with my mother, and we had taken 
rooms at a hotel which had been located in an old palace. The room 
in which I went to bed was large and lofty. The moon was shining 
brightly, and I remember standing before a draped window, thinking 
of the romantic nature of the surroundings, remnants of old stories of 
knights and ladies, and the possibility that even in that room itself 
love-scones and sanguinary tragedies might have taken place. The 
night was so lovely that many of the people were strolling through the 
narrow lanes or so-called streets, singing as they went, and I laid awake 
for some time listening to these patrols of serenaders, and of course 
finally fell asleep. I became aware that some one was leaning over me 
closely, and that my own breathing was being interfered with : a decided 
feeling of an unw^elcome presence of some sort awakened me. As I 
opened my eyes I saw, as distinctly as I ever saw any living person, a 
draped head about a foot or eighteen inches to the right, and just above 
my bed. The horror which took possej^ion of my young fancy was 
beyond anything 1 have ever experienced. The head was covered by a 
long black veil which floated out into the moonlight, the face itself was 
pale and beautiful, and the lower part swathed in the wliite band com- 
monly worn by the nuns of Catholic orders. My hair seemed to rise 
up, and a profuse perspiration attested the genuineness of the terror 
which I felt. For a time I lay in this way, and then gradually gaining 
more command over my superstitious terrors, concluded to try to grap- 
ple with the apparition. It remained perfectly distinct until 1 reached 
at it sharply with my hand, and then disappeared, to return again, 
however, as soon as I sank back into the pillow. The second or third 
grasp which I made at the head was not followed by a reappearance, 
and I then saw that the ghost was not a real presence, but depended 
upon the position of my head. If I moved my eyes either to the left or 



THE PERCEPTION OF THINGS, 103 

right of the original position occupied by my head when I awakened, the 
ghost disappeared, and by returning to about the same position, I could 
make it reappear with nearly the same intensity as at first. I presently 
satisfied myself by these experiments that the illusion arose from the 
effect of the imagination, aided by the actual figure made by a visual 
section of the moonbeams shining through the lace curtains of the win- 
dow. If I had given way to the first terror of the situation and cov- 
ered up my head, I should probably have believed in the reality of the 
apparition, since I have not by the slightest word, so far as I know, ex- 
aggerated the vividness of my feelings." 

THE FHY8IOLOOICAL FBO0E88 IN FEBOSFTIOX. 

Enough has now been said to prove the general law of 
perception, which is this, that whilst part of what we per- 
ceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another 
part (and it may be the larger part) alvxiys comes (in Laza- 

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



104 P8TCH0L0G7, 

which on previous occasions the reaction was most frequent* 
ly aroused. 

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

We must remember this when, in dealing with the eye, 
we come to point out the erroneousness of the principle laid 



THE PERCEPTION OF THINGS. 105 

down by Beid and Helmholtz that true sensations can 
never be changed bj the suggestions of experience. 

A certain illusion of which I have not yet spoken affords 
an additional illustration of this. When tve tviU to execute a 
movement and the movement for some reason does not occur ^ 
urdesa the sensation of the part's not moving is a strong one, tve 
are apt to fed as if the mxyvement had actiutUy taken place. 
This seems habitually to be the case in anaesthesia of the 
moving parts. Close the patient's eyes, hold his anaesthetic 
arm still, and tell him to raise his hand to his head ; and 
when he opens his eyes he will be astonished to find that 
the movement has not taken place. All reports of anaesthetic 
cases seem to mention this illusion. Sternberg who wrote on 
the subject in 1885,* lays it down as a law that the intention 
to move is the same thing as the feeling of the motion. We 
shall later see that this is ialse (Chapter XXV); but it 
certainly may suggest the feeling of the motion with hallu- 
cinatory intensity. Sternberg gives the following experi- 
ment, which I find succeeds with at least half of those who 
try it : Rest your palm on the edge of the table with your 
forefinger hanging over in a position of extreme flexion, 
and then exert your will to flex it still more. The position 
of the other fingers makes this impossible, and j'et if we do 
not look to see the finger, we think we feel it move. He 
quotes from Exner a similar experiment with the jaws: Put 
some hard rubber or other unindentable obstacle between 

* In the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, pp. 
25d-4. I have tried to account for some of the variations in this conscious- 
ness. Out of 140 persons whom I found to feel their lost foot, some did so 
dubiously. "Either they only feel it occasionally, or only when it puins 
them, or only when they try to move it; or they only feel it when ihe> 
' think a g(X)d deal about it * and make an eflfort to conjure it up. When 
tliey 'grow inattentive,' the feeling 'flies back* or 'jumps back,' lo the 
stump. Every degree of consciousness, from complete and permanent hal- 
lucination down to something hardly distinguishable from ordinary fancy, 
seems represented in the sense of the missing extremity which these 
patients say they have. Indeed I have seldom seen a more plausible lot of 
evidence for the view that imagination and sensation are but differences of 
vividness in an identical process than these confessions, taking them alto- 
gether, contain. Many patients say they can hardly tell whether they 
feel or fancy the limb. ** 



106 PSrCHOLOGT. 

your back teeth and bite hard : you think you feel the jaw 
move and the front teeth approach each other, though in 
the nature of things no movement can occur.* — The visu- 
al suggestion of the path traversed by the finger-tip as the 
locus of the movement-feeling in the joint, which we dis- 
cussed on page 41, is another example of this semi-hallu- 
cinatory power of the suggested thing. Amputated people, 
as we have learned, still feel their lost feet, etc. This is a 
necessary consequence of the law of specific energies, for if 
the central region correlated with the foot give rise to any 
feeling at all it must give rise to the feeling of a foot.t But 
the curious thing is that many of these patients can unll the 
foot to move, and when they have done so, distinctly /erf the 
movement to occur. They can, to use their own language, 
* work ' or * wiggle ' their lost toes. X 

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



♦ Pflttger'8 Archiv, xxxvn. 1. 
t Not all patieuts have this additional illusion. 

1 1 ought to say that in almost all cases the vc^tiOQ is followed hf 
actual contraction of muscles in the 9iumD, 



THE PERCEPTION OF THLNQ8. 107 

• APPSBOEIFTION.' 

In (Germany smceHerbart's time Psychology has always 
had a great deal to say about a process called Apperception^^ 
The incoming ideas or sensations are said to be * apper- 
ceived ' by * masses ' of ideas already in the mind. It is plain 
that the process we have been describing as perception is, 
at this rate, an apperceptive process. So are all recogni- 
tion, classing, and naming ; and passing beyond these sim- 
plest suggestions, all farther thoughts about our percepts are 
apperceptive processes as well. I have myself not used the 
word apperception because it has carried very different mean, 
ings in the history of philosophy,! and 'psychic reaction,* 
* interpretation,' * conception,' * assimilation,' * elaboration,' 
or simply ' thought,' are perfect synonyms for its Herbartian 
meaning, widely taken. It is, moreover, hardly worth while 
to pretend to analyze the so-called apperceptive perform- 
ances beyond the first or perceptive stage, because their varia- 
tions and degrees are literally innumerable. * Apperception * 
is a name for the sum-total of the effects of what we have 
studied as association; and it is obvious that the things 
which a given experience will suggest to a man depend on 
what Mr. Le^es calls his entire psycliostatical conditions, 
his nature and stock of ideas, or, in other words, his charac- 
ter, habits, memory, education, previous experience, and 
momentary mood. We gain no insight into what really oc- 
curs either in the mind or in the brain by calling all these 
things the *apperceiving mass,' though of course this may 
upon occasion be convenient On the whole I am inclined 
to think Mr. Lewes's term of * assimilation ' the most fruit- 
ful one yet used.t 

Professor H. Steinthal has analyzed apperceptive pro- 
cesses with a sort of detail which is simply burdensome.^ 



♦ Cf. Herbart, Psychol, als. Wissenschaft, § 125. 

t Compare the historical reviews by K. Lange : Ueber Apperception 
(Plauen, 1879), pp. 12-14; by Staude in Wundt's Philosophische Studicn, i. 
149; and by Marty in Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil., x. 347 flf. 

X Problems, vol. i. p. 118 ff. 

g See his I^nleitimg in die Pisycbologie u. Sprachwissenschaft (1881 i 
p. 166 ff. 



108 P870H0L0Q7. 

TTift introdnction of the matter may, however, be quoted 
He begins with an anecdote from a comic paper. 

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

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

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

** Every man has cue group of ideas which relate to his own person 
and interests, and another which is connected with society. Each has 
his group of ideas about plants, religion, law, art, etc., acd more 
especially about the rose, epic poetry, sermons free trade, and the like. 
Thus the mental content of every individual, even of the uneducated 

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



THE PBRCBPTION OF THINOB, 109 

and of children, consists of masses or circles of knowledge of which 
each lies within some larger circle, alongside of others similarly in- 
cluded, and of which each includes smaller circles within itself. . . , 
The perception of a thing like a horse ... is a process between the 
present horse's picture before our eyes, on the one hand, and those fused 
or interwoven pictures and ideas of all the horses we hare ever seen, on 
the other; ... a process between two factors or momenta, of which 
one existed before the process and was an old possession of the mind 
(the group of ideas, or concept, namely), whilst the other is but just 
presented to the mind, and is the immediately supervening factor (the 
sense-impression). The former apperceives the latter; the latter is 
apperceived by the former. Out of their combination an api>erception- 
product arises: the knowledge of the perceived being as a horse. The 
earlier factor is relatively to the later one active and a priori ; the super- 
vening factor is given, a posteriori^ passive. ... We may then define 
Apperception as the movement of two masses of consciousness (Vorstel- 
luugsmassen) against each other so as to produce a cognition. 

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

This account of Steinthal's brings out very clearly the 
difference hettveen our psychological conceptions and what are 
called concepts in logic. In logic a concept is unalterable ; but 
what are popularly called our ' conceptions of things ' alter 
by being used. The aim of ' Science ' is to attain concep* 
tions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to- 
change them. There, is an everlasting struggle in every 
mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the 
tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a cease- 
less compromise between the conservative and the pro- 
gressive factors. Every new experience must be disposed 

* Op. cit. pp. 166-171. 



110 PaYCHOLOGY. 

of under some old head. The great point is to find the head 
which has to be least altered to take it in. Certain Polyne- 
sian natives, seeing horses for the first time, called them 
pigs, that being the nearest head. My child of two played 
for a week with the first orange that was given him, calling 
it a 'ball.' He called the first whole eggs he saw 'potatoes,' 
having been accustomed to see his * eggs ' broken into a 
glass, and his potatoes without the skin. A folding pocket- 
corkscrew he unhesitatingly called * bad-scissors.' Hardly 
any one of us can make new heads easily when fresh expe- 
riences come. Most of us grow more and more enslaved to 
the stock conceptions with which we have once become 
familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impres- 
sions in any but the old ways. Old-fogyism, in short, is the 
inevitable terminus to which life sweeps us on. Objects 
which violate our established habits of * apperception ' are 
simply not taken account of at all ; or, if on some occasion 
we are forced by dint of argument to admit their existence, 
twenty-four hours later the admission is as if it were not, 
and every trace of the unassimilable truth has vanished 
from our thought Genius, in truth, means little more than 
the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. 

On the other hand, nothing is more congenial, from 
babyhood to the end of life, than to be able to assimilate 
the new to the old, to meet each threatening violator or 
burster of our well-known series of concepts, as it comes 
in, see through its unwontedness, and ticket it oft' as an old 
friend in disguise. This victorious assimilation of the new 
is in fact the type of all intellectual pleasure. The lust for 
it is curiosity. The relation of the new to the old, before 
the assimilation is performed, is wonder. We feel neither 
curiosity nor wonder concerning things so far beyond us 
that we have no concepts to refer them to or standards by 
which to measure them.* The Fuegians, in Darwin's voy- 

* The great maxim in pedagogy is to knit every new piece of knowl- 
edge on ton pre-existing curiosity — i.e., to assimilate its matter in some 
way to what is already known. Hence the advantage of " comparing all 
that is far off and foreign to something that is near home, of making the 
unknown plain by the example of the known, and of connecting all the 
instruction with the personal experience of the pupil. ... If the teacher is 



THB PERCEPTION OF TEINOS. Ill 

age, wondered at the small boats, but took the big ship as 
a ' matter of course.' Only what we partly know already 
inspires us with a desire to know more. The more elabo- 
rate textile fabrics, the vaster works in metal, to most of 
us are like the air, the water, and the ground, absolute ex- 
istences which awaken no ideaa It is a matter of course 
that an engraving or a copper-plate inscription should pos- 
sess that degree of beauty. But if we are shown a pertr- 
drawing of equal perfection, our personal sympathy with 
the difficulty of the task makes us immediately wonder at 
the skill. The old lady admiring the Academician's picture, 
says to him : " And is it really all done by hand?'' 

IS FBBOEPTION UNCONSCIOITS INFEBSNCB P 

A widely-spread opinion (which has been held by such 
men as Schopenhauer, Spencer, Hartmann, Wundt, Helm- 
holtz, and latelt interestingly pleaded for by M. Binet *) 
will have it thsA^percqption should be caUed a sort of reasoning 
operaiiony more or less unconsciously and atUomaticaUy per- 
formed. The question seems at first a verbal one, depend- 
ing on how broadly the term reasoning is to be taken. If, 
every time a present sign suggests an absent reality to our 
mind, we make an inference ; and if every time we make an 
inference we reason ; then perception is indubitably reason- 
ing. Only one sees no room in it for any unconscious part. 
Both associates, the present sign and the contiguous things 
which it suggests, are above-board, and no intermediary 

to explain the distance of the sun from the earth, let him ask . , . 'If any- 
one there in the sun fired off a cannon straight at you, what should you 
do?* * Get out of the way ' would be the answer. • No need of that,' 
the toacher might reply. ' You may quietly go to sleep in your room, 
and get up again, you may wait till your confirmation-day, you may learn 
a trade, and grow as old as I am, — then only will the cannon-ball be get- 
ting near, then you may jump to one sidel See, so great as that is the sun's 
distance!*" (K. Lange, Ueber Apperception, 1879, p. 76— a charming 
though prolix little work.) 

♦ A. Schopenhauer, Satz vom Grunde, chap iv. H. Spencer. Psychol., 
part VI. chaps, ix, x. E. v. Hartmann. Phil, of the Unconscious (B), 
chaps. VII, vin. W. Wundt. Beitrftge, pp. 422 ff.; Vorlesungen, iv, xin. 
H. Helmholtz. Physiol Optik, pp. 430, 447. A. Binet, Psychol, du Rai- 
soxmement, chaps, in, v. Wundt and Helmholtz have more recently 
•recanted.' See above, vol i. p. 169 note. 



112 P8TCH0L0OY. 

ideas are required. Most of those who have upheld the 
thesis in question have, however, made a more complex 
supposition. What they have meant is that perception is 
a mediate inference, and that the middle term is unconscious. 
When the sensation which I have called * this ' (p. 83, aufyra) 
is felt, they think that some process like the following runs 
through the mind : 

' This ' is M ; 

but M is A ; 

therefore * this ' is A.* 

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

*This' is like those; 
Those are A ; 
Therefore * this ' is A. 

The major premise here involves no association by conti- 
guity, no naming of those as M, but only a suggestion of 
unnamed similar images, a recall of analogous past sensa- 
tions with which the characters that make up A were habit- 
ually conjoined. But hers again, what grounds of fact are 
there for admitting this recall ? We are quite unconscious 
of any such images of the past. And the conception of all 
the forms of association as resultants of the elementary fact 
of habit-worn paths in the brain makes such images entirely 
superfluous for explaining the phenomena in point. Since 
the brain-process of * this,' the sign of A, has repeatedly 
been aroused in company with the process of the full object 
A, direct paths of irradiation from the one to the other must 
be already established. And although roundabout paths 
may also be possible, as from *this' to * those, and then 

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



THE PERCEPTION OF THIN08. 113 

from Hhose * to * A* (paths which would lead to practically 
the same conclusion as the straighter ones), jet there is no 
•ground whatever for assuming them to be traversed now, 
especially since appearances point the other way. In 
explicit reasoning, such paths are doubtless traversed , in 
perception they are in all probability closed. So far, then, 
from perception being a species of reasoning properly so 
called, both it and reasoning are co-ordinate varieties of that 
deeper sort of process known psychologically as the asso- 
ciation of ideas, and physiologically as the law of habit in 
the brain. To caU perception uruxynscious reasoning is thus 
either a usdess metaphor ^ or a positively misleading confusion 
between ttvo diff^erent things. 

One more point and we may leave the subject of Per- 
ception. Sir Wm. Hamilton thought that he had discovered a 
* great law ' which had been wholly overlooked by psycholo- 
gists, and which, 'simple and universal,' is this: "Knowl- 
edge and Feeling, — Perception and Sensation, though al- 
ways coexistent, are always in the inverse ratio of each 
other." Hamilton wrote as if perception and sensation 
were two coexistent elements entering into a single state 
of consciousness. Spencer refines upon him by coutending 
that they are two mutually exclusive states of conscious- 
ness, not two elements of a single state. If sensation be 
taken, as both Hamilton and Spencer mainly take it in this 
discussion, to mean the feeling of pleasure or pain^ there is 
no doubt that the law, however expressed, is true ; and that 
the mind which is strongly conscious of the pleasantness or 
painfulness of an experience is ipso facto less fitted to 
observe and analyze its outward cause.* Apart from pleas- 
ure and pain, however, the law seems but a corollary of the 
fact that the more concentrated a state of consciousness is, 
the more vivid it is. When feeling a color, or listening to 
a tone per «e, we get it more intensely, notice it better, than 
when we are aware of it merely as one among many other 
properties of a total object. The more diffused cerebral 
excitement of the perceptive state is probably incompatible 

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



114 PaTOHOLOGT. 

with quite 843 strong an excitement of separate parts as 
the sensational state comports. So we come back here to 
our own earlier discrimination between the perceptive and 
the sensational processes, and to the examples which we 
gave on pp. 80, 81.* 

HAIiIiUOINATIGNS. 

Between normal perception and illusion we have seen 
that there is no break, the jwoce»« being identically the same 
in both. The last illusions we considered might fairly be 
called hallucinations. We must now consider the false 
perceptions more commonly called by that name.t In or- 

* Here is another good example, taken from Helmholtz's Optics, p. 485: 
''The sight of a man walking is a familiar spectacle to us. We peroeive 
it as a connected whole, and at most notice the most striking of its pecu- 
liarities. Strong attention is required, and a special choice of the point of 
view, in order to feel the perpendicular and lateral oscillations of such a 
walking figure. We must choose fitting points or lines in the background 
with which to compare the positions of its head. But if a distant walking 
man be looked at through an astronomical telescope (which inverts the 
object), what a singular hopping and rocking appearance he presents I No 
difliculty now in seeing the body's oscillations, and many other details of 
the gait. . . . But, on the other hand, its total character, whether light or 
clumsy, dignified or graceful, is harder to perceive than in the upright po- 
sition." 

f Illusions and hallucinations must both be distinguished from Mution; 
A delusion is a false opinion about a matter of fact, which need not neces- 
sarily involve, though it often docs involve, false perceptions of sensible 
things. We may, for example, have religious delusions, medical delusions, 
delusions about our own importance, about other peoples' characters, etc., 
ad libitum. The delusions of the insane are apt to affect certain t3rpical 
forms, often very hard to explain. But in many cases they are certainly 
theories which the patients invent to account for their abnormal bodily 
sensations. In other cases they are due to hallucinations of hearing and of 
sight. Dr. Clouston (Clinical Lectures on Mental Disease, lecture ni ad 
fin.) gives the following special delusions as having been found in about 
a hundred melancholy female patients who were afilicted in this way. 
There were delusions of 

general persecution; being destitute: 

generul suspicion; being followed by the police; 

being poisoned; being very wicked; 

being killed: impending death; 

being conspired against; impending calamity; 

being defrauded; the soul being lost; 

being preached against in church; having no stomach; 

being pregnant; having no inside; 



TRB PERCBPTION OF THIN08. IIB 

dinary parlance hallucination is held to differ from illusion in 
that, whilst there is an object really there in illusion, inhaUv^ 
cination there is no objective atimvlua at oH. We shall presently 
see that this supposed absence of objective stimulus ill hal- 
lucination is a mistake, and that hallucinations are often 
only extremes of the perception process, in which the secon* 
dary cerebral reaction is out of all normal proportion to the 
peripheral stimulus wh^ch occasions the activity. Hallu- 
cinations usually appear abruptly and have the character of 
being forced upon the subject But they possess various 
degrees of apparent objectivity. One mistake in limine must 
be guarded against They are often talked of as mental 
images projected outwards by mistake. But where an hallu- 
cination is complete, it is much more than a mental image. 
An hallucination is a stricUy sensational form of oonsdousnesSf 
as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there. 
The object happens not to be there, that is alL 

The milder degrees of hallucination have been desig* 
nated as pseudo-haUtidnations. Pseudo-hallucinations and 
hallucinations have been sharply distinguished from eaoh 



having a bone in the throat; having neither stomach nor bnins; 

having lost much money; being covered with vermin; 

being unfit to live; letters being written about her; 

that she will not recover; property being stolen; 

that she is to be murdered; her children being killed; 

that she is to be boiled aUve; having committed theft; 

that she is to be starved; the legs being made of glass; 

that the flesh is boiling; having horns on the head; 
that the head is severed from the being chloroformed; 

body; having committed murder; 

that children are burning; fear of being hanged; 

that murders take place aromid; being called names by person ; 

that it is wrong to take food; being acted on by spirits; 

beiHg in bell; being a man; 

being tempted of the devil; the body being transformed; 

being possessed of the devil; insects coming from the bod^ 
having committed an unpardon- rape being practised on her; 

able sin; having a venereal disease; 

unseen agencies workiiig; being a fish; 

her own identity; being dead; 

being on fire; having committed 'suicide of the soul. 



116 PSYCHOLOGY. 

other only within a few years. Dr. Eandinsky writes of 
their di£ference as follows : 

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

**Dr. N. L. . . . heard one day suddenly amongst the voices of his 
persecutors (* coming from a hollow space in the midst of the wall *) a 
rather loud voice impressively saying to him : ' Change your national 
allegiance.' Understanding this to mean that his only hope consisted 
in ceasing to be subject to the Czar of Russia, he reflected a moment 
what allegiance would be better, and resolved to become an English sub- 
ject. At the same moment he saw a pseudo-hallucinatory lion of 
natural size, which appeared and quickly laid its fore-paws on his 
Bhoulders. He had a lively feeling of these paws as a tolerably painful 
local pressure (complete hallucination of touch). Then the same voice 
from the wall said : *Now you have a lion — now you will rule,' where- 
upon the patient recollected that the lion was the national emblem of 
England. The lion appeared to L. very distinct and vivid, but he never- 
theless remained conscious, as he afterwards expressed it, that hesiiw the 
animal, not with his bodily but with his mental eyes. (After his re- 
covery he called analogous apparitions by the name of ' expressive-plastic 
ideas.') Accordingly he felt no terror, even though he felt t he contact of 
the claws. . . . Had the lion been a complete hallucination, the jmtient, 
as he himself remarked after recovery, would have felt groat fear, and 
very likely screamed or taken to flight. Had it been a simple image of 
the fancy he would not have connected it with the voices, of whose ob- 
jective reality he was at the time quite convinced." * 

From ordinary images of memory and fancy, pseudo- 
halhicinatious differ in being much more vivid, minute, de- 

*V. Eandinsky: Eritische u. Elinische Betrachtungeo imQebieted. 
Sinnestfluschungen (1885), p. 42. 



THE PERCEPTION OF THIN08, 117 

tailed, steady, abrupt, and spontaneous, in the sense that 
all feeling of our own activity in producing them is lacking. 
Dr. Kandinsky had a patient who, after taking opium or 
haschisch, had abundant pseudo-hallucinations and hallu- 
cinations. As he also had strong visualizing power and 
was an educated physician, the three sorts of phenomena 
could be easily compared. Although projected outwards 
(usually not farther than the limit of distinctest vision, a 
loot or so) the pseudo-hallucinations lacked the character of 
objective reality which the hallucinations possessed, but, 
unlike the pictures of imagination, it was almost impossible 
to produce them at wilL Most of the * voices ' which people 
hear (whether they give rise to delusions or not) are pseudo- 
hallucinations. They are described as ^ inner ^ voices, al- 
though their character is entirely unlike the inner speech 
of the subject with himself. I know two persons who hear 
8uch inner voices making unforeseen remarks whenever they 
grow quiet and listen for them. They are a very common 
incident of delusional insanity, and at last grow into vivid 
hallucinations. The latter are comparatively frequent oc- 
currences in sporadic form; and certain individuals are 
liable to have them often. From the results of the ' Census 
of Hallucinations,' which was l)egun by Edmund Gurney, it 
would appear that, roughly speaking, one person at least 
in every ten is likely to have had a vivid hallucination at 
some time in his life.* The following cases from healthy 
people will give an idea of what these hallucinations are : 

*'When a girl of eighteen^ I was one evening engaged in a very 
painful discussion with an elderly person. My distress was so great 
that I took up a thick ivory knitting-needle that was lying on the man- 
telpiece of the parlor and broke it into small pieces as I talked. In the 
midst of the discussion I was very wishful to know the opinion of a 
brother with whom I had an unusually close relationship. I turned 
round and saw him sitting at the further side of a centre-table, with his 
arms folded (an unusual position with him), but, to my dismay, I per- 



* See Proceedings of Soc. for Psych. Research, Dec. 1889, pp. 7, 188. 
The International Congress for Experimental Psychology has now charge 
erf the Census, and the present writer is its agent for America. 



118 FBYCHOLOQT. 

oeired from the sarcastic expression of his mouth that he was not in 
sympathy with me, was not 'taking my side/ as I should then have 
expressed it. The surprise cooled me, and the discussion was dropped. 
**Some minutes after, having occasion to speak to my brother, I 
turned towards him, but he was gone. I inquired when he left the 
room, and was told that he had not been in it, which I did not believe, 
thinking that he had come in for a minute and had gone out without 
being noticed. About an hour and a half afterwards be appeared, and 
convinced me, with some trouble, that he had never been near the 
house that evening. He is still alive and well.*' 

Here is another case : 

*'One night in March 1878 or '74, I cannot recollect which year, 
I was attending on the sick-bed of my mother. About eight o^clock in 
the evening I went into the dining room to fix a cup of tea, and on turn- 
ing from the sideboard to the table, on the other side of the table before 
the fire, which was burning brightly, as was also the gas, I saw standing 
with his hand clasped to his side in true military fashion a soldier of 
about thirty years of age, with dark, piercing eyes looking directly into 
mine. He wore a small cap with standing feat her ; his costume was 
also of a soldierly style. He did not strike me as being a spirit, ghost, 
or anything uncanny, only a living man ; but after gazing for fully a 
minute I realized that it was nothing of earth, for he neither moved 
his eyes nor his body, and in looking closely I could see the fire beyond. 
I was of course startled, and yet did not run out of the room. I felt 
stunned. I walked out rapidly, h4)wever, and turning to the servant 
in the hall asked her if she saw anything. She said not. I went into 
my mother's room and remained talking for about an hour, but never 
mentioned the above subject for fear of exciUng her, and finally forgot 
it altogether, returning to the dining-room, still in forgetfulness of 
what had occurred, but repeating, as above, the turning from sideboard 
to table in act of preparing more tea. I looked casually towards the 
fire, and there I saw the soldier again. This time I was entirely alarmed, 
and fled from the room in haste. I called to my father, but when he 
came he saw nothing/* 

Sometimes more than one sense is affected The fol- 
lowing is a case : 

** In response to your request to write out my experience of Oct. 80, 
1886, I will inflict on you a letter. 

** On the day above mentioned, Oct. 30, 1886, I was in , 

where I was teaching. I had performed my regular routine work for 
the day, and was sitting in my room working out trigonometrical for- 



THE PERCEPTION OF THIN08. 119 

mulsB. I was expecting every day to hear of the confinement of my wife, 
and natoraliy my thoughts for some time had been more or less with 
her. She was, by the way, in B , some fifty miles from me. 

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

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

*' Shortly after the experience above described, I retired for the night 
and, as I usually do, slept quietly until morning. T did not speculate 
particularly about the strange appearance of the night before, and 
though I thought of it some, I did not tell anybody. The following 
morning I rose, not conscious of having dreamed anythinj^, but I was 
very firmly impressed with the idea that there was sometiiiug for meat 
the telegraph-office. J tried to throw off the impression, for so far as I 
knew there was no reason for it. Having nothing to do, I went out for 
a walk ; and to help tlrrow off the impression above noted. I walked 
away from the telegraph -office. As 1 proceeded, however, the impres- 
sion became a conviction, and I actually tunuMi about and went to the 
very place I had resolved not to visit, the telegraph -office. The first 
person I saw on arriving at said office was the telegraph-operator, who 
being on terms of intimacy with me, remarked : * Hello, i)apa, Tve got 
a telegram for you.' The telegram announced the birth of a boy, 
weighing nine pounds, and that all were doing well. Now. then, I have 
no theory at all about the events narrated above ; I never had any such 
experience before nor since ; I am no believer in spiritualism, am not in 
the least superstitious, know very little about * thought-transference,* 



120 P8TCH0L0GT. 

* unconscious cerebration/ etc., etc., but I am absolutely oertain about 
what I have tried to relate. 

** In regard to the remark which I heard, * It is a little Herman,* etc, 
I would add that we had previously decided to call the child, if a boy, 
Herman — my own name, by the way."* 

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

** While sitting at my desk this a. m. reading a circular of the Loyal 
Legion a very curious thing happened to me, such as I have never ex- 
perienced. It was perfectly real, so real that it took some minutes to 
recover from. It seems to me like a direct intromission into some other 
world. I never had anything approaching it before save when dream- 
ing at night. I was wide awake, of course. But this was the feeling. I 
had only just sat down and become interested in the circular, when I 
seemed to lose myself for a minute and then found myself in the top 
story of a high building very white and shining and clean, with a 
noble window immediately at the right of where I sat. Through this 
window I looked out upon a marvellous reach of landscape entirely new. 
I never had before such a sense of infinity in nature, such superb 
stretches of light and color and cleanness, I know that for the space 
of three minutes I was entirely lost, for when I beji^an to come to, so to 
speak, — sitting in that other world, I debated for three or four minutes 
more as to which was dream and which was reality. Sitting there I got 
a faint sense of C ... [the town in which the writer was], away oflf 
and dim at first. Then I remember thinking ' Why, I used to live in 

C ; perhaps I am going back.' Slowly C did come back, and 

I found myself at my desk again. For a few minutes the process of 
determining where I was was very funny. But the whole experience 
was perfectly delightful, there was such a sense of brilliancy and 
clearness and lightness about it. I suppose it lasted in all about seven 
minutes or ten minutes." 

The hallucinations of fever-delirium are a mixture of 
psendo-halliicination, true hallucination, and illusion. 
Those of opium, hasheesh, and belladonna resemble them 



•This case is of the class which Mr. Myere terms 'veridical.' In a 
subsequent letter the writer informs me that his vision occurred some five 
hours brfore the child was bom. 



THE PERCEPTION OF THINGS, 121 

in this respect. The following vivid account of a fit of 
hasheesh-delirium has been given me by a friend : 

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

*' The character of the symptoms changed rapidly. A sort of wave 
seemed to pass over me, and I became aware of the fact that my pulse 
was beating rapidly. I took out my watch, and by exercising consider- 
able will-power managed to time the heart-beats, 185 to the minute. 

** I could feel each pulsation through my whole system, and a curi- 
ous twitching commenced, which no effort of the mind could stop. 

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

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

** (I may here state that the word * Ishmaral* seemed to haunt my 
other hallucinations, for I remember that I heard it frequently there- 
after.) I next enjoyed a sort of metempsychosis. Any animal or 
thing that I thought of could be made the being which held my mind. 
I thought of a fox, and instantly I was transformed into that animal. 1 
could distinctly feel myself a fox, could see my long ears and bushy 



122 PSYCHOLOQy. 

tail, and by a sort of introvision felt that my complete anatomy was 
that of a fox. Suddenly the point of vision changed. My eyes seemed 
to be located at the back of my mouth ; I looked out between the parted 
lips, saw the two rows of pointed teeth, and, closing my mouth with a 
snap, saw— nothing. 

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

*' Into countless other objects was I transformed, many of them so 
absurd that I am unable to conceive what suggested them. For ex- 
ample, I was a little china doll, deep down in a bottle of olive oil, next 
moment a stick of twisted candy, then a skeleton inclosed in a whiri- 
ing coffin, and so on ad ir^flnitum, 

'* Towards the end of the delirium the whirling images appeared 
again, and I was haunted by a singular creation of the brain, which re- 
appeared every few moments. It was an image of a double-faced doli^ 
with a cylindrical body running down to a point like a p^-top. 

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

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



THE NBUBAIi PBOCB88 IN HAIiLUOINATION. 

Examples of these singular perversions of perception, 
might be multiplied indefinitely, but I have no more space. 
Let us turn to the question of what the physiological pro- 
cess may be to which they are due. It must, of course, 
consist of an excitement from within of those centres which 
are active in normal perception, identical in kind and de- 
gree with that which real external objects are. usually 
needed to induce. The particular process which cor* 



THE PERCEPTION OF THINGS. 15555 

rents from the sense-organs arouse would seem under 
normal circumstances to be arousable in no other way. On 
p. 72 flf. above, we saw that the centres aroused by incom- 
ing peripheral currents are probably identical with the 
centres used in mere imagination ; and that the vividness 
of the sensational kind of consciousness is probably cor- 
related with a discrete degree of intensity in the process 
therein aroused. Beferring the reader back to that pas- 
sage and to what was more lately said on p. 103 flf., I now 
proceed to complete my theory of the perceptive process 
by an analysis of what may most probably be believed to 
take place in hallucination strictly so called. 

We have seen (p. 75) that the free discharge of cells 
into each other through associative paths is a likely reason 
why the maximum intensity of function is not reached 
when the cells are excited by their neighbors in the cortex. 
At the end of Chapter XXV we sliall return to this concep- 
tion, and whilst making it still more precise, use it for ex- 
plaining certain phenomena connected with the wilL The 
idea is that the leakage forward along these paths is too 
rapid for the inner tension in any centre to accumulate to 
the maximal explosion-point, unless the exciting currents 
are greater than those which the various portions of the 
cortex supply to each other. Currents from the periphery 
are (as it seems) the only currents whose energy can van- 
quish the supra-ideational resistance (so to call it) of the 
cells, and cause the peculiarly intense sort of disintegra- 
tion with which the sensational quality is linked. If, hotv- 
every the leakage forward toere to atop, the tension inside cer- 
tain cells might reach the explosion-point, even though the 
influence which excited them came only from neighboring 
cortical parts. Let an empty pail with a leak in its bottom, 
tipped up against a support so that if it ever became full 
of water it would upset, represent the resting condition of 
the centre for a certain sort of feeling. Let water poured 
into it stand for the currents which are its natural stimulus ; 
then the hole in its bottom will, of course, represent the 
* paths * by which it transmits its excitement to other asso- 
ciated cells. Now let two other vessels have the function 



124 PSYCHOLOGY. 

of snpplying it with water. One of these vessels stands 
for the neighboring cortical cells, and can pour in hardlj 
any more water than goes out by the leak. The pail conse- 
sequently never upsets in consequence of the supply from 
this source. A current of water passes through it and does 
work elsewhere, but in the pail itself nothing but what 
stands for ideatiorud activity is aroused. The other vessel, 
however, stands for the peripheral sense-organs, and sup- 
plies a stream of water so copious that the pail promptiy 
fills up in spite of the leak, and presently upsets ; in other 
words, sensational activity is aroused. But it is obvious that 
if the leak were plugged, the slower stream of supply 
would also end by upsetting the pail. 

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

It would seem that some hallucinations are best to be 
explained in this way. We have in fact a regular series of 
facts which can all be formulated under the single law that ^Ae 
.substantive strength of a state of consciousness hears an inverse 
proportion to its svggestiveness. It is the halting-places ot 
our thought which are occupied with distinct imagery. 
Most of the words we utter have no time to awaken images 
at all ; they simply awaken the following worda But when 
the sentence stops, an image dwells for awhile before the , 
mental eye (see Vol. I. p. 243). Again, whenever the asso- 
ciative processes are reduced and impeded by the approach 
of unconsciousness, as in falling asleep, or growing faint, or 
becoming narcotized, we find a concomitant increase in the 
intensity of whatever partial consciousness may survive. In 
some people what M. Maury has called * hypnagogic ' hal- 
lucinations * are the regular concomitant of the process of 



*Le Sommeil et les Rdves (1865), chaps, m, iv. 



THE PERCEPTION OF THINOa. 126 

falling asleep. Trains of faces, landscapes, etc., pass before 
the mental eye, first as fancies, thien as pseudo-hallucina- 
tions, finally as fuU-fiedged hallucinations forming dreams. 
If we regard association-paths as paths of drainage, then the 
shutting off of one after another of them as the encroaching 
cerebral paralysis advances ought to act like the plugging 
cf the hole in the bottom of the pail, and make the activity 
more intense in those systems of cells that retain any 
activity at all. The level rises because the currents are 
not drained away, until at last the full sensational explosion 
may occur. 

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

Dr. Hugh]in£cs Jackson's explanation of the epileptic 
seizure is acknowledged to be masterly. It involves 



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

t Not, of course, in all cases, because the cells remaining active are them- 
selves on the way to be overpowered by the general (unknown) condition to 
which sleep is due. 



126 P8TCH0L0QT. 

principles exactly like those which I am bringing forward 
here. The * loss of cons'ciousness ' in epilepsy is due to the 
most highly organized brain-processes being exhausted 
and thrown out of gear. The less organized (more instinc- 
tive) processes, ordinarily inhibited by the others, are then 
exalted, so that we get as a mere consequence of relief from 
the inhibition, the meaningless or maniacal action which 
so often follows the attack. * 

Similarly the svbavUua tendinorum or jerking of the 
muscles which so often startles us when we are on the point 



* For a full account of Jackson's theories, sec his ' Croonian Lectures ' 
published in the Brit. Med. Jouin. for 1884. Of. also his remarks in the 
Discussion of Dr. Mercier's paper on Inhibition in 'Brain/ xi. 861. 

The loss of vivacity in the images in the process of waking, as well as 
the gain of it in falling asleep, are both well described by M. Taine, who 
writes (oii Intelligence, i. 50. 58) that often in the da3rtime, when fatigued 
and seated in a chair, it is sufficient for him to close one eye with a hand- 
kerchief, when, **by degrees, the sight of the other eye becomes vague, 
and it closes. All external sensations are gradually effaced, or cease, at all 
events, to be remarked ; the internal images, on the other band, feeble and 
rapid during the state of complete wakefulness, become intense, distinct, 
colored, steady, and lasting : there is a sort of ecstasy, accompanied by a 
feeling of expansion and of comfort. Warned by frequent experience, I 
know that sleep is coming on. and that I must not disturb the rising 
vision ; 1 remain passive, and in a few minutes it is complete. Architecture, 
landscapes, moving figures, pass slowly by, and sometimes remain, with 
incomparable clearness of form and fulness of being ; sleep comes on, and 
I know no more of the real world I am in. 3Iany times, like M. Maury, 
I have caused myself to be gently roused at different moments of this state, 
and have thus been able to mark its characters. — The intense image which 
seems an external object is but a more forcible continuation of the feeble 
image which an instant before I recognized as internal : some scrap of a 
forest, some house, some person which I vaguely "imagined on closing my 
eyes, has in a minute become present to me with full bodily details, so as to 
change into a complete hallucination. Then, waking up on a hand touch- 
ing me, I feel the figure decay, lose color, and evaporate : what had ap- 
peared a substance is reduced ton shadow, . . . In such a cose. I have often 
seen, for a passing moment, the image grow pale, waste away, and evapo- 
rate ; sometimes, on opening the eyes, a fragment of landscape or the skirt 
of a dress appears still to float over the fire-irons or on the black hearth." 
This persistence of dream -objects for a few moments after the eyes are 
opened seems to be no extremely rare experience. Many cases of it have 
been reported to me directly. Compare MtlUer's Physiology, Baly's tr., 
p. 945. 



THE PERCEPTION OF THIN08. 127 

of failing asleep, may be interpreted as due to the rise (in 
certain lower motor centres) of the ordinary * tonic ' tension 
to the explosion-point, when the inhibition commonly ex- 
erted by the higher centres falls too suddenly away. 

One possible condition of hallucination then stands 
revealed, whatever other conditions there may be. When 
the normal paths of association bettoeen a centre and other centres 
are throian out of gear^ any activity which may exist in the 
first centre tends to increase in intensity untUfinaRy the point 
may be reached at which the last inward resistance is overcorne^ 
and the/uU sensational process explodes,* Thus it will happen 
that causes of an amount of activity in brain-cells which 
would ordinarily result in a weak consciousness may pro- 
duce a very strong consciousness when the overflow of these 
cells is stopped by the torpor of the rest of the brain. A 
sUght peripheral irritation, then, if it reaches the centres of 
•consciousness at all during sleep, will give rise to the dream 
of a violent sensation. All the books about dreaming are 
full of anecdotes which illustrate this. For example, M. 
Maury's nose and lips are tickled with a feather while he 
sleeps. He dreams he is beiug tortured by having a pitch- 
plaster applied to his face, torn off, lacerating the skin of 
nose and lips. Descartes, on being bitten by a flea, dreams 
of being run through by a sword. A friend tells me, as I 
write this, of his hair changing its position in his forehead 
just as he * dozed off' in his chair a few days since. In- 
stantly he dreamed that some one had struck him a blow. 
Examples can be quoted ad libitum, but these are enough, t 



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

f M. A. Maury gives a number: op. cit. pp. 1S6-S. 



128 P8TCH0L0OT, 

We seem herewith to have an explanation for a certain 
number of hallucinations. Whenever the normal forward 
irradiation of irvtra-cortical excitement through association-paihs 
is checked, any accidental spontaneous activity or any peripheral 
stimulation {hotvever inadequate at other times) by which a brain- 
centre may be visited, sets up a process off'vH sensational inten- 
sity therein. 

In the hallucinations artificially produced in hypnotic 
subjects, some degree of peripheral excitement seems usu- 
ally to be required. The brain is asleep as far as its own 
spontaneous thinking goes, and the words of the ' magneti- 
zer ' then awaken a cortical process which drafts oflf into 
itself any currents of a related sort which may come in 
from the periphery, resulting in a vivid objective percep- 
tion of the suggested thing. Thus, point to a dot on a 
sheet of paper, and call it * General Grant's photograph,*' 
and your subject will see a photograph of the General 
there instead of the dot. The dot gives objectivity to the 
appearance, and the suggested notion of the General gives 
it form. Then magnify the dot by a lens ; double it by a 
prism or by nudging the eyeball ; reflect it in a mirror ; 
turn it upside down ; or wipe it out ; and the subject will 
tell you that the * photograph ' has been enlarged, doubled, 
reflected, turned about, or made to disappear. In M. Binet's 
language, * the dot is the outward point de repere which is 
needed to give objectivity to your suggestion, and without 
which the latter will only produce a conception in the 
subject's mind.t M. Binet has shown that such a periphe- 



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

t It is a difticult thing to distinguish in a hypnotic patient between a 
genuine sensorial hallucination of something suggested and a conception 
of it merely, coupled with belief that it is there. I have been surprised at the 
vagueness with which such subjects will oftijn trace upon blank paper the 
outlines of the pictures which they say they * see ' thereupon. On the other 



THB PBRCBPTION OF THING8. 1S» 

ral point de rqph^ is used in an enormous number, not only 
of hypnotic hallucinations^ but of hallucinations of the 
insane. These latter are of ten t^niZo^oZ ; that is, the patient 
hears the voices always on one side of him, or sees the 
figure only when a certain one of his eyes is open. In 
many of these cases it has been distinctly proved that a 
morbid irritation in the internal ear, or an opacity in the 
humors of the eye, was the starting point of the current 
which the patient's diseased acoustic or optical centres 
clothed with their peculiar products in the way of ideas. 
Hallucinations prodvced in this way are 'illusions '; and M. 
Binet'a theory, that all haUvcinationa must start in the periphery, 
may be called an attempt to reduce hallucination and illusion to 
one physiological type, the type, namely, to which normal per- 
ception belongs. In every case, according to M. Binet, 
whether of perception, of hallucination, or of illusion, we 
get the sensational vividness by means of a current from 
the peripheral nerves. It may be a mere trace of a cur- 
rent But that trace is enough to kindle the maximal or 
snpra-ideational process so that the object perceived will 
have the character of externality. What the nature of the 
object shall be will depend wholly on the particular sys- 
tem of paths in which the process is kindled. Part of the 
thing in all cases comes from the sense-organ, the rest is 
furnished by the mind. But we cannot by inirospection 
distinguish between these parts ; and our only formula for 
the result is that the brain has reacted on the impression in 
the normal way. Just so in the dreams which we haye 
considered, and in the hallucinations of which M. Binet 
tells, we can only say that the brain has reacted in an abnor- 
mal way. 

if. Binet's theory accounts indeed/or a multitude of cases.^ 
but certainly not for aU, The prism does not always double 



hand, you will bear them say that they find no difference between a real 
flower which you show them and an imaginary flower which you tell 
them is beside it. When told that one is imaginary and that they must 
pick out the real one, they sometimes say the choice la impossible, and 
sometimes they point to the imaginary flower. 



180 PSTCHOWGT. 

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

Sporadic cases of hallucination, visiting people only 
once in a lifetime (which seem to be by far the most fre- 
quen*^^ type), are on any theory hard to understand in detail 
They are often extraordinarily complete ; and the fact that 
many of them are reported as veridical^ that is, as coincid- 
ing with real events, such as accidents, deaths, eta, of the 
persons seen, is an additional complication of the phe- 
nomeiion. The first really scienlitic study of hallucination 



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

t Brain, xi. 441. 

IMind, X. 161, 816 ; and Phantasms of the Living (1886), I. 470-488. 



THE PERCEPTION OF THINQS. 131 

iu all its possible bearings, on the basis of a large mass of 
empirical material, was begun bj Mr. Edmund Gumey and 
is continued by other members of the Society for Psy- 
chical Besearch ; and the * Census ' is now being applied 
to several countries under the auspices of the International 
Congress of Experimental Psychology. It is to be hoped 
that out of these combined labors something solid will 
eventually grow. The facts shade off into the phenomena 
of motor automatism, trance, etc.; and nothing but a wide 
comparative study can give really instructive results.* 

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

• PEBOEPTION-TIMB.' 

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

* In Mr. Guraey's work. Just cited, a very Uu^ge Dumber of veridical 
cases are critically discussed. 



132 P8JCH0L0QT, 

Dr. Bomanes gives an interesting variation of these 
time-measurements. He found ^ 

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

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

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

* Mental £volution in Animals, p. 186. 



THE PEBOBPTION OF THIN08. 133 

aeveral highly distinguished men in science and literature, most of 
whom I found to be slow readers." * 

*LUercUure, The best treatment of perception with which lam ac- 
quainted is that in Mr. James Sully's book on ' Illusions ' in the Interna- 
tional Scientific Series. On hallucinations the literature is large. Oumey, 
Eandinsky (as already cited), and some articles by Eraepelin in the 
Vierteljahrschrift ftlr Wissenschaftliche Philoeophie, vol. T (1881), are 
the most systematic studies recently made. All works on Insanity treat 
of them. Dr. W. W. Ireland's works. ' The Blot upon the Brain ' (1886) and 
* Through the Ivory (3ate ' (1890) have much information on the subject. 
Gumey gives pretty complete references to older literature. The most 
important thing on the subject from the point of view of theoiy Is the 
article by Mr. Myers on the Demon of Socrates in the Proceedings of tha 
Society for I^chical Research for 1880. p. Sdd. 



CHAPTEE XX 

THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE.* 
THE FEELINO OF CBTTDE EXTEN8ITY. 

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

In the sensations of smell and taste this element of 
varying vastness seems less prominent but not altogether 
absent Some tastes and smells appear less extensive than 
complex flavors, like that of roast meat or plum pudding, 
on the one hand, or heavy odors like musk or tuberose, on 



* Reprinted, with considerable revision, from * Mind ' for 1887. 

184 



THB PEROEPTION OF 8PA0B. 136 

the other. The epithet sharp given to the acid class would 
seem to show that to the popular mind there is something 
narrow and, as it were, streaky, in the impression they 
make, other flavors and odors being bigger and rounder. 

The sensations derived from the inward organs are also 
distinctly more or less voluminous. Bepletion and empti- 
ness, suffocation, palpitation, headache, are examples of 
this, and certainly not less spatial is the consciousness we 
have of our general bodily condition in nausea, fever, heavy 
drowsiness, and fatigi^e. Our entire cubic content seems 
then sensibly manifest to us as such, and feels much larger 
than any local pulsation, pressure, or discomfort. Skin 
and retina are, however, the organs in which the space- 
element plays the most active part. Not only does the 
maximal vastness yielded by the retina surpass that yielded 
by any other organ, but the intricacy with which our atten- 
tion can subdivide this vastness and perceive it to be com- 
posed of lesser portions simultaneously coexisting along- 
side of each other is without a parallel elsewhere.* The 
ear gives a greater vastness than the skin, but is consider- 
ably less able to subdivide iit 

Now my first thesis is that this element, discernible in each 
and every sensation, though more developed in some than in 
others, is the original sensation of space, out of which all the 
exact knowledge about space that we afterwards come to 
have is woven by processes of discrimination, association, 
and selection. * Extensity,' as Mr. James Ward calls it,:|: 



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

f Amongst sounds the graver ones seem the most extensive, Stumpf 
gives three reasons for this: 1) association with bigger causes; 2) wider 
reverberation of the hand and body when grave notes are sung; 8) audi- 
bility at a greater distance. He thinks that these three reasons dispense us 
from supposing an immanent extensity in the sensation of sound as such. 
See his remarks in the Tonpsychologie, i. 207-211. 

\ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th Edition, article Psychology, pp. 46, 58. 



136 P8TGH0L0QT. 

on this view, becomes an element in each sensation just as 
intensity is. The latter every one will admit to be a dis- 
tinguishable though not separable ingredient of the sensible 
quality. In like manner extensity, being an entirely pecul- 
iar kind of feeling indescribable except in terms of itself, 
and inseparable in actual experience from some sensational 
quality which it must accompany, can itself receive no 
other name than that of senaaiiorud dement. 

It must now be noted that the vaatneaa hitherto spoken (^ 
is cts great in one direction as in another. Its dimensions are 
so vague that in it there is no question as yet of surface 
as opposed to depth ; ' volume ' being the best short name 
for the sensation in question. Sensations of different orders 
are roughly comparable^ inter se, unth respect to their volumes. 
This shows that the spatial quality in each is identical 
wherever found, for diflferent qualitative elements, e.g. 
warmth and odor, are incommensurate. Persons bom 
blind are reported surprised at the largeness with which 
objects appear to them when their sight is restored. Franz 
says of his patient cured of cataract : "He saw ever3rthing 
much larger than he had supposed from the idea obtained 
by his sense of touch. Moving, and especially living, 
objects appeared very large." * Loud sounds have a cer- 
tain enormousness of feeling. It is impossible to conceive 
of the explosion of a cannon as filling a small space. In 
general, sounds seem to occupy all the room between us 
and their source ; and in the case of certain ones, the 
cricket's song, the whistling of the wind, the roaring of the 
surf, or a distant railway train, to have no definite start- 
ing point. 

In the sphere of vision we have facts of the same order. 
'Glowing' bodies, as Hering says, give us a perception 
** which seems roomy (raumha/t) in comparison with that 
of strictly surface color. A glowing iron looks luminous 
through and through, and so does a flame." t A luminous 
fog, a band of sunshine, affect us in the same way. As 
Hering urges : 

* Philosophical Trausactions (1841). 

t Hermann's Hnndb d. Physiol., Bd iii. 1, S 575. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 137 

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

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

" When we transfer the jitteiition from objects of one sense to those 
of another we have an indescribable feeling (though at the same time 
one perfectly determinate and reproducible at pleasure) of altered direc- 
tion, or differently localized tension (Spannung), We feel a strain for- 
ward in the eyes, one directed sideways in the ears, increasing with 
the degree of our attention, and changing according as we look at an 
object carefully, or listen to something attentively ; wherefore we speak 
of straining the attention. The difference is most plainly felt when 

♦ Lac. ciU 8. 572. 



138 P8TCH0L0OT. 

the attention vibrates rapidly between eye and ear. This feeling local* 
izes itself with most decided difference in regard to the varions sense- 
organs according as we wish to discriminate a thing delicately by touchy 
taste, or smell. 

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

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

* Elemente der Psyebophysik, ii. 475-6. 

t See Foster's Text-book of Physiology, bk. in. c. vi. § 2. 

X Fechner, who was ignorant of the but lately discovered function of 
the semi-circular canals, gives a diifcrent explanation of the organic seat of 
these feelings. They are probably highly composite. With me, actual move- 
ments in the eyes play a considerable part in them, though I am hardly con- 
scious of tbe peculiar feelings in the scalp which Fechner goes on to de- 
scribe thus : ' ' The feeling of strained attention in the different sense-organs 
seems to be only a muscular one produced in using these various organs 
by setting in motion, by a sort of reflex action, the set of muscles which 
belong to them. One can ask, then, with what particular muscular con- 
traction the sense of strained attention in the effort to recall something is 
associated ? On this cjuestion my own feeling gives me a decided answer ; 
it comes to me distin(;tly not as a sensation of tension in the inside of the 
head, but as a feeling of strain and contraction in the scalp, with a pressure 
from outwards in over the whole cranium, undoubtedly caused by a con- 
traction of the muscles of the scalp. This harmonizes very well with the 
expressions, sich den Kopf zerbrechen, den Kopf zusammennehmen. In a 
former illness, when I could not endure the slightest effort after continuous 
thought, and had no theoretical bins on this question, the muscles of the 
scalp, especially those of the back-head, assumed a fairly morbid degree of 
sensibility whenever I tried to think." (Elem. der Psychophysik, ii. 
490-91.) 



TEE PEROEPTION OF 8PA0E. 139 

In the still itself there is a vague form of projection 
into the third dimension to which Hering has called atten- 
tion. 

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

The interior of one's mouth-cavity feels larger when ex- 
plored by the tongue than when looked at. The crater of a 
newly-extracted tooth, and the movements of a loose tooth 
in its socket,, feel quite monstrous. A midge buzzing 
against the drum of the ear will often seem as big as a but- 
terfly. The spatial sensibility of the tympanic membrane 
has hitherto been very little studied, though the subject 
will well repay much trouble. If we approach it by intro- 
ducing into the outer ear some small object like the tip of 
a roUed-up tissue-paper lamplighter, we are surprised at 
the large radiating sensation which its presence gives us, 
and at the sense of clearness and openness which comes 
when it is removed. It is immaterial to inquire whether 
the far-reaching sensation here be due to actual irradiation 
upon distant nerves or noi We are considering now, not 
the objective causes of the spatial feeling, but its subjective 
varieties, and the experiment shows that the same object 
gives more of it to the inner than to the outer cuticle of 
the ear. The pressure of the air in the tympanic cavity 
upon the membrane gives an astonishingly large sensation. 
We can increase the pressure by holding our nostrils and 
closing our mouth and forcing air through our Eustachian 
tubes by an expiratory efi'ort ; and we can diminish it by 
either inspiring or swallowing under the same conditions of 
closed mouth and nose. In either case Wf3 get a large round 
tridimensional sensation inside of the head, which seems 
as if it must come from the affection of an organ much 
larger than the tympanic membrane, whose surface hardly 
exceeds that of one's little-finger-nail. 



140 PSTCffOLOQT. 

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

The reader will have noticed, in this enumeration of 
facts, that voluminousness of the feeling seems to bear very little 
relation to the size of the organ that yields it. The ear and 
eye are comparatively minute organs, yet they give us feel- 
ings of great volume. The same lack of exact proportion 
between size of feeling and size of organ affected obtains 
within the limits of particular sensory organs. An object 
appears smaller on the lateral portions of the retina than it 
does on the fovea, as may be easily verified by holding the 

* That the sensatioD in question is one of tactile rather than of acoustic 
sensibility would seem proved by the fact that a medical friend of the 
writer, both of whose membrana tymjHini are quite normal, but one of 
whose ears is almost totally deaf, feels the presence and withdrawal of ob- 
jects as well at one ear as at the other. 



THE PEROEPTION OF SPACE. 141 

two forefingers parallel and a couple of inches apart, and 
transferring the gaze of one eye from one to the other. 
Then the finger not directly looked at will appear to shrink, 
and this whatever be the direction of the fingers. On the 
tongue a crumb, or the calibre of a small tube, appears 
larger than between the fingers. If two points kept equi- 
distant (blunted compass- or scissors-points, for example) 
be drawn across the skin so as really to describe a pair of 
parallel lines, the lines will appear farther apart in some 
spots than in others. If, for example, we draw them hori- 
zontally across the face, so that the mouth falls between 
them, the person experimented upon will feel as if they 
began to diverge near the mouth and to include it in a well- 
marked ellipse. In like manner, if we keep the compass- 




Fio. 61 (after Weber). 

points one or two centimetres apart, and draw them down 
the forearm over the wrist and palm, finally drawing one 
along one finger, the other along its neighbor, the appear- 
ance will be that of a single line, soon breaking into two, 
which become more widely separated below the wrist, to 
contract again in the palm, and finally diverge rapidly 
again towards the finger-tips. The dotted lines in Figs. 
51 and 52 represent the true path of the compass-points ; 
the full lines their apparent path. 

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

* The skin seems to obey a different law from the eye here. If a given 
retinal tract be excited, first by a series of points, an4 next by the two 



142 



PSTCHOLOOT, 



In the eye, intensity of nerve-stimulation seems to in- 
crease the vdume of the feeling as well 
as its brilliancy. If we raise and lower 
the gas alternately, the whole room and 
all the objects in it seem alternately to 
enlarge and contract If we cover half 
a page of small print with a gray glass, the 
print seen through the glass appears 
decidedly smaller than that seen outside 
of it, and the darker the glass the greater 
the difference. When a circumscribed 
opacity in front of the retina keeps off 
part of the light from the portion which 
it covers, objects projected on that 
portion may seem but half as large as 
when their image falls outside of it* 
The inverse effect seems produced by 
certain drugs and anaesthetics. Mor- 
phine, atropine, daturine, and cold blunt 
the sensibility of the skin, so that dis- 
tances upon it seem less. Haschish pro- 
duces strange perversions of the general 
sensibility. Under its influence one's 
body may seem either enormously en- 
larged or strangely contracted. Some- 
times a single member will alter its 
proportion to the rest; or one's back, 
for instance, will appear entirely absent, 
as if one were hollow behind. Objects 
comparatively near will recede to a vast 
distance, a short street assume to the 
eye an immeasurable perspective. Ether and chloroform 




I 



Fio. 62 (after Weber). 



extreme points, with the interval between them unexcited, this interval will 
seem considerably less in the second case than it seemed in the first. In 
the skin the unexcited interval feels the larger. The reader may easily 
verify the facts in this case by taking a visiting-card, cutting one edge of 
it into a saw-tooth pattern, and from the opposite edge cutting out all but 
the two comers, and then comparing the feelings aroused by the two edges 
when held against the skin. 

* Classen, Physiologic des tresichtssinnes, p. 114 ; see also A. Riehl, Der 
Philosophische Kriticismus, ii. p. 149. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 143 

occaaionally produce not wholly dissimilar results. Panum, 
the German physiologist, relates that when, as a boy, he 
was etherized for neuralgia, the objects in the room grew 
extremely small and distant, before his field of vision dark- 
ened over and the roaring in his ears began. He also men- 
tions that a Mend of his in church, struggling in vain to 
keep awake, saw the preacher grow smaller and smaller 
and more and more distant I myself on one occasion 
observed the same recession of objects during the begin- 
ning of chloroformization. In various cerebral diseases 
we find analogous disturbances. 

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

The greater extensiveness that the feeling of certain 
parts of the same surface has over other parts, and that 
one order of surface has over another (retina over skin, for 
example), may also to a certain extent be explained by the 
operation of the same factor. It is an anatomical fact that 
the most spatially sensitive surfaces (retina, tongue, finger- 



144 PaTGHOLOQT. 

tips, etc.) are supplied by nerve-trunks of unusual thick- 
ness, which must supply to every unit of surface-area an 
unusually large number of terminal fibres. But the varia- 
tions of felt extension obey probably only a very rough law 
of numerical proportion to the number of fibres, A sound 
is not twice as voluminous to two ears as to one ; and the 
above-cited variations of feeling, when the same surface is 
excited under different conditions, show that the feeling is 
a resultant of several factors of which the anatomical one 
is only the principal. Many ingenious hypotheses have 
been brought forward to assign the co-operating factors 
where different conditions give conflicting amounts of felt 
space. Later we shall analyze some of these cases in de- 
tail, but it must be confessed here in advance that many of 
them resist analysis altogether. * 

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



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 145 

TETE PEIBOIIPTION OF SPATTATi OBDBB. 

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

Let no one be surprised at this notion of a space without 
order. There may be a space without order just as there 
may be an order without space.* And the primitive percep- 
tions of space are certainly of an unordered kind. The 
order which the spaces first perceived potentially include 
must, before being distinctly apprehended by the mind, be 
woven into those spaces by a rather complicated set of in- 
tellectual acts. The primordial largenesses which the sen- 
sations yield must be measured and svbdivided by conscious- 
ness, and added together, before they can form by their 
synthesis what we know as the real Space of the objective 
world. In these operations, imagination, association, at- 
tention, and selection play a decisive part ; and although 
they nowhere add any new material to the space-data of 
sense, they so shuffle and manipulate these data and hide 

aloDe were necessary, we should have square inches and half inches, and 
various other forms, rectilinear and curvilinear, of fragance and sound." 
(Lectures, xxii.) 

♦ Musical tones, e.g., have an order of quality independent either of 
their space- or time-order. Music comes from the time-order of the notes 
upsetting their quality- order. In general, it abed efg h ij k, etc., stand 
for an arrangement of feelings in the order of their quality, they may as- 
sume cmy space-order or time-order, &8 defa h g, etc., and still the order 
of quality will remain fixed and unchanged. 



146 PaTCHOLOGT. 

present ones behind imagined ones that it is no wonder if 
some authors have gone so far as to think that the sense- 
data have no spatial worth at all, and that the intellect, 
since it makes the subdivisions, also gives the spatial 
quality to them out of resources of its own. 

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

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

//* a number of sensible extents are to be perceived alongside 



THE PEBOBPTION OF SPACE, 147 

of each other and in definite order they must appear as parts in 
a vaster sensible extent which can enter the mind simply and aU 
at once. I think it will be seen that the difiSculty of esti- 
mating correctly the form of one's body by pure feeling 
arises from the fact that it is very hard to feel its totality as 
a unit at alL The trouble is similar to that of thinking for- 
wards and backwards simultaneously. When conscious of 
our head we tend to grow unconscious of our feet, and there 
enters thus an element of time-succession into our percep- 
tion of ourselves which transforms the latter from an act of 
intuition to one of construction. This element of con- 
structiveness is present in a still higher degree, and carries 
with it the same consequences, when we deal with objective 
spaces too great to be grasped by a single look. The rela- 
tive positions of the shops in a town, separated by many 
tortuous streets, have to be thus constructed from data ap- 
prehended in succession, and the result is a greater or less 
degree of vagueness. 

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

Spatial order is an abstract term. The concrete percep- 
tions which it covers are figures, directions, positions, mag- 
nitudes, and distances. To single out any one of these 
things from a total vastness is partially to introduce order 
into the vastness. To subdivide the vastness into a multi- 
tude of these things is to apprehend it in a completely 
orderly way. Now what are these things severally ? To 



148 P8TCH0L00T. 

begin with, no one can for an instant hesitate to saj that 
some of them are qualities of sensation, just as the total 
yastness is in which they lie. Take figure : a square, a 
circle, and a triangle appear in the first instance to the eye 
simply as three different kinds of impressions, each so pecul- 
iar that we should recognize it if it were to return. When 
Nunnely's patient had his cataracts removed, and a cube and 
a sphere were presented to his notice, he could at once 
perceive a difference in their shapes ; and though he could 
not say which was the cube and which the sphere, he saw 
they were not of the same figure. So of lines : if we can 
notice lines at all in our field of vision, it is inconceivable 
that a vertical one should not affect us differently from an 
horizontal oue, and should not be recognized as affecting us 
similarly when presented again, although we might not yet 
know the name * vertical,' or any of its connotations, beyond 
this peculiar affection of our sensibility. So of angles : an 
obtuse one affects our feeling immediately in a different way 
from an acute one. Distance-apart, too, is a simple sensa- 
tion — the sensation of a line joining the two distant points : 
lengthen the line, you alter the feeling and with it the 
distance felt. 

Space-rdations. 

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

We may consequently imagine a disciple of this school 
to say to us at this point : " Suppose you have made a sep- 
arate specific sensation of each line and each angle, what 
boots it ? You have still the order of directions and of 
distances to account for ; you have still the relative magni- 
tudes ot all these felt figures to state ; you have their re- 
spective positions to define before you can be said to have 
brought order into your space. And not one of these de- 



TEE PERCEPTION OF 8PA0E. 149 

terminations can be effected except through an act of re* 
lating thought, so that your attempt to give an account of 
space in terms of pure sensibility breaks down almost at 
the very outsei Position, for example, can never be a sen- 
sation, for it has nothing intrinsic about it ; it can only 
obtain between a spot, line, or other figure and extraneous 
co-ordinateSy and can never be an element of the sensible 
datum, the line or the spot, in itsell Let us then confess 
that Thought alone can unlock the riddle of space, and 
that Thought is an adorable but unfathomable mystery." 

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

'Relation' is a very slippery word. It has so many 
different concrete meanings that the use of it as an abstract 
universal may easily introduce bewilderment into our 
thought We must therefore be careful to avoid ambiguity 
by making sure, wherever we have to employ it, what its 
precise meaning is in that particular sphere of application. 
At present we have to do with space-relations, and no others. 
Most ' relations ' are feelings of an entirely different order 
from the terms they relate. The relation of similarity, e.g., 
may equally obtain between jasmine and tuberose, or be- 
tween Mr. Browning's verses and Mr. Story's ; it is itself 
neither odorous nor poetical, and those may well be pardoned 
who have denied to it all sensational content whatever. 
But just as, in the field of quantity, the relation between 
two numbers is another number, so in the field of space the 
relations are facts of the same order with the facts they relate. 
If these latter be patches in the circle of vision, the former 
are certain other patches betioeen them. When we speak of 
the relation of direction of two points toward each other, 
we mean simply the sensation of the line that joins the two 
points together. The line is the rdaiion; feel it and you 
feel the relation, see it and you see the relation ; nor can 
you in any conceivable way think the latter except by im- 
agining the former (however vaguely), or describe or indi- 
cate the one except by pointing to the other. And the 
moment you have imagined the line, the relation stands 



160 PaTOHOLOQT. 

before you in all its completeness, with nothing farther tc 
be done. Just so the relation of direction between two lines 
is identical with the peculiar sensation of shape of the 
space enclosed between them. This is commonly called 
an angular relation. 

If these relations are sensations, no less so are the rela- 
tions of position. The relation of position between the top and 
bottom points of a vertical line is that line^ and nothing else. 
The relations of position between a point and a horizontal 
line below it are potentially numerous. There is one more 
important than the rest, called its distance. This is the 
sensation, ideal or actual, of a perpendicular drawn from the 
point to the line.* Two lines, one from each extremity of 
the horizontal to the point, give us a peculiar sensation of 
triangularity. This feeling may be said to constitute the 
locus of all the relations of position of the elements in ques- 
tion. Bightness and Irftness, upness and dotvnness, are again 
pure sensations diflfering specifically from each other, and 
generically from everything else. Like all sensations, they 
can only be indicated, not described. If we take a cube and 
label one side top, another bottoniy a third /ron^, and a fourth 
back, there remains no form of words by which we can de- 
scribe to another person which of the remaining sides is right 
and which left. AVe can only point and say here is right 
and there is left, just as we should say this is red and thaJt 
blue. Of two points seen beside each other at all, one is 
always afiected by one of these feelings, and the other by 
the opposite; the same is true of the extremities of any 
line.t 

* The whole science of geometry may be said to owe Its being to the 
exorbitant interest which the human mind takes in lines. We cut space 
up in every direction in order to manufacture them. 

f Kant was, I believe, the first to call attention to this last order of facts. 
After pointing out that two opposite spherical triangles, two gloves of a 
pair, two spirals wound in contrary directions, have identical inward de- 
terminations, that is, have their parts defined with relation to each other by 
the sam'j law, and so must be conceived as identical, he showed that the im- 
possibility of their mutual superposition obliges us to assign to each figure 
of a symmetrical pair a peculiar difference of its own which can only con- 
sist in an outward determination or relation of its parts, no longer to c»ach 
other, but to the whole of an objectively outlying space with its points of the 
<X)inpass given absolutely. This inwwceivuble difference is perceived only 



THE PERCEPTION OF 8PACB. 151 

Thus it appears indubitable that all space-relations ex- 
cept those of magnitude are nothing more or less than pure 
sensational objects. But magnittide appears to outstep this 
narrow sphere. We have relations of muchness and little- 
ness between times, numbers, intensities, and qualities, as 
well as spaces. It is impossible, then, that such relations 
should form a particular kind of simply spatial feeling. 
This we must admit : the relation of quantity is generic 
and occurs in many categories of consciousness, whilst the 
other relations we have considered are specific and occur 
in space alone. When our attention passes from a shorter 
line to a longer, from a smaller spot to a larger, from a 
feebler light to a stronger, from a paler blue to a richer, 
from a march tune to a galop, the transition is accompanied 
in the synthetic field of consciousness by a peculiar feeling 
of difference which is what we call the sensation of more, — 
more length, more expanse, more light, more blue, more 
motion. This transitional sensation of more must be iden- 
tical with itself under all these different accompaniments, 
or we should not give it the same name in every case. We 
get it when we pass from a short vertical line to a long 
horizontal one, from a small square to a large circle, as 
well as when we pass between those figures whose shapes 
are congruous. But when the shapes are congruous our 
consciousness of the relation is a good deal more distinct, 
and it is most distinct of all when, in the exercise of our 
analytic attention, we notice, first, a part, and then the 
whde, of a single line or shape. Then the more of the whole 
actually sticks out, as a separate piece of space, and is so 
envisaged. The same exact sensation of it is given when 
we are able to superpose one line or figure on another. This 
indispensable condition of exact measurement of the more 
has led some to think that the feeling itself arose in every 
case from original experiences of superposition. This is 

'through the relation to right and left, which is a matter of immediate 
intuition." In these last words {loelches unmittelbar auf Anachauung geht 
— Prolegomena, § 12) Kant expresses all that we have meant by speaking 
of up and down, right and left, as seimitiom. He is wrong, however, in 
invoking relation to extrinsic total space as essential to the existence of 
these contrasts in figures. Relation to our own body is enough. 



152 PSYCHOLOGY. 

probably not an absolutely true opinion^ but for onr pres- 
ent purpose that is immateriaL So far as the snbdiyisions 
of a sense-space are to be measured exactly against each 
other, objective forms occupying one subdivision must 
directly or indirectly be superposed upon the other, and 
the mind must get the immediate feeling of an outstanding 
pins. And even where we only feel one subdivision to be 
vaguely larger or less, the mind must pass rapidly between 
it and the other subdivision, and receive the immediate sen- 
sible shock of the more. 

We seem thus to have accounted for aU space-rdaiions^ and 
made them dear to our understanding. They are nothing but 
sensations of particular lines, particular angles, partuydar forms 
of transition, or (in the case of a distinct more) of particular 
outstanding portions of space after tioo figures have been super- 
posed. These relation-sensations may actually be produced 
as such, as when a geometer draws new lines across a figure 
with his pencil to demonstrate the relations of its parts, 
or they may be ideal representations of lines, not really 
drawn. But in either case their entrance into the mind is 
equivalent to a more detailed subdivision, cognizance, and 
measurement of the space considered. The bringing of sub- 
divisions to consciousness constitutes, then, the entire process 
by which toe pass from our first vague feding of a total 
vastness to a cognition of the vastness in detail. The more 
numerous the subdivisions are, the more elaborate and per- 
fect the cognition becomes. But inasmuch as all the sub- 
divisions are themselves sensations, and even the feeling 
of * more ' or * less ' is, where not itself a figure, at least a 
sensation of transition between two sensations of figure, 
it follows, for aught we can as yet see to the contrary, 
that all spatial hioidedge is sensationid at bottom, and that, 
as the sensations lie together in the unity of consciousness, 
no new material element whatever comes to them from a 
supra-sensible source.* 

* In the eyes of many it will have seemed strange to call a relation a 
mere line, and a line a mere sensation. We may easily learn a great deal 
about any relation, say that between two points: we may divide the line 
which joins these, and distinguish it, and classify it, and find out iU rela- 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 163 

The bringing of avbdivisions to consciousness ! This, then^ 
is our next topic. They may be brought to consciousness 
under three aspects in respect of their locality , in respect 
of their size, in respect of their sJuxpe. 

The Meaning of Localization. 

Confining oursdves to the problem of locality for the pres- 
ent, let us begin with the simple case of a sensitive surface, 
only two points of which receive stimulation from without 
How, first, are these two points felt as alongside of each 
other with an interval of space between them ? We must 
be conscious of two things for this : of the duality of the ex- 
cited points, and of the extensiveness of the unexcited 
interval. The duality alone, although a necessary, is not a 
sufficient condition of the spatial separation. We may, 
for instance, discern two sounds in the same place, sweet 
and sour in the same lemonade, warm and cold, round and 
pointed contact in the same place on the skin, etc.''*' In all 
discrimination the recognition of the duality of two feelings 
by the mind is the easier the more strongly the feelings are 

tions by drawing or representing new lines, and so on. But all this 
further industry has naught to do with our acquaintance with the relation 
itself, in its first intention. So cognized, the relation is the line and nothing 
more. It would indeed be fair to call it something less; and in fact it is 
easy to understand how most of us come to feel as if the line were a much 
grosser thing than the relation. The line is broad or narrow, blue or red, 
made by this object or by that alternately, in the course of our experience; 
it Is therefore independent of any one of these accidents; and so, from 
viewing it as no one of such sensible qualities, we may end by thinking of 
it as something which cannot be defined except as the negation of all sen- 
sible quality whatever, and which needs to be put into the sensations by a 
mysterious act of * relating thought. ' 

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

* This often happens when the warm and cold points, or the round and 
pointed ones, are applied to the skin within the limits of a single * Em- 
pfindungskreis.' 



154 P87€nOL007. 

contrasted in quality. If our two excited points awaken 
identical qualities of sensation, they must, perforce, appear 
to the mind as one ; and, not distinguished at all, they are, 
afortioriy not localized apart Spots four centimetres dis- 
tant on the back have no qualitative contrast at all, and fuse 
into a single sensation. Points less than three thousandths 
of a millimetre apart awaken on the retina sensations so 
contrasted that we apprehend them immediately as two. 
Now these unlikenesses which arise so slowly when we pass 
from one point to another in the back, so much faster on 
the tongue and finger-tips, but with such inconceivable 
rapidity on the retina, what are they ? Can we discover 
anything about their intrinsic nature? 

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

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

And yet the moment we reflect on this answer an insu- 
perable logical difficulty seems to present itself. No single 
quale of sensation can, by itself, amount to a consciousness 
of position. Suppose no feeling but that of a single point 
ever to be awakened. Could that possibly be the feeling 
of any special tohereiiess or thereness ? Certainly not. Only 
when a second point is felt to arise can the first one acquire 
a determination of up, doum, right or left, and these determina- 
tions are all relative to thai second, point. Each point, so far as 
it is placed, is then only by virtue of what it is not, namely, 
by virtue of another point. This is as much as to say that 
position has nothing intrinsic about it ; and that, although a 
feeling of absolute bigness may, a feding of place cannot, 
possibly form an immanent element in any single isolated sensa- 
tion. The very writer we have quoted has given heed to 
this objection, for he continues (p. 335) by saying that the 



♦ Vierordt, Grundriss der Physiologie, 5te Auflage (1877), pp. 826. 486. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 155 

sensations thus originally localized " are only so in them- 
selvesy but not in the representation of consciousness, which 
is not yet present . . . They are, in the first instance, de- 
void of all mutual relations with each other.*' But such a 
localization of the sensation 'in itself ' would seem to mean 
nothing more than the susceptibility or jpoterdiality of being 
distinctly localized when the time came and other conditions 
became fulfilled. Can we now discover anything about such 
susceptibility in itself before it has borne its ulterior fruits 
in the developed consciousness ? 

^ Local Signs* 

To begin with, every sensation of the skin and every vis- 
ceral sensation seems to derive from its topographic seat 
a peculiar shade of feeling, which it would not have in 
another place. And this feeling per se seems quite another 
thing from the perception of the place. Says Wundt * : 

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



♦Vorlesungen Ub. Menschen- u. Thierseele (Leipzig, 1863), i. 214. See 
also Ladd's Physiological Psychology, pp. 896-8, aud compare the uccount 
by G. Stanley Hall (Mind, x. 671) of the sensations produced by moving 
a blunt point lightly over the skin. Points of cutting pain, quivering, 
thrilling, whirling, tickling, scratching, and acceleration, alternated with 
each other along the surface. 



166 P8TCnOLOG7. 

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

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

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

♦ Of the anatomical and physiological conditions of these facts we know 
as yet but little, and that little need not here be discussed. Two principal 
hypotheses have been invoked in the case of the retina. Wundt (Men- 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 167 

And now let ns revert to the query propounded a 
moment since : Can these differences cf mere qtuHity in feeling ^ 
varying according to locality yet having each sensibly and in- 
trinsically and by itsdf nothing to do tvith position , constittde 
the 'sicsceptibilities^ tve merUioned, the conditions of being per* 
ceived in position, of the localities to which they bdong ? The 
numbers on a row of houses, the initial letters of a set of 
words, have no intrinsic kinship with points of space, and 
yet they are the conditions of our knowledge of where any 
house is in the row, or any word in the dictionary. Can the 
modifications of feeling in question be tags or labels of this 
kind which in no wise originally reveal the position of the 
spot to which they are attached, but guide us to it by what 
Berkeley would call a * customary tie ' ? Many authors have 
unhesitatingly replied in the aflSrmative ; Lotze, who in his 
Medizinische Psychologie* first described the sensations in 
this way, designating them, thus conceived, as local-signs. 
This term has obtained wide currency in Germany, and in 
speaking of the * local-sign theory ' hereafter, I shall always 
mean the theory which denies thai there can be in a sensation any 
element of actual locality, of inherent spatial order, any tone as 

seben-u. Thierseele, i. 214) called attention to the changes of color- sensibility 
which the retina displays as the image of the colored object passes from the 
fovea to the periphery. The color alters and becomes darker, and the 
change is more rapid in certain directions than in others. Tbis alteration 
in general, however, is one of which, as 6uch, we are wholly unconscious. 
We see the sky as bright blue all over, the moditications of the blue sensa- 
tion being interpreted by us, not as differences in the objective color, but 
as distinctions in its locality. Lotze (Medizinische Psychologie, 883. 355), on 
the other hand, has pointed out the peculiar tendency which each particu- 
lar point of the retina has to call forth that movement of the eyeball which 
will carry the image of the exciting object from the point in question to 
Xhefovefi. With each separate tendency to movement (as with each actual 
movement) we may suppose a peculiar modification of sensibility to be 
conjoined. This modification would constitute the peculiar local tlngeing 
of the image by each point. See also Sully's Psychology, pp. 118-121. 
Prof. B. Erdman has quite lately (Vierteljahrsschrift f. wiss. Phil., x. 
324-9) denied the existence of all evidence for such immanent qualla of 
feeling characterizing each locality. Acute as his remarks are. tlicy quite 
fail to convince me. On the skin the giialui are evident. 1 should say. 
Where, as on the retina, they are less so (Kries and Auerbach), tbis may 
well be a mere difficulty of discrimination not yet educated to the 
analysis. 

♦ 1852, p. 881. 



168 P87CH0L0GT. 

it were which cries to us immediately and without further 
ado, *I am here,' or *I am there,' 

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

But such a machinery is already familiar to us. It is 
neither more uor less than the law of habit in the nervous 
system. When any point of the sensitive surface has been 
frequently excited simultaneously with, or immediately 
before or after, other points, and afterwards comes to be 
excited alone, there will be a tendency for its perceptive 
nerve-centre to irradiate into the nerve-centres of the other 
points. Subjectively considered, this is the same as if we 
said that the peculiar feeling of the first point suggests the 
fedimj of the entire region with whose stimulation its own ex^ 
citement has been habit ualhj associated. 

Take the case of the stomach. When the epigastrium 
is heavily pressed, when certain muscles contract, etc., the 
stomach is squeezed, and its peculiar local sign awakes in 
consciousness simultaneously with the local signs of the 
other squeezed parts. There is also a sensation of total 
vastness aroused by the combined irritation, and somewhat 
in this the stomach-feeling seems to lie. Suppose that 
later a pain arises in the stomach from some non-mechani- 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 169 

oal cause. It will be tinged by the gastric local sign, and 
the nerve-centre supporting this latter feeling will excite 
the centre supporting the dermal and muscular feelings 
habitually associated with it when the excitement was 
mechanicaL . From the combination the same peculiar 
vastness will again arise. In a word, ' something * in the 
stomach-sensation * reminds ' us of a total space, of which 
the diaphragmatic and epigastric sensations also form a 
part, or, to express it more briefly still, suggests the neigh- 
borhood of these latter organs.* 

Bevert to the case of two excited points on a surface with 
an unexcited space between them. The general result of 
previous experience has been that when either point was 
impressed by an outward object, the same object also 
touched the immediately neighboring parts. Each point, 
together with its local sign, is thus associated with a circle 
of surrounding points, the association fading in strength as 
the circle grows larger. Each will revive its own circle ; 
but when both are excited together, the strongest revival 
will be that due to the combined irradiation. Now the tract 
joining the two excited points is the only part common to the 
two circles. And the feelings of this whole tract will there- 
fore awaken with considerable vividness in the imagination 
when its extremities are touched by an outward irritant 
The mind receives with the impression of the two distinct 
points the vague idea of a line. The twoness of the points 
comes from the contrast of their local signs : the line comes 
from the associations into which experience has wrought 
these latter. If no ideal line arises we have duality with- 
out sense of interval ; if the line ^e excited actually rather 

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



160 P8TCH0L0OT. 

than ideally, we have the interval given with its ends, in 
the form of a single extended object feli E. H. Weber, in 
the famous article in which he laid the foundations of all 
our accurate knowledge of these subjects, laid it dotvn as 
the logical requisite for the perception of two separated points^ 
that the mind should, along tmth its consciousness of them, be^ 
come aware of an unexdted interval as such. I have only tried 
to show how the knotvn lavos of experience may cause this requi- 
site to be fulfilled. Of course, if the local signs of the entire 
region offer but little qualitative contrast inter se, the line 
suggested will be but dimly defined or discriminated in 
length or direction from other possible lines in its neighbor- 
hood. This is what happens in the back, where conscious- 
ness can sunder two spots, whilst only vaguely apprehend- 
ing their distance and direction apart 

The relation of position of the two points is the sug- 
gested interval or line. Turn now to the simplest case, 
that of a single eocdted spot. How can it suggest its position ? 
Not by recalling any particular line unless experience have 
constantly been in the habit of marking or tracing some one 
line from it towards some one neighboring point Now 
on the back, belly, \a8cera, etc., no such tracing habitually 
occurs. The consequence is that the only suggestion is 
that of the whole neighboring circle ; i.e., the spot simply 
recalls the general region in which it happens to lie. By a pro- 
cess of successive construction, it is quite true that we can 
also get the feeling of distance between the spot and some 
other particular spot. Attention, by reinforcing the local 
sign of one part of the circle, can awaken a new circle 
round this part, and so de proche enproche we may slide our 
feeling down from our cheek, say, to our foot. But when 
we first touched our cheek we had no consciousness of the 
foot at all.* In the extremities, the lips, the tongue and 
other mobile parts, the case is different We there have 
an instinctive tendency, when a part of lesser discriminative 



♦ Unless, iiideod. the foot happen to be spontaneously tingling or some- 
thing of the sort at the moment. ITie whole surface of the body is always 
in a state of semi-conscious Irritation which needs only the emphasis ot 
attention, or of some accidental inward irritation, to become strong at any 
point. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 161 

sensibility is touched, to move the member so that the 
touching object glides along it to the place where sensi- 
bility is greatest If a body touches our hand we move the 
hand over it till the finger-tips are able to explore ii If 
the sole of our foot touches anything we bring it towards 
the toes, and so forth. There thus arise lines of habitual 
passage from all points of a member to its sensitive tip. 
These are the lines most readily recalled when any point 
is touched, and their recall is identical with the conscious- 
ness of the distance of the touched point from the ' tip.* I 
think anyone must be aware when he touches a point of 
his hand or wrist that it is the relation to the finger-tips of 
which he is usually most conscious. Points on the fore- 
arm suggest either the finger-tips or the elbow (the latter 
being a spot of greater sensibility*). In the foot it is the 
toes, and so on. A point can only be cognized in its rela- 
tions to the entire body at once by awakening a visual 
image of the whole body. Such awakening is even more 
obviously than the previously considered cases a matter of 
pure association. 

TTiis leads us to the eye. On the retina the fovea and the 
yellow spot about it form a focus of exquisite sensibility, 
towards which every impression falling on an outlying por- 
tion of the field is moved by an instinctive action of the 
muscles of the eyeball. Few persons, until their attention 
is called to the fact, are aware how almost impossible it is 
to keep a conspicuous visible object in the margin of the 
field of view. The moment volition is relaxed we find that 
without our knowing it our eyes have turned so as to bring 
it to the centre. This is why most persons are unable tc 
keep the eyes steadily converged upon a point in space with 
nothing in it The objects against the walls of the room 

* It is true that the Inside of the fore arm, though its (Uscriminalive 
sensibility is often less than that of the outside, usually rises very promi- 
nently into consciousness when the latter is touched. Its (psthetic sensi- 
bility to contact is a good deal finer. We enjoy stroking it from the ex- 
tensor to the flexor surface around the ulnar side more than in the reverse 
direction. Pronating movements give rise to contacts in this order, and 
are frequently indulged in when the back of the fore-arm feels an object 
against it. 



162 PSTCHOLOQT. 

invincibly attract the fovese to themselves. If we contem- 
plate a blank wall or sheet of paper, we always observe in 
a moment that we are directly looking at some speck upon it 
which, unnoticed at first, ended by 'catching our eye.' Thus 
whenever an image falling on the point P of the retina excites 
attention^ it more habittudly moves from that point totoards the 
fovea than in any one other direction. The line traced thus by 
the image is not always a straight line. When the direction 
of the point from the fovea is neither vertical nor horizon- 
tal but oblique, the line traced is often a curve, with its con- 
cavity directed upwards if the direction is upwards, down- 
wards if the direction is downwards. This may be verified 
by anyone who will take the trouble to make a simple ex- 
periment with a luminous body like a candle-flame in a dark 
enclosure, or a star. Gazing first at some point remote 
from the source of light, let the eye be suddenly turned full 
upon the latter. The luminous image will necessarily fall 
in succession upon a continuous series of points, reaching 
from the one first afl'ected to the fovea. But by virtue of 
. the slowness with which retinal excitements die away, the 
entire series of points will for an instant be visible as an 
after-image, displaying the above peculiarity of form ac- 
cording to its situjition.* These radiating lines are neither 
regular nor invariable in the same person, nor, probably, 
equally curved in difi'erent individuals. We are incessant- 
ly drawing them between the fovea and every point of the 
field of view. Objects remain in their peripheral indistinct- 
ness only so long as they are unnoticed. The moment we 
attend to them they grow distinct through one of these mo- 
tions — which leads to the idea prevalent among uninstructed 
persons that we see distinctly all parts of the field of view 
at once. The result of this incessant tracing of radii is that 
whenever a local sign P is awakened by a spot of light falling 
upon it, it recalls forthunthf even though the eyeball be unmoved, 
the local signs of all the other points which lie between P and 
the fovea. It recalls them in imaginary form, just as the 
normal reflex movement would recall them in vivid form ; 
and with their recall is given a consciousness more or less 

* These facts were tiral noticed by Wundl: see his Beitrage, p. 140, 203 
See also Lamansky, PflUger's Archiv, xi. 418. 



THB PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 163 

faint of the whole line on which they lie. In other words, 
no ray of light can fall on any retinal spot without the lo- 
cal sign of that spot revealing to us, by recalling the line 
of its most habitual associates, its direction and distance 
from the centre of the field. The fovea acts thus as the 
origin of a system of polar co-ordinates, in relation to which 
each and every retinal point has through an incessantly-re* 
peated process of association its distance and direction de- 
termined. Were P alone illumined and all the rest of the 
field dark we should still, even with motionless eyes, know 
whether P lay high or low, right or left, through the ideal 
streaky different from all other streaks, which P alone 
has the power of awakening.^ 

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

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

The uncritical reader, giving his first careless glance at the subject, will 
say that there is no mystery in this, and that ' of course ' local signs must 
appear alongside of each other, each in its own place; — there is no other 
way possible. But the more philosophic student, whose business it is to 
discover difficulties quite as much as to get rid of them, will reflect that it 
is conceivable that the partial factors might fuse into a larger space, and 
yet not each be located within it any more than a voice is located in a 
chorus. He will wonder how, after combining into the line, the points 
can become severally alive again : the separate puffs of a ' sirene ' no longer 
strike the ear after they have fused into a certain pitch of sound. He will 
recall the fact that when, after looking at things with one eye closed, we 



164 P87CH0L00T, 

And with this we can close the first great division of 
our subject We have shown that, within the range of 

double, by opening the other eye, the number of retinal points affected, 
the new retinal sensations do not as a rule appear (UongHde of the 
old ones and additional to them, but merely make the old ones seem 
larger and nearer. Why should the affection of new points on the 9ame 
retina have so different a result ? In fact, he will see no sort of logical 
connection between (1) the original separate local signs, (2) the line as a 
unit, (8) the line with tbe points discriminated in it, and (4) the various 
nerve-processes which subserve all these different things. He will suspect 
our local sign of being a very slippery and ambiguous sort of creature. 
Positionless at first, it no sooner appears in the midst of a gang of compan- 
ions than it is found maintaining the strictest position of its own, and as- 
signing place to each of its associates. How is this possible ? Must we 
accept what we rejected a while ago as absurd, and admit the points each 
to have position in set Or must we suspect that our whole construction 
has been fallacious, and that we have tried to conjure up, out of association, 
qualities which the associates never contained? 

There is no doubt a real difficulty here; and the shortest way of dealing 
with it would be to confess it insoluble and ultimate. Even if position be 
not an intrinsic character of any one of those sensations we have called 
local signs, we must still admit that there is something about everyone of 
them that stands for the potentiality of position, and is the ground why the 
local sign, when it gets placed at all, gets placed A^'^ rather than there. If this 
• something ' be interpreted as a physiological something, as a mere nerve- 
process, it is easy to s>iy in a blank way that when il is excited alone, it is 
an • ultimate fact '(1) that a positionless spot will appear; that when it is 
excited together with other similar processes, but inthout the process of 
discriminative attention, it is another ' ultimate fact ' (2) that a unitary line 
will come; and that the final * ultimate fact ' (8) is that, when the nerve- 
process is excited in combination with that other process which subserves 
the feeling of attention, what results will be the line with the local sign 
inside of it determined to a particular place. Thus we should escape the 
responsibility of explaining, by falling back on the everlasting inscruta- 
bility of the psycho-neural nexus. The moment we call the ground of lo- 
calization physiological, we need only point out how, in those cases in 
which localization occurs, the physiological process differs from those in 
which it does not, to have done all we can possibly do in the matter. This 
would be unexceptionable logic, and with it we might let the matter drop, 
satisfied that there was no self-contradiction in it, but only the universal 
psychological puzzle of how a new mode of consciousness emerges when- 
ever a fundamentally new mode of nervous action occurs. 

But, blameless as such tactics would logically be on our part, let us see 
whether we cannot push our theoretic insight a little farther. It seems to 
me we can. We cannot, it is true, give a reason why the line we feel when 
process (2) awakens should have its own peculiar shape; nor can we explain 
the essence of the process of discriminative attention. But we can see 
why, if the brute facts be admitted that a line may have one of its parts 
singled out by attention at all, and that that part may appear in relation to 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 165 

every sense, experience takes a5 initio the spatial form. We 
have also shown that in the cases of the retina and skin 

other parts at all, the relation must be in the line iUe^,^~toT the line and 
the parts are the only things supposed to be in consciousness. And we can 
furthermore suggest a reason why parts appearing thus in relation to each 
other in a line should fall into an immutable order, and each within that 
order keep its characteristic place. 

If a lot of such local signs all have any quality which evenly augments 
as we paf« from one to the other, we can arrange them in an ideal serial 
order, in which any one local sign must lie below those with more, above 
those with less, of the quality in question. It must divide the series into 
two parts, — unless indeed it have a maximum or minimum of the quality, 
when it either begins or ends it. 

Such an ideal series of local signs in the mind is, however, not yet iden- 
tical with the feeling of a line in space. Touch a dozen points on the skin 
eueeeseively, and there seems no necessary reason why the notion of a defi- 
nite line should emerge, even though we be strongly aware of a gradation 
of quality among the touches. We may of course symbolically arrange 
them in a line in our thought, but we can always distinguish between a 
line symbolically thought and a line directly felt. 

But note now the peculiarity of the nerve-processes of all these local 
signs: though they may give no line when excited successively, when ex- 
cited together tbey do give the actual sensation of a line in space. The 
sum of them is the neural process of that line; the sum of their feelings 
is the feeling of that line: and if we begin to single out particular points 
from the line, and notice them by their rank, it is impossible to see how 
this rank can appear except as an actual fixed space-position sensibly felt 
as a bit of the total line. The scale itself appeariug as a line, rank in it 
must appear as a definite part of the line. If the seven notes of an octave, 
when heard together, appeared to the sense of hearing as an outspread 
line of sound— which it is needless to say they do not— why then no one 
note could be discriminated without being localized, according to its pitch, 
in the line, either as one of its extremities or as some part between. 

But not alone the gradation of their quality arranges the local-sign 
feelings in a scale. Our movements arrange them also iu a fme-scale. 
Whenever a stimulus passes from point a of the skin or retina to point/, 
it awakens the local-sign feelings in the perfectly definite time-order abcdef. 
It cannot excite/ until cde have been successively aroused. The feeling e 
sometimes is preceded by ab. sometimes followed by ba, according to the 
movement's direction: the result of it all being that we never feel either a, 
c, or/, without there clinging to it faint reverberations of the various time- 
orders of transition in which, throughout past experience, it has been 
aroused. To the local sign a there clings the tinge or tone, the penumbra 
orfringe. of the transition bed. To/ to c, there cling quite different tones. 
Once admit the principle that a feeling may be tinged by the reproductive 
consciousness of an habitual transition, even when the transition is not 
made, and it seems entirely natural to admit that, if the transition be habit- 
ually in the order abcdef ^ and if a, c, and/ be felt separately at all, a will 
be felt with an essential earliness, f with an essential lateness, and that c wiU 



166 PUTOHOLOQY, 

every sensible total may be subdivided by disoiinmiative 
attention into sensible parts, which are also spaces, and 
into relations between the parts, these being sensible spaces 
too. Furthermore, we have seen (in a foot-note) that differ- 
ent parts, once discriminated, necessarily fall into a deter- 
minate order, both by reason of definite gradations in their 
quality, and by reason of the fixed order of time-succes- 
sion in which movements arouse them. But in all thii^ 
nothing has been said of the comparative measurement of 
one sensible space-total against another, or of the way 
in which, by summing our divers simple sensible space- 
experiences together, we end by ronstructing what we re- 
gard as the unitary, continuous, and infinite objective Space 
of the real world. To this more difficult inquiry we next 
pass. 

THE CONSTBUOnON OF 'BEAIi' 8PAOB. 

The problem breaks into two subordinate problems . 

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

(2) Hoiv do their mutual addition and fusion and reduction 
to the same scale, in a ivord, hoiv does their synthesis, occur ? 

I think that, as in the investigation just finished, we 
found ourselves able to get along without invoking any data 
but those that pure sensibility on the one hand, and the 
ordinary intellectual powers of discrimination and recollec- 



fall between. Thus those psycliologists who set little store by local signs 
and great store by movements in explaining space-perception, would have 
a perfectly definite time-order, due to motion, by which to account for 
the definite order of positions thai appears when sensitive spots are excited 
all at once. Without, however, the preliminary admission of the * ulti- 
mate fact' that this collective excitement shall feel like a U/i€ and nothing- 
else, it can never be explained why the new order should needs be an 
order of positions, and not of merely ideal serial rank. We shall hereafter 
have any amount of opportunity to observe how thoroughgoing is the par- 
ticipation of motion in all our spatial measurements. Whether the local 
signs have their respective qualities evenly graduated or not. the feelings 
of transition must be set down as among the Ter(P causa> in localization. 
But the gradation of the local signs is hardly to be doubted: so we may be- 
lieve ourselves really to possess two sets of reasons for localizing any point 
we may happen to distinguish from out the midst of any line or any larger 
•pace. 



THS PBRCBPTION OF SPACE. 1(57 

idon on the other, were able to yield; so here we shall 
emerge from our more complicated quest with the convic- 
tion that all the facts can be accounted for on the supposi- 
tion that no other mental forces have been at work save 
those we find everywhere else in psychology : sensibility, 
namely, for the data ; and discrimination, association, 
memory, and choice for the rearrangements and combina- 
tions which they undergo. 

1. The Svbdiviaion of the Original Sense-spaces. 

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

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

♦M. Binet (Revue Philosophique, Sept. 1880, page 291) says we judge 
them locally different as soon as their sensations differ enough for us to 
distinguish them as qqalitatively different when successively excited. This 
is not strictly true. Skin-sensations, different enough to be discriminated 
when succesnne, may still fuse locally if excited both at once. 



168 PaTCHOLOQT. 

of the minuteness with which we are able to subdivide the 
total bigness of the sensation it yields. On its periphery 
the local differences do not shade off very rapidly, and we 
can count there fewer subdivisions. 

But these local differefruxa of feeling ^ so long as the aurfaoe 
is unexcited from without^ are almost nvU, I canot feel them 
by a pure mental act of attention unless they belong to quite 
distinct parts of the body, as the nose and the lip, the finger- 
tip and the ear ; their contrast needs the reinforcement of 
outward excitement to be felt In the spatial muchness of 
a colic — or, to call it by the more spacious-sounding verna- 
cular, of a * bellyache '—one can with difficulty distinguish 
the north-east from the south-west comer, but can do so 
much more easily if, by pressing one's finger against the 
former region, one is able to make the pain there more in- 
tense. 

The local differefrvces require then an adventitious sensa^ 
tion, superinduced upon them, to atvaken the attention. After 
the attention has once been awakened in this way, it may 
continue to be conscious of the unaided difference ; just as 
a sail on the horizon may be too faint for us to notice until 
someone's finger, placed against the spot, has pointed it out 
to us, but may then remain visible after the finger has been 
withdrawn. But all this is true only on condition that 
separate points of the surface may be exdvsivdy stimulated. 
If the whole surface at once be excited from without, and 
homogeneously, as, for example, by immersing the body in 
salt water, local discrimination is not furthered. The local- 
signs, it is true, all awaken at once ; but in such multitude 
that no one of them, with its specific quality, stands out in 
contrast with the rest If, however, a single extremity be 
immersed, the contrast between the wet and dry parts is 
strong, and, at the surface of the water especially, the local- 
signs attract the attention, giving the feeling of a ring sur- 
rounding the member. Similarly, two or three wet spots 
separated by dry spots, or two or three hard points against 
the skin, will help to break up our consciousness of the 
latter's bigness. In cases of this sort, where points re- 
ceiving an identical kind of excitement are, nevertheless, 
felt to be locally distinct, and the objective irritants are also 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 169 

judged multiple, — e.g., compass-points on skin or stars on 
retina, — the ordinary explanation is no doubt just, and we 
judge the outward causes to be multiple because we have 
discerned the local feelings of their sensations to be dif- 
ferent. 

Capacity for ^partial stimtikUion is thus the second condi" 
tion/avoring discrimination. A sensitive surface which has to 
be excited in all its parts at once can yield nothing but a 
sense of undivided largeness. This appears to be the case 
with the olfactory, and to all intents and purposes with the 
gustatory, surfaces. Of many tastes and flavors, even sim- 
idtaneously presented, each affects the totality of its re- 
spective organ, each appears with the whole vastness given 
by that organ, and appears interpenetrated by the rest* 



* It may. however, be said that even in the tongue there is a determina- 
tion of bitter tiavors to the buck and of acids to the front edge of the organ. 
Spices likewise affect its sides and front, and a taste like that of alum 
localizes itself, by its styptic effect on the portion of mucous membrane, 
which it immediately touches, more sharply than roast pork, for example, 
which stimulates all parts alike. The pork, therefore, tastes more spacious 
than the alum or the pepper. In the nose, too, certain smells, of which 
vinegar may be taken as the type, seem less spatially extended than heavy, 
suffocating odors, like musk. The reason of this appears to be that the 
former inhibit inspiration by their sharpness, whilst the latter are drawn 
into the lungs, and thus excite an objectively larger surface. The ascr p- 
lion of height and depth to certain notes seems due, not to any localization 
of the sounds, but to the fact that a feeling of vibration in the chest and 
tension in the gullet accompanies the singing of a bass note, whilst, when 
we sing high, the palatine mucous membrane is drawn upon by the muscles 
which move the larynx, and awakens a feeling in the roof of the mouth. 

The only real objection to the law of partial stimulation laid down in 
the text is one that might be drawn from the organ of hearing; for, ac- 
cording to modem theories, the cochlea may have Its separate nerve-termini 
exclusively excited by sounds of differing pitch, and yet the sounds seem 
all to fill a common space, and not necessarily to be arranged alongside of 
each other At most the high note is felt as a thinner, brighter streak 
against a darker ))ackground. In an article on Space, published in the 
Journal of Speculative Philosophy for January, 1879, 1 ventured to suggest 
that possibly the auditory nerve termini might be "excited all at once by 
sounds of any pitch, as the whole retina would be by every luminous point 
if there were no dioptric apparatus, affixed.*' And I added : " Notwith- 
standing the brilliant conjectures of the last few years which assign differ- 
ent acoustic end-organs to different rates of air- wave, we are still greatly 
in the dark about the subject : and. I, for ihy part, would much more con- 
fidently reject a theory of hearing which violated the principles advanced in 



170 PSYCHOLOGY. 

I should have been willing some years ago to name with* 
out hesitation a third condition of discrimination — saying it 
would be most developed in that organ which is susceptible 
of the moat variom qttalities of feeling. The retina is un- 
questionably such an organ. The colors and shades it 
perceives are infinitely more numerous than the diversities 
of skin -sensation. And it can feel at once white and black, 
whilst the ear can in nowise so feel sound and silence. But 
the late researches of Donaldson, Blix, and Qt)ldscheider, * 
on specific points for heat, cold, pressure, and pain in the 
skin ; the older ones of Czermak (repeated later by £lug 
in Ludwig's laboratory), showing that a hot and a cold 
compass-point are no more easily discriminated as two than 
two of equal temperature ; and some unpublished experi- 
ments of my own — all disincline me to make much of this 
condition now.t There is, however, one quality of sensa- 

tbis article than give up those principles for the sake of any hypothesis 
hitherto published about either organs of Corti or basilar membrane." 
Professor Rutherford's theory of hearing, advanced at the meeting of the 
British Association for 1886, already furnishes an%lternative view which 
would make heariug present no exception to the space-theory I defend 
and which, whether destined to be proved true or false, ought, at any rate 
to make us feel that the Helmholtzian theory is probably not the last wora 
in the physiology of heariug. Stepano. S. (Hermann und Schwalbe's Jahres- 
bericht, xv. 404. Literature 1886) reports a case in which more than the 
upper half of one cochlea was lost without any such deafness to deep notes 
on that side as Helmholtz's theory would require. * 

♦ Donaldson, in Miud, x. 399, 577; Goldscheider, in Archiv f . (Anat u.) 
Physiologic; Blix, in Zeitsclirift fUr Biologic. A good resume may be 
found in Ladd's Physiol. Psychology, part ii. chap. rv. §§ 21-28. 

f I tried on nine or ten people, making numerous observations on each, 
what difference it made in the discrimination of two points to have them 
alike or unlike. The points chosen were (1) two large needle-heads, (2) 
two screw-heads, and (3) a needle-head and a screw-head. The distance 
of the screw-heads was measured from their centres. I found that when 
the points gave diverse qualities of feeling (as in 8), this facilitated the 
discrimination, but much less strongly than I expected The difference, 
in fact, would often not be perceptible twenty times running When, 
however, one of the points was endowed with a rotary movement, the 
other remaining still, the doubleness of the points became much more evi- 
dent than before. To observe this I took an ordinary pair of compasses with 
one point blunt, and the movable leg replaced by a metallic rod which couhi. 
at any moment, be made to rotate in situ by a dentist's drilling-machine, to 
which it was attached. The compass had then its points applied to the skin 
at such a distance apart as to be felt as one impression. Suddenly rotating 
the drill-apparatus then almost always made them seem as two. 



THB PERCEPTION OF 8PACK 171 

tion which is particularly exciting, and that is the feding 
of motion over any of our surfaces. The erection of this 
into a separate elementary quality of sensibility is one of 
the most recent of psychological achievements, and is 
worthy of detaining us a while at this point 

The Sensation of Motion over Surfaces. 

The feding of motion has generally been assumed by 
physiologists to be impossible until the positions of terminus 
a quo and terminus ad quern are severally cognized, and the 
successive occupancies of these positions by the moving 
body are perceived to be separated by a distinct interval of 
time.* As a matter of fact, however, we cognize only the 
very slowest motions in this way. Seeing the hand of a 
clock at XII and afterwards at YI, we judge that it has 
moved through the interval Seeing the sun now in the 
east and again in the west, I infer it to have passed over 
my head. But we can only infer that which we already 
generically know in some more direct fashion, and it is ex- 
perimentally certain that we have the feeling of motion 
given us as a direct and simple sensation. Czermak long ago 
pointed out the difference between seeing the motion of the 
second-hand of a watch, when we look directly at it, and 
noticing the fact of its having altered its position when we 
fix our gaze upon some other point of the dial-plate. In 
the first case we have a specific quality of sensation which 
is absent in the second. If the reader will find a portion 
of his skin — the arm, for example — where a pair of com- 
pass-points an inch apart are felt as one impression, and if 
be will then trace lines a tenth of an inch long on that spot 
with a pencil-point, he will be distinctly aware of the point's 
motion and vaguely aware of the direction of the motion. 
The perception of the motion here is certainly not derived 
from a pre-existing knowledge that its starting and ending 
points are separate positions in space, because positions in 
space ten times wider apart fail to be discriminated as such 

• This is only another example of what I call ' the psychologist's fal- 
lacy '—thinking that the mind he is studying must necessarily be conscious 
«f the object after the fashion in which the psychologist himself is con- 
scious of it. 



172 PSYCHOLOGY. 

when excited by the dividers. It is the same with the 
retina. One's fingers when cast upon its peripheral portions 
cannot be counted — that is to say, the five retinal tracts 
which they occupy are not distinctly apprehended by the 
mind as five separate positions in space — and yet the slight- 
est movement of the fingers is most vividly perceived as 
movement and nothing else. It is thus certain that our 
sense of movement, being so much more delicate than our 
sense of position, cannot possibly be derived from it. A 
curiovs observation by Exner * completes the proof that move- 
ment is a primitive form of sensibility, by showing it to be 
much more delicate than our sense of succession in time. 
This very able physiologist caused two electric sparks to 
appear in rapid succession, one beside the other. The 
observer had to state whether the right-hand one or the 
left-hand one appeared first When the interval was re- 
duced to as short a time as 0.044^^ the discrimination of 
temporal order in the sparks became impossible. But 
Exner found that if the sparks were brought so close to- 
gether in space that their irradiation-circles overlapped, the 
eye then felt their flashing as if it were the motion of a 
single spark from the point occupied by the first to the 
point occupied by the second, and the time-interval might 
then be made as small as 0.015" before the mind began to 
be in doubt as to whether the apparent motion started 
from the right or from the left. On the skin similar ex- 
periments gave similar results. 

Vierordt, at almost the same time;\ called atttention to cer- 
tain persistent illusions, amongst ivhich are these : If another 
person gently trace a line across our wrist or finger, the 
latter being stationary, it will feel to us as if the mem- 
ber were moving in the opposite direction to the tracing 
point. If, on the contrary, we move our limb across a fixed 
point, it will be seen as if the point were moving as well. 
If the reader will touch his forehead with his forefinger 
kept motionless, and then rotate the head so that the skin 
of the forehead passes beneath the finger's tip, he will have 
— 

•Sitzb. der. k. Akad. Wien, Bd. lxxii.. Abth. 8 (1875). 
t Zeilschrift fOr Biologic, xii. 2'26 (1876). 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 173 

an irresistible sensation of the latter being itself in motion 
in the opposite direction to the head. So in abducting the 
fingers from each other ; some may move and the rest be still 
still, but the still ones will feel as if thej were actively sep- 
arating from the rest These illusions, according to Vierordt, 
are survivals of a primitive form of perception, when 
motion was felt as such, but ascribed to the whole content 
of consciousness, and not yet distinguished as belonging ex- 
clusively to one of its parts. When our perception is fully 
developed we go beyond the mere relative motion of thing 
and ground, and can ascribe absolute motion to one of these 
components of our total object, and absolute rest to another. 
When, in vision for example, the whole background moves 
together, we think that it is ourselves or our eyes which 
are moving ; and any object in the foreground which may 
move relatively to the background is judged by us to be 
still. But primitively this discrimination cannot be per- 
fectly made. The sensation of the 'motion spreads over all 
that we see and infects it. Any relative motion of object 
and retina both makes the object seem to move, and makes 
us feel ourselves in motion. Even now when our whole ob- 
ject moves we still get giddy ; and we still see an apparent 
motion of the entire field of view, whenever we suddenly 
jerk our head and eyes or shake them quickly to and fro. 
Pushing our eyeballs gives the same illusion. We knoiv in 
all these cases what really happens, but the conditions are 
unusual, so our primitive sensation persists unchecked. So 
it does when clouds float by the moon. We know the moon 
is still ; but we see it move even faster than the clouds. 
Even when we slowly move our eyes the primitive sensation 
persists under the victorious conception. If we notice 
closely the experience, we find that any object towards 
which we look appears moving to meet our eye. 

But the most valuable contribution to the subject is 
the paper of G. H. Schneider,* who takes up the matter 
zoologically, and shows by examples from every branch of 
the animal kingdom that movement is the quality by which 
animals most easily attract each other's attention. The in- 

* Vierteljahrsch. fttr wiss. Philos., n. 877. 



174 PSYCHOLOGY, 

stmct of ' shamming death ' is no shamming of death at all, 
but rather a paralysis through fear, which saves the insect, 
crustacean, or other creature from being noticed at aRhj\ns 
enemy. It is parallelled in the human race by the breath- 
holding stillness of the boy playing * I spy,' to whom the 
seeker is near ; and its obverse side is shown in our invol- 
untary waving of arms, jumping up and down, and so forth, 
when we wish to attract someone's attention at a distance. 
Creatures ' stalking * their prey and creatures hiding from 
their pursuers alike show how immobility diminishes con- 
spicuity. In the woods, if we are quiet, the squirrels and 
birds will actually touch us. Flies will light on stuffed 
birds and stationary frogs.* On the other hand, the tre- 
mendous shock of feeling the thing we are sitting on begin 
to move, the exaggerated start it gives us to have an insect 
unexpectedly pass over our skin, or a cat noiselessly come 
and snuffle about our hand, the excessive reflex effects of 
tickling, etc., show how exciting the sensation of motion is 
per 86, A kitten cannot help pursuing a moving ball. Im- 
pressions too faint to be cognized at all are immediately 
felt if they move. A fly sitting is unnoticed, — we feel it the 
moment it crawls. A shadow may be too faint to be per- 
ceived. As soon as it moves, however, we see it. Schneider 
found that a shadow, with distinct outline, and directly fix- 
ated, could still be perceived when moving, although its 
objective strength might be but half as great as that of a 
stationary shadow so faint as just to disappear. With a 
blurred shadow in indirect vision the difterence in favor 
of motion was much greater — namely, 13.3 : 40.7. If we 
hold a finger between our closed eyelid and the sunshine 
we shall not notice its presence. The moment we move it 
to and fro, however, we discern it. Such visual perception 
as this reproduces the conditions of sight among the 
radiates, t 



* Exner tries to show that the structure of the faceted eye of articulates 
adapts it for perceiving motions almost exohisively. 

t Schneider tries to explain why a sensory surface is so much more ex- 
cited when its impression moves. It lias long since been noticed how much 
more acute is discrimination of successive than of simultaneous differences. 
But in the case of a moving impression, say on the retina, we have a sum- 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 175 

Enough has now been said to show that in the education 
of spatial discrimination the motions of impressions across sen- 
sory surfaces mvst have been the principal argent in breaking 
up our consciousness of the surfaces into a consciousness 
of their parts. Even to-day the main function of the pe- 
ripheral regions of our retina is that of sentinels, which, 
when beams of light move over them, cry * Who goes there ? * 
and call the fovea to the spot Most parts of the skin do 
but perform the same office for the finger-tips. Of course 
finger-tips and fovea leave some power of direct perception 
to marginal retina and skin respectively. But it is worthy 
of note that such perception is best developed on the skin of 
the most movable parts (the labors of Vierordt and his 
pupils have well shown this) ; and that in the blind, whose 
skin is exceptionally discriminative, it seems to have become 
BO through the inveterate habit which most of them possess 
of twitching and moving it under whatever object may 
touch them, so as to become better acquainted with the con- 
formation of the same. Czermak was the first to notice this. 
It may be easily verified. Of course movement of sttr/ace 
under object is {/or purposes of stimulation) equivalent to move- 
ment of object over surface. In exploring the shapes and 

matioD of both sorts of differeDce ; whereof the natural effect must be to 
produce the most perfect discrimination of all. 

A B JL B 

Fio. 68. 

In the left-hand figure let the dark spot B move, for example, from 
right to left. At the outset there is the simultaneous contrast of black and 
white in Band A. When the motion has occurred so that the right-hand 
figure is produced, the same contrast remains, the black and the white 
having changed places. But in addition to it there is a double suc- 
cessive contrast, first in A, which, a moment ago white, has now become 
black : and second in B, which, a moment ago black, has now become 
white. If we make each single feeling of contrast = 1 (a supposition lar 
too favorable to the state of rest), the sum of contrasts in the case of motion 
will be 8, as against 1 in the state of rest. That is, our attention will be 
called by a treble force to the dilTerence of color, provided the color be 
gin to move. — (Cf. also Fleischl. Fhysiologische Optische T^otizen, 2te 
Mitiheilung, Wiener Sitzungsberichte, 1882.) 



176 PSYCHOLOGY, 

sizes of things by either eye or skin the movements of these 
organs are incessant and unrestrainable. Every such move- 
ment draws the points and lines of the object across the 
surface, imprints them a hundred times more sharply, 
and drives them home to the attention. The immense part 
thus played by movements in our perceptive acti>dty is held 
by many psychologists* to prove that the muscles are them- 
selves the space-perceiving organ. Not surface-sensibility, 
but ^ the muscular sense/ is for these writers the original 
and only revealer of objective extension. But they have 
all failed to notice with what peculiar intensity muscular 
contractions call surface-sensibilities into play, and that the 
mere discrimination of impressions (quite apart from any 
question of measuring the space between them) largely 
depends on the mobility of the surface upon which they 
fall, t 



* Brown, Bain. J. 8. Mill, and in a modified manner Wundt, Helmhollz. 
Sully, etc. 

fW. Oil. Dunan, in his forcibly written essay MEspace Visuel et 
I'Espace Tactile* in the Heviie Philosophique for 1888, endeavors to prove 
that surfaces alone give no perception of extent, by citiug the way in 
which the blind go to work to gain an idea of an object's shape. I f surfaces 
were the percipient organ, he says. " both the seeing and the blind ought 
to gain an exact idea of the size (and shape) of an object by merely laying 
their hand flat upon it (provided of course that it were smaller than the 
hand), and this because of their direct appreciation of the amount of tactile 
surface affected, and with no recourse to the muscular sense. . . . But the 
fact is that a person born blind never proceeds in this way to measure ob- 
jective surfaces. The only means which he has of getting at the size of a 
body is that of running his finger along the lines by which it is bounde<i. 
For instance, if you put into the hands of one bom blind a book whose 
dimensions are unknown to him, he will begin by resting it agjiiust his 
chest so as to hold it horizontal ; then, bringing his two hands together at 
the middle of the edge opposite to the one n^ainst his body, he will draw 
them asunder till they reach the ends of the edge in question : and then, 
and not till then, will he be able to say what the length of the object is " 
(vol. XXV. p. 148). I think that anyone who will try to appreciate the size 
and shape of an object by simply * laying his hand flat upon it ' will find 
that the great obstacle is that he feels the contours so imperfectly. The 
moment, however, the hands move, the contours are emphatically and dis- 
tinctly felt. All perception of shape and size is perception of contours, and 
first of all these must be made sharp. Motion does this ; and the impulse 
to move our .organs in perception is primarily due to the craving which we 
feel to get our surface-sensations sharp. When it comes to the naming and 



THE PEBOBPTION OF SPACE, 177 

2. The Measurement of the aenae-spacea against each other. 

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

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

The great agent in comparing the extent fdi by one sensory 
surface loith thatfdt by another ^ is supeiposition — superposition 
of one surface upon anotliery and superposition of one outer 
thing upon many surfaces. Thus are exact equivalencies and 
common measures introduced, and the way prepared for 
numerical results. 

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

But with the power of exploring one part of the surface 
by another we get a direct perception of cutaneous equiva- 
lencies. The primitive differences of bigness are over- 
powered when we feel by an immediate sensation that a 
certain length of thigh-surface is in contact with the entire 
palm and fingers. And when a motion of the opposite finger- 
tips draws a line first along this same length of thigh and 



measuring of objects in terms of some common standard we shall see pres- 
ently how movements help also ; but no more in this case than the other 
do they help, because the quality of extension itself is contributed by the 
'muscular sense.' 



178 PSYCHOLOGT. 

then along the whole of the hand in questiony we get a new 
manner of measurement, less direct but confirming the 
equivalencies established by the first In these ways, by 
superpositions of parts and by tracing lines on different 
parts by identical movements, a person deprived of sight 
can soon learn to reduce all the dimensions of his body to a 
homogeneous scale. By applying the same methods to 
objects of his own size or smaller, he can with equal ease 
make himself acquainted with their extension stated in 
terms derived from his own bulk, palms, feet, cubits, spans, 
paces, fathoms (armspreads), etc. In these reductions it is 
to be noticed that when the resident sensations of largeness 
of two opposed surfaces conflict^ one of the sensations is chosen 
as the true standard and the other treated as tUusory, Thus 
an empty tooth-socket is believed to be really smaller than 
the finger-tip which it will not admit, although it mAjfed 
larger ; and in general it may be said that the hand, as the 
almost exclusive organ of palpation, gives its own magnitude 
to the other parts, instead of having its size determined by 
them. In general, it is, asFechner says, the extent felt by 
the more sensitive part to which the other extents are re- 
duced. * 

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



* Fechner describes (Psychophysik, i. 182) a * method of equivalenU' 
for measuriDg tbe seosibiliiy of the skin. Two compasses are used, one on 
the part A. another on the part H, of the surface The points on B must 
be adjusted so that their distance apart appears equal to that between the 
points on A With the i)iace A constant, the second pair of points must be 
varied a great deal for every change in the place B though for the same A 
and B the relation of the two compasses Is remarkably constant, and con- 
tinues unaltered for mouths provided but few experiments are made on 
each day. If. however, we practise dally their difterence grows less, in 
accordance with the law given in the text 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 179 

keep their sizes, and that most of our sensations are 
affected by errors for which a constant allowance must be 
made. 

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

With the rest of us this innocence is lost. Out of aU the 
visual magnitudes of each known object we have selected one as 
the REAL one to think of, and degraded all the others to serve as 
its signs. This ' real ' magnitude is determined by aesthetic 
and practical interests. It is that which we get when the 
object is at the distance most propitious for exact visual 
discrimination of its details. This is the distance at which 
we hold anything we are examining. Farther than this we 
see it too small, nearer too large. And the larger and the 
smaller feeling vanish in the act of suggesting this one, 
their more important meaning. As I look along the dining- 



180 P8YCH0L0QT. 

table I overlook the fact that the farther plates and glasses 
fed so much smaller than my own, for I hnmo that they are 
all equal in size ; and the feeling of them, which is a present 
sensation, is eclipsed in the glare of the knowledge, which 
is a merely imagined one. 

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

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

* Prof. Jastrow gives as the result of his experiments this genei-al 
conclusion (Am. Journal of Psychology, iii. 58) : **The space-perceptions 
of disparate senses are themselves disparate, and whatever harmony 
there is amongst them we are warranted in regarding as the result 
of experience. The spacial notions of one deprived of the sense of sight 
and reduced to the use of the other space-senses must indeed be different 
from our own." But he continues: *'The existence of the striking 
disparities between our visual and our other space- perceptions without 
confusing us. and, indeed, without usually being noticed, can only be 
explained by the tendency to interpret all dimensions into their vistuil 
equivalents.** But this author gives no reasons for saying * visual ' rather 
than ' tactile ;' and I must continue to think that probabilities point the 
other way so far as what we cnll real magnitudes are concerned. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 181 

It will have been noticed in the account given that 
tohen two sensorial space-impressions, believed to come/rom the 
same object, differ, then the one most interestino, practically 
or cestheticaUy, is judged to be the true one. This law of 
interest holds throughout — though a permanent interest, 
like that of touch, may resist a strong but fleeting one like 
that of pain, as in the case just given of the felon. 

3. The Summation of the Sense-spaces. 

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

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

Even now the space inside our mouth, which is so inti- 
mately known and accurately measured by its inhabitant 
the tongue, can hardly be said to have its internal direc- 
tions and dimensions known in any exact relation to those 
of the larger world outside. It forms almost a little world 
by itself. Again, when the dentist excavates a small cavity 
in one of our teeth, we feel the hard point of his instrument 
scraping, in distinctly differing directions, a surface which 
seems to our sensibility vaguely larger than the subsequent 
use of the mirror tells us it * really ' is. And though the 
directions of the scraping differ so completely inter se, not 
one of them can be identified with the particular direction 
in the outer world to which it corresponds. The space of 
the tooth-sensibility is thus really a little world by itself, 
which can only become congruent with the outer space- 



182 P8TCH0L0QT 

world bj farther experiences which shall alter its bulk, 
identify its directions, fuse its margins, and finally imbed it 
as a definite part within a definite whole. And even though 
every joint's rotations should be felt to vary inter ^ as so 
many differences of direction in a common room ; even 
though the same were true of diverse tracings on the skin, 
and of diverse tracings on the retina respectively, it would 
still not follow that feelings of direction, on these different 
surfaces, are intuitively comparable among each other, or 
with the other directions yielded by the feelings of the 
semi-circular canals. It would not follow that we should 
immediately judge the relations of them all to each other 
in one space-world. 

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

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



THE PERCEPTION OF 8PA0R 183 

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

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

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

In the first place, following the great intellectual law of 
economy, we simplify, unify, and identify as much as we 
possibly can. Whatever sensible data can be attended to together 
toe UxxUe together. Their several extents seem one extent. The 
place at which each appears is held to be the same tvith the place 



184 PaTCHOLOQT, 

at which the others appear. They become^ in shorty 90 many 
properties of one and the same real thing. This is the first 
and great commandment, the fxuidamental 'act' bj which 
our world gets spatially arranged. 

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

* Cf. Lipps on *Complicatiou/ Grundtalsachen, etc., p. 579. 

t Ventriloquism shows this very prettily. The yentriloquist talks with- 
out moving his lips, and at the same time draws our attention to a doll, a 
box, or some other object. We forthwith locate the voice within this 
object. On the stage an actor ignorant of music sometimes has to sing, 
or play on the guitar or violin. He goes through the moUons before our 
eyes, whilst in the orchestra or elsewhere the music is performed. But 
because as we listen we see the actor, it is almost impossible not to ?tear the 
music as if coming from where he sits or stands. 



THE PEBCBPTION OF SPACE. 185 

DifferefnJt impressiona on the same sense-organ do interfere 
with each other's perception, and cannot well be attended 
to at once. Hence toe do not locate them in each other's spaces^ 
but arrange them in a serial order of exteriority^ each alongside 
of the rest, in a space larger than that which any one sensation 
brings. This larger space, however, is an object of concep- 
tion rather than of direct intuition, and bears all the marks 
of being constructed piecemeal by the mind. The blind 
man forms it out of tactile, locomotor, and auditory experi- 
ences, the seeing man out of visual ones almost exclusively. 
As the visual construction i* ^h^ Q oai Qa i io understand, 
let us consider that first 

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

We can usually recover anything lost from sight by 
moving our attention and our eyes back in its direction ; and 



* Cf. Slmnd. in Mind, xin. 340. 



186 P8TCH0L0QT. 

through these constant changes every field of seen things 
comes at last to be thought of as always haying a fringe 
of other things possible to be seen spreading in all directions 
round about it. Meanwhile the movements concomitantly 
with which the various fields alternate are also felt and re- 
membered ; and gradually (through association) this and 
that movement come in our thought to suggest this or that 
extent of fresh objects introduced. Gradually, too, since 
the objects vary indefinitely in kind, we abstract from 
their several natures and think separately of their mere 
extents, of which extents the various movements remain aa 
the only constant introducers and associates. More and 
more, therefore, do we think of movement and seen extent 
as mutually involving each other, until at last (with Bain 
and J. S. Mill) we may get to regard them as synonymous, 
and say, " What is the meaning of the vxyrd eodent, unless it 
be possible movement?"* We forget in this conclusion 
that (whatever intrinsic extensiveness the movements may 
appear endowed with), that seen spreadoutness which ia 
the pattern of the abstract extensiveness which we imagine 
came to us originally from the retinal sensation. 

The muscular sensations of the eyeball signify this sort 
of visible spreadoutness, just as this visible spreadoutnesa 
may come in later experience to signify the * real ' bulks, 
distances, lengths and breadths known to touch and loco- 
motion, t To the very end, however, in us seeing men, 
the quality, the nature, the sort of thing tve mean by exten- 
siveness, would seem to be the sort of feeling which our re- 
tinal stimulations bring. 

In one deprived of sight the principles by which the 
notion of real space is constructed are the same. Skin- 
feelings take in him the place of retinal feelings in giving 

* See, e.g., Bain's Senses and Intellect, pp. 866-7, 871. 

f When, for example, a baby looks at its own moring hand, it sees 
one object at the same time that it feels another. Both interest its 
attention, and it locates them together. But the felt object's size is the 
more constant size, just as th'e felt object is, on the whole, the more in- 
teresting and important object ; and so the retinal sensations become re- 
garded as its signs and have their 'real space-values' interpreted in 
tangible terms. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 187 

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



* The incoherence of the different primordial sense-spaces inter te 
is often made a pretext for denying to the primitive bodily feelings any 
spatial quality at all. Nothing is commoner than to hear it said : "Babies 
have originally no spatial perception ; for when a baby's toe aches he does 
not place the pain in the toe. He makes no detinile movements of defence, 
and may be vaccinated without being held. " The facts are true enough ; 
but the interpretation is all wrong. What really happens is that ihe baby 
does not place his* toe' in the pain ; for he knows nothing of his * toe * as 
yet. He has not attended to it as a visual object ; he has not handled it 
with his fingers ; nor have its normal organic sensations or contacts yet 
become interesting enough to be discriminated from the whole massive 
feeling of the foot, or even of the leg to which it belongs. In short, the 
toe is neither a member of the babe's optical space, of his hand-movement 
space, nor an independent member of his leg-and-foot space. It has ac- 
tually no mental existence yet save as this little pain-space. What wonder, 



188 PBTCHOLOGT, 

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

then, if the pain seem a little space-world all by itself? But let the pain 
once associate itself with these other space -worlds, and its space will be- 
come part of their space. Let the baby feel the nurse stroking the 
limb and awakening the pain every time her finger passes towards the 
toe ; let him look on and see her liuger on the toe every time the pain 
shoots up ; let him handle his foot himself and get the pain whenever 
the toe comes into his tingei-s or his mouth ; let moving the leg exacerbate 
the pain,— and all is changed. The space of the pain becomes identified 
with that part of each of the other spaces which gets felt when it 
awakens ; and by their identity with it these parts are identified with each 
other, and grow systematically connected as members of a larger extensive 
whole. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 189 

SiaBUNGS IN JOINTS AND FSELINGS IN MUSCLES. 

1. Fedings of Movement in Joints. 

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

When, by simply flexing my right forefinger on its meta- 
carpal joint, I trace with its tip an inch on the palm of my 
left hand, is my feeling of the size of the inch purely and 
simply a feeling in the skin of the palm, or have the mus- 
cular contractions of the right hand and forearm anything 
to do with it ? In the preceding pages I have constantly 
assumed spatial sensibility to be an affair of surfaces. At 
first starting, the consideration of the ' muscular sense ' as 
a space-measurer was postponed to a later stage. Many 
writers, of whom the foremost was Thomas Brown, in his 
Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, and of whom 
the latest is no less a Psychologist than Prof. Delboeuf,* 
hold that the consciousness of active muscular motion, 
aware of its own amount, is the fons et origo of all spatial 
measurement. It would seem to follow, if this theory were 
true, that two skin-feelings, one of a large patch, one of a 
small one, possess their difference of spatiality, not as an 
immediate element, but solely by virtue of the fact that the 
large one, to get its points successively excited, demands 
more muscular contraction than the small one does. Fixed 
associations with the several araountsof muscular contrac- 
tion required in this particular experience would thus ex- 

* * Pourquoi les Sensations visuelles sont elles etendues?' in Revue 
Philosophique, iv. 167. — As the proofs of tins chapter are being corrected, 
I receive the third 'Heft ' of MUnsterberg's Beitrllge zur Experimentellen 
Psychologie, in which that vigorous young psychologist reaffirms (if I 
understand him after so hasty a glance) more radically than ever the doc- 
trine that muscular sensation proper is our one means of measuring exten- 
sion. Unable to reopen the discussion here, I am in duty bound to call 
the attention of the reader to Herr M.'s work. 



190 PSYCHOLOGY. 

plain the apparent sizes of the skin-patches, which sizes 
wonld consequently not be primitive data but derivatiTe re- 
sults. 

It seems to me that no evidence of the muscdar measure^ 
merits in question exists; but that all the facts may be ex- 
plained by surface-sensibility, provided we take that of the 
joint-surfaces also into account 

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

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

If we suggest that the blind may have originally traced 
the figures on the cutaneous surface of cheek, thigh, or palm, 
and may now remember the specific figure which each pres- 
ent movement formerly caused the skin-surface to per- 
ceive, lie may reply that the delicacy of the motor percep- 



* Even if the ligure be (Iniwn on a board instead of in the air, the vari- 
ations of contact on the linger's surface will be much simpler than the pe- 
culiarities of the traced figure itself. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 191 

tion far exceeds that of most of the cutaneous surfaces ; 
that, in fact, we can feel a figure traced only in its differen- 
tials, so to speak, — a figure which we merely start to trace by 
our finger-tip, a figure which, traced in the same way on our 
finger-tip by the hand of another, is almost if not wholly 
unrecognizable. 

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

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

That the joint-surfaces are sensitive appears evident from 
the fact that in inflammation they become the seat of excru- 
<;iating pains, and from the perception by everyone who 
lifts weights or presses against resistance, that every in- 
crease of the force opposing liim betrays itself to his con- 
sciousness principally by the starting-out of new feelings 
or the increase of old ones, in or about the joints. If the 
structure and mode of mutual application of two articular 
surfaces be taken into account, it will appear that, granting 
the surfaces to be sensitive, no more favorable mechanical 

*8ee for example Duchenne, Electrisation localisee, pp. 727, 770, Ley* 
4en; Virchow's Archiv, Bd. xlvii. (1869). 

t E.g., Eulenburg, Lehrb. d. Nervenkranklieiten (Berlin), 1878, i. 8. 



192 PSTCHOLOQT. 

conditions could be possible for the delicate calling of the 
sensibility into play than are realized in the minutely grad- 
uated rotations and firmly resisted variations of pressure 
involved in every act of extension or flexion. Nevertheless 
it is a great pity that we have as yet no direct testimony, 
no expressions from patients with healthy joints accident- 
ally laid open, of the impressions they experience when the 
cartilage is pressed or rubbed. 

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

Since Lewinski's paper an important experimental re- 
search by A. Goldscheider f has appeared, which completely 
establishes our point. This patient observer caused his 
fingers, arms, and legs to be passively rotated upon their 
various joints in a mechanical apparatus which registered 
both the velocity of movement impressed and the amount 

* • Ueber den Kraftsinn/ Virchow's Archiv, Bd. Lxxvii. 184. 
t Archiv f. (Anat. u) Physiologic (1889), pp. 869, 540. 



THB PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 193 

of angular rotation. No active muscular contraction took 
place. The minimal felt amounts of rotation were in all cases 
surprisingly small, being much less than a single angular de- 
gree in all the joints except those of the fingers. ^Such dis- 
placements as these, the author says (p. 490), can hardly be 
detected by the eye. The point of application of the force 
which rotated the limb made no difference in the result. 
Botations round the hip-joint, for example, were as deli- 
cately felt when the leg was hung by the heel as when it 
was hung by the thigh whilst the movements were per- 
formed. AnsBsthesiaof the skin produced by induction-cur- 
rents also had no disturbing effect on the perception, nor 
did the various degrees of pressure of the moving force 
upon the skin affect it. It became, in fact, all the more 
distinct in proportion as the concomitant pressure-feelings 
were eliminated by artificial anaesthesia. When the joints 
themselves, however, were made artificially anaesthetic the 
perception of the movement grew obtuse and the angular 
rotations had to be much increased before they were per- 
ceptible. All these facts prove according to Herr Gold- 
scheider, that the joint surfaces and these alone are the start- 
ing point of the impressions by which the movements of our 
members are immediately perceived. 

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

I will answer these questions by asking another : Why 
do we move our joints at all ? Surely to gain something 
more valuable than the insipid joint-feelings themselves. 
And these more interesting feelings are in the main pro- 
duced upon the skin of the moving part, or of some other 
part over which it passes, or upon the eye. With move- 
ments of the fingers we explore the configuration of all real 
objects with which we have to deal, our own body as well as 



194 parcHOLOGT, 

foreign things. Nothing that interests us is located in the 
joint ; everything that interests us either is some part of 
our skin, or is something that we see as we handle it. The 
cutaneously felt and the seen extents come thus to figure 
as the important things for us to concern ourselyes witL 
Every time the joint moves, even though we neither see, 
nor feel cutaneously, the reminiscence of skin-events and 
sights which formerly coincided with that extent of move- 
ment, ideally awaken as the movement's import, and the 
mind drops the present sign to attend to the import alone. 
The joint-sensation itself, as such, does not disappear in 
the process. A little attention easily detects it, with all 
its fine peculiarities, hidden beneath its vaster suggestions ; 
so that really the mind has two space-perceptions before 
it, congruent in form but different in scale and place, either 
of which exclusively it may notice, or both at once, — the 
joint-space which it feds and the real space which it means. 
The joint-spaces serve so admirably as signs because of 
their capacity for paralld variation to all the peculiarities 
of external motion. There is not a direction in the real 
world nor a ratio of distance which cannot be matched by 
some direction or extent of joint-rotation. Joint-feelings, 
like all feelings, are roomy. Specific ones are contrasted 
inter se as diflferent directions are contrasted within the 
same extent. If I extend my arm straight ont at the 
shoulder, the rotation of the shoulder- joint will give me one 
feeling of movement ; if then I sweep the arm forward, the 
same joint will give me another feeling of movement. 
Both these movements are felt to happen in space, and 
diti'er in specific quality. Why shall not the specifieness 
of the quality just consist in the feeling of a peculiar direc- 
lion ? * Why may not the several joint-feelings be so many 
perceptions of movement in so many difl*erent directions '? 
That we cannot explain why they should is no presumption 
that they do not, for we never can explain why any sense- 
organ should awaken the sensation it does. 



* Direction in its " tirnt iutuntion,' of course; direction with which so 
far wo merely become (icquainUd, and about which we know nothing save 
perhaps its dilTereuce from another direction a moment ago experienced lo 
the same way ! 



TUB PERCEPTION OF 8PACK 195 

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

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

The localization of the joint-feeling in a space simulta- 
neously known otherwise (i.e. to eye or skin), is what ia 
commonly called the extradition or eccentric projection of the 
feeling. In the preceding chapter I said a good deal on this 
subject ; but we must now see a little more closely just what 
happens in this instance of it. The content of the joint- 
feeling, to begin with, is an object, and is in itself a place. 
For it to be placed, say in the elbow, the elbow as seen or han- 
dled must already have become another object for the mind. 



* I have said hardly anything about associations with visual space in 
the foregoing account, because 1 wished to represent a process which the 
blind and the seeing man might equally share. It is to be noticed that 
the space siiggested to the imagination when the joint moves, and pro- 
jected to the distance of the finger-tip, is not represented as any specific 
skin-tract. What the seeing man imagines is a visible path: what the blind 
man imagines is rather a generic image, an abstraction from many skin- 
spaces whose local signs have neutralized each other, and left nothing but 
their common vastness behind. We shall see as we go on that this generic 
abstraction of space- magnitude from the various local peculiarities of feel- 
ing which accompanied it when it was for the first time felt, occurs on a 
considerable scale in the acquired perceptions of blind as well as of seeing 
men. 



196 P8YCH0L00T. 

and with its place as thus known, the place which the joint- 
feeling fills must coalesce. That the latter should be felt 
* in the elbow ' is therefore a * projection ' of it into the place 
of another object as much as its being felt in the finger-tip 
or at the end of a cane can be. But when we say • projec- 
tion ' we generally have in our mind the notion of a there as 
contrasted with a here. What is the here when we say that the 
joint- feeling is there ? The * here ' seems to be the spot 
which the mind has chosen for its own post of observation, 
usually some place within the head, but sometimes within 
the throat or breast — not a rigorously fixed spot, but a 
region from any portion of which it may send forth its vari- 
ous acts of attention. Extradition from either of these 
regions is the common law under which we perceive the 
whereabouts of the north star, of our own voice, of the con- 
tact of our teeth with each other, of the tip of our finger, 
of the point of our cane on the ground, or of a movement 
in our elbow-joint 

But/or the distance bettoeen tJie ' here * and the * there * to be 
fdtj the entire intervening spojce must be itself an object of per- 
$eption. The consciousness of this intervening space is the 
Bine qud non of the joint-feeling's projection to the farther 
end of it. When it is filled by our own bodily tissues (as 
where the projection only goes as far as the elbow or fin- 
ger-tip) we are sensible of its extent alike by our eye, by 
our exploring movements, and by the resident sensations 
which fill its length. When it reaches beyond the limits 
of our body, the resident sensations are lacking, but limbs 
and hand and eye suiRce to make it known. Let me, for 
example, locate a feeling of motion coming from my elbow- 
joint in the point of my cane a yard beyond my hand. 
Either I see this yard as I flourish the cane, and the seen 
end of it then absorbs my sensation just as my seen elbow 
might absorl) it, or I am blind and imagine the cane as an 
object continuing my arm, either because I have explored 
both arm and cane with the other hand, or because I have 
pressed them both along my body and leg. If I project my 
joint-feeling farther still, it is by a conception rather than a 
distinct imagination of the space. I think: * farther,' 'thrice 
as far,* etc.; and thus get a symbolic image of a distant 



THB PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 197 

path at which I poini^ But the ' absorption ' of the joint- 
feeling by the distant spot, in whatever terms the latter 
may be apprehended, is never anything but that coales- 
cence into one ' thing ' already spoken of on page 184, of 
whatever different sensible objects interest our attention at 
once. 

2. Fedings of Mttscvlar Contraction. 

Readers versed in psychological literature will have 
missed, in our account thus far, the usual invocation of 
Uhe muscular sense.' This word is used with extreme 
vagueness to cover all resident sensations, whether of 
motion or position, in our members, and even to designate 
the supposed feeling of efferent discharge from the brain. 
We shall later see good reason to deny the existence of the 
latter feeling. We have accounted for the better part at least 
of the resident feelings of motion in limbs by the sensibility 
of the articular surfaces. The skin and ligaments also must 
have feelings awakened as they are stretched or squeezed 
in flexion or extension. And I am inclined to think that 
the sensations of our contracting muscles themsdves probably play 
as smaU a part in building up our exact knotdedge of space as 
any doss of sensations which toe possess. The muscles, indeed, 
play an all-important part, but it is through the remote 
effect of their contractions on other sensitive parts, not 
through their own resident sensations being aroused. In 
other words, muscular contraction is only indirectly instru- 
menial f in giving us space-perceptions, by its effects on surfaces. 
In skin and retina it produces a motion of the stimulus 
upon the surface ; in joints it produces a motion of the 
surfaces upon each other — such motion being by far the 

* The ideal enlargement of a system of sensations by the mind is noth- 
ing exceptional. Vision is full of it ; and in the manual arts, where a 
workman gets a tool larger than the one he is accustomed to and has sud- 
denly to adapt all his movements to its scale, or where he has to execute 
a familiar set of movements in an unnatural position of body; where a 
piano-player meets an Instrument with unusually broad or narrow keys; 
where a man has to alter the size of bis handwriting — we see how promptly 
the mind multiplies once for all, as it were, the whole series of its opera- 
tions by a constant factor, and has not to trouble itself after that with fur* 
ther adjustment of the details. 



198 PBTOHOLOQT. 

most delicate maimer of exciting the surfaces in question 
One is tempted to doubt whether the muscular sensibility 
as such plays even a subordinate part as sign of these 
more immediately geometrical perceptions which are so 
uniformly associated with it as effects of the contraction 
objectively viewed. 

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

Empirically we find this probability confirmed by many 
facts. The judicious A. W. Volkman observes t that : 

*' Muscular feeling gives tolerably fine evidence as to the existence 
of movement, but hardJy any direct information about its extent or 
direction. We are not aware that the contractions of a supinator 
longtts have a wider range than those of a supinator hrevis; and that 
the fibres of a bipenniform muscle contract in opposite directions is a fact 
of which the muscular feeling itself gives not the slightest intimation. 
Muscle- feeling belongs to that class of general sensations which tell us 
of our inner st^t<»-s, but not of outor relations ; it does not belong among 
the space-perceiving senses." 

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

G. H. Lewes makes the same remark. When we think 
of our muscular sensations as movements in space, it is 



♦ Pflttger's Archiv. xlv. 65. 

f UntersuchuDgen Im Gebiete der Optik, Leipzig (1868)» p. 188. 



THE PBRCEPTIOi^ OF SPACE, 199 

because we have ingrained with them in our imagination a 
movement on a surface simultaneously felt 

** Thus whenever we breathe there is a contraction of the muscles 
of the ribs and the diaphragm. Since we see the chest expanding, we 
know it as a movement and can only think of it as such. But the dia- 
phragm itself is not seen, and consequently by no one who is not physi- 
ologically enlightened on the point is this diaphragm thought of in 
movement. Nay, even when told by a physiologist that the diaphragm 
moves at each breathing, every one who has not seen it moving down- 
ward pictures it as an upward movement, because the chest moves 
upward." ♦ 

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

* Problems of Life and Mind, prob. vi. chap. iv. § 45. 



300 P8YCH0L0QT, 

Take again the contractions of the muscles which make 
the eyeball rotate. The feeling of these is supposed by 
many writers to play the chief part in our perceptions of 
extent The space seen between two things meaTiS^ accord- 
ing to these authors, nothing but the amount of contraction 
which is needed to carry the /orea from the first thing to the 
second. But close the eyes and note the contractions in 
themselves (even when coupled as they still are with the 
delicate surface sensations of the eyeball rolling under the 
lids), and we are surprised at finding how vague their space-* 
import appears. Shut the eyes and roll them, and you can 
with no approach to accuracy tell the outer object which 
shall first be seen when you open them again.* Moreover, it 
our eye-muscle-contractions had much to do with giving us 
our sense of seen extent, we ought to have a natural illusion 
of which we find no trace. Since the feeling in the muscles 
grows disproportionately intense as the eyeball is rolled 
into an extreme eccentric position, all places on the extreme 
margin of the field of view ought to appear farther from 
the centre than they really are, for the fovea cannot get to 
them without an amount of this feeling altogether in excess 
of the amount of actual rotation, t When we turn to the 

* Volkmann. op. cit. p. 189. Compare also what Hering says of the in- 
ability in his own case to make after-images seem to move when he rolls 
his closed eyes in their sockets ; and of the insignificance of his feelings of 
convergence for the sense of distance (Beitrftge zur Physiologie, 1861-2, 
pp. 81, 141). Helmholtz also allows to the muscles of convergence a very 
feeble share in producing our sense of the third dimension (PhysiologisGhe 
Optik, 649-59). 

f Compire Lipps, Psychologische Studien (1885), p. 18. and the other 
arguments given on pp. VZ to 27. The most plausible reasons for contrac- 
tions of the eyeball-muscles being admitted as original contributors to the 
perception of extent, are those of Wundt, Physiologische Psychologic, n. 
96-100. They are drawn from certain constant errors in our estimate of 
lines and angles ; which, however, are susceptible, all of them, of different 
interpretations (see some of them further on). — Just as my MS. goei 
to the printer, Herr MUnsterberg's Beitrftge zur experimentellen Psy- 
chologic, Heft 2, comes into my hands with experiments on the measure- 
ment of space recorded in it, which, in the author's view, prove the feeling 
of muscular strain to be a principal factor in our vision of extent. As 
MQnstcrberg worked three hours a day for a year and a half at comparing 
the length of lines, seen with his lyes in different positions ; and as he care- 
fully averaged and * perceuted ' 20.000 observations, his conclusion must be 
listened to with ^reat respect. Briefly it is thi.<», that ** our judgments of 



THB PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 201 

muBcles of the body at large we find the same vagueness. 
Goldscheider found that the minimal perceived rotation ol 

size depend od a comparison of the intensity of the feelings of movement 
which arise in our eyehall-muscles as we glance over the distance, and 
which fuse with the sensations of light " (p. 142). The facts upon which 
the conclusion is hased are certain constant errors which MUnsterberg 
found according as the standard or given interval was to the right or the 
left of the interval to be marked off as equal to it, or as it was above or 
below it, or stood in some more complicated relation still He admits that 
he cannot explain all the errors in detail, and that we " stand before results 
which seem surprising and not to be unravelled, because we cannot analyze 
the elements which enter into the complex sensation which we receive." 
But he has no doubt whatever of the general fact ** that the movements of 
the eyes and the sense of their position when fixed exert so decisive an 
influence on our estimate of the spaces seen, that the errors cannot possi- 
bly be explained by anything else than the movement-feelings and their 
reproductions in the memory" (pp. 166, 167). It is presumptuous to doubt 
A man's opinion when you haven't had his experience ; and yet there are a 
number of points which make me feel like suspending judgment in regard 
to Herr M.'s dictum. He found, for example, a coustaut tendency to under- 
estimate intervals lying to the right, and to overestimate intervals lying 
to the left. He ingeniously explains this i\s a result of the habit of read- 
ing, which trains us to move our eyes easily along straight lines from left 
to right, whereas in looking from right to left we move them in carved 
lines across the page. As we measure intervals as straight lines, it costs 
more muscular effort to measure from right to left ihan the other way, 
and an interval lying to the left seems to us consequently longer than it 
really is. Now I have been a reader for more years than Herr Mtlnster- 
berg; and yet with me there is a strongly pronounced error the other way. 
It is the rightward-lying interval which to me seems longer than it really 
is. Moreover, Herr M. wears concave spectacles, and looked through them 
with his headflxed. May it not be that some of the errors were due to dis- 
tortion of the retinal image, as the eye looked no longer through the centre 
but through the margin of the glass? In short, with all the presumptions 
which we have seen against muscular contraction being definitely felt as 
length, I think that there may be explanations of Herr M.'s results which 
have escaped even his sagacity ; and I call for a suspension of judgment 
until they shall have been confirmed by other observers. I do not myself 
doubt that our feeling of seen extent may be altered by concomitant mus- 
cular feelings. In Chapter XVll (pp. 28-80) we saw many examples of 
similar alterations, interferences with, or exaltations of, the sensory effect 
of one nerve process by another. I do not see why currents from the 
muscles or eyelids, coming in at the same time with a retinal impression, 
might not make the latter seem bigger, in the same way that a greater tn- 
tensity in the retinal stimulation makes it seem bigger ; or in the way that 
a greater extent of surface excited makes the color of the surface seem 
stronger, or if it be a skin-surface, makes its heat seem greater ; or in the 
way that the coldness of the dollar on the forehead (in Weber's old experi- 
ments) made the dollar seem heavier. But this is a physiological way : and 



202 PSTCnOLOQT. 

a limb about a joint was no less when the movement was 
' active ' or produced by muscular contraction than when it 
was * passively * impressed.* The consciousness of active 
movement became so blunt when the joint (alone!) was 
made ansBsthetic by faradization, that it became evident 
that the feeling of contraction could never be used for 
^ne discrimination of extents. And that it was not used 
for coarse discriminations appeared clear to Goldscheider 
from certain other results which are too circumstantial 
for me to quote in detail, t His general conclusion is that 
we feel our movements exclusively in our articular sur- 
faces, and that our muscular contractions in all probability 
hardly occasion this sort of perception at all. % 

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

Before making a minuter study of Space as apprehended 
by the eye, we must turn to see what we can discover of 
space as known to the blind. But as we do so, let us cast 
a glance upon the results of the last pages, and ask our- 
selves once more whether the building up of orderly 
space-perceptions out of primitive ineoherency requires 
any mental powers beyond those displayed in ordinary in- 
tellectual operations. I think it is obvious — granting the 
spacial qvale to exist in the primitive sensations — that dis^ 
crimination, association, addition, multiplication, and divi- 
sion, blending into generic images, substitution of similars, 
selective emphasis, and abstraction from uninteresting de- 
tails, are quite capable of gi^ing us all the space-percep- 

the bigness gained is that of the retinal image after all. If I understand 
Mttnsterberg's meaning, it is quite different from this : the bigness be- 
longs to the muscular feelings, as such, and is vcnix^\y as»ociated with those 
of the retina. This is what I deny. 

♦ Archivf. (Anat. u.) Physiol.' (1889), p. 542. 

t Ibid, p. 496. 

X Ibid. p. 497. Goldscheider thinks that our muscles do not ever give 
us the feeling of resM^iA«r^, that being also due to the articular surfaces- 
whilst tceight is due to the tendons. Ibid. p. 541. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 203 

tions we have so far studied, without the aid of any mys- 
terious * mental chemistry' or power of * synthesis ' to create 
elements absent from the original data of feeling. It can- 
not be too strongly urged in the face of mystical attempts, 
however learned, that there is not a landmark, not a length, 
not a point of the compass in real space which is not some 
one of our feelings, either experienced directly as a presen- 
tation or ideally suggested by another feeling which has 
come to serve as its sign. In degrading some sensations 
to the rank of signs and exalting others to that of realities 
signified, we smooth out the wrinkles of our first chaotic 
impressions and make a continuous order of what was a 
rather incoherent multiplicity. But the content of the order 
remains identical with that of the multiplicity — sensational 
both, through and through. 

HCW THE BlilKD FEBOETVIB SFACB. 

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

But the symbol will often give us the emotional efiect 
of the perception. Such expressions as the abysmal vault 
of heaven, the endless expanse of ocean, etc., summarize 



204 PBTCHOLOQT 

many computations to the imagination, and give the sense 
of an enormous horizon. So it seems with the blind. They 
multiply mentally the amount of a distinctly felt freedom 
to move, and gain the immediate sense of a vaster freedom 
still. Thus it is that blind men are never without the con- 
sciousness of their horizon. They all enjoy travelling, es- 
pecially with a companion who can describe to them the 
objects they pass. On the prairies they feel the great open- 
ness ; in valleys they feel closed in ; and one has told me 
that he thought few seeing people could enjoy the view 
from a mountain-top more than he. A blind person on 
entering a house or room immediately receives, from the 
reverberations of his voice and steps, an impression of its 
dimensions, and to a certain extent of its arrangement. 
The tympanic sense noticed on p. 140, supra^ comes in to 
help here, and possibly other forms of tactile sensibility not 
yet understood. Mr. W. Hanks Lev}% the blind author of 
•Blindness and the Blind' (London), gives the following ac- 
count of his powers of perception : 

'^Whether within a house or in the open air, whether walking oi 
standing still, I can tell, although quite blind, when I am opposite an 
object, and can perceive whether it be tall or short, slender or bulky. 
I can also detect whether it be a solitary object or a continuous fence ; 
whether it be a close fence or composed of open rails ; and often whether 
it be a wooden fence, a brick or stone wall, or a quick-set hedge. I 
cannot usually perceive objects if much lower than my shoulder, but 
sometimes very low objects can be detected. This may depend on the 
nature of the objects, or on some abnormal state of the atmosphere. 
The currents of air can have nothing to do with this power, as the state 
of the wind does not directly affect it; the sense of hearing has nothing 
to do with It, as when snow lies thickly on the ground objects are more 
distinct, although the footfall cannot be heard. I seem to perceive 
objects through the skin of my face, and to have the impressions im- 
mediately transinitted to the brain. The only part of my body possess- 
ing this power is my face ; this 1 have ascertained by suitable experi- 
ments. Stopping my ears does not int<»rfere with it, but coveiing my 
face with a thick veil destroys it altogether. None of the five senses 
have anything to do with the existence of this power, and the circum- 
stances above named induce me to call this unrecognized sense by the 
name of 'facial perception.' . . . When passing along a street I can 
distinguish shops from private houses, and even point out the doors and 
windows, etc., and this whether the doors be shut or open. When a 
window consists of one entire sheet of glass, it is more difficult to dis 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 203 

cover than one composed of a number of small panes. From this it 
would appear that glass is a bad conductor of sensation, or at any rate 
of the sensation specially connected with this sense. When objecta 
below the face are perceived, the sensation seems to come in an oblique 
iine from the object to the upp)er part of the face. While walking with 
a friend in Forest Lane, Stratford, I said, pointing to a fence which 
separated the road *from a field, * Those rails are not quite as high as 
my shoulder.* He looked at them, and said they were higher. We, 
however, measured, and found them about three inches lower than my 
shoulder. At the time of making this observation I was about four 
feet from the rails. Certainly in this instance facial perception was 
more accurate than sight. When the lower part of a fence is brick- 
work, and the upper part rails, the fact can be detected, and the line 
where the two meet easily perceived. Irregularities in height, and pro- 
jections and identations in walls, can also be discovered. ^^ 

According to Mr. Levy, this power of seeing with the 
face is diminished by a fog, but not by ordinary dark- 
ness. At one time he could tell when a cloud obscured the 
horizon, but he has now lost that power, which he has 
known several persons to possess who are totally blind. 
These effects of aqueous vapor suggest immediately that 
fluctuations in the heat radiated by the objects may be the 
source of the perception. One blind gentleman, Mr. EH-* 
bume, an instructor in the Perkins Institution in South 
Boston, who has the power spoken of in an unusual degree, 
proved, however, to have no more delicate a sense of tem- 
perature in his face than ordinary per3ons. He himself 
supposed that his ears had nothing to do with the faculty 
until a complete stoppage of them, not only with cotton 
but with putty on top of it, by abolishing the perception 
entirely, proved his first impression to be erroneous. Many 
blind men say immediately that their ears are concerned 
in the matter. 

Sounds certainly play a far more prominent part in 
the mental life of the blind than in our own. In taking a 
walk through the country, the mutations of sound, far and 
near, constitute their chief delight. And to a great extent 
their imagination of distance and ol objects moving from 
one distant spot to another seems to consist in thinking 
how a certain sonority would be modified by the change 
of place. It is unquestionable that the semi-circular-canal 
feelings play a great part in defining the points of the com- 



20t5 PSYCHO LOOT. 

pass and the direction of distant spots, in the blind as in 
us. We start towards them by feelings of this sort ; and so 
many directions, so many diflFerent-feeling starts.* 

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

I am disjv.sed to believe, after interrogating many blind 
persons, that the use of imaginary maps on a reduced scale 
is less frequent with them than with the rest of us Possi- 
bly the extraordinary changeableness of the visual magni- 
tudes of things makes this habit natural to us, while the 
fixity of tactile magnitudes keeps them from falling into it 
(When the blind young man operated on by Dr. Franz was 

* "Whilst the memories which we seeing folks preserve of a man all 
centre round a certain exterior form composed of his image, his height, 
his gah. In the blind aU these memories are referred to something quite 
different, namely, the acmndofhis voice.** (Dunan, Rev. Phil., xxv. 867.) 



THE PBRCBPTION OF SPACE, 207 

shown a portrait in a locket, he was vastly surprised that 
the face could be put into so small a compass : it would 
have seemed to him, he said, as impossible as to put a bushel 
into a pint) Be this as it may, however, the space which 
each blind man feels to extend beyond his body is felt by 
him as one smooth continuum — all trace of those muscular 
startings and stoppings and reversals which presided over 
Its formation having been eliminated from the memory. It 
seems, in other words, a generic image of the space-element 
common to all these experiences, with the unessential par- 
ticularities of each left out In truth, where in this space 
a start or a stop may have occurred was quite accidental 
It may never occur just there again, and so the attention 
lets it drops altogether. Even as long a space as that 
traversed in a several-mile walk- will not necessarily appear 
to a bb'nd man's thought in the guise of a series of locomo- 
tor acts. Only where there is some distinct locomotor diffi- 
culty, such as a step to ascend, a difficult crossing, or a 
disappearance of the path, will distinct locomotor images 
constitute the idea. Elsewhere the space seems continuous, 
and its parts may even all seem coexistent ; though, as a 
very intelligent blind friend once remarked to me, * To 
think of such distances involves probably more mental 
wear and tear and brain-waste in the blind than in the see- 
ing.' This seems to point to a greater element of succes- 
sive addition and construction in the blind man's idea. 

Our own visual explorations go on by means of innum- 
erable stoppings and startings of the eyeballs. Yet these 
are all effaced from the final space-sphere of our visual 
imagination. They have neutralized each other. We can 
even distribute our attention to the right and left sides 
simultaneously, and think of those two quarters of space 
as coexistent. Does the smoothing out of the locomotor 
interruptions from the blind man's tactile space-sphere 
offer any greater paradox? Surely not. And it is curious 
to note that both in him and in us there is one particular 
fccomotor feeling that is apt to assert itself obstinately to 
the last. We and he alike spontaneously imagine space as 
Ijdng in frorU of us, for reasons too obvious to enumerate. 
If we think of the space behind us, we, as a rule, have to 



WS PSYCHOLOGY. 

turn round mentally, and in doing so the front space van- 
ishes. But in this, as in the other things of which we have 
been talking, individuals differ widely. Some, in imagin- 
ing a room, can think of all its six surfaces at once. Others 
mentally turn round, or, at least, imagine the room in sev- 
eral successive and mutually exclusive acts (cf. p. 54, above). 

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

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

After my own observation of blind people, I should 
hardly have considered this as anything but an eccentric 
opinion, worthy to pair off with that other belief that color 
is primitively seen without extent, had it not been for the 
remarkable Essay on Tactile and Visual Space by M. Ch. 
Dunan, which appeared in the Bevue Philosophique for 
1888. This author quotes * three very competent witnesses, 
all officials in institutions for the blind [it does not appear 
from the text that more than one of them was blind him- 
self], who say that blind people only live in time. M. 
Dunan himself does not share exactly this belief, but he 
insists that the blind man's and the seeing man's represen- 
tation of space have absolutely naught in common, and that 
we are deceived into believing that what they mean by 
space is analogous to what we mean, by the fact that so many 
of them are but semi-blind and still think in visual terms, 
and from the farther fact that they all talk in visual terms 
just like ourselves. But on examining M. Dunan's reasons 
one finds that they all rest on the groundless logical as- 
sumption that the perception of a geometrical form which 
we get with our eyes, and that which a blind man gets with 

♦Vol. XXV. pp. 867-8. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. ' 2U» 

his fingers, must either be absolutely identical or absolutely 
unlike. They cannot be similar in diversity, " for they are 
simple notions, and it is of the essence of such to enter the 
mind or leave it all at once, so that one who has a simple no- 
tion at all, possesses it in all its completeness. . . . There- 
fore, since it is impossible that the blind should have of 
the forms in question ideas comjUetdy identical with our see- 
ing ones, it follows that their ideas must be radicoUy dif- 
ferent /ram and wholly irredvcible to our own.'' * Hereupon 
M. Dunan has no difficulty in finding a blind man who still 
preserves a crude sensation of diffused light, and who says 
when questioned that this light has no extent. Having ' no 
extent ' appears, however, on farther questioning, to signify 
merely not enveloping any particular tactile objects, nor 
being located within their outline; so that (allowing for 
latitude of expression) the result tallies perfectly with our 
own view. A relatively stagnant retinal sensation of diffused 
light, not varying when different objects are handled, would 
naturally remain an object quite apart If the word 'ex- 
tent ' were habitually used to denote tactile extent, this sen- 
sation, having no tactile associates whatever, would natu- 
rally have * extent ' denied of it And yet all the while it 
would be analogous to the tactile sensations in having the 
quality of bigness. Of course it would have no other tac- 
tile qualities, just as the tactile objects have no other opti- 
cal qualities than bigness. All sorts of analogies obtain 
between the spheres of sensibility. Why are * sweet ' and 
* soft ' used so synonymously in most languages ? and why 
are both these adjectives applied to objects of so many 
sensible kinds. Hough sounds, heavy smells, hard lights, 
cold colors, are other examples. Nor does it follow from 
such analogies as these that the sensations compared need 
be composite and have some of their parts identical. We 
saw in Chapter XIII that likeness and difference are an ele- 
mentary relation, not to be resolved in every case into a 
mixture of absolute identity and absolute heterogeneity of 
content (cf. VoL I, pp. 492-3). 

I oonolude, then, that although in its more superficial 



210 PBTCHOLOQT. 

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

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

This has remained in literature as * Molyneux's query.* 
Mol}Tieux answered *No.' And Locke says :* 

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

This opinion has not lacked experimental confirmation. 
From Chesselden's case downwards, patients operated for 
congenital cataract have been unable to name at first the 
things they saw. " So, Puss, I shall know you another time," 
said Ghesseldeu's patient, after catching the cat, looking at 
her steadfastly, and setting her down. Some of this inca- 
pacity is unquestionably due to general mental confusion at 
the new experience, and to the excessively unfavorable con- 
ditions for perception which an eye with its lens just extir- 
pated affords. That the analogy of inner nature between 
the retinal and tactile sensations goes beyond mere exten- 
sity is proved by the cases where the patients were the most 
intelligent, as in the young man operated on by Dr. FranZi 

♦ Essay cone. Hum. Und., bk. it. clmp. ix. § 8. 



THB PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 211 

who named circular, triangular, and quadrangular figures 
at first sight* 

VISUAIi SPACE. 

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

If a common person is asked how he is enabled to see 
things as they are, he will simply reply, by opening his 
eyes and looking. This innocent answer has, however, 
long since been impossible for science. There are various 
paradoxes and irregularities about what we appear to per- 
ceive under seemingly identical optical conditions, which 
immediately raise questions. To say nothing now of the 
time-honored conundrums of why we see upright with an 
inverted retinal picture, and why we do not see double ; 
and to leave aside the whole field of color-contrasts and 
ambiguities, as not directly relevant to the space-problem, — 
it is certain that the same retinal image makes us see quite 
differently-sized and differently-shaped objects at different 
times, and it is equally certain that the same ocular move* 
ment varies in its perceptive import. It ought to be pos- 
sible, were the act of perception completely and simply 
intelligible, to assign for every distinct judgment of size, 
shape, and position a distinct optical modification of some 
kind as its occasion. And the connection between the two 
ought to be so constant that, given the same modification, 
we should always have the same judgment. But if we 

♦ Philosophical Transactions, 1841. In T. K. Abbot's Sight and Touch 
there is a good discussion of these cases. Obviously, positive cases are of 
more importance than negative. An under- witted peasant, No6 M., whose 
case is described by Dr. Dufour of Lausanne (Guerison d'un Aveugle r\^, 
1876) is much made of by MM. Naville and Dunan ; but it seems to me 
only to show how little some people can deal with new experiences in which 
others find themselves quickly at home. This man could not even tell 
whether one of his first objcois of .sight moved or stood still (p. 9). 



212 PSYCHO LOQT. 

study the facts closely we soon find no such constant con- 
nection between either jvdgmenJt ani retinal modification^ or 
jvdgment and muscular modification, to exist. The judgment 
seems to result from the combination of retinal, muscular 
and intellectual factors with each other ; and any one of 
them may occasionally overpower the rest in a way which 
seems to leave the matter subject to no simple law. 

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

The Third Dimension, 

Berkeleyans unanimously assume that no retinal sensa- 
tion can primitively be of volume ; if it be of extension at 
all (which they are barely disposed to admit), it can be only 
of two-, not of three-, dimensional extension. At the begin- 
ning of the present chapter we denied this, and adduced 
facts to show that all objects of sensation are voluminous 
in three dimensions (of. p. 136 ff.). It is impossible to lie 
on one's back on a hill, to let the empty abyss of blue fill 
one's whole visual field, and to sink deeper and deeper into 
the merely sensational mode of consciousness regarding it, 
without feeling that an indeterminate, palpitating, circling 



THB PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 213 

depth is as indefeasibly one of its attributes as its breadth. 
We may artificially exaggerate this sensation of depth. 
Bise and look from the hill-top at the distant view ; repre- 
sent to yourself as viyidly as possible the distance of the 
uttermost horizon ; and then unth inverted head look at the 
same. There will be a startling increase in the perspective, 
a most sensible recession of the maximum distance ; and 
as you raise the head you can actually see the horizon- 
line again draw near.^ 

Mind, I say nothing as yet about our estimate of the 
-real' amount of this depth or distance. I only want to 
confirm its existence as a natural and inevitable optical 
consort of the two other optical dimensions. The field of 
view is always a vdume-nrnt Whatever be supposed to be 
its absolute and * real ' size, the relative sizes of its dimen- 
sions are functions of each other. Indeed, it happens per- 
haps most often that the breadth- and height-feeling take 
their absolute measure from the depth-feeling. If we plunge 
our head into a wash-basin, the felt nearness of the bottom 
makes us feel the lateral expanse to be smalL If, on the 
contrary, we are on a mountain-top, the distance of the 
horizon carries with it in our judgment a proportionate 

* What may be the physiological process connected with this increased 
sensation of depth is hard to discover. It seems to have nothing to do with 
the parts of the retina affected, since the mere inversion of the picture (by 
mirrors, reflecting prisms, etc.), without inverting the head, does not seem 
to bring it about ; nothing with sympathetic axial rotation of the eyes, 
which might enhance the perspective through exaggerated disparity of 
the two retinal images (see J. J. MtUler, * Raddrehung u. Tiefendimen- 
Bion/ Leipzig Acad. Berichte, 1876, page 124), for one-eyed persons get 
it as strongly as those with two eyes. I cannot find it to be connected 
with any alteration in the pupil or with any ascertainable strain in the 
muscles of the eye, sympathizing with those of the body. The exaggeia- 
lion of distance is even greater when we throw the head over backwards 
and contract our superior recti in getting the view, than when we bend 
forward and contract the inferior recti. Making the eyes diverp^e slightly 
by weak prismatic glasses has no such effect. To me, and to all whom I 
have asked to repeat the observation, the result is so marked that I do not 
well understand how such an observer as Helmholtz, who has carefully 
examined vision with inverted head, can have overlooked it. (See his 
Phys. Optik, pp. 488, 728, 728, 772.) I cannot help thinking that anyone 
who can explain the exaggeration of the depth-sensation in this case will 
Bt the same time throw much light on its normal constitution. 



214 P87CH0L00r. 

heit^ht and length in the mountain-chains that bound it to 
our view. But as aforesaid, let us not consider the ques- 
tion of absolute size now, — it must later be taken up in a 
thorough way. Let us confine ourselves to the way in 
which the three dimensions which are seen, get their values 
fixed reldtivdy to each other. 

Beid, in his Inquiry into the Human Mind, has a section 
*0f the Geometry of Visibles,' in which he assumes to 
trace what the perceptions would be of a race of * Idome- 
nians ' reduced to the sole sense of sight Agreeing with 
Berkeley that sight alone can give no knowledge of the third 
dimension, he humorously deduces various ingenious ab- 
surdities in their interpretations of the material appear- 
ances before their eyes. 

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

First of all, one of the sensations given by the object 
is chosen to represent its * real ' size and shape, in accord- 
ance with the principles laid down on pp. 178 and 179. 
One sensation measures the * thing'' present, and the * thing * then 
measures the other sensations. The peripheral parts of the 
retina are equated with the central by receiving the image 
of the same object This needs no elucidation in case the 

* •• In Fmriep's Notizeii (1838, July), No. 133, is to be found a detnilccl 
account, with a picture, of an £8thonian girl, Eva Lauk, then fourteen 
years old, born with neither arms nor legs, which concludes with the 
following words : * According to the mother, her intellect developed quite 
as fast us that of her brother and sisters ; in particular, she came as quickly 
to a right judgment of the size and distance of visible objects, although, 
of coui-se, she had no use of hands.' " (Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille, n 
44.) 



THE PERCBPTION OF SPACE. 215 

object does not change its distance or its front. But sup- 
pose, to take a more complicated case, that the object is a 
stick, seen first in its whole length, and then rotated round 
one of its ends ; let this fixed end be the one near the eye. 
In this movement the stick's image will grow progressively 
shorter; its farther end will appear less and less sepa- 
rated laterally from its fixed near end; soon it will be 
screened by the latter, and then reappear on the opposite 
side, and finally on that side resume its original length. 
Suppose this movement to become a familiar experience ; 
the mind will presumably react upon it after its usual fash- 
ion (which is that of unifying all data which it is in any 
way possible to unify), and consider it the movement of a 
constant object rather than the transformation of a fluctuat- 
ing one. Now, the sensation of depth which it receives dur- 
ing the experience is awakened more by the far than by the 
near end of the object. But how much depth? What shall 
measure its amount ? Why, at the moment the far end is 
ready to be eclipsed, the difference of its distance from the 
near end's distance must be judged equal to the stick's 
whole length ; but that length has already been judged 
equal to a certain optical sensation of breadth. Thtis we 
fini thai given amounts of the visual depth-feeling become signs 
o/Jixed amounts of the visual breadth-feeling. The measure- 
ment of distance is^ as Berkeley truly said, a result of sugges^ 
tion and experience. But visual experience alone is adequate 
to produce it, and this he erroneously denied. 

Suppose a colonel in front of his regiment at dress- 
parade, and suppose he walks at right angles towards the 
midmost man of the line. As he advances, and surveys 
the line in either direction, he looks more and more doum 
it and less and less at it, until, when abreast of the mid- 
most man, he feels the end men to be most distant ; then 
when the line casts hardly any lateral image on his retina 
at all, what distance shall he judge to be that of the end 
men? Why, half the length of the regiment as it was 
originally seen, of course ; but this leugth was a moment 
ago a retinal object spread out laterally before his sight. 
He has now merely equated a retinal depth-feeling with a 
retinal breadth-feeling. If the regiment moved, and the 



216 PBTCEOLOGT. 

colonel stood still, the resnlt would be the same. In sncli 
ways as these a creature endowed with eyes alone conld 
hardly fail of measuring out all three dimensions of the 
space he inhabited. And we ourselves, I think, although 
we TTUiy often 'realize' distance in locomotor terms 
(as Berkeley says we must always do), yet do so no less 
often in terms of our retinal map, and always in this way 
the more spontaneously. Were this not so, the three visual 
dimensions could not possibly feel to us as homogeneous as 
they do, nor as commensurable inter se. 

Let U8 then admit distance to be at least as genuinely optuxd 
a content of consdousnesa as either height or breadth. The 
question immediately returns^ Can any of them be said in any 
strictness to be optical sensations ? We have contended all 
along for the affirmative reply to this question, but must 
now cope with difficulties greater than any that have as- 
sailed us hitherto. 

HdmhoUtz and Reid on Sensations. 

A sensation is, as we have seen in Chapter XVll, 
the mental affection that follows most immediately upon 
the stimulation of the sense tract Its antecedent is di- 
rectly physical, no psychic links, no acts of memory, infer- 
ence, or association intervening. Accordingly, if we sup- 
pose the nexus between neural process in the sense-organ, 
on the one hand, and conscious affection, on the other, to 
be by nature uniform, the same process otight always to give 
the same sensation ; and conversely, if what seems to be a sen- 
sation varies whilst the process in the sense-organ remains un- 
changed^ the reason is presumably that it is recdly not a sensa^ 
tion but a higher mental product, whereof the variations depend 
on events occurring in the system of higher cerebral centres, 

Now tlie size of the field of view varies enormously in all 
three dimensions, without our being able to assign with any 
definiteness the process in the visual tract on which the 
variation depends. We just saw how impossible such 
assignment was in the case where turning down the head 
produces the enlargement. In general, the maximum feel- 
ing of depth or distance seems to take the lead in deter- 
mining the apparent magnitude of the whole field, and the 



THB PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 217 

two other dimensions seem to follow. If, to use the former 
instance, I look close into a wash-basin, the lateral extent 
of the field shrinks proportionately to its nearness. If I 
look from a mountain, the things seen are vast in height 
and breadth, in proportion to the famess of the horizon. 
But when toe ask what changes in the eye determine how great 
this maximum feeling of depth or distance (which is undoubt- 
edly felt as a unitary vastness) shaU be, we find ourselves 
nnable to point to any one of them as being its absolutely regular 
concomitant. Convergence, accommodation, double and 
disparate images, differences in the parallactic displacement 
when we move our head, faintness of tint, dimness of out- 
line, and smaliness of the retinal image of objects named 
and known, are all processes that have something to do with 
the perception of * far ' and of * near ' ; but the effect of 
each and any one of them in determining such a perception 
at one moment may at another moment be reversed by the 
presence of some other sensible quality in the object, that 
makes us, evidently by reminding us of past experience, 
judge it to be at a different distance and of another shape. 
If we paint the inside of a pasteboard-mask like the out- 
side, and look at it with one eye, the accommodation- and 
parallax-feelings are there, but fail to make us see it hollow, 
as it is. Our mental knowledge of the fact that human 
faces are always convex overpowers them, and we directly 
perceive the nose to be nearer to us than the cheek instead 
of farther of. 

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

Now the query immediately arises : Can the feelings of 
these processes in the eye, since they are so easily neutralized and 
reversed by intellectual suggestions, ever have been direct sensa- 
tions of distance at all ? Ought we not rather to assume, 
since the distances which we see in spite of them are con- 
clusions from past experience, that the distances which we 



218 PSTCHOLOQT. 

see by means of them are equally such conclusions ? Ought 
we not, in short, to say unhesitatingly that distance must be 
an intellectual and not a sensible content of consciousness ? 
and that each of these eye-feelings serves as a mere signal 
to awaken this content, our intellect being so framed that 
sometimes it notices one signal more readily and sometimes 
another ? 

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

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

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

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

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

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



* Physiol. Optik, p 488. Helmholtz's reservation of 'qualities' is in- 
consistent. Our judgments of light and color vary as much as our judg- 
ments of size, shape, and place, and ought by parity of reasoning to be 
called intellectual products and not sensations. In other places he does 
treat color as if it were an intellectual product. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 219 

origin, and a content that no items of visual sensibility can 
account for.* 

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

If, therefore, among the facts of optical space-perception 
(which we must now proceed to consider in more detail) we 
find instances of an identical organic eye-process, giving us 
different perceptions at different times, in consequence of 
different collateral circumstances suggesting different objec- 
tive facts to our imagination, we must not hastily conclude, 
with the school of Helmholtz and Wundt, that the organic 
eye-process pure and simple, without the collateral circum- 
stances, is incapable of giving us any sensation of a spatial 
kind at all. We must rather seek to discover by tchat mean» 
the circumstances can so have transformed a space-sensa- 
tion, which, but for their presence, would probably have 
been felt in its natural purity. And I may as well say 

* It is needless at this point to consider what Helmholtz's views of the 
nature of the intellectual space-yielding process may be. He vacillates — 
we shall later see how. 

\ Op. eit. p. 214. 



220 PSTCHOLoer, 

now in advance that we shall find the means to be nothing 
more or less than association — the suggestion to the mind of 
optical objects not actuaUy present^ but more habitually asso- 
ciated with the 'collateral circumstances' than the sensa- 
tion which they now displace and being imagined now with 
a quasi-hallucinatory strength. But before this conclu- 
sion emerges, it will be necessary to have reviewed the 
most important facts of optical space-perception, in relation 
to the organic conditions on which they depend. Headers 
acquainted with German optics will excuse what is already 
familiar to them in the following section.* 

* Before embarking on this new topic it will be well to shelve, once for 
all. the problem of wbat is the physiological process that underlies the 
distance- feeling, Since one-eyed people have it, and are inferior to the 
two-eyed only in measuring its gradations, it can have no exclusive connec- 
tion with the double and disparate images produced by binocular parallax. 
Since people with closed eyes, looking at an after-image, do not usually 
see it draw near or recede with varying convergence, it cannot be simply 
constituted by the convergence- feeling. For the same reason it would 
appear non-identical with the feeling of accommodation. The differ- 
ences of apparent parallactic movement between far and near objects as 
we move our head cannot constitute the distance-sensation, for such dif- 
ferences may be easily reproduced experimentally (in the movements of 
visible spots against a background) without engendering any illusion of per- 
spective. Finally, it is obvious that visible faintness, dimness, and small- 
ness are not per se the feeling of visible distance, however much in the 
case of well-known objects they may serve as signs to suggest it. 

A certain maximum distance-value, however, being given to the field of 
view of the moment, whatever it be, the feelings that accompany the pro- 
cesses just enumerated become so many local signs of the gnidation of 
distances within this maximum depth. They help us to subdivide and 
measure it. Itself, however, is felt as a unit, a total distance-value, detei- 
mining the vastness of the whole field of view, which accordingly appears 
as au abyss of a certain volume. And the question still persists, what 
neural process is it that underlies the sense of this distance-value? 

Hering, who has tried to explain the gradations within it by the inter- 
action of certain native distance-values belonging lo each point of the two 
retince, seems willing to admit that the absolute scale of the space-volume 
within which the natively fixed relative distances shall appear is not fixed, 
but determined each time by 'experience in the widest sense of the word * 
{Beitroge, p. 844). What he calls the Kernpunkt of this space-volume is 
the point we are momentarily fixating. The absolute scale of the whole 
volume depends on the absolute distance at which this Kernpunkt is judged 
to lie from the person of the looker. "By an alteration of the localization 
of the Kernpunkt, the inner relations of the seen space are nowise altered ; 
this space in its totality is as a fixed unit, so to speak, displaced with re 



THE PBRCBFTION OF SPACE. 221 

Let us begin the long and rather tedious inquiry by the 
most important case. Physiologists have long sought for 



spect to the self of the looker'' (p. 845). But what constitutes the localiza- 
tion of the Kempunkt itself at any given time, except ' Experience,' i.e., 
higher cerebral and intellectual processes, involving memory, Bering does 
not seek to define. 

Stumpf, the other sensationalist writer who has best realized the difii- 
culties of the problem, thinks that the primitive sensation of distance 
must have an immediate physical antecedent, either in the shape of "an 
organic alteration accompanying the process of accommodation, or else 
given directly in the specific energy of the optic nerve." In contrast vith 
Bering, however, he thinks that it is the abMlute distance of the spot 
fixated which is thus primitively, immediately, and physiologically given, 
and not the relative distances of other things about this spot. These, he 
thinks, are originally seen in what, broadly speaking, may be termed one 
plane with it. Whether the distance of this plane, considered as a phe- 
nomenon of our primitive sensibility, be an invariable datum, or suscepti- 
ble of fluctuation, he does not, if I understand him rightly, und*^rtake 
dogmatically to decide, but inclines to the former view. For him then, 
as for Bering, higher cerebral processes of association, under the name of 
' Experience,' are the authors of fully one-half part of the distance-percep- 
tions which we at any given time may have. 

Bering's and Stumpf 's theories are reported for the English reader by 
Mr. Sully (in Mind. in. pp. 172-6). Mr. Abbott, in his Sight and Touch 
(pp. 96-8), gives a theory which is to me so obscure that I only refer the 
reader to its place, adding that it seems to make of distance a fixed func- 
tion of retinal sensation as modified by focal adjustment. Besides these 
three authors I am ignorant of any, except Panum , who may have attempt- 
ed to define distance as in any degree an immediate sensation. And with 
them the direct sensational share is reduced to a very small proportional 
part, in our completed distance judgments. 

Professor Lipps, in his singularly acute Psychologische Studien (p. 69 
ff.),argucs, as Ferrier, in his review of Berkeley (Philosophical Remains, ii. 
330 fL), had argued before him, that it is logically impossible we should 
perceive the distance of anything from the eye by sight; for r seen distance 
can only be between seen termini ; and one of the termini, in the case of dis 
tance from the eye, is the eye itself, which is not seen. Similarly of the 
distance of two points behind each other : the near one hides the far one, 
no space is seen between them. For the space between two objects to be 
seen, both must appear beside each other, then the space in quest ion will be 
visible. On no other condition is its visibility possible. The conclusion is 
that things can properly be seen only in what Lipps calls a surface, and 
that our knowledge of the third dimension must needs be conceptual, not 
sensational or visually intuitive. 

But no arguments in the world can prove a feeling which actually 
exists to be impossible. The feeling of depth or distance, of faruess or 
awayness, does actually exist as a fact of our visual sensibility. All that 
Professor Lipps*8 reasonings prove concerning it is that it is not linear in 



S22 



PSYCHOLOGY. 



a simple law by which to connect the seen direction and 
distance of objects with the retinal impressions they pro- 
dace. Two principal theories have been held of this mat- 
ter, the * theory of identical points,* and the * theory of pro- 
jection,' — each incompatible with the other, and each 
beyond certain limits becoming inconsistent with the 
facts. 

The Theory of Identical Points. 

This theory starts from the truth that on both retinsB 
an impression on the upper half makes us perceive an ob- 
ject as below, on the lower half as above, the horizon ; and 





Fio.54. 

on the right half an object to the left, on the left half one 
to the right, of tlie median line. Thus each quadrant of one 
retina corresponds as e whole to the similar quadrant of 

its character, or in its immediacy fully homogeneous and consubstantial 
with the feeling of literal distance between two seen termini; in short, 
Jiat there are tipo sorts of optical sensation, each inexplicably due to a 
peculiar neural process. The neural process is easily discovered, in the 
case of lateral extension or spreadoutness, to be the number of retinal 
nerve- ends affected by the light ; in the case of protension or mere farness 
it is more complicated and, as we have concluded, is still to seek. The 
two sensible qualities unite in the primitive visual bigness. The measure- 
ment of their various amounts against each other obeys the general laws 
of all such measurements. We discover their equivalencies by means 
of objects, apply the same units to both, and translate them into each other 
so habitually that at last they get to seem to us even quite similar in kind. 
This final appearance of homogeneity may perhaps be facilitated by the 
fact that in binocular vision two points situated on the prolongation of the 
optical axis of one of the eyes, so that the near one hides the far one, are by 
the other eye seen laterally apart. Each eye has in fact a foreshortened 
lateral view of the other's line of sight. In The London Times for Feb. 8, 
1884, is an interesting letter by J. D. Dougal, who tries to explain by this 
reason why two-eyed ritle-shootmg has such advantages over shooting with 
one eye closed. 



THB PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 223 

the other ; and within two similar quadrants, al and ar for 
example, there should, if the correspondence were consist- 
ently carried out, be geometrically similar points which, if 
impressed at the same time by light emitted from the same 
object, should cause that object to appear in the same direc- 
tion to either eye. Experiment verifies this surmise. If 
we look at the starry vault with parallel eyes, the stars all 
seem single ; and the laws of perspective show that under 
the circumstances the parallel light-rays coming from each 
star must impinge on points within either retma which are 
geometrically similar to each other. The same result may 
be more artificially obtained. If we take two exactly simi- 
lar pictures, smaller, or at least no larger, than those on an 
ordinary stereoscopic slide, and if we look at them as 
stereoscopic slides are looked at, that is, at one with each 
eye (a median partition confining the view of either eye to 
the picture opposite it), we shall see but one flat picture, 
all of whose parts appear sharp and single.* Identical 
points being impressed, both eyes see their object in the 
same direction, and the two objects consequently coalesce 
into one. 

The same thing may be shown in still another way. 
With fixed head converge the eyes upon some conspicuous 
objective point behind a pane of glass ; then close either 
eye alternately and make a little ink-mark on the glass, 
* covering ' the object as seen by the eye which is momen- 
tarily open. On looking now with both ejes the ink-marks 
will seem single, and in the same direction as the objective 
point Conversely, let the eyes converge on a single ink- 

* Just so. a pair of spectacles held an inch or so from the eyes seem 
like one large median glass. The faculty of seeing stereoscopic slides single 
without an instrument is of the utmost utility to the student of physio- 
logical optics, and persons with strong eyes can easily acquire it. The 
only (lifticulty lies in dissociating the degree of accommodation from the 
degree of convergence which it usually accompanies. If the right picture 
\s focussed by the right e3'e, the left by the left eye, the optic axes must 
either be parallel or converge upon an imaginary point some distance 
behind the plane of the pictures, according to the size and distance apart 
of the pictures. The accommodation, however, has to be made for the 
plane of the pictures itself, and a near accommodation with a far-off con- 
vergence is something which the ordinary use of our eyes never teaches U8 
to effect. 



224 P8TOH0L0OT. 

spot on the glass, and then by alternate shutting of them 
let it be noted what objects behind the glass the spot 
covers to the right and left eye respectively. Now with 
both eyes open, both these objects and the spot will 
appear in the same place, one or other of the three becom- 
ing more distinct according to the fluctuations of retinal 
attention.* 

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

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

It is an immediate oonsegvence of the law of identical pro- 

♦ These two observations prove the law of identical direction only for 
objects which excite the fovea or lie in the line of direct looking. Ob- 
servers skilled in indirect vision can, however, more or less easily verify the 
law for outlying retinal points. 



TEB PBRCBPTION OF BPAOB, 



226 



jection of images on geometrically similar points that images 
tvhich/aU upon geometrically dispabate jxnn^ of the tvx> retinae 
should be projected in disparate directions^ and that their objects 
should consequenUy appear in two places^ or look double. 
Take the parallel rays from a star falling upon two eyes 
which converge upon a near object, O, instead of being 
parallel, as in the previously instanced case. If SL and SB 
in Fig. 65 be the parallel rays, each of them will fall upon 
the nasal half of tiie retina which it strikes. 



8 8 
"" id 



Fio. 66. 



But the two nasal halves are disparate, geometrically 
symmetrical^ not geometrically similar. The image on the 
left one will therefore appear as if lying in a direction left- 
ward of the Cyclopean eye's line of sight ; the image of the 
right one will appear far to the right of the same direction. 
The star will, in short, be seen double, — * homonymously ' 
double. 

Conversely, if the star be looked at directly with parallel 
axes, O will be seen double, because its images will aflfect 
the outer or cheek halves of the two retinae, instead of one 
outer and one nasal half. The position of the images will 
here be reversed from that of the previous case. The right 



226 PaTOHOLOQY. 

eje*s image will now appear to the left, the left eye's to the 
right — ^the double images will be * heteronymous. ' 

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

Careful experiments made by many observers according 
to the so-called haploscopic method confirm this law, and 
show that corresponding pointSf of single visual direction^ exist 
upon the two retinae. For the detail of these one must con- 
sult the special treatises. 

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

Here comes the first great conflict of the identity-theory 
with experience. Were the theory true, we ought all to 
have an intuitive knowledge of the horopter as the line oi 
distinctest vision. Objects placed elsewhere ought to seem, 
if not actually double, at least blurred. And yet no living 
man makes any such distinction between tlie parts of his 
field of \'ision. To most of us the whole field appears single, 
and it is only by rare accident or by special education that 
we ever catch a glimpse of a double image. In 1838, Wheat- 
stone, in his truly classical memoir on binocular vision and 
the stereoscope,* showed that the disparateness of the 

* This essay, published in the Philosophical TraDsactions, contaiDs the 
germ of almost all the methods applied since to the study of optical percep- 
tloQ. It seems a pity that England, leading off so brilliantly the modem 



TUB PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 227 

points ou which the two images of an object fall does not 
within certain limits affect its seen singleness at all, but 
rather the diaixvnce at which it shall appear. Wheatstone 
made an observation, moreover, which subsequently became 
the bone of much hot contention, in which he strove to 
show that not only might disparate images fuse, but im- 
ages on corresponding or identical points might be seen 
double.* 

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

Add to this that the experiment quoted from Helmholtz 
above by no means always succeeds, but that many indi- 
viduals place their, finger between the object and one of 
their eyes, oftenest the right; t finally, observe that the 

epoch of this study, should so quickly have dropped out of the field. 
Almost all subsequent progress has been made in Germany, Holland, and, 
loT^o intertallo, America. 

* This is no place to report this controversy, but a few bibliographic 
references may not be inappropriate. Wheatstone 's own experiment is in 
section 12 of his memoir. In favor of his interpretation see Helmholtz, 
Phys. Opt.,pp. 737-9; Wundt. Physiol. Psychol . 2leAufl. p. 144; Nagel, 
Sehen mit zwei Augen, pp. 78-83 Against Wheatstone see Volkmann. 
Arch. f. Ophth., v. 2-74. and Untersuchungen. p 266 ; Hering, Beitrftgezui 
Physiologic, 29-45, also in Hermann's Hdbch. d Physiol., Bd. iii. 1 Th. 
p. 435 . Aubert, Physiologic d Netzhaut, p. 322 ; Sch5n. Archiv f. Ophthal., 
XXIV. 1. pp. 56-65 ; and Donders, ihul. xiii 1. p. 15 and note. 

t When we see the finger the whole time, we usually put it in the line 
joining object and left eye if it be the left finger, joining object and right 
eye if it be the right finger. Microscopists, marksmen, or persons one of 
whose eyes is much better than the other, almost always refer directions to 
a single eye, as may be seen by the position of the shadow on their face 
when they point at a cnndlc-flame 



228 PaYCHOLOQY, 

identity-theory, with its Cyclopean starting point for all 
lines of direction, gives by itself no ground for the distance 
on any line at which an object shall appear, and has to be 
helped out in this respect by subsidiary hypotheses, which, 
in the hands of Hering and others, have become so complex 
as easily to fall a prey to critical attacks ; and it will soon 
seem as if the law of identical seen directions by corresponding 
points f although a simple formvla for expressing condsdy many 
fundamental phenmnena^ is by no means an adequate account of 
the whole matter of retinal perception.* 

The Projection- Theory. 

Does the theory of projection fare any better? This 
theory admits that each eye sees the object in a different 
direction from the other, along the line, namely, passing 
from the object through the middle of the pupil to the 
retina. A point directly fixated is thus seen on the optical 
axes of both eyes. There is only one point, however, 
which these two optical axes have in common, and that is 
the point to which they converge. Everything directly 
looked at is seen at this point, and is thus seen both single 
and at its proper distance. It is easy jx) show the incom- 
patibility of this theory \idth the theory of identity. Take 
an objective point (like O in Fig. 50, when the star is looked 
at) casting its images R' and L' on geometrically dissimilar 
parts of the two retinae and affecting the outer half of each 
eye. On the identity-theory it ought Decessarily to appear 
double, whilst on the projection-theory there is no reason 
whatever why it should not appear single, provided only 
it be located by the judgment on each line of visible direc- 



* Professor Joseph Le Gonte, who believes strongly in ihe identity- 
theory, has embodied the latter in a pair of laws of the relation between 
positions seen single and double, near or far, on the one hand, and con- 
vergences and retinal impressions, on the other, which, though compli- 
cated, seems to me by far the best descriptive formulation yet made of the 
normal fact^ of vision. His account is easily accessible to the reader in his 
volume 'Sight ' in the International Scientific Series, bk. ii. c. 8, so I say 
no more about it now, except that it does not solve any of the difficulties 
we are noting in the identity-theory, nor account for the other fluctuating 
perceptions of which we go on to treat. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 



229 



tion, neither nearer nor farther than its point of intersection 
with the other line. 

Every point in thefidd of view ought^ in truths if the pro- 
fection-theory tvere tmi/omdy vcdid^ to appear single, entirely 
irrespective of the varying positions of the eyes, for from 
every point of space two lines of visible direction pass to 
the two retinse ; and at the intersection of these lines, or 
just where the point is, there, according to the theory, it 
should appear. The objection to this theory is thvs precisdy 
the reverse of the objection to the identity -th^yry. If the latter 
rtdedy we ought to see most things double aR the time. If the 
projection-theory rvled^ we ought never to see anything double. 
As a matter of fact tve get too few double images for the iden- 
ttty^heoryy and too many for the projection-theory. 

The partisans of the projection-theory, beginning with 




Fio. 86. 

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



230 P8TCH0L0Q7. 

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

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

Yet, in spite of this tendency to inaccuracy, we are never 
actually mistaken about the half-dollar being behind the 
pen-point. It may not seem far enough off, but still it is 
farther than the point. In general it may be said that 
where the objects are known to us, no such illusion of dis- 
tance occurs in any one as the theory would require. And 
in some observers, Hering for example, it seems hardly to 
occur at all. If I look into infinite distance and get my 
finger in double images, they do not seem infinitely far off. 

* Naturally it takes a smaller object at a less distance to cover by its 
image a constant amount of retinal surface. 



THE PERCEPTION OF 8PACB. 



231 



To make objects at different distances seem equidistant, 
careful precautions must be taken to have them alike in 
appearance, and to exclude all outward reasons for ascrib- 
ing to the one a different location from that ascribed to the 
other. Thus Bonders tries to prove the law of projection 
by taking two similar electric sparks, one behind the other 
on a dark ground, one seen double ; or an iron rod placed 
so near to the eyes that its double images seem as broad as 
that of a fixated stove-pipe, the top and bottom of the objects 
being cut off by screens, so as to prevent all suggestions 
of perspective, etc. The three objects in each experiment 
seem in the same plane. ^ 

Add to this the impossibility, recognized by aR observ- 
ers, of ever seeing double with the/oveop, and the fact that 
authorities as able as those quoted in the note on Wheat- 
stone's observation deny that they can see double then with 
identical points, and we are forced to conclude that the 
projection-theory f like its predecessor, breaks dotim. Neither 
/ormnlates exactly or exhatistively a law/or all our perceptions. 

Ambiguity of Retinal Impressions, 

What does each theory try to do ? To make of seen location 
a Jioced function of retinal impression. Other facts may be 




Fio. 67. 

brought forward to show how far from fioced are the perceptive 
functions of retinal impressions. We alluded a while ago to 
the extraordinary ambiguity of the retinal image as a re- 
vealer of magnitude. Produce an after-image of the sun 
and look at your finger-tip : it will be smaller than your 
nail. Project it on the table, and it will be as big as a 
strawberry; on the wall, as large as a plate; on yonder 
mountain, bigger than a house. And yet it is an unchanged 



► Archlv f. Ophlhal.. Bd. xvii. Ablh. 2, pp. 44-6 (1871). 



232 



PSYCHOLOOT. 



retinal impression. Prepare a sheet with the figures shown 
in Fig. 57 strongly marked upon it, and get by direct fixa- 
tion a distinct after-image of each. 

Project the after-image of the cross upon the upper left- 
hand part of the wall, it will appear as in Fig. 58 ; on the 
upper right-hand it will appear as in Fig. 59. The circle 





Fio. sa 



FlO. 69. 



similarly projected will be distorted into two different 
ellipses. If the two parallel lines be projected upon the 
ceiling or floor far in front, the farther ends will diverge ; 
and if the three parallel lines be thrown on the same sur- 
faces, the upper pair will seem farther apart than the lower. 
Adding certain lines to others has the same distorting 
effect. In what is known as Zollner's pattern (Fig. 60), the 
long parallels tip towards each other the moment we draw 
the short slanting lines over them yet their retinal images 



^OOOOOOOOOOOOO 



X 



,^^'yy^''^'.^^<'^^yyyy^' 



\ 



O O O O O s^ O o ^ 



FlO. 60. 



are the same they always were. A similar distortion of 
parallels appears in Fig 61. 

Drawing a square inside the circle (Fig. 52) gives to the 
outline of the latter an indented appearance where the 
square's comers touch it. Drawing the radii inside of one 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 



233 




Fio. 61. 





Fio. es. 



• 
Fio. 68. 



234 P8TCH0L0GT, 

of the right angles in the same figure makes it seem largei 
than the other. In Fig. 63, the retinal image of the space 
between the extreme dots is in all three lines the same, yet 
it seems much larger the moment it is filled up with other 
dots. 

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

Ambiguoua Import of Eye-movements. 

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

The/eelings of convergence of the eyeballs permit of the 
same ambiguous interpretation. When objects are near we 
converge strongly upon them in order to see them ; when 
far, we set our optic axes parallel. But the exact degree of 
convergence fails to be felt ; or rather, being felt, fails to 
tell us the absolute distance of the object we are regarding. 
Wheatstone arranged his stereoscope in such a way that the 
size of the retinal images might change without the con- 
vergence altering ; or conversely, the convergence might 
change without the retinal image altering. Under these 
circumstances, be says,t the object seemed to approach or 
recede in the first case, without altering its size , in the 
second, to change its size without altering its distance — just 

*A. W. Volkmaun, UutersuchuDgen, p. 268. 
f Philosophical Transactions, 1852. p. 4. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 235 

the reverse of what might have been expected. Wheatstone 
adds, however, that * tixiug the attention ' converted each of 
these perceptions into its opposite. The same perplexity 
occurs in looking through prismatic glasses, which alter the 
eyes' convergence. We cannot decide whether the object 
has come nearer, or grown larger, or both, or neither; and 
our judgment vacillates in the most surprising way. We 
may even make our eyes diverge, and the object will none 
the less appear at a finite distance. When we look through 
the stereoscope, the picture seems at no determinate dis- 
tance. These and other facts have led Helmholtz to deny 
that the feeling of convergence has any very exact value as 
a distance-measurer.* 

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

There is still another deception, occurring in persons tvho 
have had one eye-musde suddenly paralyzed. This deception 



* Physiol. Optik, 649-664. Lutor this Huthor is led to value couverg- 
ence more highly. Arch f. (Anat. u.) Physiol. (1878), p. 322. 

f AnoniHlies of Accommodation and Refraction (New Sydenham Soc. 
Transl., London, 1864). p. 155. 

i These strange contradictions have been <'alled by Aul>ert 'secondary * 
deceptions of judgment. See GrundzUge d. Physiologischen Optik (Leip- 
zig. 1876), pp. 601, 615. 627. One of tlie best examples of them \h the small 
size of the moon as first seen through a telescope. It is larger and brighter, 
so we see its details more distinctly and judge it nearer. But because we 
judge it so much nearer we think it must have grown smaller. Of. Char- 
pentier in Jahresbericht, x. 430. 



286 P8TCH0L0QT. 

has led Wundt to affirm that the eyeball-feeling proper, the 
incoming sensation of effected rotation, tells us only of the 
direction of our eye-movements, but not of their whole ex- 
tent* For this reason, and because not only Wundt, but 
many other authors, think the phenomena in these partial 
paralyses demonstrate the existence of a feeling of innerva- 
tion, a feeling of the outgoing nervous current, opposed to 
every afferent sensation whatever, it. seems proper to note 
the facts with a certain degree of detail 

Suppose a man wakes up some morning with the exter- 
nal rectus muscle of his right eye half paralyzed, what will 
be the result? He will be enabled only with great effort 
to rotate the eye so as to look at objects lying far off to the 
right. Something in the effort he makes will make him feel 
as if the object lay much farther to the right than it really 
is. If the left and sound eye be closed, and he be asked 
to touch rapidly with his finger an object situated towards 
his right, he will point the finger to the right of it. The 
current explanation of the * something ' in the effort which 
causes this deception is that it is the sensation of the out- 
going discharge from the nervous centres, the * feeling of 
innervation,' to use Wundt's expression, requisite for bring- 
ing the open eye with its weakened muscle to bear upon 
the object to be touched. If that object be situated 20 
degrees to the right, the patient has now to innervate as 
powerfully to turn the eye those 20 degrees as formerly 
he did to turn the eye 30 degrees. He consequently 
believes as before that he has turned it 30 degrees ; until, 
by a newly-acquired custom, he learns the altered spatial 
import of all the discharges his brain makes into his right 
abducens nerve. The * feeling of innervation,' maintained 
to exist by this and other observations, plays an immense 
part in the space-theories of certain philosophers, especial- 
ly Wundt. I shall elsewhere try to show that the observa- 
tions by no means warrant the conclusions drawn from 
them, and that the feeling in question is probably a wholly 
fictitious entity, t Meanwhile it suffices to point out that 
even those who set most store by it are compelled, by the 

* Revue Philosophique, in. 9, p. 220. 
f See Chapter XXIV. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 237 

readiness with which the translocation of the field of view 
becomes corrected and further errors avoided, to admit 
that the precise space-import of the supposed sensation of 
outgoing energy is as ambiguous and indeterminate as that of 
any other of the eye-feelings tve have considered hitherto. 

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

The Choyce of the Visual Reality, 

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



238 P8TCH0L0OT. 

other optical sensations noiv absent, but which the present 
sensations suggest. 

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

Before answering either question, let us be doubly sure 
about our facts, and see how true it is that in our dealings 
toith objects tee always do pick out one of the visual imager they 
yield, to constitute the realfomfi or size. 

The matter of size has been already touched upon, so 
that no more need be said of it here. As regards shape, 
almost all the retinal shapes that objects throw are perspec- 
tive * distortions.' Square table-tops constantly present two 
acute and two obtuse angles ; circles drawn on our wall- 
papers, our carpets, or on sheets of paper, usually show like 
ellipses ; parallels approach as they recede ; human bodies 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 239 

are foreshortened ; and tlie transitions from one to another 
of these altering forms are infinite and continual. Out of 
the flux, however, one phase always stands prominent It 
is the form the object has when we see it easiest and best : 
and that is when our eyes and the object both are in what 
may be called the normal position. In this position our 
head is upright and our optic axes either parallel or sym- 
metrically convergent ; the plane of the object is perpen- 
dicular to the visual plane ; and if the object is one containing 
many lines it is turned so as to make thetn, as far as possible, 
either parallel or perpendicular to the visual plane. In this 
situation it is that we compare all shapes with each other; 
here every exact measurement and decision is made.* 

It 18 very easy to see why the normal situation should have 
this extraordinary pre-eminence. First, it is the position in 
which we easiest hold anything we are examining in our 
hands ; second, it is a turning-point between all right- and 
all left-hand perspective views of a given object ; third, it 
is the only position in which symmetrical figures seem sym- 
metrical and equal angles seem equal ; fourth, it is often 
that starting-point of movements from which the eye is 
least troubled by axial rotations, by which superposition t of 
the retinal images of diflferent lines and different parts of 
the same line is easiest produced, and consequently by 
which the eye can make the best comparative measure- 
ments in its sweeps. All these merits single the normal 
position out to be chosen. No other point of view offers 
so many aesthetic and practical advantages. Here we be- 
lieve we see the object as it is ; elsewhere, only as it seems. 
Experience and custom soon teach us, however, that the 
seeming appearance passes into the real one by continuous 
gradations. They teach us, moreover, that seeming and 
being may be strangely interchanged. Now a real circle 
may slide into a seeming ellipse ; now an ellipse may, by 
slicling in the same direction, become a seeming circle ; now 

♦ The only exception seems to be when we expressly wish to abstract from 
particulars, and to judge of the general 'effect.' Witness ladies trjring oq 
new dresses with their heads inclined and their eyes askance ; or painters in 
the same attitude judging of the ' values ' in their pictures. 

f ITie importance of Superposition will appear later on. 



240 P8TCH0L00T. 

a rectangular cross grows slant-legged ; now a slant-legged 
one grows rectangular. 

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

Sensations which tve Ignore. 

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

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

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

** The visible appearances of objects are intended by nature only as 
signs or indications, and the mind passes instantly to the things sig- 



THE PERCEPTION OF 8PA0E. 241 

uified, without making the least reflection upon the sign, or even per- 
ceiving that there is any such thing. . . . The mind has acquired a con- 
firmed and inveterate habit of inattention to them (the signs). For 
they no sooner appear than, quick as lightning, the thing signified suc- 
ceeds and engrosses all our regard. They have no name in language ; 
and although we are conscious of them when they pass through the 
mind, yet their passage is so quick and so familiar that it is absolutely 
unheeded ; nor do they leave any footsteps of themselves, either in the 
memory or imagination." (Inquiry, chap. v. §§2, 8.) 

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

The deepest inattention is to subjective optical sensa- 
tions, strictly so called, or those which are not signs of 
outer objects at all. Helmholtz's treatment of these phe- 
nomena, muacce vditantes, negative after-images, double 
images, etc., is very satisfactory. He says : 

** We only attend with any ease and exactness to our sensations in so 
far forth as they can be utilized for the knowledge of outward things ; 
and we are accustomed to neglect all those portions of them which have 
no significance as regards the external world. So much is this the case 
that for the most part special artifices and practice are required for 
the observation of these latter more subjective feelings. Although it 
might seem that nothing should be easier than to be conscious of one's 
own sensations, experience nevertheless shows that often enough either a 
special talent like that showed in eminent degree by Purkinje, or acci- 
dent or theoretic speculation, are necessary conditions for the discovery 
of subjective phenomena. Thus, for example, the blind spot on the 
retina was discovered by Mariotte by the theoretic way ; similarly by 
me the existence of * summation 'tones in acoustics. In the majority 
of cases accident is what first led observers whose attention was espe- 
cially exercised on subjective phenomena to discover this one or that ; 
only where the subjective appearances are so intense that they inter- 
fere with the perception of objects are they noticed by all men alike. 
But if they have once been discovered it is for the most part easy for 
subsequent observers who place themselves in proper conditions and 
bend their attention in the right direction to perceive them. But in 



242 P8TGH0L00T 

many cases — for example, in the phenomena of the blind spot, in the 
discrimination of over-tones and combination-tones from the ground- 
tone of musical sounds, etc. — such a strain of the attention is required, 
even with appropriate instrumental aids, that most persons fail. The 
very after-images of bright objects are by most men perceived only 
under exceptionally favorable conditions, and it takes steady practice 
to see the fainter images of this kind. It is a commonly recurring ex- 
perience that persons smitten with some eye-disease which impairs 
vision suddenly remark for the first time the muscas voUitantes which 
all through life their vitreous humor has contained, but which they now 
firmly believe to have arisen since their malady ; the truth being that 
the latter has only made them more observant of all their visual sensa- 
tions. There are also cases where one eye has gradually g^wn blind, 
and the patient lived for an indefinite time without knowing it, until, 
through the accidental closure of the healthy eye alone, the blindness 
of the other was brought to attention. 

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

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

Even where the sensation is not merely subjective, as in 
the cases of which Helmholtz speaks, but is a sign of some- 
thing outward, we are also liable, as Reid says, to overlook 
its intrinsic quality and attend exclusively to the image of 
the * thing ' it suggests. But here everyone can easily notice 
the sensation itself if he will. Usually we see a sheet of 
paper as uniformly white, although a part of it may be in 
shadow. But we can in an instant, if we please, notice the 
shadow^ as local color. A man walking towards us does 
not usually seem to alter his size ; but we can, by setting 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 243 

our attention in a peculiar way make him appear to do so. 
The whole education of the artist consists in his learning 
to see the presented signs as well as the represented things. 
No matter what the field of view means, he sees it also as 
it feds — that is, as a collection of patches of color bounded 
by lines — the whole forming an optical diagram of whose 
intrinsic proportions one who is not an artist has hardly a 
conscious inkling. The ordinary man's attention passes 
over them to their import; the artist's turns back and 
dwells upon them for their own sake. * Don't draw the 
thing as it i«, but as it looks ! ' is the endless advice of every 
teacher to his pupil ; forgetting that what it * is ' is what it 
would also ' look,' provided it were placed in what we have 
called the ' normal ' situation for vision. In this situation 
the sensation as ' sign ' and the sensation as ' object ' co- 
alesce into one, and there is no contrast between them. 

Sensations which seem Suppressed, 

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

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

** We have not a single well-attested example. In all those illusions 
which are provoked by sensations in the absence of their usually excit- 
ing objects, the mistake never vanishes by the better understanding of 
the object really present, and by insight into the cause of deception. 
Phosplienes provoked by pressure on the eyeball, by traction on the en- 
trance of the optic nerve, after-images, etc., remain projected into their 
apparent place in the field of vision, just as the image projected from 



244 PSTCnOLOQT. 

a mirror^s surface continues to be seen behind the mirror, although we 
know that to all these appearances no outward reality corresponds. 
True enough, we can remove our attention, and keep it removed, from 
sensations that have no reference to the outer world, those, e.g., of the 
weaker after-images, and of entoptic objects, etc. . . . But what would 
become of our perceptions at all if we had the power not only of ignor- 
ing, but of transforming into their oppositesy any part of them that 
differed from that outward experience, the image of which, as that of 
a present reality, accompanies them in the mind ? " * 

And again : 

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

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

(a) With Helmholtz, color-perception is equally with space- 
perception an intellectual affair. The so-called simulta- 
neous color-contrast, by which one color modifies another 
alongside of which it is said, is explained by him as an 
unconscious inference. In Chapter XVII we discussed the 
color-contrast problem ; the principles which applied to its 
solution will prove also applicable to part of the present 
problem. In my opinion, Bering has definitively proved 
that, when one color is laid beside another, it modifies the 
sensation of the latter, not by virtue of any mere mental 
suggestion, ao Helmholtz would have it, but by actually 
exciting a new nerve-process, to which the modified feeling 
of color immediately corresponds. The explanation is 
physiological, not psychological. The transformation of 

♦Physiol. Optik, p. 817. 




That processes iu the visual apparatus propagate tliem- 
selves laterallj, if one may so express it, is also shown by 
the phenom^mj of eojifrnM which occur after looking upon 
motiom of various kinds. Here are a few examples. If, 
over tli© rail of a mo^iug vessel, we look at the water iiish- 
ing along the side, and tben transfer our gaze to the deck, a 
band of planks will appear to us^ moving in the opposite 



246 rsrciioLOGY. 

direction to that in which, a moment previously, we liad 
been seeing the water move, whilst on either side of this 
band another band of planks will move as the water did. 
Looking at a waterfall, or at the road from out of a car- 
window in a moving train, produces the same illusion, which 
may be easily verified in the laboratory by a simple piece 
of apparatus. A board with a window five or six inches 
wide and of any convenient length is supported upright on 
two feei On the back side of the board, above and below 
the window, are two rollers, one of which is provided with 
a crank. An endless band of any figured stuff is passed 
over these rollers (one of which can be so adjusted on its 
bearings as to keep the stuff always taut and not liable to 
slip), and the surface of the front board is also covered with 
stuff or paper of a nature to catch the eye. Turning the 
crank now sets the central band in continuous motion, 
whilst the margins of the field remain really at rest, but 
after a while appear moving in the contrary way. Stopping 
the crank results in an illusory appearance of motion in 
reverse directions all over the field. 

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




Fio. 65. 



** If the revolution is in the direction in which the spira 
approaches the centre of the disk the entire surface of the latter 
to expand during revolution and to contract after it has ceasec 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 247 

vice versd if the movement of revolution is in the opposite direction. If 
in the former case the eyes of the observers are turned from the rotat- 
ing disk towards any familiar object — e.g. the face of a friend— the latter 
seems to contract or recede in a somewhat striking manner, and to 
expand or approach after the opposite motion of the spiral." '*' 

An elementary form of these motor illusions seems to be 
the one described by Helmholtz on pp. 568-571 of his 
Optik* The motion of anything in the field of vision along 
an acute angle towards a straight line sensibly distorts 



■li * ft-rJl __^ii!rrg' .^ ■■ B 



a M — 



FlO. 66. 

that line. Thus in Fig. 66 : Let AB be a line drawn on 
paper, CDE the tracing made over this line by the point 
of a compass steadily followed by the eye, as it moves. As 
the compass-point passes from C to D, the line appears to 
move downwards ; as it passes from D to E, the line appears 
to move upwards ; at the same time the whole line seems 
to incline itself in the direction FG during the first half 
of the compass's movement ; and in the direction HI dur- 
ing its last half ; the change from one inclination to an- 
other being quite distinct as the compass-point passes 
over D. 

Any line across which we draw a pencil-point appears 
to be animated by a rapid movement of its own towards 
the pencil-point. This apparent movement of both of two 
things in relative motion to each other, even when one of 
them is absolutely still, reminds us of the instances quoted 

* Bowditch and Hall, in Journal of Physiology, vol. iii. p. 299. Helm- 
holtz tries to explain this phenomenon by unconscious rotations of the eye- 
ball. But movements of the eyeball can only explain such appearances 
of movements as are the same over the whole field. In the windowed 
board one part of the field seems to move in one way, another part in an- 
other. The same is true when we turn from the spiral to look at the wall 
— the centre of the field alone swells out or contracts, the margin does the 
reverse or remains at rest. Mach and Dvorak have beautifully proved the 
Impossibility of eye-rotations in this case (Siizungsber. d. Wiener Akad., 
Bd. Lxi.). See also Bowditch and Hall's paper as above, p. 300. 



248 PaTCHOLOQT, 

from Yierordt on page 188, and seems to take ns back to a 
primitive stage of perception, in which the discriminations 
we now make when we feel a movement have not yet been 
made. If we draw the point of a pencil through * Zollner's 
pattern ' (Fig. 60, p. 232), and follow it with the eye, the 
whole figure becomes the scene of the most singular 
apparent unrest, of which Helmholtz has very carefully 
noted the conditions. The illusion of Zollner's figure van- 
ishes entirely, or almost so, with most people, if they 
steadily look at one point of it with an unmoving eye ; and 
the same is the case with many other illusions. 

Now all these facta taken together seeni to show — ^vaguely 
it is true, but certainly — that present excitements and after- 
effects of former excitements mxiy alter the resvU of processes 
occurring simultaneously al a distance from them in the retina 
or other portions of the apparatus for optical sensation. In 
the cases last considered, the moving eye, as it sweeps the 
fovea over certain parts of the figure, seems thereby to 
determine a modification in the feeling which the other parts 
confer, which modification is the figure's 'distortion.' It is 
true that this statement explains nothing. It only keeps 
the cases to which it applies from being explained spuri- 
ously. The spurious account of these illusions is that they are 
intellectual, not sensational^ that they are secondary, not primary, 
mental facts. The distorted figure is said to be one which 
the mind is led to imagine, by falsely drawing an uncon- 
scious inference from certain premises of which it is not 
distinctly aware. And the imagined figure is supposed to 
be strong enough to suppress the perception of whatever 
real sensations there may be. But Helmholtz, Wundt, 
Delboeuf, Zollner, and all the advocates of unconscious in- 
ference are at variance with each other when it comes to 
the question what these unconscious premises and infer- 
ences may be. 

That small angles look proportionally larger than larger 
ODes is, in brief, the fundamental illusion to which almost all 
authors would reduce the peculiarity of Fig. 67, as of Figs. 
60, 61, 62 (pp. 232, 233). This peculiarity of small angles 
is by Wundt treated as the case of a filled space seeming 
larger than an empty one, as in Fig. 68 ; and this, according 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 



249 



r 

r 
2 



to both Delboeof and Wundt, is owing to the fact that more 
muscular innervation is needed for the eye to traverse a 
filled space than an empty one, because the points and lines 





\ 



\ 





Fio. 67. 



in the filled space inevitably arrest and constrain the eye, 
and this makes us feel as if it were doing more work, ie. 
traversing a longer distance.* When, however, we recol- 

a h e 



Fio. 68. 

lect that muscular movements are positively proved to have 
7U> share in the waterfall and revolving-spiral illusions, and 
that it is hard to see how Wundt's and Delboeuf s particular 
form of muscle-explanation can possibly apply to the com- 
pass-point illusion considered a moment ago, we must con- 
clude that these writers have probably exaggerated, to say 
the least, the reach of their muscle-explanation in the case 



* Bulletins de TAcad. de Belgique, xxi. 2; Revue Phllosophique, VL 
pp. 228-5; Physiologische Psycliologie. 2te Aufl. p. 108. Compare Mttn- 
sterberg's view8. Beitragc*. Heft 2. p. 174. 



260 P8TCH0L0QT. 

of the subdivided angles and lines. Never do we get sucb 
strong muscular feelings as when, against the course of na- 
ture, we oblige our eyes to be still ; but fixing the eyes on 
one point of the figure, so far from making that part of the 
latter seem larger, dispels, in most persons, the illusion of 
these diagrams altogether. 

As for Helmholtz, he invokes, to explain the enlarge- 
.ment of small angles,* what he calls a ^law of oomtrosV 
between directions and distances of lines, analogous to thai 
between colors and intensities of light Lines cutting 
another line make the latter seem more inclined away from 
them than it really is. Moreover, clearly recognizable mag- 
nitudes appear greater than equal magnitudes which we 
but vaguely apprehend. But this is surely a sensational- 
istic law, a native function of our seeing-apparatus. Quite 
as little as the negative after-image of the revolving spiral 
could such contrast be deduced from any association of 
ideas or recall of past objects. The principle of contrast 
is criticised by Wundt, f who says that by it small spaces 
ought to appear to us smaller, and not larger, than they 
really are. Helmholtz might have retorted (had not the 
retort beeu as fatal to the uniformity of his own principle 
as to Wundt' s) that if the muscle-explanation were true, it 
ought not to give rise to just the opposite illusions in the 
skin. We saw on p. 141 that subdivided spaces appear 
shorter than empty ones upon the skin. To the instances 
there given add this : Divide a line on paper into equal 
halves, puncture the extremities, and make punctures all 
along one of the halves ; then, with the finger-tip on the 
opposite side of the paper, follow the line of punctures ; 
the empty half will seem much longer than the punctured 
half. This seems to bring things back to unanalyzable 
laws, by reason of which our feeling of size is determined 
differently in the skin and in the retina, even when the 
objective conditions are the same. Bering's explanation 
of ZoUner's figure is to be found in Hermann's Handb. d. 
Physiologic, in. 1. p. 579. Lipps % gives another reason 

♦ Physiol. Optik, pp. 562-71. 
t Physiol. Psych., pp. 107-«. 
X Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, pp. 626-80. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 251 

why lines cutting another line make the latter seem to 
bend away from them more than is really the * case. If, 
he says, wo draw (Fig. 69) the line pm upon the line aA, 
and follow the latter with our eye, we shall, on reaching 
the point m, tend for a moment to slip off ah and to follow 
mpf without distinctly realizing that we are not still on the 
main line. This makes us feel as if the remainder mb of 
the main line were bent a little away from its original direc- 
tion. The illusion is apparent in the shape of a seeming 



a- 




Fio. 60. 



approach of the ends 6, 6, of the two main lines. This to 
my mind would be a more satisfactory explanation of this 
class of illusions than any of those given by previous au- 
thors, were it not again for what happens in the skin. 

Considering all the circumstances, I fed justified in dis- 
carding his entire batch of illusions as irrelevant to our pres- 
ent inquiry. Whatever they may prove, they do not prove 
that our visual percepts of form and movement may not be 
sensations strictly so called. They much more probably 
fall into line with ^he phenomena of irradiation and of 
color-contrast, and with Vierordt's primitive illusions of 
movement. They show us, if anything, a realm of sen- 
sations in which our habitual experience has not yet made 
traces, and which persist in spite of our better knowledge, 
t^nsuggestive of those other space-sensations which we all 
the time know from extrinsic evidence to constitute the real 
space-determinations of the diagram. Very likely, if these 
sensations were as frequent and as practically important as 
they now are insignificant and rare, we should end by sub- 
stituting their significates — the real space-values of the 
diagrams — for them. These latter we should then seem to 



262 



P8TCH0L0GT. 



see directly, and the illusions would disappear like that of 
the size of a tooth-socket when the tooth has been out a 
week. 



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

To which the answer is that it t9 a datum of sensation, 
but a datum which, like many other data, must first be 
discriminated. As a rule, no sensible qualities are dis- 
criminated without a motive.* And those that later we 
learn to discriminate were originally felt confused. As 
well pretend that a voice, or an odor, which we have 
learned to pick out, is no sensation now. One may easily 
acquire skill in discriminating double images, though, as 
Hering somewhere says, it is an art of which one cannot 
become master in one year or in two. For masters like 
Hering himself, or Le Conte, the ordinary stereoscopic dia- 
grams are of little use. Instead of combining into one solid 
appearance, they simply cross each other with their doubled 



r r ^ ^ y ^ 



Fio. 70. 



lines. Volkmann has shown a great variety of ways in 
which the addition of secondary lines, diflfering in the two 

*Cf. supra, p. 515 flf. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 253 

fields, helps us to see the primary lines double. The effect 
is analogous to that shown in the cases which we despatched 
a moment ago, where given lines have their space-value 
changed by the addition of new lines, without our being 
able to say why, except that a certain mutual adhesion of 
the lines and modification of the resultant feeling takes 
place by psychophysiological laws. Thus, if in Fig. 70, 1 
and r be crossed by an horizontal line at the same level, 
and viewed stereoscopically, they appear as a single pair of 
lines, «, in space. But if the horizontal be at different 
levels, as in T, r', three lines appear, as in «'.* 

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

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

* See Archiv f. Ophthalm. , v. 2, 1 (1859), where many more examples 
are given. 

f Uutersuchungen, p. 250 ; see also p. 242. 

J I pass over certain difficulties about double images, drawn from the 
perceptions of a few squinters (e.g. by Schweigger, Klin. Untersuch tlber 
das Schielen. Berlin, 1881 : by Javal. Annales d'Oculistique, lxxxv. 
p. 217), because the facts are exceptional at best and very difficult of inter- 
pretation. In favor of the sensationalistic or nativistic view of one such 
case, see the important paper by Von Kries, Archiv f. Ophthalm., xxiv. 
4, p. 117. 



254 



ParCHOLOGT. 



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




Fig. 71. 

really oblique-legged figures are seen as rectangular crosses. 
The unstable judgments of relative distance and size 
were also mentioned on pp. 231-2. Whatever the size may 
be of the retinal image which an object makes, the object is 
seen as of its own normal size. A man moving towards us 
is not sensibly perceived to groiVy for example ; and my 
finger, of which a single joint may more than conceal him 
from my view, is nevertheless seen as a much smaller object 
than the man. As for distances, it is often possible to make 
the farther part of an object seem near and the nearer part 
far. A human profile in intaglio, looked at steadily with 
one eye, or oven both, soon appears irresistibly as a bas- 
relief. The inside of a common pasteboard mask, painted 
like the outside, and viewed with one eye in a direct light, 
also looks convex instead of hollow. So strong is the illu- 

* Pbysiologiscbe Uutersucbuugeu im Gebielc dcr Optik, v. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 



255 



«ion, after long fixation, that a friend who painted suck a 
mask for me told me it soon became difficult to see how to 
itpply the brush. Bend a visiting-card across the middle, 
8o that its halves form an angle of 90^ more or less ; set it 
npright on the table, as in Fig. 72, and view it with one eye. 




Tou can make it appear either as if it opened towards jou 
or away from you. In- the former case, the angle ab lies 




upon the table, b being nearer to you than a ; in the latter 

case ah seems vertical to the table — as indeed it really is — 

with a nearer to you than b* Again, look,with either one or 

♦ Cf. E. Mach, Beitrilge zur Analyse der Einptindungen. p. 87. 



266 



P87CH0L00T. 



two eyes, at the opening of a wine-glass or tumbler (Fig, 
73), held either above or below the eye's leveL The retinal 
image of the opening is an oval, but we can see the oval in 
either of two ways, — ^as if it were the perspective view of a 
circle whose edge b were farther from us than its edge a 
(in which case we should seem to be looking down on the 
circle), or as if its edge a were the more distant edge (in 
which case we should be looking up at it through the h side 
of the glass). As the manner of seeing the edge changes, 
the glass itself alters its form in space and looks straight 
or seems bent towards or from the eye,* according as the 
latter is placed beneath or above ii 

Plane diagrams also can be conceived as solids, and that 
in more than one way. Figs. 74, 75, 76, for example, are am- 




Fio. 74. 



Fio. 7& 




biguous perspective projections, and may each of them re- 
mind us of two diflferent natural objects. Whichever of these 
♦ Cf. V. Egger, Revue Pbilos., xx. 488. 



THB PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 267 

objects we conceive clearly at tlie moment of looking at the 
figure, we seem to «ee in all its solidity before us. A little prac- 
tice will enable as to flap the figures, so to speak, backwards 
and forwards from one object to the other at will. We need 
only attend to one of the angles represented, and imagine it 
either solid or hollow — pulled towards us out of the plane 
of the paper, or pushed back behind the same — and the 
whole figure obeys the cue and is instantaneously trans- 
formed beneath our gaze.* 

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

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

In the case of the diagrams 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, the real 
object, lines meeting or crossing each other on a plane, is 

* Loeb (Pfltiger's Arcbiv, xl. 274) has proved that muscular changes 
of adaptation in the eye for near and far distance are what determine the 
form of the relief. 

t The strongest passage in Helmholtz's argument against sensations of 
space is relative to these fluctuations of seen relief: "Ought one not to 
conclude that if sensations of relief exist at all, they must be so faint and 
vague as to have no influence compared with that of past experience? 
Ought we not to believe that the perception of the third dimension may 
have arisen without them, since we now sec it taking place as well against 
them as toit/i them ?" (Physiol. Optik. p. 817.) 




258 PSYCHOLOGY. 



replaced by an imagined solid which we describe as seeftu 
Really it is not seen bttt only so vividly conceived as to 
approach a vision of reality. We feel all the while, however, 
that the solid suggested is not solidly there. The reason 
why one solid may seem more easily suggested than 
another, and why it is easier in general to perceive the 
diagram solid than flat, seems due to probability.* Those 
lines have countless times in our past experience been 
drawn on our retina by solids for once that we have seen 
them flat on paper. And hundreds of times we have 
looked down upon the upper surface of parallelopipeds, 
stairs and glasses, for once that we have looked upwards 
at their bottom — hence we see the solids easiest as if from 
above. 

Habit or probability seems also to govern the illusion of 
the intaglio profile, and of the hollow mask. We have never 
seen a human face except in relief — hence the case with 
which the present sensation is overpowered. Hence, too, 
the obstinacy with which human faces and forms, and 
other extremely familiar convex objects, refuse to appear 
hollow when viewed through Wheatstone's pseudoscope. 
Our perception seems wedded to certain total ways of 
seeing certain objects. The moment the object is suggested 
at all, it takes possession of the mind in the fulness of its 
stereotyped habitual form. This explains the suddenness 
of the transformations when the perceptions change. The 
object shoots back and forth completely from this to that 
familiar thing, and doubtful, indeterminate, and composite 
things are excluded, apparently because we are unused to 
their existence. 

When we turn from the diagrams to the actual folded 
>dsiting-eard and to the real glass, the imagined form seems 
fully as real as the correct one. The card flaps over ; the 
glass rim tilts this way or that, as if some inward spring 
suddenly became released in our eye. In these changes the 
actual retinal image receives different complements from the 
mind. But the remarkable thing is that the complement 



* Cf. E. Mach, Beitrilge, etc., p. 90, and the preceding chapter of tbt 
present work, p. 86 ff. 



THE PRRGEPTION OF 8PA0K 259 

tod the image combine so completely that the twain are 
one flesh, as it were, and cannot be discriminated in the 
result If the complement be, as we have called it (on pp. 
237-8), a set of imaginary absent eye-sensations, they seem 
no whit less vividly there than the sensation which the eye 
now receives from without. 

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

The mystery is solved when we note the class to which 
all these experiences belong. They are 'perceptions' of 
definite 'things,' definitely situated in tridimensional space. 
The mind uniformly uses its sensations to identify things by. 
The sensation is invariably apperceived by the idea, name, 
or * normal ' aspect (p. 238) of the thing. The peculiarity of 
the optical signs of things is their extraordinary mutability. 
A * thing ' which we follow with the eye, never doubting of 
its physical identity, will change its retinal image inces- 
santly. A cross, a ring, waved about in the air, will pass 
through every conceivable angular and elliptical form. All 
the while, however, as we look at them, we hold fast to the 
perception of their * real ' shape, by mentally combining 
the pictures momentarily received with the notion of peculiar 
positions in space. It is not the cross and ring pure and 
simple which we perceive, but the cross so hdd, the ring so 
hdd. From the day of our birth we have sought every hour 
of our lives to correct the apparent form of things, and trans- 

* I ought to say that I seem always able to see the cross rectangular at 
will. But this appears to come from an imperfect absorption of the 
rectangular after-image by the inclined plane at which the eyes look. The 
cross, with me, is apt to detach itself from this and then look square. I get the 
illusion better from the circle, whose after-image becomes in various ways 
elliptical on being projected upon the different surfaces of the room, and 
cannot then be easily made to look circular again. 



260 P8TCH0L0QT, 

late it into the real form by keeping note of the way they 
are placed or held In no other class of sensations does 
this incessant correction occur. What wonder, then, that 
the notion * so placed ' should invincibly exert its habitual 
corrective effect, even when the object with which it com- 
bines is only an after-image, and make us perceive the latter 
under a changed but more * real ' form ? The * real ' form 
is also a sensation conjured up by memory ; but it is one so 
probdble, so habittuiUy conjured up when we have just this 
combination of optical experiences, that it partakes of the 
invincible freshness of reality, and seems to break through 
that law which elsewhere condemns reproductive processes 
to being so much fainter than sensations. 

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

Bering has well accounted for the sensationally vivid 
character of these habitually reproduced forms. He says, 

* In Chapter XVIII, p. 74. I gave a reason why imagnnalions ou^ht not 
to be as vivid as sensations. It should be borne in mind that that reason 
does not apply to these complemental imaginings of the real shape of 
things actually before our eyes. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 261 

after reminding us that every visual sensation is correlated 
to a physical process in the nervous apparatus : 

^* If this psychophysical process is aroused, as usually happens, by 
light-rays impinging on the retina, its form depends not only on the na- 
ture of these rays, but on the constitution of the entire nervous appa- 
ratus which is connected with the organ of vision, and on the state in 
which it finds itself. The same stimulus may excite widely different 
sensations according to this state. 

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

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

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

** But not only by repetition of the same retinal image, but by that 
of similar ones, will the law obtain. Portions of the image common to 
the successive experiences will awaken, as it were, a stronger echo in 
the nervous apparatus than other portions. Hence it results that repro- 
duction is usually elective : the more strongly reverberating parts of the 
picture yield stronger feelings than the rest. This may result in the 



262 P8T0H0L0Q7. 

latter being quite overlooked and, as it were, eliminated from perception. 
It may even come to pass that instead of these parts eliminated by elec< 
tion a feeling of entirely different elements comes to consciousness — 
elements not objectively contained in the stimulus. A group of sensa- 
tions, namely, for which a strong tendency to reproduction has become, 
by frequent repetition, ingrained in the nervous system will easily revive 
as a wliole when, not its whole retinal image, but only an essential part 
thereof, returns. In this case we get some sensations to which no ade- 
quate stimulus exists in the retinal image, and which owe their being 
solely to the reproductive power of the nervous apparatus. This is 
wmplementary (ergdmende) reproduction. 

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



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 



263 



tion to the production of that percept which our judgment tells us is 
right, our knowledge strives in vain to conjure up the feeling of it ; 
we then know that we see something to which no reality corresponds, 
but we see it all the same." * 

Note that no object not prchohle^ no object which we are not 
incessantly practised in reproducing, can acquire this vividness 
in imagination. Objective corners are ever changing their 
imgles to the eyes, spaces their apparent size, lines their 
distance. But by no transmutation of position in space 
does an objective straight line appear bent, and only in one 
I position out of an infinity does a broken line look straight. 
Accordingly, it is impossible by projecting the after-image 

A B 




Fio. 77. 

cJ, a straight line upon two surfaces which make a solid 
angle with each other to give the line itself a sensible 
*kink.' Look with it at the corner of your room: the 
after-image, which may overlap all three surfaces of the 
comer, still continues straight. Volkmann constructed a 
complicated surface of projection like that drawn in Fig. 
77, but he found it impossible so to throw a straight after- 
image upon it as to alter its visible form. 

♦Hermann's TTandb. dor Physiologic, in. 1. p. 565-71. 



264 



P8T0H0L0GT. 



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

Similarly, a square cross, or a square, drawn on paper, 
ishould look higher than it is broad. And that this is actu- 
ally the case, the reader may verify by a glance at Fig. 78. 



Fio. 78. 



For analogous reasons the upper and lower halves of the 
letter S, or of the figure 8, hardly seem to differ. But when 
turned upside down, as g, g, the upper half looks much the 
larger, t 



* Bulletin de TAcademie de Belgique, 2me Serie, xix. 2. 

f Wundt seeks to explain all these illusions by the relatively stronger 
* feeling of innervation ' needed to move the eyeballs upwards, — a careful 
study of the muscles concerned is taken to prove this, — and a consequently 
greater estimate of the distance traversed. It suflaces to remark, however, 
with Lipps, that were the innervation all, a column of 8's placed on top 
of each other should look each larger than the one below it, and a weather- 
cock on a steeple gigantic, neither of which is the case. Only the halves 
of the mme object look diflferect in size, because the customary correction 



THE PERCEPTION OF 8PACE, 265 

Hering has tried to explain our exaggeration of small 
angles in the same way. We have more to do with right 
angles than with any others : right angles, in fact, have an 
altogether unique sort of interest for the human mind« 
Nature almost never begets them, but we think space by 
means of them and put them everywhere. Consequently 
obtuse and acute ones, liable always to be the images of 
right ones foreshortened, particularly easily revive right 
ones in memory. It is hard to look at such figures as 
a, 6, c, in Fig. 79, without seeing them in perspective, as 






I 

Fio. T». 

approximations, at least, to foreshortened rectangular 
forms. * 

At the same time the genuine sensational form of the 
lines before us can, in all the cases of distortion by sug- 
gested perspective, be felt correctly by a mind able to ab- 
stract from the notion of perspective altogether. Individ- 
uals differ in this abstracting power. Artistic training im- 
proves it, so that after a little while errors in vertical bi- 
section, in estimating height relatively to breadth, etc., be- 
come impossible. In other words, we learn to take the 
optical sensation before us pare, f 

for foreshortening bears only on the relations of the parts of special ih%ng$ 
spread out before us. Cf. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., 2te Aufl. n. 9ft-8; 
Th. Lipps, Grundtatsachen, etc., p 585. 

* HeriDg would purily solve in this way the mystery of Figs. 60, 61, and 
67. No doubt the explanation partly applies ; but the strange cessation of 
the illusion when we fix the gaze fails to be accounted for thereby. 

t Helmholtz has sought (Physiol. Optik, p. 715) to explain the diverg- 
ence of the apparent vertical meridians of the two retinae, by the manner 
in which an identical line drawn on the ground before us in the median 
plane will throw its images on the two eyes respectively. The matter is 
too technical for description here ; the imlearned reader may be referred 
for it to J. Le Conte*s Sight in the Internal. Scient. Series, p. 108 ff. But, for 
the benefit of those to whom verbnm mt, I cannot help saying that it seems 
to me that the exactneu of the relation of the two meridians— whether di^sr- 



266 F8Y0H0L0QY, 

We may then sum up <yur study of illusions by saying that 
they in no wise undermine our view that every spatial determi- 
nation of things is originally given in the shape of a sensation 
of the eyes. They only show how very potent certain 
imagined sensations of the eyes may become. 

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

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

gent or not, for their divergence differs in individuals and often in one in- 
dividual at diverse times— precludes its being due to the mere habitual 
falHngoff of the image of one objective line on both. Le Conte, e.g., 
measures their position down to a sixth of a degree, others to tenths. This 
indicates an organic identity in the sensations of the two rctinsB, which the 
experience of median perspective horizontals may roughly have agreed 
with, but hardly can have engendered. Wundt explains the divei:gence as 
usual, by the Innervaiionsgefuhl {op. cit. ii. 99 ff.). 
♦ Physiol. Optik, p. 547. 



THB PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 267 

Measurement implies a stuff to measure. Retinal sensa- 
tions give the stuff; objective things form the yard-stick ; mo- 
tion does the measuring operation; which can, of course, be 
well performed only where it is possible to make the same 
object fall on many retinal tracts. This is practically im- 
possible where the tracts make a wide angle with each 
other. But there are certain directions in the field of view, 
certain retinal lines, along which it is particularly easy to 
make the image of an object slide. The object then be- 
comes a * ruler' for these lines, as Helmholtz puts it,* 
making them seem straight throughout if the object looked 
straight to us in that part of them at which it was most 
distinctly seen. 

But all this need of superposition shows how devoid of 
exact space-import the feelings of movement are per se. As 
we compare the space-value of two retinal tracts by super- 
posing them successively upon the same objective line, so 
we also have to compare the space-value of objective angles 
and lines by superposing them on the same retinal tract. 
Neither procedure would be required if our eye-movements 
were apprehended immediately, by pure muscular feeling 
or innervation, for example, as distinct lengths and direc- 
tions in space. To compare retinal tracts, it would then 
suffice simply to notice how it feels to move any image over 
them. And two objective lines could be compared as 
well by moving different retinal tracts along them as by 
laying them along the same. It would be as easy to com- 

♦ *' We can with a short ruler draw a line as long as we please on a 
plane surface by first drawing one as long as the ruler permits, and then 
sliding the ruler somewhat along the drawn line and drawing again, etc. 
If the ruler is exactly straight, we get in this way a straight line. If it is 
somewhat curved we get a circle. Now, instead of the sliding ruler we 
use in the field of sight the central spot of distinctest vision impressed with 
a linear sensation of sight, which at times may be intensified till it becomes 
an after-image. We follow, in looking, the direction of this line, and in 
so doing we slide the line along itself and get a prolongation of its length. 
On a plane surface we can carry on this procedure on any sort of a straight 
or curved ruler, but in the field of vision there is for each direction and 
movement of the eye only one sort of line which it is possible for us to 
slide along in its own direction continually." These are what Helmholtz 
calls the • circles of direction * of the visual field— lines which he has 
studied with his usual care. Cf. Physiol. Optih, p. 548 flf. 



268 ParCROLOQT, 

pare non-parallel figures as it now is to judge of those 
which are parallel."^ Those which it took the same amount 
of movement to traverse would be equal, in whatever direc- 
tion the movement occurred. 

GBNEBAIi 8ITMMABT. 

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

All our sensations are positively and inexplicably exten- 
sive wholes. 

The sensations contributing to space-j^erccp^tow seem 
exclusively to be the surface of skin, retina, and joints. 
* Muscular ' feelings play no appreciable part in the genera- 
tion of our feelings of form, direction, etc. 

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

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

Subdivisions, once discriminated, acquire definite rela- 
tions of position towards each other within the total space. 
These * relations ' are themselves feelings of the subdivis- 
ions that intervene. When these subdivisions are not the 
seat of stimuli, the relations are only reproduced in imagi- 
nary form. 

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

The education of our space-perception consists largely 
of two processes — reducing the various sense-feelings to a 



♦ Cf. Heriug in Hermann's Handb. der Physiol., iii. 1, pp. 653-4. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 269 

common measure, and adding them together into the single 
all-including space of the real world- 

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

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

The m^QjSuring of our space-feelings against each other 
mainly comes about through the successive arousal of dif- 
ferent ones by the same thing, by our selection of certain 
ones as feelings of its real size and shape, and by the deg- 
radation of others to the status of being merely signs of 
these. 

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

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

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

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

* This shriukage and expansion of the absolute space-value of the total 
optical sensation remains to my mind the most obscure part of the whole 



270 P8TCH0L0QT. 

HISTOBICAIi. 

Let us now close with a brief historical survey. The 
first achievement of note in the study of space-perception 
was Berkeley's theory of vision. This undertook to establish 
two points, first that distance was not a visual but a tactile 
form of consciousness, suggested by visual signs ; secondly, 
that there is no one quality or 4dea ' common to the sensa- 
tions of touch and sight, such that prior to experience one 
might possibly anticipate from the look of an object any- 
thing about its felt size, shape, or position, or from the 
touch of it anything about its look. 

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

His disciples in Great Britain have solved this problem 
after Berkeley's own fashion, and to a great extent as we 
have done ourselves, by the ideas of the various senses sug- 
gesting each other in consequence of Association. But, either 
because they were intoxicated with the principle of associa- 
tion, or because in the number of details they lost their 
general bearings, they have forgotten, as a rule, to state under 
what sensible form the primitive spatial experiences are found 
which later became associated with so many other sensible 
signs. Heedless of their master Locke's precept, that the 
mind can frame unto itself no one new simple idea, they 
seem for the most part to be trying to explain the extensive 
quality itself account for it, and evolve it, by the mere asso- 
ciation together of feelings which originally possessed it not. 
They first evaporate the nature of extension by making it 
tantamount to mere * coexistence,' and then they explain 
coexistence as being the same thing as succession^ provided it 



subject. It is a real optical sensation, seeming inirospeclively to have 
nothing to do with locomotor or other suggestions. It is easy to say that 
Mho Intellect produces it,' but what does that mean? The investigator 
who will throw light on this one point will probably clear up other diffi- 
culties as well. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, 271 

be an extremely rapid or a reversible succession. Space- 
perception thus emerges without being anywhere postulated 
The only things postulated are unextended feelings and time. 
Says Thomas Brown (lecture xxhl) : " I am inclined to re- 
verse exactly the process commonly supposed ; and instead 
of deriving the measure of time from extension, to derive 
the knowledge and original measure of extension from time." 
Brown and both the Mills think that retinal sensations, 
colors, in their primitive condition, are felt with no extension 
and that the latter merely becomes inseparably associated 
with them. John Mill says : " Whatever may be the retinal 
impression conveyed by a line which bounds two colors, I 
see no ground for thinking that by the eye alone we could 

(acquire the conception of what we now mean when we say 
ttat one of the colors is outside [beside] the other." * 
Whence does the extension come which gets so insepa- 
rably associated with these non-extended colored sensations ? 
I From the ' sweep and movements ' of the eye — from mus- 

cular feelings. But, as Prof. Bain says, if movement-feel- 
ings give us any property of things, " it would seem to be 
not space, but time." t And John Mill says that " the idea 
i of space is, at bottom, one of time." % Space, then, is not to 

I' be found in any elementary sensation, but, in Bain's words, 

** as a quality, it has no other origin and no other meaning 
than the aasociation of these different [non-spatial] motor 
I and sensitive effects." § 

This phrase is mystical-sounding enough to one who 
understands association as producing nothing, but only as 
knitting together things already produced in separate ways. 
The truth is that the English Associationist school, in trying 
I to show how much their principle can accomplish, have 

1 altogether overshot the mark and espoused a kind of theory 

J in respect to space-perception which the general tenor of 

I their philosophy should lead them to abhor. Keally there 

are but three possible kinds of theory concerning space. 
Either (1) there is no spatial qvality of sensation at all, and 



I 
j 



* Examintitiou of Hamilton, 3(1 ed. p. 283. 
f Senses and Intellect, 3d ed. p. 188. 
i Exam, of Hamilton, 8d ed. p. 283. 
g Senses and Iiuellect, p. 372. 



272 PSYCHOLOGY. 

space is a mere symbol of succession ; or (2) there is an ex* 
tensive quality given immediately in certain particular sen- 
sations ; or, finally, (3) there is a quality produoed out of the 
inward resources of the mind, to envelop sensations which, 
as given originally, are not spatial, but which, on being 
cast into the spatial form, become united and orderly. This 
last is the Kantian view. Stumpf admirably designates it 
as the ' psychic stimulus ' theory, the crude sensations being 
considered as goads to the mind to put forth its slumbering 
power. 

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

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

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



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 273 

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

'* A man must be forsaken by all the gods to dream that the world we 
see outside of us, filling space in its three dimensions, moving down the 
inexorable stream of time, governed at each step by Causality's invariable 
law, — but in all this only following rules which we may prescribe for it 
in advance of all experience, — to dream, I say, that such a world should 
stand there outside of us, quite objectively real with no complicity of 
ours, and thereupon by a subsequent actj through the instrumentality 
of mere sensation, that it should enter our head and reconstruct a dupli- 
cate of itself as it was outside. For what a poverty-stricken thing is this 
mere sensation ! Even in the noblest organs of sense it is nothing more 
than a local and specific feeling, susceptible within its kind of a few 
▼ariattons, but always strictly subjective and containing in itself noth- 
ing objective, nothing resembling a perception. For sensation of every 
sort is and remains a process in the organism itself. As such it is limited 
to the territory inside the skin and can never, accordingly, per se con- 
tain anything that lies outside the skin or outside ourselves. . . . Only 
when the Understanding ... is roused to activity and brings its 
sole and only form, the law of Causality, into play, only then does the 
mighty transformation take place which makes out of subjective sensa- 
tion objective intuition. The Understanding, namely, grasps by means 
of its innate, a priori, ante-experiential form, the given sensation of the 
body as an effect which as such must necessarily have a cause. At the 
same time the Understanding summons to its aid the form of the outer 
sense which similarly lies already preformed in the intellect (or brain), 
and which is Space, in order to locate that cause outside of the organ- 
ism. ... In this process the Understanding, as 1 shall soon show, takes 
note of the most minute peculiarities of the given sensation in order to 
construct in the outer space a cause which shall completely account for 
them. This ojDeration of the Understanding is, however, not one that 
takes place discursively, reflectively, in ahstracto, by means of words 
and concepts ; but is intuitive and immediate. . . . Thus the Under- 
standing must first create the objective world ; never can the latter, 
already complete in se, simply promenade into our heads through the 
senses and organic apertures. For the senses yield us nothing further 
than the raw material which must be first elaborated into the objective 
conception of an orderly physical world-system by means of the afore- 
said simple forms of Space, Time, and Causality. . . . Let me show the 



274 ParOHOLOOT. 

great chasm between sensation and peroeption by showing how raw the 
material is out of which the fair structure is upreared. Only two senses 
serve objectiye perception : touch and sight. They alone furnish the 
data on the basis whereof the Understanding, by the process indicated, 
erects the objective world. . . . These data in themselves are still no 
perception ; that is the Understanding's work. If I press with my hand 
against the table, the sensation I receive has no analogy with the idea 
of the firm cohesion of the parts of this mass : only when my Under- 
standing passes from the sensation to its cause does it create for itself 
a body with the properties of solidity, impenetrability, and hardness. 
When in the dark I lay my hand on a surface, or grasp a ball of three 
inches diameter, in either case the same parts of the band receive the 
impression : but out of the different contraction of the hand in the two 
cases my Uuderstandiug constructs the form of the body whose contact 
caused the feeling, and confirms its construction by leading me to move 
my baud over the body. If one bom blind handles a cubical body, the 
sensations of his hand are quite uniform on all sides and in all direc- 
tions.— only the corners press upon a smaller part of his skin. In these 
sensations, as such, there is nothing whatever analogous to a cube. But 
from the felt resistance his Understanding infers immediately and 
intuitively a cause thereof, which now presents itself as a solid body ; 
and from the movements of exploration which the arms made whilst 
the feelings of the hands remained constant he constructs, in the space 
known to him a priori^ the body's cubical shape. Did he not bring 
with him ready-made the idea of a cause and of a space, with the laws 
thereof, there never could arise, out of those successive feelings in his 
hand, the image of a cube. If we let a string run through our closed 
hand, we immediately construct as the cause of the friction and its dura- 
tion in such an attitude of the hand, a long cylindrical body moving 
uniformly in one direction. But never out of the pure sensation in the 
hand could the idea of movement, that is, of change of position in space 
by means of time, arise : such a content can never lie in sensation, nor 
come out of it. Our Intellect, antecedently to all experience, must bear 
in itself the intuitions of Space and Time, and therewithal of the possi- 
bility of motion, and no less the idea of Causality, to pass from the 
empirically given feeling to its cause, and to construct the latter as a 
so moving body of the designated shape. For how great is the abyss 
between the mere sensation in the hand and the ideas of causality, 
materiality, and movement through Space, occurring in Time I The 
feeling in the hand, even with different contacts and positions, is some- 
thing far too uniform and poor in content for it to be possible to con- 
strue.' t out of it the idea of Space with its three dimensions, of the 
action of bodies on each other, with the properties of extension, impen- 
etrability, cohesion, shape, hardness, softness, rest, and motion — in 
short, the foundations of the objective world. This is only possible 
through Space, Time, and Causality ... bpjng preformed in the 
Intellect itself, . . . from wh«nce it a^ain follows that the DAroeption 



THE PERCEPTION OF 8PA0B. 276 

of the external world is essentially an intellectual process, a work of the 
Understanding, to which sensation furnishes merely the occasion^ and 
the data to be interpreted in each particular case/* * 

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

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

The other prominent German writers on space are also 
' psychical stimulists.' Herbart, whose influence has been 
widest, says * the resting eye sees no 8pace,'t and ascribes 

* Vierfache Wnrzel des Satzes vom zureichendea Grunde, pp. 5^7. 
t Psychol, als Wissensclmft. S 111. 



276 PSTCHOLOQT, 

visual extension to the influence of movements combining 
with the non-spatial retinal feelings so as to form gradated 
series of the latter. A given sensation of such a series 
reproduces the idea of its associates in regular order, and 
its idea is similarly reproduced by any one of them with 
the order reversed. Out of the fusion of these two con- 
trasted reproductions comes the form of space* — Heaven 
knows how. 

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

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

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

**In the eye, space-perception has certain constant peculiarities 
which prove that no single optical sensation by itself possesses the ex- 
tensive form, but that everywhere in our perception of space heterogene- 

♦ Psychol, als Wissenschaft, § 113. 

t Lehrbuch d. Psychol., 2te Auflage, Bd. ii. p. 66. Volkmann's fifth 
chapter contains a really precious collection of historical notices concern- 
ing space- perception theories. 



i 



I 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 277 

ouB feelings combine. If we simply suppose that luminous sensations 
per 86 fe^l extensive, our supposition is shattered by that influence of 
movement in vision which is so clearly to be traced in many normal 
errors in the measurement of the field of view. If we assume, on the 
other hand, that the movements and their feelings are alone possessed 
of the extensive quality, we make an unjustified hypothesis, for the 
phenomena compel us, it is true, to accord an influence to movement, 
but give ns no right to call the retinal sensations indifferent, for there 
are no visual ideas without retinal sensations. If then we wish rigor- 
ously to express the given facts, we can ascribe a spatial constitution 
only to combinations of retinal sensations with those of movement." 

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

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

Now let no modest reader think that if this sounds ob- 
scure to him it is because he does not know the full con- 
text ; and that if a wise professor like Wundt can talk so 
fluently and plausibly about * combination ' and * psychic 
synthesis,' it must surely be because those words convey a 
so much greater fulness of positive meaning to the scholar- 
ly than to the unlearned mind. Eeallj^ it is quite the re- 
verse ; all the virtue of the phrase lies in its mere sound 
and skin. Learning does but make one the more sensible of 
its inward unintelligibility. Wundt's * theory ' is the flim- 
siest thing in the world. It starts by an untrue assump- 
tion, and then corrects it by an unmeaning phrase. Betinal 
sensations are spatial ; and were they not, no amount of 
'synthesis' with equally spaceless motor sensations could 



278 PaTOHOLOGT. 

intelligibly make them so. Wundt's theory is, in short, 
but an avowal of impotence, and an appeal to the inscru- 
table powers of the soul.* It confesses that we cannot 
analyze the constitution or give the genesis of the spatial 
quality in consciousness. But at the same time it says the 
ardecedefrda thereof are psychical and not cerebral facts. 
In calling the quality in question a semsational quality, our 
own account equally disclaimed ability to analyze it, but 
said its antecedents were cerebral, not psychical — in other 
words, that it was a^rs^psychical thing. This is merely 
a question of probable fact, which the reader may decide. 

And now what shall be said of Helmholtz? Can I find 
fault with a book which, on the whole, I imagine to be one 
of the four or five greatest monuments of human genius in 
the scientific line? If truth impels I must fain try, and 
take the risks. It seems to me that Helmholtz*s genius 
moves most securely when it keeps close to particular facts. 
At any rate, it shows least strong in purely speculative 
passages, which in the Optics, in spite of many beauties, 
seem to me fundamentally vacillating and obscure. The 
*empiristic' view which Helmholtz defends is that the 
space-determinations we perceive are in every case pro- 
ducts of a process of unconscious inference, f The infer- 
ence is similar to one from induction or analogy. % We al- 
ways see that form before us which habitually would have 
caused the sensation we now have. § But the latter sensa- 
tion can never be intrinsically spatial, or its intrinsic space- 
determinations would never be overcome as they are so 
often by the * illusory ' space-determinations it so often 
suggests.] Since the illusory determination can be traced 
to a suggestion of Experience, the * real ' one must also be 
such a suggestion : so that all space intuitions are due sole- 



* Why talk of 'genetic theories '? when we have in the next breath to 
"Write as Wuudt does: ** If then we must regard the intuition of space as a 
product that simply emerges from the conditions of our mental and physi- 
cal organization, nothing need stand in the way of our designating it asone 
of the a priari functions with which consciousness is endowed." (Logik, 
II. 460.) 

t P. 430. I Pp. 430. 449. g P 428 | P. 442. 



THB PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 279 

ly to Experience.* The only psychic activity required for 
this is the association of ideas, f 

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

Well, Helmholtz does so leave it. At one time he seems 
to fall back on inscrutable powers of the soul, and to range 
himself with the ' psychical stimulists.' He speaks of Kant 
as having made the essential step in the matter in dis- 
tinguishing the content of experience from that form — 
space, course — which is given it by the peculiar faculties 
of the mind. % But elsewhere, again, § speaking of sensa- 
tionalistic theories which would connect spatially determi- 
nate feelings directly with certain neural events, he says it 
is better to assume only such simple psychic activities as 
we know to exist, and gives the association of ideas as an 
instance of what he means. Later, | he reinforces this re- 
mark by confessing that he does not see how any neural 
process can give rise without antecedent experience to a 
ready-made {fertige) perception of space. And, finally, in 
a single momentous sentence, he speaks of sensations of 
touch as if they might be the original material of our space- 
percepts — which thus, from the optical point of view, * may 
be assumed as given,'li 

Of course the eye-man has a right to fall back on the 
skin-man for help at a pinch. But doesn't this mean that 
he is a mere eye-man and not a complete psychologist ? In 
other words, Helmholtz's Optics and the * empiristic theory ' 
therein professed must not be understood as attempts at 
answering the general question of how space-consciousness 
enters the mind. They simply deny that it enters with the 

• Pp. 442, 818. t P- 798. Cf . also Popular Scientific Lectures, pp. 301-8. 
\ P. 466; see also 428, 441. S P. 797. | P. 812. 

1 Bottom of page 797. 



280 P8T0H0L0OT, 

first optical sensations.* Our own account has affirmed 
stoutly that it enters then ; but no more than Helmholtz 
have we pretended to show why. Who calls a thing a first 
sensation admits he has no theory of its production. Helm- 
holtz, though all the while without an articulate theory, 
makes the world think he has one. He beautifully traces 
the immense part which reproductive processes play in our 
vision of space, and never — except in that one pitiful little 
sentence about touch — does he tell us just what it is they 
reproduce. He limits himself to denying that they repro- 
duce originals of a visual sort. And so difficult is the 
subject, and so magically do catch-words work on the 
popular-scientist ear, that most likely, had he written 
* physiological ' instead of * nativistic,' and * spiritualistic ' 
instead of * empiristic ' (which synonyms Hering suggests), 
numbers of his present empirical evolutionary followers 
would fail to find in his teaching anything worthy of praise. 
But since he wrote otherwise, they hurrah for him as a sort 
of second Locke, dealing another death-blow at the old 
bugaboo of 'innate ideas.' His 'nativistic' adversary 
Hering they probably imagine — Heaven save the mark ! — 
to be a scholastic in modern disguise. 

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

Lipps, and almost all the an ti- sensationalist theorists 
except Helmholtz, seem guilty of that confusion which Mr. 

*In fact, to borrow a simile from Prof. G. E. Mtlller (Theorie der sinul. 
Auf merksamkeit, p. 88), the various senses bear in tl^e Helmholtzian phi- 
losopliy of perception the same relation to the ' object ' perceived by their 
means that a troop of jolly drinkers bear to the landlord's bill, when no 
one has any money, but each hopes that one of the rest will pay. 

tGrundtatsacheu des Seelenlebens (1888), pp. 480, 591-2. Psycholo- 
gische Studien (1885), p. 14. 



THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE. 281 

Shadwortli Hodgson has done so much to clear &waj, viz., 
the confounding the analysis of an idea with the means of 
its production. Lipps, for example, finds that every space 
we think of can be broken up into positions, and concludes 
that in some undefined way the several positions must have 
pre-existed in thought before the aggregate space could 
have appeared to perception. Similarly Mr. Spencer, de- 
fining extension as an * aggregate of relations of coexistent 
position,' says " every cognition of magnitude is a cogni- 
tion of relations of position,"* and "no idea of extension 
can arise from the simultaneous excitation" of many nerves 
" unless there is a knowledge of their relative positions."t 
Just so Prof. Bain insists that the very meaning of space is 
scope for movement, | and that therefore distance and mag- 
nitude can be no original attributes of the eye's sensibility. 
Similarly because movement is analyzable into positions 
occupied at successive moments by the mover, philoso- 
phers (e.g. Schopenhauer, as quoted above) have repeatedly 
denied the possibility of its being an immediate sensation. 
We have, however, seen that it is the most immediate of all 
our space-sensations. Because it can only occur in a defi- 
nite direction the impossibility of perceiving it without 
perceiving its direction has been decreed — a decree which 
the simplest experiment overthrows. § It is a case of what 
I have called the * psychologist's fallacy ' : mere acquaint- 
ance with space is treated as tantamount to every sort^ of 
knowledge about it, the conditions of the latter are de- 
manded of the former state of mind, and all sorts of mytho- 
logical processes are brought in to help. II As well might 
one say that because the world consists of all its parts, there- 



* Psychology, ii. p. 174. 

t Ibid. p. 168. 

X Senses and Intellect. 8d ed. pp. 86^75. 

§ Cf . Hall and Donaldson in Mind, x. 559. 

I As other examples of the confusion, take Mr. Sully : " The fallaeiout 
a$9umption that there can be an idea of distance in general, apart from 
particular distances" (Mind, in. p. 177); and Wundt: "An indefinite 
localization, which waits for experience to give it its reference to real 
space, stands in contradiction with the very idea of localization, which 
means the reference to a determinate point of space " (Physiol. Psych., 
Ite Aufl. p. 480). 



282 P8TCH0L0QT. 

fore we can only apprehend it at all by having miconsciously 
summed these up in our head. It is the old idea of our 
actual knowledge being drawn out from a pre-existent 
potentiality, an idea which, whatever worth it may meta- 
physically possess, does no good in psychology. 

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

* G. Berkeley : Essay towards a new Theory of Vision ; Samuel Bailey : 
A Review of Berkeley's Theory of Vision (1842) ; J. S. Mill's Review of 
Bailey, in his Dissertations and Disquisitions, vol. ii ; Jas. Ferrier : Re- 
view of Bailey, in * Philosophical Remains,' vol. ii ; A. Bain : Senses and 
Intellect, 'Intellect.' chap, i; U.Spencer: Principles of Psychology, pt. 
VI. chaps. XIV, XVI ; J. S. Mill : Examination of Hamilton, chap, xiii 
(the best statement of the so-called English empiricist position ) : T. K. 
Abbott: Sight and Touch, 1861 (the first English book to go at all mi 
nutely into facts; Mr. Abbott maintaining retinal sensations to be originally 
of space in three dimensions) ; A. C. Eraser : Review of Abbott, in North 
British Review for Aug. 1864 ; another review in Macmillan's Magazine. 
Aug. 1866 ; J. Sully : Outlines of Psychology, chap, vi ; J. Ward : En- 
cyclop. Britannica, 9th Ed., article * Psychology,' pp. 53-6 ; J. E. Walter: 
The Perception of Space and Matter (1879) —I may also refer to a ' discus- 
sion ' between Prof. Q. Croom Robertson, Mr. J. Ward, and the present 
writer, in Mind, vol. xiii.— The present chapter is only the tilling out with 
detail of an article entitled 'The Spatial Quale,' which appeared in the 
Journal of Speculative Philosophy for January 1879 (xui. 64). 



CHAPTEB XXL« 
THE PERCEPTION OP REALITY. 

Etebyone knows the difference between imagining a 
thing and believing in its existence, between supposing a 
proposition and acquiescing in its truth. In the case of 
acquiescence or belief, the object is not only apprehended 
by the mind, but is held to have reality. Belief is thus the 
mental state or function of cog nizing reaut^j. As used m 
JFe following pages, * Belief ' will mean every degree of as- 
surance, including the highest possible certaiaty and con- 
viction. 

There are, as we know, two ways of studying every 
psychic state. First, the way of analysis: What does it 
consist in? What is its inner nature? Of what sort of 
mind-stuff is it composed? Second, the way of history: 
What are its conditions of production, and its connection 
with other facts ? 

Into the first way we cannot go very far. In its inner 
nature^ hdief^ or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more 
oRied to the emotions than to anything dse. Mr. Bagehot dis^ 
tinctly calls it the 'emotion' of conviction. I just now 
spoke of it as acquiescence. It resembles more than any- 
thing what in the psychology of volition we know as con- 
sent. Consent is recognized by all to be a manifestation 
of our active nature. It would naturally be described by 
such terras as * willingness ' or the * turning of our dispo- 
sition.' What characterizes both consent and belief is the 
cessation of theoretic agitation, through the advent of an 
idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to 
the exclusion of contradictory ideas. When this is the 
case, motor effects are apt to follow. Hence the states of 

* Reprinted, with additions, from * Mind' for July 1889. 



284 PSTCHOLOGT. 

consent and belief, characterized by repose on the purely 
intellectual side, are both intimately connected with subse- 
quent practical activity. This inward stability of the mind's 
content is as characteristic of disbelief as of belief. But we 
shall presently see that we never disbelieve anything ex- 
cept for the reason that we believe something else which 
contradicts the first thing.* Disbelief is thus an incidental 
complication to belief, and need not be considered by itself. 

The true opposites of bdief, psychologically considered, 
are dovbt and inquiry, not disbelief. In both these states the 
content of our mind is in unrest, and the emotion engen- 
dered thereby is, like the emotion of belief itself, perfectly 
distinct, but perfectly indescribable in words. Both sorts 
of emotion may be pathologically exalted. One of the 
charms of drunkenness unquestionably lies in the deepen- 
ing of the sense of reality and truth which is gained therein. 
In whatever light things may then appear to us, they seem 
more utterly what they are, more * utterly utter ' than when 
we are sober. This goes to a fully unutterable extreme 
in the nitrous oxide intoxication, in which a man's very soul 
will sweat with conviction, and he be all the while unable 
to tell what he is convinced of at all.t The pathological 
state opposed to this solidity and deepening has been called 
the questioning mB,Tii2i,{Grubd8ucht by the Germans). It is 
sometimes found as a substantive affection, paroxysmal or 
chronic, and consists in the inability to rest in any concep- 
tion, and the need of having it confirmed and explained. 
^ Why do I stand here where I stand ? * * Why is a glass a 
glass, a chair a chair ? ' * How is it that men are only of 
the size they are? Why not as big as houses,' etc., etc.J 



* Compare this psychological fact with the corres|K)udiDg iv/gical truth 
that all DegatioD rests ou covert assertion of something else than the thing 
denied. (See Bradley's Principles of Logic, bk. i. ch. 3.) 

t See that very remarkable little work, * The Anaesthetic Revelation and 
the Gist of Philosophy,' by Benj. P. Blood (Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874). 
Compare also Mind, vn. 206. 

J "To one whose mind is healthy thoughts come and go unnoticed; 
with me they have to be faced, thought about in a peculiar fashion, and 
then disposed of as finished, and this often when I am utterly wearied and 
would be at peace ; but the call is imperative. This goes on to the hiu- 



THB PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 286 

There is, it is true, another pathological state which is as 
far removed from doubt as from belief, and which some 
may prefer to consider the proper contrary of the latter 
state of mind. I refer to the feeling that everything is 
hollow, unreal, dead. I shall speak of this state again 
upon a later page. The point I wish to notice here is sim- 
ply that belief and disbelief are but two aspects of one 
psychic state. 

John Mill, reviewing various opinions about belief, 
comes to the conclusion that no account of it can be given : 

** What," he says, ** is the diflference to our minds between thinkiog 
of a reality aod represeoting to ourselves an imaginary picture ? I con- 
fess I can see no escape from the opinion that the distinction is ultimate 
and primordial. There is no more diflSculty in holding it to be so than 
in holding the difference between a sensation and an idea to be primor- 
dial. It seems almost another aspect of the same difference. ... I 
cannot help thinking, therefore, that there is in the remembrance of a 
real fact, as distinguished from that of a thought, an element which 
does not consist ... in a difference between the mere ideas which are 
present to the mind in the two cases. This element, howsoever we de- 
fine it, constitutes belief, and is the difference between Memory and 
Imagination. From whatever direction we approach, this difference 
seems to close our path. When we arrive at it, we seem to have reached, 
as it were, the central point of our intellectual nature, presupposed and 
built upon in every attempt we make to explain the more recondite 
phenomena of our mental being."* 

drance of all natural action. If I were told that the staircase was on fire 
and I had only a minute to escape, and the thought arose—' Have they 
sent for tireengincs? Is it probable that the man who has the key is on 
band? Is the man a careful sort of person? Will the key be hanging on 
a peg? Am I thinking rightly? Perhaps they don't lock the depot' — 
my foot would be lifted to go down ; I should be conscious to excitement 
ihat I was losing my chance ; but I thould be unable to stir until all these 
absurdities were entertained and disposed of. In the most critical moments 
of my life, when I ought to have been so engrossed as to leave no room far 
any secondary ViougJits, I have been oppressed by the inability to be at 
peace. And in the most ordinary circumstances it is all the same. Let me 
instance the other morning I went to walk. The day was biting cold, but 
1 was unable to proceed except by jerks. Once I got arrested, my feet in 
a muddy pool. One foot was lifted to go, knowing that it was not g(X)d to 
be standing in water, but there I was fast, the cause of detention being the 
discussing with myself the reasons why I should not stand in that pool." 
(T. S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 1888, p. 43. 8ee 
a»o Berger. in Archiv f. Psychiatric, vi. 217.) 
* Note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, i. 412-428. 



286 P8TCn0L0QY. 

If the words of Mill be taken to apply to the mere sub- 
jective analysis of belief — to the question, What does it 
feel like when we have it ? — ^they must be held, on the whole, 
to be correct Belief, the sense of reality, feels like itself — 
that is about as much as we can say. 

Prof, Brentano, in an admirable chapter of his Psycho^ 
logiCj expresses this by saying that conception and belief 
(which he names judgment) are two different fundamental 
psychic phenomena. What I myself have called (Vol. I, p. 
275) the * object ' of thought may be comparatively simple, 
like "Ha! what a pain," or "It-thunders"; or it may be 
complex, like " Columbus-disco vered-America-in-1492," or 
" There-exists-an-all-wise-Creator-of-the-world." In either 
case, however, the mere thought of the object may exist as 
something quite distinct from the belief in its reality. The 
belief, as Brentano says, presupposes the mere thought : 

** Every object comes into consciousness in a twofold way, as simply 
thought of [vorgesteUt] and as admitted [atierkatmt] or denied. The 
relation is analogous to that which is astsumed by most philosophers 
(by Kant no less than by Aristotle) to obtain betw^een mere thought and 
desire. Nothing is ever desired without being thought of ; but the 
desiring is nevertheless a second quite new and peculiar form of rela- 
tion to the object, a second quite new way of receiving it into 
consciousness. No more is anything judged [i.e., believed or disbelieved] 
which is not thought of too. But we must insist that, so soon as the 
object of a thouglit T>ecomes the object of an assenting or rejecting 
judgment, our consciousness steps into an entirely new relation to- 
wards it. It is then twice present in consciousness, as thought of, and 
as held for leal or denied ; just as when desire awakens for it, it is both 
thought and simultaneously desired.'' (P. 266.) 

The commonplace doctrine of * judgment' is that it 
consists in the combination of * ideas ' by a * copula ' into 
a * proi)osition,' which may be of various sorts, as affir- 
mative, negative, hypothetical, etc. But who does not see 
that in a disbelieved or doubted or interrogative or condi- 
tional proposition, tlio ideas are combined in the same 
identical way in which they are in a proposition wliich is 
solidly believed ? The way in which the ideas are combined is 
a part of the inner constitution of the thonghVs ol>Ject or content. 
That object is sometimes an articulated whole with relations 
between its parts, amongst which relations, that of predicate 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 287 

to subject may be one. But when we have got our object 
with its inner constitution thus defined in a proposition, 
then the question comes up regarding the object as a whole : 
'Is it a real object? is this proposition a true proposition 
or not ? ' And in the answer Yea to this question lies that 
new psychic act which Brentano calls * judgment,' but which 
1 prefer to call * belief.' 

In every proposition, then, so far as it is believed, ques- 
tioned, or disbelieved, four elements are to be distinguished, 
the subject, the predicate, and their relation (of whatever 
sort it be) — these form the object of belief — and finally the 
psychic attitude in which our mind stands towards the 
proposition taken as a whole — and this is the belief itself.* 

Admitting, then, that this attitude is a state of conscious- 
ness sxd generis^ about which nothing more can be said in 
the way of internal analysis, let us proceed to the second 
way of studying the subject of belief : Under tvhat eircum- 
stances do toe think things real ? We shall soon see how much 
matter this gives us to discuss. 

THE VABIOnS ORDEHS OP BEAUTY. 

Suppose a new-born mind, entirely blank and waiting 
for experience to begin. Suppose that it begins in the 
form of a visual impression (whether faint or vivid is im- 
material) of a lighted candle against a dark background, 
and nothing else, so that wliilst this image lasts it consti- 
tutes the entire universe known to the mind in question. 
Suppose, moreover (to simplify the hypothesis), that the 
candle is only imaginai*y, and that no * original' of it is 
recognized by us psychologists outside. Will this hallu- 
cinatory candle be believed in, vnW it have a real existence 
for the mind ? 

What possible sense (for that mind) would a suspicion 
have that the candle was not real ? What would doubt or 
disbelief of it imply ? When toe, the oulooking j)sycholo- 
gists, say the candle is unreal, we mean something quite 
definite, viz., that there is a world known to tis which is 

* For an excellent account of the history of opiuion on this subject 
ne A. Marty, in Vierteljahrsch. f. wiss. Phi'i., viii. 101 fi. (l«84j. 



288 PSYCHOLOGY. 

real, and to which we perceiye that the candle does not 
belong ; it belongs exclusively to that individual mind, has 
no sioius anywhere else, etc. It exists, to be sure, in a 
fashion, for it forms the content of that mind's hallucina- 
tion ; but the hallucination itself, though unquestionably 
it is a sort of existing fact, has no knowledge of other facts ; 
and since those other facts are the realities j>ar eax^ZZertce for 
us, and the .only things we believe in, the candle is simply 
outside of our reality and belief altogether. 

By the hypothesis, however, the mind which sees the candle 
can spin no such considerations as these about it, for of 
other facts, actual or possible, it has no inkling whatever. 
That candle is its all, its absolute. Its entire faculty of 
attention is absorbed by it. It is, it is that ; it is there ; no 
other possible candle, or quality of this candle, no other 
possible place, or possible object in the place, no alterna- 
tive, in short, suggests itself as even conceivable ; so how 
can the mind help believing the candle real ? The suppo- 
sition that it might possibly not do so is, under the sup- 
posed conditions, unintelligible.* 

This is what Spinoza long ago announced : 

**Let lis conceive a boy," he said, ** imagiuing to himself a horse, 
and taking note of nothing else. As this imagination involves the ex- 
istence of the horse, and the hoy has no percept imi which annuls its 
existence, he will necessarily contemplate the horse as present, nor will 
he be able to doubt of its existence, however little certain of it he may 
be. I deny that a man in so far as he imagines [percipit] affirms noth- 
ing. For what is it to imagine a winged horse but to affirm that the 
horse [that horse, namely] has wings ? For if the mind had nothing 
before it but the \\inged horse it would contemplate the same as pres- 
ent, would have no cause to doubt of its existence, nor any power of 
dissenting from its existence, unless the imagination of the winged 
horse were joined to an idea which contradicted \tollit] its existence." 
(Ethics, II. 49, Scholium.) 

The sense that anything we think of is unreal can only 
come, then, when that thing is contradicted by Some other 

* We saw near the end of Chapter XIX that a candle-image taking ex- 
clusive possession of the mind in this way would probably acquire the 
sensational vividness. But this physiological accident is logically im- 
material to the argument in the text, which ought to apply as well to the 
dimmest sort of mental image as to the brightest sensation. 



TBB PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 289 

thing of which we think. Any object which remains unconn 
tradictetl is ipso/acto believed and posited as absdtUe reality. 

Now, how comes it that one thing though^, of can be con- 
tradicted by another ? It cannot unless it begins the quar- 
rel by saying something inadmissible about that other. 
Take the mind with the candle, or the boy with the horse. 
If either of them say, ' That candle or that horse, even when 
I don't see it, exists in the otUer toorldj he pushes into * the 
outer world ' an object which may be incompatible with 
eyerything which he otherwise knows of that world. If so, 
he must take his choice of which to hold by, the present 
perceptions or the other knowledge of the world. If he 
holds to the other knowledge, the present perceptions are 
contradicted, so far as their relation to that world goes. Can- 
dle and horse, whatever they may be, are not existents in 
outward space. They are existents, of course ; they are 
mental objects ; mental objects have existence as mental 
objects. But they are situated in their own spaces, the 
space in which they severally appear, and neither of those 
spaces is the space in which the realities called ' the outer 
world ' exist 

Take again the horse with wings. If I merely dream of 
a horse with wings, my horse interferes with nothing else 
and has not to be contradicted. That horse, its wings, and 
its place, are all equally real. That horse exists no other- 
wise than as winged, and is moreover really there, for that 
place exists no otherwise than as the place of that horse, 
and claims as yet no connection with the other places of 
the world. But if with this horse I make an inroad into 
the world otherwise known, and say, for example, * That is 
my old mare Maggie, having grown a pair of wings where 
she stands in her stall,' the whole case is altered ; for now 
the horse and place are identified with a horse and place 
otherwise known, and what is known of the latter objects is 
incompatible with what is perceived with the former. 
* Maggie in her stall with wings ! Never ! ' The wings are 
unreal, then, visionary. I have dreamed a lie about Mag- 
gie in her stall. 

The reader will recognize in these two cases the two 
sorts of judgment called in the logic-books existential and 



290 parcHOLOGT. 

attribatiye respectiyely. 'The candle exists as an onier 
reality* is an existential, 'Mj Maggie has got a pair of 
wings ' is an attribntive, proposition ;* and it follows from 
what was first said that oS propositions, whether attributive 
or existential, are bdieved through the very fact of being con- 
ceived, nrdess they dash with other propositions bdieved at the 
same time, by cfffirming that their terms are the same with the 
terms of these other propositions. A dream-candle has exist- 
ence, true enough ; but not the same existence (existence 
for itself, namely, or extra mentem meam) which the candles 
of waking perception have. A dream-horse has wings ; but 
then neither horse nor wings are the same with any horses 
or wings known to memory. That we can at any moment 
think of the same thing which at any former moment we 
thought of is the ultimate law of our intellectual constitu- 
tion. But when we now think of it incompatibly with our 
other ways of thinking it, then we must choose which way 
to stand by, for we cannot continue to think in two contra- 
dictory ways at once. The whole distinction of real and un- 
real, the whole psychology of bdief disbdief, and doubt, is this 
grounded on two mental facts— first, that tve are liable to think 
differently of the same ; and second, that when we have done so, 
we can choose which loay of thinking to adhere to and ichich to 
disregard. 

The subjects adhered to become real subjects, the at- 
tributes adhered to real attributes, the existence adhered 
to real existence ; whilst the subjects disregarded become 
imaginary subjects, the attributes disregarded erroneous 



♦ In both existential and attributive judgments a syntlicsis is repre- 
Bented. The syllable ea? in the word Existence, da in the word Diuein, ex- 
press it. * The candle exists ' is equivalent to * The candle is over Viere* 
And the * over there ' means real space, space related to other reals. The 
proposition amounts to saying: 'The candle is in the same space with 
other reals.' It affirms of the candle a very concrete predicate — namely, 
this relation to other particular concrete things. Their real existence, as 
we shall later see, resolves itself into their peculiar relation to onrselveM. 
Existence is thus no substantive quality when we predicate it of any ob- 
ject ; it is a relation, ultimately terminating in ourselves, and at the mo- 
ment when it terminates, becoming a practical relation. But of this more 
anon. I only wish now to indicate the superficial nature of the distinction 
between the existential and the attributive proposition. 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALTTT, 291 

attribntes, and the existence disregarded an existence in 
no man's land, in the limbo * where footless fancies dwell.' 
The real things are, in M. Taine's terminology, the reduo- 
Uvea of the things judged unreal. 

THE MANY -WOBIiDS. 

Habitually and practically we do not count these disre- 
garded things as existents at alL For them Vce victis is the 
law in the popular philosophy ; they are not even treated as 
appearances ; they are treated as if they were mere waste, 
equivalent to nothing at all. To the genuinely philosophic 
mind, however, they still have existence, though not the 
same existence, as the real things. As objects of fancy, as 
errors, as occupants of dreamland, etc., they are in their 
way as indefeasible parts of life, as undeniable features of 
the Universe, as the realities are in their way. The total 
world of which the philosophers must take account is thus 
composed of the realities plus the fancies and illusions. 

Two sub-universes, at least, connected by relations 
which philosophy tries to ascertain ! * Really there are more 
than two sub-universes of which we take account, some of 
us of this one, and others of that. For there are various 
categories both of illusion and of reality, and alongside of 
the world of absolute error (i.e., error confined to single 
individuals) but still within the world of absolute reality 
(i.e., reality believed'by the complete philosopher) there is 
the world of collective error, there are the worlds of abstract 
reality, of relative or practical reality, of ideal relations, 
and there is the supernatural world. The popular mind 
conceives of all these sub-worlds more or less discon- 
nectedly ; and when dealing with one of them, forgets for 
the time being its relations to the rest. The complete phi- 
losopher is he who seeks not only to assign to every given 
object of his thought its right place in one or other of these 
sub-worlds, but he also seeks to determine the relation of 
each sub-world to the others- in the total world which is. 

The most important sub-universes commonly discrimi- 
nated from each other and recognized by most of us as 
existing, each with its own special and separate style of 
existence, are the following : 



iW2 PBTCHOLOQY. 

(1) The world of sense, or of physical * things ' as we 
instinctiTely apprehend them, with such qualities as heat, 
color, and sound, and such ' forces ' as life, chemical affinity, 
gravity, electricity, all existing as such within or on the 
surface of the things. 

(2) The world of science, or of physical things as the 
learned conceive them, with secondary qualities and ' forces ' 
(in the popular sense) excluded, and nothing real but solids 
and fluids and their 'laws' (i.e., customs) of motion.* 

(3) The world of ideal relations, or abstract truths be- 
lieved or believable by all, and expressed in logical, mathe- 
matical, metaphysical, ethical, or aesth^etic propositions. 

(4) The world of * idols of the tribe,' illusions or preju- 
dices common to the race. All educated people recognize 
these as forming one sub-universe. The motion of the sky 
round the earth, for example, belongs to this world. That 
motion is not a recognized item of any of the other worlds ; 
but as an * idol of the tribe ' it really exists. For certain 
philosophers * matter ' exists only as an idol of the tribe. 
For science, the * secondary qualities ' of matter are but 
'idols of the tribe.' 

(5) The various supernatural worlds, the Christian 
heaven and hell, the world of the Hindoo mythology, the 
world of Swedenborg's visa et avdita, etc. Each of these is 
a consistent system, with definite relations among its own 
parts. Neptune's trident, e.g., has no status of reality what- 
ever in the Christian heaven ; but within the classic Olym- 
pus certain definite things are true of it, whether one believe 
in the reality of the classic mythology as a whole or not 
The various worlds of deliberate fable may be ranked with 
these worlds of faith — the world of the IHad, that of King 
Lear, of the Pickwick Papers, etc.t 

* I deline the scientific universe here in the radical mechanical way. 
Practically, it is oftener thought of in a mongrel way and resembles in 
more points the popular physical world. 

f It thus comes about that we can say such things as that Ivanhoe 
did not really marry Rebecca, as Thackeray falselp makes him do. The 
real Ivanhoe-world is the one which Scott wrote down for us. In that 
toorld Ivanhoe does not many Rebecca. The objects within that world 
are knit together by perfectly definite relations, which can be affirmed 
or denied. Whilst absorbed in the novel, we turn our backs on all other 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 293 

(6) The various worlds of indiyidual opinion, as nomer- 
ons as men are. 

(7) The worlds of sheer madness and vagary, also in- 
definitely numerous. 

Every object toe think of gets at last referred to one world or 
another of this or of some similar list. It settles into our be- 
lief as a common-sense object, a scientific object, an abstract 
object, a mythological object, an object of some one's mis- 
taken conception, or a madman's object; and it reaches 
this state sometimes immediately, but often only after be- 
ing hustled and bandied about amongst other objects until 
it finds some which will tolerate its presence and stand in 
relations to it which nothing* contradicts. The molecules 
and ether-waves of the scientific world, for example, simply 
kick the object's warmth and color out, they refuse to 
have any relations with them. But the world of ' idols of 
the tribe ' stands ready to take them in. Just so the world 
of classic myth takes up the winged horse ; the world of 
individual hallucination, the vision of the candle; the 
world of abstract truth, the proposition that justice is 
kingly, though no actual king be just. The various worlds 
themselves, however, appear (as aforesaid) to most men's 
minds in no very definitely conceived relation to each 
other, and our attention, when it turns to one, is apt to 
drop the others for the time being out of its account Pro- 
positions concerning the diflferent worlds are made from 
' different points of view '; and in this more or less chaotic 
state the consciousness of most thinkers remains to the 
end. Each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own 
fashion ; only the reality lapses with the attention. 

THE -WORLD OP •PRAOTICAIi BBALITIBS.* 

Each thinker, however, has dominant habits of atten- 
tion ; and these practically elect from among the various 
worlds some one to be for him the world of vltimate realities. 
From this world's objects he does not appeal. Whatever 

worlds, and, for the time, the Ivanhoe-world remains our absolute reality. 
When we wake from the spell, however, we find a still more real world, 
which reduces Ivanhoe, and all things connected with him, to the fletive 
status, and relegates them ta one of the sub-universes grouped under Ko. 5. 



5J94 ParCHOLOGT. 

positiTely contradicts them must get into another world or 
die. The horse, e.g.9 may have wings to its heart's content, 
so long as it does not pretend to be the real world's horse — 
that horse is absolutely wingless. For most men, as we shall 
immediately see, the ' things of sense ' hold this prerogative 
position, and are the absolutely real world's nucleus. Other 
things, to be sure, may be real for this man or for that — 
things of science, abstract moral relations, things of the 
Christian theology, or what not But even for the special 
man, these things are usually r^al with a less real reality 
than that of the things of sense. They are taken less 
seriously ; and the very utmost that can be said for any- 
one's belief in them is that k is as strong as his ' belief in 
his own senses.' * 

In all this the everlasting partiality of our nature shows 
itself, our inveterate propensity to choice. For, in the 
strict and ultimate sense of the word existence, everything 
which can be thought of at all exists as some sort of object, 
whether mythical object, individual thinker's object, or ob- 
ject in outer space and for intelligence at large. Errors, 
fictions, tribal beliefs, are parts of the whole great Universe 
which God has made, and He must have meant all these 
things to be in it, each in its respective place. But for us 
finite creatures, " 'tis to consider too curiously to consider 

* Tlie world of dreams is our real world whilst wo are sleeping, because 
our attcution then lapses from the sensible world. Conversel}', when we 
wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes 
unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the 
day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub- 
universe alongside of the waking world. Most people have probably hail 
dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into ail 
actually existing region of being, perhaps a comer of the * spiritual world.* 
And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as revelations, and 
have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and creating 
themes for faith to lay hold upon. The Mai-ger universe,' here, which 
helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is 
its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Super- 
natural. The dream holds true, namely, in one half of that universe ; the 
waking perceptions in the other half. Even to-day dream-objects figure 
among the realities in which some ' psychic- researchers ' are seeking to rouse 
our belief. All our theories, not only those about the supernatural, but 
our philosophic and sc^ientific theories as well, are like our dreams in rous- 
ing such different degrees of belief in different minds. 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY, 

SO." The mere fact of appearing as an object at all is not 
enough to constitute reality. That may be metaphysical 
reality, reality for God; but what we need is practical 
realily, reality for ourselves ; and, to have that, an object 
must not only appear, but it must appear both interesting 
and important. The worlds whose objects are neither in- 
teresting nor important we treat simply negatively, we 
brand them as unreal. 

In the relative sense, then, the sense in which we contrast 
reality with simple i^nreality, and in which one thing is 
said to havei more reality than another, and to be more be- 
lieved, reality means simply relation to our emotional and 
active life. This is the only sense which the word ever has 
in the mouths of practical men. In this sense, whatever ex- 
cites and stimulates our interest is real ; whenever an object 
so appeals to us that we turn to it, accept it, fill our mind 
with it, or practically take account of it, so far it is real for 
us, and we balieve it. Whenever, on the contrary, we 
ignore it, fail to consider it or act upon it, despise it, reject 
it, forget it, so far it is unreal for us and disbelieved. 
Hume*s account of the matter was then essentially correct, 
when he said that belief in anything was simply the having 
the idea of it in a lively and active manner : 

'* I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, 
firm, steady conception of an object than the imagination alone is ever 
able to attain. ... It consists not in the peculiar nature or order of 
the ideas, but in the manner of their conception and in ihexv feeling to 
the mind. I confess that it is impossible perfectly to explain this feel- 
ing or manner of conception. ... Its true and proper name ... is 
belief, which is a term that everyone suflBciently understands in common 
life. And in philosophy we can go no farther than assert that belief is 
something telt by thomind, which distinguishes the idea of the judg- 
ment from the fictions of the imagination.* It gives them more weight 
and influence ; makes them appear of greater importance ; enforces 
them in the mind ; gives them a superior influence on the passions, and 
renders them the governing principle in our actions." t 



* Distinguishes realities from unrealities, the essential from the rubbishy 
and neglectable. 

f Inquiry conceming Hum. Understanding, sec. v. pt. 2 (slightly trans- 
posed in my quotation). 



996 PSTCHOLOGT 

Or as Prof. Bain puts it : ''In its essontial character, 
belief is a phase of onr active nature — otherwise called the 
Will." * 

The object of belief, then, reality or real existence, is 
something quite different from all the other predicates which 
a subject may possess. Those are properties intellectually 
or sensibly intuited. When we add any one of them to the 
subject, we increase the intrinsic content of the latter, we 
enrich its picture in our mind. But adding reality does 
not enrich the picture in any such inward way ; it leaves it 
inwardly as it finds it, and only fixes it and stamps it in to 

*' The real/^ as Kant says, ** contains no more than the possible. A 
hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred pos- 
sible dollars. ... By whatever, and by however many, predicates I 
may think a thing, nothing is added to it if I add that the thing exists. 
. . . Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain, we 
must always step outside of it in order to attribute to it existence." t 

The * stepping outside ' of it is the establishment either 
of immediate practical relations between it and ourselves, 
or of relations between it and other objects with which we 
have immediate practical relations. Relations of this sort, 
which are as yet not transcended or superseded by others, 
are ipso facto real relations, and confer reality upon their 
objective term. The f am et origo of aU reality, whether from 

♦ Note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, i. 894. 

t Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Mftller, ii. 615-17. Hume also : 
*' When, after the simple conception of anything, we would conceive it as 
existent, we in reality make no addition to, or alteration of, our first idea. 
Thus, when we affirm that God is existent, we simply form the idea of 
such a being as He is represented to us ; nor is the existence which we at- 
tribute to Him conceived by a particular idea, which we join to His other 
qualities, and can again separate and distinguish from them. . . . The be- 
lief of the existence joins no new idea to those which compose the ideas of 
the object. When I think of God, when I think of Him as existent, and 
when I believe Him to be existent, my idea of Him neither increases nor 
diminishes. But as 'lis certain there is a great difference betwixt the sim- 
ple conception of the existence of an object and the belief of it, and as this 
difference lies not in the facts or compositions of the idea which we con- 
ceive, it follows that it must lie in the manner in which we conceive it." 
(Treatise of Human Nature, pt. iii. sec. 7.) 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY, 297 

the abaclvte or the practical point of view^ is thus subjective^ is 
oursdves. As bare logical thinkers, without emotional re- 
action, we give reality to whatever objects we think of, for 
they are really phenomena, or objects of our passing 
thought, if nothing more. But, as thinkers with emotional 
reactio'ri, toe give what seems to us a still higher degree of 
reality to whatever things tve select and emphasize and turn 
to WITH A WILL. These are our living realities; and not 
only these, but all the other things which are intimately 
connected with these. Reality, starting from our Ego, 
thus sheds itself from point to point — first, upon all objects 
which have an immediate sting of interest for our Ego in 
them, and next, upon the objects most continuously related 
with these. It only fails when the connecting thread is 
lost. A whole system may be real, if it only hang to our 
Ego by one immediately stinging term. But what contra- 
dicts any such stinging term, even though it be another 
stinging term itself, is either not believed, or only believed 
after settlemant of the dispute. 

We reach thus the important conclusion that our ovm 
reality^ that setiseofour ovm life which tve at every moment poS' 
sesSy is the nlfimate of idtimates for our belief, * As sure as I 
exist ! ' — this is our uttermost warrant for the being of all 
other things. As Descartes made the indubitable reality 
of the cogito go bail for the reality of all that the cogito in- 
volved, so we ail of us, feeling our own present reality with 
absolutely coercive force, ascribe an all but equal degree 
of reality, first to whatever things we lay hold on with a 
sense of personal need, and second, to whatever farther 
things continuously belong with these. " Mein Jetzt und 
Hier," as Prof. Upps says, " ist der letzte Angelpunkt fiir 
alle Wirklichkeit, also alle Erkenntniss.'' 

The world of living realities as contrasted with unreali- 
ties is thus anchored in the Ego, considered as an active 
and emotioual term.* That is the hook from which the 
rest dangles, the absolute support. And as from a painted 

* I use the notioQ of the Ego here, as common -sense uses it. Nothing 
is prejudged as to the results (or absence of results) of ulterior attempts to 
analyze the notion. 



298 PaTCHOLOOT. 

hook it ha49 been said that one can only hang a painted 
chain, so conversery, from a real hook only a real chain 
can properly be hnng. Whatever things have intimate and 
continuous connection with my life are things of whose ideality 
I cannot doubt. Whatever things fail to establish this con- 
nection are things which are practically no better for me 
than if they existed not at all. 

In certain forms of melancholic perversion of the sensi- 
bilities and reactive powers, nothing tonches as intimately, 
rouses us, or wakens natural feeling. The consequence is 
the complaint so often heard from melancholic patients, 
that nothing is believed in by them as it used to be, and 
that all sense of reality is fled from life. They are sheathed 
in india-rubber ; nothing penetrates to the quick or draws 
blood, as it were. According to Griesinger, " I see, I hear !" 
such patients say, * but the objects do not reach me, it is as 
if there were a wall between me and the outer world !" 

*' Id such patients there often is an alteration of the cutaneous sen- 
sibility, such that things feel indistinct or sometimes rough and woolly. 
But even were this change always present, it would not completely ex- 
plain the psychic phenomenon . . . which reminds us more of the altera- 
tion in our psychic relations to the outer world which advancing age on 
the one hand, and on the other emotions and passions, may bring about. 
In childhood we feel ourselves to be closer to the world of sensible 
phenomena, we live immediately with them and in them; an intimately 
vital tie binds us and them together. But with the ripening of reflec- 
tion this tie is looscn»?d, the warmth of our interest cools, things look 
differently to us. and we act more as foreigners to the outer world, even 
though we know it a great deal better. Joy and expansive emotions in 
general draw it nearer to us again. Everything makes a more lively 
impression, and with the quick immediate return of this warm recep- 
tivity for sense impressions, joy makes us feel young again. In depress- 
ing emotions it is the other way. Outer things, whether living or in- 
organic, suddenly grow cold and foreign to us, and even our favorite 
objects of interest feel as if they belonged to us no more. Under these 
circumstances, receiving no longer from anything a lively impression, 
we cease to turn towards outer things, and the sense of inward loneliness 
grows upon us. . . . Where there is no strong intelligence to control this 
blas^ condition, this psychic coldness and lack of interest, the issue of 
these states in which all seems so cold and hollow, the heart dried up, 
the world grown dead and empty, is often suicide or the deeper forms 
of insanity.* 

* Oriesinger, Mental Diseases, ^% 50, 98. The neologism we so often 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 299 

THB FABAMOUNT BSAUTY OF SENSATIONS. 

Bnt DOW we are met by questions of detail. What does 
this surnngf tbis exciting power, this interest, consist in, 
which some objects have ? which are those * intimate rela- 
tions ' with our life which give reality ? And what things 
stand in these relations immediately, and what others are 
so closely connected with the former that (in Hume's lan- 
guage) we * carry our disposition ' also on to them ? 

In a simple and direct way these questions cannot be 
answered at all. The whole history of human thought is 
but an unfinished attempt to answer them. For what have 
men been trying to find out, since men were men, but just 
those things : " Where do our true interests lie — which re- 
lations shall we call the intimate and real ones — which 
things shall we call living realities and which not ?*' A few 
psychological points can, however, be made clear. 

Any relation to our mind at alt, in the absentee of a stronger 
relation, suffices to make an object real. The barest appeal 
to our attention is enough for that. Kevert to the begin- 
ning of the chapter, and take the candle entering the vacant 
mind. The mind was waiting for just some such object to 
make its spring upon. It makes its spring and the candle 
is believed. But when the candle appears at the same time 
with other objects, it must run the gauntlet of their rivalry, 
and then it becomes a question which of the various candi- 
dates for attention shall compel belief. As a rule we be- 
lieve as much as we can. We would believe everything if 
we only could. When objects are represented by us quite 
unsystematically they conflict but little with each other, 
and the number of them which in this chaotic manner we 
can believe is limitless. The primitive savage's mind is a 
jungle in which hallucinations, dreams, superstitions, con- 
ceptions, and sensible objects all flourish alongside of each 
other, unregulated except by the attention turning in this 
way or in that. The child's mind is the same. It is only 
as objects become permanent and their relations fixed that 

hear, that an experience * gives us a realm ng sense * of the truth of some 
proposition or other, illustrates the dependence of the sense of reality upon 
eateitement. Only what stii-s us is * realized.' 



800 P8TCH0L0OT. 

discrepancies and contradictions are felt and must be set- 
tled in some stable way. As a rule, the success with which 
a contradicted object maintains itself in our belief is pro- 
portional to several qualities which it must possess. Of 
these the one which would be put first by most people, 
because it characterizes objects of sensation, is its — 

(1) Coerciveness over attention, or the mere power to 
possess consciousness : then follow — 

(2) Liveliness, or sensible pungency, especially in the 
way of exciting pleasure or pain ; 

(3) Stimulating eflect upon the will, i.e., capacity to 
arouse active impulses, the more instinctive the better ; 

(4) Emotional interest, as object of love, dread, admira- 
tion, desire, etc. ; 

(5) Congruity with certain favorite forms of contempla- 
tion — unity, simplicity, permanence, and the like ; 

(6) Independence of other causes, and its own causal 
importance. 

These characters run into each other. Coerciveness is 
the result of liveliness or emotional interest. What is lively 
and interesting stimulates eo ipso the will ; congruity holds 
of active impulses as well as of contemplative forms ; causal 
independence and importance suit a certain contemplative 
demand, etc. I will therefore abandon all . attempt at a 
formal treatment, and simply proceed to make remarks in 
the most convenient order of exposition. 

As a whole, sensations are more lively and are judged 
more real than conceptions ; things met with every hour 
more real than things seen once ; attributes perceived when 
awake, more real than attributes perceived in a dream. 
But, owing to the diverse relations contracted by the various 
objects vnth each other, the simple rule that the lively and 
permanent is the real is often enough disguised. A con- 
ceived thing may be deemed more real than a certain sen- 
sible thing, if it only be intimately related to other sensible 
things more vivid, permanent, or interesting than the first 
one. Conceived molecular vibrations, e.g., are by the 
physicist judged more real than felt warmth, because so 
intimately related to all those other facts of motion in the 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 301 

world which he has made his special study. Similarly, a 
rare thing may be deemed more real than a permanent 
thing if it be more widely related to other permanent 
things. All the occasional crucial observations of science 
are examples of this. A rare experience, too, is likely to 
be judged more real than a permanent one, if it be more in- 
teresting and exciting. Such is the sight of Saturn through 
a telescope ; such are the occasional insights and illumi- 
nations which upset our habitual ways of thought. 

But no mere floating conception, no mere disconnected 
rarity, ever displaces vivid things or permanent things from 
our belief. A conception, to prevail, must terminate in the 
world of orderly sensible experience. A rare phenomenon, 
to displace frequent ones, must belong with others more 
frequent stilL The history of science is strewn with wrecks 
and ruins of theory — essences and principles, fluids and 
forces — once fondly clung to, but found to hang together 
with no facts of sense. And exceptional phenomena solicit 
our belief in vain until such time as we chance to conceive 
them as of kinds already admitted to exist What science 
means by * verification ' is no more than this, that no object 
of conception shall be believed which sooner or later has 
not some permanent and vivid object of sensation for its 
term. Compare what was said on pages 3-7, above. 

Sensible ohjex^ta are thus either our realities or the tests of our 
realities. Conceived objects must show sensible effects or dse he 
disbelieved. And the effects, even though reduced to relative 
unreality when their causes come to view (as heat, which 
molecular vibrations make unreal), are yet the things on 
which our knowledge of the causes rests. Strange mutual 
dependence this, in which the appearance needs the reality 
in order to exist, but the reality needs the appearance in 
order to be known ! 

Sensible vividness or pungency is then the vital factor in 
reality when once the conflict bettoeen objects^ and the connecting 
of them together in the mind, has begun. No object which 
neither possesses this vividness in its own right nor is able 
to borrow it from anything else has a chance of making 
headway against vivid rivals, or of rousing in us that re- 
action in which belief consists. On the vivid objects we 



302 P8TCn0L0QT, 

pif^ as the saying is, our faith in all the rest ; and our 
belief retarns instinctively even to those of them from 
-which reflection has led it away. Witness the obduracy 
with which the popular world of colors, sounds, and sm jUs 
holds its own against that of molecules and vibrations. 
Let the physicist himself but nod, like Homer, and the 
world of sense becomes his absolute reality agaia.* 

That things originally devoid of this stimulating power 
should be enabled, by association with other things which 
have it, to compel our belief as if they had it themselves, is a 
remarkable psychological fact, which since Hume's time it 
has been impossible to overlook. 

**The vividness of the first conception," he writes, ** diffuses itself 
along the relations and is conveyed, as by so many pipes or channels, to 
every idea that has any communication with the primary one. . . . 
Superstitious people are fond of the relics of saints and holy men, for the 
same reason that they seek after types and images, in order to enliven 
their devotion and give them a moi*e intimate and strong conception of 
those exemplary lives. . . . Now, 'tis evident one of the best relics a 
devotee could procure would be the handiwork of a saint, and if his 
clothes and furniture are ever to be considered in this light, 'tis because 
they were once at his disposal, and were moved and affected by him; in 
which respect they are . . . connected with him by a shorter train of 
consequences than any of those from which we learn the reality of his 

* The way in which sensations are pitted against systematized concep- 
tions, and in which the one or the other then prevails according as the 
sensations are felt by ourselves or merely known by report, is interestingly 
illustrated at the present day by the state of public belief about * spiritual- 
istic ' phenomena. There exist numerous narratives of movement without 
•contact on the part of articles of furniture and other material objects, in 
the presence of certain privileged individuals called mediums. Such move- 
ment violates our memories, and the whole system of accepted physical 
'science.' Couse<iuently those who have not seen it either brand the 
narratives imnuMliately as lies or call the phenomena 'illusions' of sense, 
produced by fraud or due to hallucination. But one who has actually seen 
fiuch a phenomenon, under what seems to him suflBciently * test-conditions,* 
will hold to his sensible expcrifnce through thick and thin, even though 
the whole fabric of 'science' sliould be rent in twain. That man would 
be a weak-spirited creature indeed who should allow any fly-blown gener- 
alities al)<)ut ' the liability of the senses to be deceived ' to bully him out of 
his adhesion to what for him was an indubitable experience of sight. A 
man may err in this obstinacy, sure enough, in any particular case. But 
the spirit that animates him is that on which ultimately the very life and 
health of Science rest. 



THB PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 303 

existence. This phenomenon clearly proves that a present impression, 
with a relation of causation, may enliven any idea, and consequently 
produce belief or assent, according to the precedent definition of it. . . . 
It has been remarked among the Mahometans as well as Christians 
that those pilgrims who have seen Mecca or the Holy Land are ever 
after more faithful and zealous believers than those who have not had 
that advantage. A man whose memory presents him with a lively 
image of the Red Sea and the Desert and Jerusalem and Galilee can 
never doubt of any miraculous events which are related either by Moses 
or the Evangelists. The lively idea of the places passes by an easy 
transition to the facts which are supposed to have been related to them 
by contiguity, and increases the belief by increasing the vivacity of the 
conception. The remembrance of those fields and rivers has the same 
influence as a new argument. . . . The ceremonies of the Catholic 
religion may be considered as instances of the same nature. The 
devotees of that strange superstition usually plead in excuse for the 
mummeries with which they are upbraided that they feel the good effect 
of external motions and postures and actions in enlivening their 
devotion and quickening their fervor, which otherwise would decay, 
if directed entirely to distant and immaterial objects. We shadow out 
the objects of our faith, say they, in sensible types and images, and 
render them more present to us by the immediate presence of these 
types than it is possible for us to do merely by an intellectual view and 
contemplation.''* 

Hume's cases are rather trivial ; and the things which 
associated sensible objects make us believe in are supposed 
by him to be unreal. But all the more manifest for that is 
the fact of their psychological influence. Who does not 
'realize' more the fact of a dead or distant friend's 
existence, at the moment when a portrait, letter, garment 
or other material reminder of him is found? The whole 
notion of him then grows pungent and speaks to us and 
shakes us, in a manner unknown at other times. In chil- 
dren's minds, fancies and realities live side by side. But 
however lively their fancies may be, they still gain help 
from association with reality. The imaginative child 
identifies its dramatis personce with some doll or other 
material object, and this evidently solidifies belief, little as 
it may resemble what it is held to stand for. A thing not 
too interesting by its own real qualities generally does the 
best service here. The most useful doll I ever saw was a 
large cucumber in the hands of a little Amazonian-Indian 

• Treatise of Human Nature, bk. i. pt. in. sec. 7. 



804 PSTCHOLOGT. 

girl ; she nursed it and washed it and rocked it to sleep in 
a hammock, and talked to it all day long — there was no 
part in life which the cucumber did not play. Says Mr. 
Tylor: 

** An imaginative child will make a dog do duty for a horse, or a sol- 
dier for a shepherd, till at last the objective resemblance almost disap- 
pears, and a bit of wood may be dragged about, resembling a ship on the 
sea or a coach on the road. Here the likeness of the bit of wood to a 
ship or coach is very slight indeed; but it is a thing, and can be moved 
about, . . . and is an evident assistance to the child in enabling it tc 
arrange and develop its ideas. ... Of how much use . . . may be 
seen by taking it away, and leaving the child nothing to play with. . . . 
In later years and among highly educated people the mental process 
which goes on in a child's playing with wooden soldiers and horses, 
though it never disappears, must be sought for in more complex phe- 
nomena. Perhaps nothing in after-life more closely resembles the eflfect 
of a doll upon a child than the effect of the illustrations of a tale upon 
a grown reader. Here the objective resemblance is very indefinite . . . 
yet what reality is given to the scene by a good picture. . . . Mr. Back- 
house one day noticed in Van Diemen's Land a woman arranging 
several stones that were flat, oval, and about two inches wide, and 
marked in various directions with black and red lines. These, he 
learned, represented absent friends, and one larger than the rest stood 
for a fat native woman on Flinder's Island, known by the name of 
Mother Brown. Similar practices are found among far higher races 
than the ill-fated Tasmaiiians. Among some North American tribes a 
mother who has lost a child keeps its memory ever present to her by 
filling its cradle with black feathers and quills, and carrying it about 
with her for a year or more. When she stops anywhere, she sets up the 
cradle and talks to it as she goes about her work, just as she would 
have done if the dead body had been still alive within it. Here we have 
an image; but in Africa we find a rude doll representing the child, kept 
as a memorial. . . . Bastian saw Indian women in Peru who had last 
an infant carrying about on their backs a wooden doll to represent it."* 

To many persons among us, photographs of lost ones 
seem to be fetishes. They, it is true, resemble ; but the 
fact that the mere materiality of the reminder is almost as 
important as its resemblance is shown by the popularity a 
hundred years ago of the black taflfeta * silhouettes ' which 
are still found among family relics, and of one of which 
Fichte could write to his affianced: ^ Die Farl)e fehlt, das 
Augefehlt, es fehlt d*ir himmlische Aiisdrnck deiner lieblichen 



^ Early Hist, of Mankind, p. 108. 



TUB PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 306 

ZUge ' — and jet go on worshipping it all the same. The 
opinion so stoutly professed by many, that language is es- 
sential to thought, seems to have this much of truth in it, 
that all our inward images tend invincibly to attach them- 
selves to something sensible, so as to gain in corporeity and 
life. Words serve this purpose, gestures serve it, stones, 
straws, chalk-marks, anything will do. As soon as anyone 
of these things stands for the idea, the latter seems to be 
more reaL Some persons, the present writer among the 
number, can hardly lecture without a black-board : the ab- 
stract conceptions must be symbolized by letters, squares 
or circles, and the relations between them by lines. All 
this symbolism, linguistic, graphic, and dramatic, has other 
uses too, for it abridges thought and fixes terms. But one 
of its uses is surely to rouse the believing reaction and give 
to the ideas a more living reality. As, when we are told a 
story, and shown the very knife that did the murder, the 
very ring whose hiding-place the clairvoyant revealed, the 
whole thing passes from fairy-land to mother-earth, so here 
we believe all the more, if only we see that ' the bricks are 
alive to tell the tale.' 

So much for the prerogative position of sensations in 
regard to our belief. But among the sensations themselves 
all are not deemed equally real. The more practically 
important ones, the more permanent ones, and the more 
8Bsthetically apprehensible ones are selected from the mass, 
to be believed in most of all ; the others are degraded to 
the position of mere signs and suggestions of these. This 
fact has already been adverted to in former chapters.* 
The real color of a thing is that one color-sensation which 
it gives us when most favorably lighted for vision. So 
of its real size, its real shape, etc. — these are but optical 
sensations selected out of thousands of others, because 
they have sBsthetic characteristics which appeal to our 
convenience or delight. But I will not repeat what I have 
already written about this matter, but pass on to our 
treatment of tactile and muscular sensations, as ' primary 

• See Vol. I. pp. 285-6; Vol. H. pp. 387 ft 



806 P87CH0L0GT. 

qualities/ more real than those * secondary ' qualities which 
eye and ear and nose reveaL Why do we thus so markedly 
select the tangible to be the real ? Our motives are not far 
to seek. The tangible qualities are the least fluctuating. 
When we get them at all we get them the same. The other 
qualities fluctuate enormously as our relative position to 
the object changes. Then, more decisive still, the tactile 
properties are those most intimately connected with our 
weal or woe. A dagger hurts us only when in contact with 
our skin, a poison only when we take it into our mouths, 
and we can only use an object for our advantage when we 
have it in our muscular control. It is as tangibles, then, 
that things concern us most ; and the other senses, so far 
as their practical use goes, do but warn us of what tangi- 
ble things to expect They are but organs of anticipa- 
tory touch, as Berkeley has with perfect clearness ex- 
plained.* 

Among all sensations, the most belief -compelling are 
those productive of pleasure or of pain. Locke expressly 
makes the pleasure- or pain-gLving quality to be the ultimate 
human criterion of anything's reality. Discussing (with a 
supposed Berkeleyan before Berkeley) the notion that all 
our perceptions may be but a dream, he says : 

** He may please to dream that I make him this answer . . . that I 
believe he will allow a very manifest difference between dreaming of 
being in the fire and being actually in it. But yet if he be resolved to 
appear so sceptical as to maintain that what I call being actually in the 
fire is nothing but a dream, and that we cannot thereby certainly know 
that any such thing as fire actually exists without us, I answer that we, 
certainly finding that pleasure or pain [or emotion of any sort] follows 
upon the application of certain objects to us, whose existence we per- 
ceive, or dream that we perceive by our senses, this certainly is as great 
as our happiness or misery ^ beyond which we have no concernment to 
know or to be." t 

♦ See Theory of Vision, § 59. 

f Essay, bk. iv. chap. 2. f^ 14. In another place: " He that sees a 
candle burning and hath experimented the force of its flame by putting 
his finger into it, will little doubt that this is something existing without 
him, which does him harm and puts him to great pain. . . . And if our 
dreamer pleases to try whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace be 
barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man's fancy by putting his 
band into it, he may, perhaps, be awakened into a certainty greater than 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 307 

THE INPLITENCE OF EMOTION AND ACTIVE IMFXTLSE ON 

BELIEF. 

The quality of arousing emotion, of shaking, moving us 
or inciting us to action, has as much to do with our belief in 
an object's reality as the quality of giving pleasure or pain. 
In Chapter XXIY I shall seek to show that our emotions 
probably owe their pungent quality to the bodily sensations 
which they involve. Our tendency to believe in emotionally 
exciting objects (objects of fear, desire, etc.) is thus ex- 
plained without resorting to any fundamentally new prin- 
ciple of choice. Speaking generally, the more a conceived 
object excites us, the more reality it has. The same object 
excites us differently at different times. Moral and religious 
truths come ' home ' to us far more on some occasions than 
on others. As Emerson says, " There is a difference between 
one and another hour of life in their authority and subse- 
quent effect. Our faith comes in moments, . . . yet there 
is a depth in those brief moments which' constrains us to 
ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences." 
The ' depth ' is partly, no doubt, the insight into wider sys- 
tems of unified relation, but far more often than that it is 
the emotional thrill. Thus, to descend to more trivial ex- 
amples, a man who has no belief in ghosts by daylight will 
temporarily believe in them when, alone at midnight, he 
feels his blood curdle at a mysterious sound or vision, his 
heart thumping, and his legs impelled to flee. The thought 
of falling when we walk along a curbstone awakens no emo- 
tion of dread ; so no sense of reality attaches to it, and we 
are sure we shall not fall. On a precipice's edge, however, 
the sickening emotion which the notion of a possible fall 
engenders makes us believe in the latter's imminent reality, 
and quite unfits us to proceed. 



he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination. So that 
the evidence is as great as we can desire, being as certain to us as our pleas- 
ure or pain, i.e. happiness or misery; beyond which we have no concern- 
ment, either of knowledge or being. Such an assurance of the existence 
of things w ithout us is suihcient to direct us in the attaining the good and 
avoiding the evil which is caused by them, which is the important con- 
cernment we have of being made acquainted with them. " {Ibid, bk. iv. 
chap. 11. g 8.) 



308 P8TCH0L0QT. 

The greatest proof that a man is 8ui compos is his ability 
to suspend belief in presence of an emotionally exciting 
idea. To give this power is the highest result of education. 
In untutored minds the power does not exist. Every excit- 
ing thovght in the natural man carries credence nnth it. To 
conceive with passion is eo ipso to affirm. As Bagehot says : 

**The Caliph Omar burnt the Alexandrian Library, saying: * All 
books which contain what is not in the Koran are dangerous. All which 
contain what is in it are useless 1 ' Probably no one ever had an inteuser 
belief in anything than Omar had in this. Yet it is impossible to 
imagine it preceded by an argument. His belief in Mahomet, in the 
Koran, and in the sufficiency of the Koran, probably came to him in 
spontaneous rushes of emotion ; there may have been little vestiges of 
argument floating here and there, but they did not justify the strength 
of the emotion, still less did they create it, and they hardly even excuse<l 
it. . . . Probably, when the subject is thoroughly examined, conviction 
will be found to be one of the intensest of human emotions, and one 
most closely connected with the bodily state, . . . accompanied or pre- 
ceded by the sensation that Scott makes his seer describe as the prelude 
of a prophecy : 

' At length the fatal answer came. 
In characters of living flame — 
Not spoke in words, nor blazed in scroll. 
But borne and branded on my soul.* 

A hot flash seems to burn across the brain. Men in these intense states 
of mind have altered all history, changed for better or worse the creed 
of myriads, and desolated or redeemed provinces or ages. Nor is this 
intensity a sign of truth, for it is precisely strongest in those points in 
which men differ most from each other. John Knox felt it in his anti- 
Catholicism ; Ignatius Ix)yola in his anti-Protestantism; and both, I 
suppose, felt it as much as it is possible to feel it." * 

The reason of the belief is undoubtedly the bodily com- 
motion which the exciting idea sets up. * Nothing which 
I can feel like that can be false.' All our religious and 
supernatural beliefs are of this order. The surest warrant 
for immortality is the yearning of our bowels for our dear 
ones ; for God, the sinking sense it gives us to imagine no 
such Providence or help. So of our political or pecuniary 
hopes and fears, and things and persons dreaded and 



* W. Bagehot, *The Emotion of Conviction,' Literary Studies, i 
412-17. 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 309 

desired. " A grocer has a fidl creed as to foreign policy, 
a young lady a complete theory of the sacraments, as to 
which neither has any doubt. ... A girl in a country par- 
sonage will be sure that Paris never can be taken, or that 
Bismarck is a wretch " — all because they have either con- 
ceived these things at some moment with passion, or asso- 
ciated them with other things which they have conceived 
with passion. 

M. Benouvier calls this belief of a thing for no other 
reason than that we conceive it with passion, by the name 
of mental vertigo.* Other objects whisper doubt or dis- 
belief ; but the object of passion makes us deaf to all but 
itself, and we affirm it unhesitatingly. Such objects are the 
delusions of insanity, which the insane person can at odd 
moments steady himself against, but which again return to 
sweep him oflf his feet. Such are the revelations of mysti- 
cism. Such, particularly, are the sudden beliefs which ani- 
mate mobs of men when frenzied impulse to action is 
involved. Whatever be the action in point — whether the 
stoning of a prophet, the hailing of a conqueror, the burn- 
ing of a witch, the baiting of a heretic or Jew, the starting 
of a forlorn hope, or the flying from a foe — the fact that to 
believe a certain object will cause that action to explode is a 
sufficient reason for that belief to come. The motor im- 
pulse sweeps it unresisting in its train. 

The whole history of witchcraft and early medicine is 
a commentary on the facility with which anything which 
chances to be conceived is believed the moment the belief 
chimes in with an emotional mood. 'The cause of sickness?' 
When a savage asks the cause of anything he means to ask 
exclusively * What is to blame ? ' The theoretic curiosity 
starts from the practical life's demands. Let some one then 
accuse a necromancer, suggest a charm or spell which has 
been cast, and no more * evidence ' is asked for. What evi- 
dence is required beyond this intimate sense of the culprit's 
responsibility, to which our very viscera and limbs reply ? f 

* Psycbologie Ralionnelle, cb. 12. 
f Two examples out of a thousand : 

Reid, Inquiry, ch. ii. g 9: **I remember, many years ago, a white ox 
was brought into the country, of so enormous size that people came many 



310 P8TCH0L0QT. 

Human credulity in the way of therapeutics has similar 
psychological roots. If there is anything intolerable (espe- 
cially to the heart of a woman), it is to do nothing when a 



miles to see him. There happened, some months after, an uncommon 
fatality among women in child-bearing. Two such uncommon events, fol- 
lowing one another, gave a suspicion of their connection, and occasioned 
a common opinion among the country people that the white ox was the 
cause of this fatality." 

U. M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, ii. 888 : "On the third 
day of our stay at Mowa, feeling quite comfortable amongst the people, on 
account of their friendly bearing, I began to writ^ in my note-book the 
terms for articles, in order to improve my already copious vocabulary of 
native words. I had proceeded only a few minutes when I observed i 
strange commotion amongst the people who had been llockiug about me, 
and presently they ran away. In a short time we heard war-cries ringing 
loudly and shrilly over the table-land. Two hours afterwards a long line 
of warriors were seen descending the table-land and advancing towards 
our camp. There may have been between five and six hundred of them. 
We, on the other hand, had made but few preparations except such as 
would justify us replying to them in the event of the actual commence- 
ment of hostilities. But I had made many firm friends among them, and 
I firmly believed that I should be able to avert an open rupture. When 
they hud assembled at about a hundred yards in front of our camp, Safeni 
and I walked up towards them and sat down midway. Some half-dozen 
of the Mowa people came near, and the shauri began. 

** * What is the matter, my friends? ' I asked. * Why do you come 
with guns in your hands, in such numbers, as though you were coming 
to fight ? Fight ? fight us, your friends ! Tut I this is some great mis- 
take, surely.* 

**Mundele,' replied one of them. . . . *our people sjiw you yesterday 
make marks on some tara-tara [paper]. This is 'very bad. Our country 
will waste, our goats will die, our bananas will rot, and our women will 
dry up. What have we done to you that you should wish to kill us? 
We have sold you food and we have brought you wine each day. Your 
people are allowed to wander where they please without trouble. Why is 
the Mundele so wicked? We have gathered together to tight you if you 
do not burn that tara-tara now before our eyes If you burn it we go 
away, and shall be your friends as heretofore.' 

"I told them to rest there, and left Sjifcni in their hands as a pledge 
that I should return. My tent wjus not fifty yards from the spot, but 
while going towards it my brain was busy in devising some plan to foil 
this superstitious madness. My nnte-lKM)k rontaineil a va.st number of val- 
uable notes. ... I could not wicritice it to the childish ciiprice of savages. 
As I was rummaging my book-box, I came across a volume of Shakespeare 
[Chandos edition] much worn, and well thumbed, and which was of the 
same size as my field -lK>ok ; its cover was similar also, and it might be 
passed for the field-book, provided that no one remembered its appearance 



THE PBHCEPTION OF BEAUTY, 311 

loved one is sick or in pain. To do anything is a reliei 
Accordingly, whatever remedy may be suggested is a spark 
on inflammable soil. The mind makes its spring towards 
action on that cue, sends for that remedy, and for a day at 
least believes the danger past Blame, dread, and hope are 
thus the great belief-inspiring passions, and cover among 
them the future, the present, and the past. 

These remarks illustrate the earlier heads of the list on 
page 292. Whichever represented objects give us sensa- 
tions, especially interesting ones, or incite our motor im- 
pulses, or arouse our hate, desire, or fear, are real enough 
for us. Our requirements in the way of reality terminate in 
our own acts and emotions, our own pleasures and pains. 
These are the ultimate fixities from which, as we formerly 
observed, the whole chain of our beliefs depends, object 
hanging to object, as the bees, in swarming, hang to each 
other until, de proche en proche, the supporting branch, the 
Self, is reached and held. 

BELIEF IN OBJEOT8 OF THEOB7. 

Now the merely conceived or imagined objects which 
our mind represents as hanging to the sensations (causing 
them, etc.), filling the gaps between them, and weaving their 
interrupted chaos into order are innumerable. Whole sys- 
tems of them conflict with other systems, and our choice of 



too well. I took it to tbem. ' Is this the tara-tara, friends, that you wish 
burned?' 

•"Yes, yes, that is it.' 

** * Well, take it. and burn it, or keep it.' 

" * M— m. No. no, no. We will not touch it. It is fetish. You must 
bum it.' 

*• * 1 1 Well, let it be so. I will do anything to please my good friends 
of Mowa.' 

*• We walked to the nearest fire. I breathed a regretf\il farewell to my 
genial companion, which, during my many weary hours of night, had 
assisted to relieve my mind when oppressed by almost intolerable woes, 
and then gravely consigned the innocent Shakt^speare to the tinnies, heap- 
ing the brush fuel over it with ceremonious care. 

•* • A h-h,' brejithed the poor deluded natives sighing their relief. . . . 
* There is no trouble now.' . . . And something approaching to a cheer 
was shouted among them, which terminated the episode of the burning of 
Shakespeare." 



812 P87Cn0L0GT 

which system shall carry our belief is governed by princi- 
ples which are simple enough, however subtle and difficult 
may be their application to details. The conceived systenif to 
pass for trve, must at least indrnde the reality of the sensible 
objects in it, by explaining them as effects onus^if nothing more. 
The system which indvdes the most of them, and definitdy ex-- 
plains or pretends to explain the most of them, witt, ceteris 
paribus, prevail. It is needless to say how far mankind still 
is from having excogitated such a system. But the various 
materialisms, idealisms, and hylozoisms show with what in- 
dustry the attempt is forever made. It is conceivable that 
several rival theories should equally well include the actual 
order of our sensations in their scheme, much as the one- 
fluid and two-fluid theories of electricity formulated all the 
common electrical phenomena equally well. The sciences 
are full of these alternatives. Which theory is then to be 
believed ? Thai theory ivill be most generally believed which, 
besides offering us objects able to account satisfactorily for our 
sensible experience, also offers those which are most interesting, 
those tvhich appeal most urgently to our aesthetic, emotional, and 
active needs. So here, in the higher intellectual life, the 
same selection among general conceptions goes on which 
went on among the sensations themselves. First, a word 
of their relation to our emotional and active needs — and 
here I can do no better than quote from an article pub- 
lished some years ago :* 

** A philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either 
of two defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance. First, its ulti- 
mate principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints 
our dearest desires and most cherished powers. A pessimistic principle 
like Schopenhauer's incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann's 
wicked jack at-all-trades, the Unconscious, will i>erjx^tually call forth 
essays at other philosophies. Incompatibility of the future with their 
desires and active tendencies is, in fact, to most men a source of more 
fixed disquietude than uncertainty itself. Witness the attempts to 
overcome the * problem of evil,' the ' myst^rj^ of pain.' There is no 
problem of *good.' 

** But a second and worse defect in a philosophy than that of con- 
tradicting our active propensities is to give them no Object whatever 



* • Ratiouality. Activity,, and Faith * (Princeton Review, July 1882, 
pp. 64-9). 



THE PERCEPTION OF BEAUTY, 313 

to press against. A philosophy whose principle is so incommensorata 
with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in univer- 
sal a£Eairs, as to annihilate their motives at one blow, will be even more 
unpopular than pessimism. Better face the enemy than the eternal 
Void I This is why materialism will always fail of universal adoption, 
however well it may fuse things into an atomistic unity, however 
clearly it may prophesy the future eternity. For materialism denies 
reality to the objects of almost all the impulses which we most cherish. 
The real meaning of the impulses, it says, is something which has no 
emotional interest for us whatever. But what is called extradition is 
quite as characteristic of our emotions as of our sense. Both point to an 
Object as the cause of the present feeling. What an intensely objective 
reference lies in fear ! In like manner an enraptured man, a dreary- 
feeling man, are not simply aware of their subjective states ; if they 
were, the force of their feelings would evaporate. Both believe there 
is outward cause why they should feel as they do : either ' It is a glad 
world ! how good is life !' or * What a loathsome tedium is existence 1 ' 
Any philosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference by ex- 
plaining away its objects or translating them into terms of no emo- 
tional pertinency leaves the mind with little to care or act for. This 
is the opposite condition from that of nightmare, but when acutely 
brought home to consciousness it produces a kindred horror. In night- 
mare we have motives to act, but no power : here we have powers, but 
no motives. A nameless Unheimlichkeit comes over us at the thought 
of there being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the objects of 
those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies. The mon- 
strously lopsided equation of the universe and its knower, which we 
postulate as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly paralleled by the no less 
lopsided equation of the universe and the doer. We demand in it a 
character for which our emotions and active propensities shall be a 
match. Small as we are, minute as is the point by which the Cosmos 
impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that his reaction 
at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast whole, that he 
balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do what it expects of 
him. But as his abilities to * do ' lie wholly in the line of his natural 
propensities ; as he enjoys reaction with such emotions as fortitude, 
hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the like ; and as he very 
unwilhngly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or doubt, —a philosophy 
which should legitimate only emotions of the latter sort would be sure 
to leave the mind a prey to discontent and craving. 

** It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up 
of practical interests. The theory of Evolution is bt»ginniiig to do very 
good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type of reflex action. 
Cognition, in this view, is but a fleeting moment, a cross-section at a 
certain point of what in its totality is a motor phenomenon. In the 
lower forms of life no one will pretend that cognition is anything more 
than a guid«; to appropriate action. The germinal question concerning 



«14 P8T0n0L0Q7, 

things brought for the first time before consciousness is not the theo> 
retic * What is that ?* but the practical * Who goes there ? ' or rather, as 
Horwicz has admirably put it, * What is to be done ? ' — * Was fang" ich 
anf* in all our discussions about the intelligence of .lower animals the 
only tCbC we use is that of their acting as if for a purpose. Ck>gnition, 
in short, is incomplete until discharged in act. And although it is true 
that the iater mental development, which attains its maximum through 
the hypertrophied cerebrum of man, gives birth to a vast amount of 
theoretic activity over and above that which is immediately ministerial 
to practice, yet the earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, and the 
active nature asserts its rights to the end. 

** If there be any truth at all in this view, it follows that however 
vaguely a philosopher may define the ultimate universal datum, he can- 
not be said to leave it unknown to us so long as he in the slightest 
degree pretends that our emotional or active attitude towards it should 
be of one sort rather than another. He who says, *• life is real, life is 
earnest,' however much he may speak of the fundamental mysterious- 
ness of things, gives a distinct definition to that mysteriousness by 
ascribing to it the right to claim from us the particular mood called 
seriousness, which means the willingness to live with energy, though 
energy bring pain. The same is true of him who says that all is vanity. 
Indefinable as the predicate vanity may be in se^ it is clearly enough 
something which permits ansBSthesia, mere escape from suffering, to be 
our rule of life. There is no more ludicrous incongruity than for 
agnostics to proclaim with one breath that the substance of things is 
uuknowable, and with the next that the thought of it should inspire us 
with admiration of its glory, reverence, and a willingness to add our co- 
operative push in the direction towards which its manifestations seem 
to be drifting. The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it make 
such distinct demands upon our activity, we surely are not ignorant of 
its essential quality. 

*' If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great 
periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, 
we shall find, I think, simply this : that each and all of them have said 
to the human being, * The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to 
powers which you possess.' In what did the emancipating message of 
primitive Christianity consist, but in the announcement that God rec- 
ognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely 
overlooked ? Take repentance : the man who can do nothing rightly can 
at least repent of his failures. But for paganism this faculty of re- 
pentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair. 
Christianity took it and made it the one power within us which appealed 
straight to the heart of God. And after the night of the Middle Ages 
had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses of the flesh, 
and defined the Reality to be such that only slavish natures could com- 
mune with it, in what did the JSursutn corda ! of the Renaissance lie 
but in the proclamation that the archetype of verity in things laid claim 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY, 315 

on the widest activity of our whole sBSthetic being? What were 
Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals to powers which even the 
meanest of men might carry with them, faith and self-despair, but 
which were personal, requiring no priestly intermediation, and which 
brought their owner face to face with God ? What caused the wild-fire 
influence of Rousseau but the assurance he gave that man's nature 
was in harmony with the nature of things, if only the paralyzing cor- 
ruptions of custom would stand from between ? How did Kant and 
Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time with cheer, except by 
saying, * Use all your powers ; that is the only obedience which the uni- 
verse exacts ' ? And Carlyle with his gospel of Work, of Fact, of Ve- 
racity, how does he move us except by saying that the universe imposes 
no tasks upon us but such as the most humble can perform ? Emerson's 
creed that everything that ever was or will be is here in the enveloping 
Now ; that man has but to obey himself — * He who will rest in what he 
i9, is a part of Destiny '—is in like manner nothing but an exorcism of 
all scepticism as to the pertinency of one's natural faculties. 

** In a word, * Son of Man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak 
unto thee I ' is the only revelation of tinith to which the solving epochs 
have helped the disciple. But that has been enough to satisfy the 
greater part of his rational need. In se and per se the universal essence 
has hardly- been more defined by any of these formulae than by the 
agnostic x ; but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they are, 
are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent, that it speaks to them and will 
in some way recognize their reply, that I can be a match for it if I will, 
and not a footless waif, suffices to make it rational to my feeling in the 
sense given above. Nothing could be more absurd than to hope for the 
definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse to legitimate, 
and to legitimate in an emphatic manner^ the more powerful of our 
emotional and practical tendencies. Fatalism, whose solving word in 
all crises of behavior is * All striving is vain,' will never reign supreme, 
for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. 
Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in 
spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expec- 
tancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not 
given him." 

After the emotional and active needs come the intellec- 
tual and aesthetic ones. The two great aesthetic principles, 
of richness and of ease, dominate our intellectual as well 
as our sensuous life. And, ceteris paribus, no system which 
should not be rich, simple, and harmonious would have a 
chance of being chosen for belief, if rich, simple, and har- 
monious systems were also there. Into the latter we should 
unhesitatingly settle, with that welcoming attitude of the will 



816 P8TCH0L0Q7, 

in which belief consists. To quote from a remarkable 
book : 

^^This law that our consciousness constantly tends to the minimum 
of complexity and to the maximum of definiteness, is of great impor- 
tance for all our knowledge. . . . Our own activity of attention will thus 
determine what we are to know and what we are to believe. If things 
have more than a certain complexity, not only will our limited powers 
of attention forbid us to unravel this complexity, but we shall strongly 
desire to believe the things much simpler than they are. For our 
thoughts about them will have a constant tendency to become as simple 
and definite as possible. Put a man into a perfect chaos of phenomena 
— sounds, sights, feelings— and if the man continued to exist, and to 
be rational at all, his attention would doubtless soon find for him a way 
to make up some kind of rhythmic regularity, which he would impute 
to the things about him, so as to imagine that he had discovered some 
laws of sequence in this mad new world. And thus, in every case 
where we fancy ourselves sure of a simple law of Nature, we must re- 
member that a great deal of the fancied simplicity may be due, in the 
given case, not to Nature, but to the ineradicable prejudice of our own 
minds in favor of regularity and simplicity. All our thoughts are de- 
termined, in great measure, by this law of least effort, as it is found 
exemplified in our activity of attention. . , . The aim of the whole 
process seems to be to reach as complete and united a conception of 
reality as possible, a conception wherein the greatest fulness of data 
shall be combined with the greatest simplicity of conception. The effort 
of consciousness seems to be to combine the greatest richness of content 
with the greatest definiteness of organization." * 

The richness is got by including all the facts of sense 
in the scheme ; the simplicity, by deducing them out of the 
smallest possible number of permanent and independent 
primordial entities : the definite organization, by assimi- 
lating these latter to ideal objects between which relations 
of an inwardly rational sort obtain. What these ideal ob- 
jects and rational relations are will require a separate 
chapter to show.t Meanwhile, enough has surely been said 
to justify the assertion made above that no general ofifhand 
answer can be given as to which objects mankind shall 
choose as its realities. The fight is still under way. Our 
minds are yet chaotic ; and at best we make a mixture and 

* J. Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston, 1885). pp 
817-57. 

t Chapter XXVII. 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY, 317 

a compromise, as we yield to the claim of this interest or 
that, and follow first one and then another principle in 
turn. It is undeniably true that materialistic, or so-called 
'scientific,' conceptions of the universe have so far gratified 
the purely intellectual interests more than the mere senti- 
mental conceptions have. But, on the other hand, as 
already remarked, they leave the emotional and active 
interests cold. The perfect object of hdief tvovld be a God or 
* Sold of the World,' represented both optimisticaUy and moral- 
isticaUy {if such a combination cotdd be), and withal so defi> 
nitdy conceived as to show us why our phervomenal experiences 
should be sent to its by Him in just the very ivay in which they 
come. All Science and all History would thus be accounted 
for in the deepest and simplest fashion. The very room in 
which I sit, its sensible walls and floor, and the feeling the 
air and fire within it give me, no less than the * scientific ' 
conceptions which I am urged to frame concerning the 
mode of existence of all these phenomena when my back is 
turned, would then all be corroborated, not de-realized, by 
the ultimate principle of my belief. The World-soul sends 
me just those phenomena in order that I may react upon 
them ; and among the reactions is the intellectual one of 
spinning these conceptions. What is beyond the crude 
experiences is not an altemaiive to them, but something 
that means them for me here and now. It is safe to say 
that, if ever such a system is satisfactorily excogitated, 
mankind will drop all other systems and cling to that one 
alone as real. Meanwhile the other systems coexist with 
the attempts at that one, and, all being alike fragmentary, 
each has its little audience and day. 

I have now, I trust, shown suflSciently what the psycho- 
logic sources of the sense of reality are. Certain postulates 
are given in our nature ; and whatever satisfies those pos- 
tulates is treated as if real.* I might therefore finish the 

*Prof. Royce puts this well in discussing idealism and the reality of an 
'external ' world. '* If the history of popular speculation on these topics 
could be written, how much of cowardice and shuffling would be found in 
the behavior of the natural mind before the question, ' How dost thou 
know of an external reality ?' Instead of simply and plainly answering: 
' I mean by the external world in the first place something that I accept 



318 P8TCH0L00T, 

chapter here, were it not that a few additional words will 
set the truth in a still clearer light 

DOITBT. 

There is hardly a common man who (if consulted) 
would not say that things come to us in the first instance 
as ideas; and that if we take them for realities, it is because 
we add something to them, namely, the predicate of having 
also * real existence outside of our thought.' This notion that 
a higher faculty than the mere having of a conscious con- 
tent is needed to make us know anything real by its means 
has pervaded psychology from the earliest times, and is the 
tradition of Scholasticism, Kantism, and Common-sense. 
Just as sensations must come as inward affections and then 
be * extradited ; ' as objects of memory must appear at first 
as presently unrealities, and subsequently be * projected' 
backwards as past realities ; so conceptions must be entia 
rationis till a higher faculty uses them as windows to look 
beyond the ego, into the real extra-vaeuibX world ; — so runs 
the orthodox and popular account. 

And there is no question that this is a true account of 
the way in which many of our later beliefs come to pass. 
The logical distinction between the bare thought of an object 
and belief in the object's reality is often a chronological 
distinction as well. The having and the crediting of an 



or demand, that I posit, postulate, actively construct on the basis of sense- 
data,' the natural man gives us all kinds of vague compromise answers. . . . 

Where shall these endless turnings and twistings have an end? All 

these lesser motives are appealed to, and the one ultimate motive is 
neglected. The ultimate motive with the man of every-day life is the %tiU 
to have an external world Whatever consciousness contains, reason will 
persist in spontaneously adding the thought: ' But there shall be something 
beyond this.' . . . The popular assurance of an external world is iha fixed 
determination to make one, now and henceforth." (Religious Aspect of 
Philosophy, p. 304 — the italics are my own.) This immixture of the will 
appears most flagrantly in the fact that although extirnal matter is 
doubted commonly enough, minds external to our own are never doubted. 
We need them too much, are too essentially social to dispense with them. 
Semblances of matter may suflice to react upon, but not semblances of 
communing souls. A psychic solipsism i^ too hideous a mockery of our 
wants, and, so far as I know, has never been seriously entertained. — 
Chapters ix au<i x of Prof. Royce's work are on the whole the clearest 
account of the psychology el belief with which lam acquainted. 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY, 319 

idea do not always coalesce ; for often we first suppose and 
then believe ; first play with the notion, frame the hypoth- 
esis, and then affirm the existence, of an object of thought. 
And we are quite conscious of the succession of the two 
mental acts. But these cases are none of them primitive 
<?ases. They only occur in minds long schooled to doubt 
by the contradictions of experience. The primitive impulse 
is to affirm immediately the reality of aU that is conceived.* 
When we do doubt, however, in what does the subsequent 
resolution of the doubt consist? It either consists in a 
purely verbal performance, the coupling of the adjectives 
* real ' or * outwardly existing ' (as predicates) to the thing 
originally conceived (as subject) ; or it consists in the per- 
ception in the given case of that for ivhich these adjectives, ab- 
stracted from other similar concrete cases, stand. But what 
these adjectives stand for, we now know well. They stand 
for certain relations (immediate, or through intermediaries) 
to ourselves. Whatever concrete objects have hitherto stood 
in those relations have been for us * real,' * outwardly exist- 
ing.' So that when we now abstractly admit a thing to be 
** real ' (without perhaps going through any definite percep- 



* • • The leading fact in Belief, according to my view of it, is our Primi- 
tive Credulity. We begin by believing everytliing ; whatever is, is true, 
. . . The animal born in the morning of a summer day proceeds upon the 
fact of daylight ; /issumes the perpetuity of that fact. Whatever it is 
<iispoBed to do, it does without misgivings. If in the morning it began a 
round of operations continuing for hours, under the full benefit of day- 
light, it would unhesitatingly begin the same round in the evening. Its 
state of mind is practically one of unbounded confidence ; but, as yet, it 
does not understand what confidence means. 

• * The pristine assurance is soon met by checks ; a disagreeable experience 
leading to new insight. To be thwarted and opposed is one of our earliest 
and most frequent pains. It develop** the sense of a distinction between 
free niid obstructed impulses; the unconsciousness of an open way is ex- 
changed for consciousness ; we are now said properly to believe in what 
has never been contradicted, as we disbelieve in what has been contradicted. 
We believe llmt, after the dawn of day, there is before us a continuance 
of light ; we do not believe that this light is to continue forever. 

" Thus, the vital circumstance in belief is never to be contradicted — never 
to lose prestige. The number of repetitious counts for little in the process: 
we are as much convinced after ten as after fifty ; we are more convinced 
by ten unbroken than by fifty for and one against." (Bain : The Emotions 
jmd the Will, pp. 511, 512.) 



820 P8TCH0L0GT. 

tion of its relations), it is as if we said " it belongs in the 
same world with those other objects." Naturally enough, 
we have hourly opportunities for this summary process of 
belief. All remote objects in space or time are believed in 
this way. When I believe that some prehistoric savage 
chipped this flint, for example, the reality of the savage and 
of his act makes no direct appeal either to my sensation, 
emotion, or volition. What I mean by my belief in it is 
simply my dim sense of a continuity between the long dead 
savage and his doings and the present world of which the 
flint forms part. It is pre-eminently a case for applying 
our doctrine of the * fringe ' (see Vol L p. 258). When I think 
the savage with one fringe of relationship, I believe in him ; 
when I think him without that fringe, or with another one 
(as, e.g., if I should class him with ' scientific vagaries ' in 
general), I disbelieve him. The word * real ' itself is, in 
short, a fringe. 

BEI.ATIONS OF BELIEF AND WILL. 

We shall see in Chapter XXV that will consists in 
nothing but a manner of attending to certain objects, or 
consenting to their stable presence before the mind. The 
objects, in the case of will, are those whose existence 
depends on our thought, movements of our own body for 
example, or facts which such movements executed in future 
may make real. Objects of belief, on the contrary, are those 
which do not change according as we think regarding them. 
I 1^7? to get up early to-morrow morning ; I believe that I 
got up late yesterday morning; I unU that my foreign 
bookseller in Boston shall procure me a German book and 
write to him to that effect. I believe that he will make me 
pay three dollars for it when it comes, etc. Now the im- 
portant thing to notice is that this difference between the 
objects of will and belief is entirely immaterial, as far as 
the relation of the mind to them goes. All that the mind 
does is in both cases the same ; it looks at the object and 
consents to its existence, espouses it, says * it shall be my 
reality.' It turns to it, in short, in the interested active 
emotional way. The rest is done by nature, which in some 
cases makes the objects real which we think of in this 



THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY, 321 

manner, and in other cases does not. Nature cannot change 
the past to suit our thinking. She cannot change the stars 
or the winds ; but she does change our bodies to suit our 
thinking, and through their instrumentality changes much 
besides ; so the great practical distinction between objects 
which we may will or unwill, and objects which we can merely 
believe or disbelieve, grows up, and is of course one of the 
most important distinctions in the world. Its roots, how- 
ever, do not lie in psychology, but in physiology ; as the 
chapter on Volition will abundantly make plain. WHl and 
Bdirfy in shorty meaning a certain relation bettveen objects and 
the Self, are two names for one and the same psychological 
phenomenon. All the questions which arise concerning one 
are questions which arise concerning the other. The causes 
and conditions of the peculiar relation must be the same 
in both. The free-will question arises as regards belief. 
If our wills are indeterminate, so must our beliefs be, etc. 
The first act of free-will, in short, would naturally be to 
believe in free-will, etc. In Chapter XXVI, I shall mention 
this again. 

A practical observation may end this chapter. If belief 
consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an 
object, how can we believe at will ? We cannot control our 
emotions. Truly enough, a man cannot believe at will 
abruptly. Nature sometimes, and indeed not very infre- 
quently, produces instantaneous conversions for us. She 
suddenly puts us in an active connection with objects of 
which she had till then left us cold. " I realize for the first 
time," we then say, " what that means !*' This happens often 
with moral propositions. We have often heard them ; but 
now they shoot into our lives ; they move us ; we feel their 
living force. Such instantaneous beliefs are truly enough not 
to be achieved by will. But groduaUy our will can lead us to 
the same results by a very simple method : toe need only 
in cold Uood act as if the thing in question tvere real, and keep 
acting as if it tvere real, and it tvill infallibly end by grotving 
into such a connection ivith our life that it tvill become reaL \^ 
It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our 
interests in it will be those which characterize belief. 



822 P8YCH0L0QT. 

Those to whom * Gt)d ' and * Duty ' are now mere names 
can make them much more than that, if they make a little 
sacrifice to them every day. But all this is so well known 
in moral and religious education that I need say no more.* 

♦ Literature. D. Hume : Treatise on Human Nature, part lu. g§ vn- 
X. A. Bain : Emotions and Will, chapter on Belief (also pp. 20 ff). 
J. Sully: Sensation and Intuition, essay it. J. Mill: Analysis of Human 
Mind, chapter xi. Ch. Renouvicr: Psychologic Rationnelle, vol. n. 
pt. II ; and Esquisse d'une Classification systematique des Doctrines 
Philosophiques, part yi. J. H. Newman: The Grammar of Assent. J. 
Venn: Some Characteristics of Belief. V. Brochard: De TErreur, part 
n, chap. VI, ix ; and Revue Philosophique, xxviii. 1. E. Rabier : Psy- 
chologic, chap XXI. Appendix. 011^ Laprune: La Certitude Morale (1881). 
G. F. Stout: On Genesis of Cognition of Physical Reality, in * Mind,' Jan. 
1890. J. Piklsr: The Psychology of the Belief in Objective Existence 
(London, 1890).— Mill says that we believe present sensations ; and makes 
' our belief in all other things a matter of associcttum with these. So far so 
good; but as he makes no mention of emotional or volitional reaction. Bain 
rightly charges him with treating belief as a purely intellectual state. For 
Bain belief is rather an incident of our active life. When a thing is such 
as to make us act on it, then we believe it, according to Bain. " But how 
about past things, or remote things, upon which no reaction of ours is pos- 
sible? And how about belief in things which cheek action?" says Sully; 
who considers that we believe a thing only when "the idea of it has an in- 
herent tendency to approximate in character and intensity to a sensation." 
It is obvious that each of these authors emphasizes a tme aspect of the 
question. My own account has sought to be more complete, sensation, 
association, and active reaction all being acknowledged to be concerned. 
The most compendious possible formula perhaps would be that our belirf 
and attention are the same fact. For the moment, what we attend to is 
reality ; Attention is a motor reaction; and we are so made that sensations 
force attention from us. On Belief and Conduct see an article by Leslie 
Stephen, Fortnightly Review, July 188^. 

A set of facts have been recently brought to my attention which I 
hardly know how to treat, so I say a word about them in this footnote. I 
refer to a type of experience which has frequently found a place amongst 
the • Yes' answers to the * Census of Hallucinations/ and which is gener- 
ally described by those who report it as an ' impression of the presence ' of 
someuue near them, although no senstilion either of »ight, hejiring, or touch 
is involved. From the way in which this experience is spoken of by those 
who have had it, it would appear to be an extremely definite and positive 
state of mind, coupled with a belief in the reality of its object quite as 
strong as any direct sensation ever gives. And yet no sensation seems to 
be conne(!ted with it at all. Sometimes the person whose nearness is thus 
imi)ressed is n known person, dead or living, sometimes an unknown one. 
His attitude and situation are often very definitely impressed, and so, some- 
times (though not by way of hearing), are words which he wishes to say.. 

The phenomenon would seem to be due to a pure conception becoming 



THE PERCEPTION OF RBALITl. 323 

wturated with the sort of stingiDg urgency which ordinarily only aenai^ 
tiona bring. But I cannot yet persuade myself that the urgency in ques- 
tion consists in concomitant emotional and motor impulses. The * impres- 
sion ' may come quite suddenly and depart quickly; it may carry no 
emotional suggestions, and wake no motor consequences beyond those 
involved in attending to it. Altogether, the matter is somewhat paradoxical, 
and no conclusion can be come to until more definite data are obtained. 

Perhaps the most curious case of the sort which I have received is the 
following. The subject of the observation, Mr. P.» is an exceptionally 
Intelligent witness, though the words of the narrative are his wife's. 

' * Mr. P. has all his life been the occasional subject of rather singular 
delusions or impressions of various kinds. If I had belief in the existence 
of latent or embryo faculties, other than the five senses, I shouid explain 
them on that ground. Being totally blind, his other perceptions are 
abnormally keen and developed, and given the existence of a rudimentary 
sixth sense, it would be only natural that this also should be more acute in 
him than in others. One of the most interesting of his experiences in this 
line was the frequent apparition of a corpse some years ago, which may be 
worth the attention of your Committee on that subject. At the time Mr. 
P. had a music- room in Boston on Beacon Street, where he used to dc 
severe and protracted practice with little interruption. Now, all one season 
it was a very familiar occurrence with him while in the midst of work to 
feel rrld draft of air suddenly upon his face, with a prickling sensation 
at the ux>ts of his hair, when he would turn from the piuno, and a figure 
which he knew to be dead would come sliding under the crack of the door 
from without, flattening itself to squeeze through and rounding out agaiik 
to the human form. It was of a middle-aged man, and drew itself along 
the carpet on hands and knees, but with head thrown back till it reached 
the sofa, upon which it stretched itself. It remained some moments, but 
vanished always if Mr. P. spoke or made a decided movement. The most 
singular point in the occurrence was its frequent repetition. He might 
expect it on any day between two and four o'clock, and it came always 
heralded by the same sudden cold shiver, and was invariably the same fig- 
uie which went through the same movements. He afterwards traced the 
whole experience to strong tea. He was in the habit of taking cold tea, 
which always stimulates him, for lunch, and on giving up this practice he 
never saw this or any other apparition again. However, even allowing, as 
is doubtless true, that the event was a delusion of nerves first fatigued by 
overwork and then excited by this stimulant, there is one point which is 
still wholly inexplicable and highly interesting to me. Mr. P. has no 
memory whatever of sight, nor conception of it. It is impossible for him 
to form any idea of what we mean by light or color, consequently he has 
no cognizance of any object which does not reach his sense of he&ring or 
of touch, though these are so acute as to give a contrary impression some* 
times to other pnjople. When he becomes aware of the presence of a person 
or an object, by means which seem mysterious to outsiders, he can always 
trace it naturally and legitimately to slight echoes, perceptible only to his 
keen ears, or to differences in atmospheric pressure, perceptible only to his 
.acute nerves of touch; but with the apparition described, for the only time 
In his xperience, he was aware of presence, size, and appearance, without 



824 



FQYOHOLOQY. 



the use of either of these mediums. The figure never produced the least 
aound nor came within a number of feet of his person, yet he knew that it 
was a man, that it moved, and in what direction, even that it wore a full 
beard, which, like the thick curly hair, was partially gray; also that it was 
dressed in the style of suit known as ' pepper and salt. ' These points were 
all perfectly distinct and invariable each time. If asked how he perceived 
them, he will answer he cannot tell, he simply knew it. and so strongly and 
80 distinctly that it is impossible to shake his opinion as to the exact details 
of the man's appearance. It would seem that in this delusion of the senses 
he really mmo, as he has never done in the actual experiences of life, except 
in the first two years of childhood." 

On cross-examining Mr. P., I could not make out that there was any- 
thing like visual imagination involved, although he was quite unable to 
describe in Just what terms the false perception was carried on. It seemed 
to be more like an intensely definite eoncef^iUm than anything else* a con- 
oeption to which the feeling of present reality was attached, but in no sooh 
ihape as easily to fall under the heads laid down in my text 



CHAPTER XXn .♦ 
REASONING. 

We talk of man being the rational animal ; and the tra- 
ditional intellectualist philosophy has always made a great 
point of treating the brutes as wholly irrational creatures. 
Nevertheless, it is by no means easy to decide just what is 
meant by reason, or how the peculiar thinking process 
called reasoning differs from other thought-sequences which 
may lead to similar results. 

Much of our thinking consists of trains of images sug- 
gested one by another, of a sort of spontaneous revery of 
which it seems likely enough that the higher brutes should 
be capable. This sort of thinking leads nevertheless to 
rational conclusions, both practical and theoretical. The 
links between the terms are either * contiguity ' or * similar- 
ity,' and with a mixture of both these things we can hard- 
ly be very incoherent As a rule, in this sort of irrespon- 
sible thinking, the terms which fall to be coupled together 
are empirical concretes, nol abstractions. A sunset may 
call up the vessel's deck from which I saw one last summer, 
the companions of my voyage, my arrival into port, etc.; or 
it may make me think of solar myths, of Hercules' and 
Hector's funeral pyres, of Homer and whether he could 
write, of the Greek alphabet, etc. If habitual contiguities 
predominate, we have a prosaic mind ; if rare contiguities, 
or similarities, have free play, we call the person fanciftd, 
poetic, or witty. But the thought as a rule is of matters 
taken in their entirety. Having been thinking of one, we 
find later that we are thinking of another, to which we have 
been lifted along, we hardly know how. If an abstract 



* The substance of this chapter, and a good many pages of the text, 
originally appeared in an article entitled * Brute and Human Intellect,' in 
the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for July 1878 (vol. xn. p. 286). 

825 



336 PBTOHOLOOT. 

quality figures in the procession, it arrests our attention 
but for a moment, and fades into something else ; and is 
never very abstract Thus, in thinking of the sun-myths, we 
may have a gleam of admiration at the gracefulness of the 
primitive human mind, or a moment of disgust at the nar- 
rowness of modern interpreters. But, in the main, we 
think less of qualities than of whole things, real or possi- 
ble, just as we may experience them. 

The upshot of it may be that we are reminded of some 
practical duty : we write a letter to a friend abroad, or we 
take down the lexicon and study our Greek lesson. Our 
thought is rational, and leads to a rational act, but it can 
hardly be called reasoning in a strict sense of the term. 

There are other shorter flights of thought, single coup- 
lings of terms which suggest one another by association, 
which approach more to what would commonly be classed 
as acts of reasoning proper. Those are where a present sign 
suggests an unseen, distant, or future reality. Where the 
sign and what it suggests are both concretes which have 
been coupled together on previous occasions, the inference 
is common to both brutes and men, being really nothing 
more than association by contiguity. A and B, dinner-bell 
and dinner, have been experienced in immediate succes- 
sion. Hence A no sooner falls upon the sense than B is 
anticipated, and steps are taken to meet ii The whole 
education of our domestic beasts, all the cunning added by 
age and experience to wild ones, and the greater part of 
our human knowingness consists in the ability to make a 
mass of inferences of this simplest sort. Our * perceptions,' 
or recognitions of what objects are before us, are inferences 
of this kind. We feel a patch of color, and we say * a dis- 
tant house,' a whiff of odor crosses us, and we say 'a 
skunk,' a faint sound is heard, and we call it * a railroad 
train.' Examples are needless ; for such inferences of sen- 
sations not presented form the staple and tissue of our 
perceptive life, and our Chapter XIX was full of them, 
illusory or veracious. They have been called unconscious 
inferefnces. Certainly we are commonly unconscious that 
we are inferring at alL The sign and the signified melt 
into what seems to us the object of a single pulse of 



REASONING. 827 

thought. Immediate iri/erences would be a good name for 
these simple acts of reasoning requiring but two terms,^ 
were it not that formal logic has already appropriated the 
expression for a more technical use. 

•BEOBPTS.' 

In these first and simplest inferences the conclusion 
may follow so continuously upon the * sign ' that the latter 
is not discriminated or attended to as a separate object by the 
mind. Even now we can seldom define the optical signs 
which lead us to infer the shapes and distances of the ob- 
jects which by their aid we so unhesitatingly perceive. 
The objects, too, when thus inferred, are general objects. 
The dog crossing a scent thinks of a deer in general, or of 
another dog in general, not of a particular deer or dog. To 
these most primitive abstract objects Dr. G. J. Eomanes 
gives the name of recepts or generic ideas, to distinguish 
them from concepts and general ideas properly so called, t 
They are not analyzed or defined, but only imagined. 

*' It requires but a slight analysis of our ordinary mental processes 
to prove that all our simpler ideas are group-arrangements which have 
been formed spontaneously or without any of that intentionally com- 
paring, sifting, and combining process which is required in the higher 
departments of ideational activity. The comparing, sifting, and com- 
bining is here done, as it were, for the couscous agent, not by him. 
Recepts are received ; it is only concepts that require to be conceived. 
... If I am crossing a street and hear behind me a sudden shout, I 
do not require to wait in order to predicate to myself that there is prob- 
ably a hansom-cab just about to run me down : a cry of this kind, and 
in those circumstances, is so intimately associated in my mind with its 



* I see no need of aasuming more than two terms in this sort of reason- 
ing — first, the sign, and second, the thing inferred from it. Either may 
be complex, but essentially it is but A calling up B, and no middle term is 
involved. M. Binet, {n his most intelligent little book. La Psychologic du 
Raisounement, maintains that there are three terms. The present sensa- 
tion or sign must, according to him, first evoke from the past an image 
which resembles it and fuses with it, and the things suggested or inferred 
are always the contiguous associates of this intermediate image, and not of 
the immediate sensation. The reader of Chapter XIX will see why I do 
not believe in the ' image ' in question as a distinct psychic fact. 

t Mental Evolution in Man (1889), chapters ni and iv. Sec especially 
pp. 68-80, and later 368. 396. 



828 P8TCH0L0Q7. 

purpoee, that the idea which it arouses need not rise ahove the level ol 
a reoept ; and the adaptive movements on my part which that idea im- 
mediately prompts are performed without any intelligent reflection. 
Yet, on the other hand, they are neither reflex actions nor instinctive 
actions ; thty are what may be termed receptual actions, or actions de- 
pending on recepts." * 

" How far can this kind of unnamed or non-conceptional 
ideation extend ?" Dr. Bomanes asks ; and answers bj a 
variety of examples taken from the life of brutes, for which 
I must refer to his book. One or two of them, however, I 
will quote : 

** Houzeau writes that while crossing a wide and arid plain in Texas, 
his two dogs suffered greatly from thirst, and that between thirty and 
forty times they rushed down the hollows to search for water. The hol- 
lows were not valleys, and there were no trees in them, or any other 
difference in the vegetation ; and as they were absolutely dry, there 
could have been no smell of damp earth. The dogs behaved as if they 
knew that a dip in the ground offered them the best chance of finding 
water, and Houzeau has often witnessed the same behavior in other ani- 
mals. . . . 

** Mr. Darwin writes : * When I say to my terrier in an eager voice 
(and I have made the trial many times), *' Hi ! hi ! where is it ?" she at 
once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally 
first looks quickly all round, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, 
to scout for any game, but finding nothing she looks up into any neigh- 
boring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly show that 
she had in her mind a general idea, or concept, that some animal is to 
be discovered and hunted ? ' " f 

They certainly show this. But the idea in question is 
of an object c^ut which nothing farther may be articulately 
known. The thought of it prompts to activity, but to no 
theoretic consequence. Similarly in the following ex- 
ample : 

'' Water-fowl adopt a somewhat different mode of alighting upon 
land, or even upon ice, from that which they adopt when alighting 
upon water; and those kinds which dive from a height (such as terns 
and ^annets) never do so upon land or upon ice. These facts prove 
that the animals have one recept answering to a solid surface, and an- 
other answering to a fluid. Similarly a man will not dive from a height 
over hard ground or over ice, nor will he jump into water in the same 
way as he jumps upon dry land. In other words, like the water-fowl 

♦ Tj>€ cit. p. 50. \P r)'2 



RBA80NINQ. 329 

he has two distinct recepts, one of which answers to solid ground, and 
the other to an unresisting fluid. But unlike the water-fowl he is able 
to bestow upon each of these recepts a name, and thus to raise them 
both to the level of concepts. So far as the practical purposes of loco- 
motion are concerned, it is of course immaterial whether or not he thus 
raises his recepts into concepts ; but ... for many other purposes it is 
of the highest importance that he is able to do this.'' * 

IN Bl!ASONINa, TKTE PICK OUT BSSBNTIAIi QnAI<ITnB& 

The chief of these purposes is predication^ a theoretic 
function which, though it always leads eventually to some 
kind of action, yet tends as often as not to inhibit the imme- 
diate motor response to which the simple inferences of 
w^hich we have been speaking give rise. In reasoning, A 
may suggest B ; but B, instead of being an idea which is 
simply obeyed by us, is an idea which suggests the distinct 
additional idea C. And where the train of suggestion is one 
of reasoning distinctively so called as contrasted with mere 
revery or ' associative ' sequence, the ideas bear certain 
inward relations to each other which we must proceed to 
examine with some care. 

The result C yielded by a true act of reasoning is apt 
to be a thing voluntarily sought, such as the means to a 
proposed end, the ground for an observed effect, or the 
effect of an assumed cause. All these results may be 
thought of as concrete things, but they are not suggested im- 
mediately by other concrete things, as in the trains of simply as- 
sociative thought They are linked to the concretes which 
precede them by intermediate steps, and these steps are 
formed by general characters articulately denoted and ex- 
pressly analyzed out. A thing inferred by reasoning need 
neither have been an habitual associate of the datum from 
which we infer it, nor need it be similar to it It may be 
a thing entirely unknown to our previous experience, some- 
thing which no simple association of concretes could ever 
have evoked. The great difference, in feet, between that 
simpler kind of rational thinking which consists in the con- 
crete objects of past experience merely suggesting each 
other, and reasoning distinctively so called, is this, that 

* Loe. cti. p. 74. 



830 P8TCH0L007. 

whilst the empirical thinking is onl y reprodnctiYe ^reason- 
ing is productive. An empirical, or * rule-of-thumb/ thinker 
can deduce nothing from data with whose behavior and 
associates in the concrete he is unfamiliar. But put a 
reasoner amongst a set of concrete objects which he has 
neither seen nor heard of before, and with a little time, if 
he is a good reasoner, he will make such inferences from 
them as will quite atone for his ignorance. Reasoning 
helps us out of unprecedented situations — situations for 
which all our common associative wisdom, all the 'educa- 
tion ' which we share in common with the beasts, leaves us 
without resource. 

Let us make this abHity to deal with novel data the tecJin 
nical differentia of reasoning. This will sufficiently mark 
it out from common associative thinking, and will immedi- 
ately enable us to say just what peculiarity it contains. 

It contains analysis and abstraction. Whereas the merely 
empirical thinker stares at a fact in its entirety, and remains 
helpless, or gets * stuck,' if it suggests no concomitant or 
similar, the reasoner breaks it up and notices some one of 
its separate attributes. This attribute he takes to be the 
essential part of the whole fact before him. This attribute 
has properties or consequences which the fact until then 
was not known to have, but which, now that it is noticed 
to contain the attribute, it must have. 

Call the fact or concrete datum S ; 
the essential attribute M ; 
the attribute's property P. 

Then the reasoned inference of P from S cannot be 
made without M's intermediation. The * essence ' M is 
thus that third or middle term in the reasoning which a 
moment ago was pronounced essential. For his original 
concrete S the reasoner substitutes its abstract property, M, 
What is true of M, what is coupled with M, then holds- 
true of S, is coupled with S. As M is properly one of the 
parts of the entire S, reasoning may then be very toeU defined 
as tlve substitution of parts and their iinplications or consequences 
for wholes. And the art of the reasoner will consist of two ' 
stages : 



BEA80NINO. 331 

First, sagacity,* 'or the ability to discoTer what part, M, 
lies embedded in the whole S which is before him ; 

Second, learning, or the ability to recall promptly M's 
consequences, concomitants, or implications, t 

If we glance at the ordinary syllogism — 

MisP; JH'^^ 
S isM; \^1. ^ 
.-. 8 isP 

* J. Locke. Essay cone. Hum. Understand in g. bk. iv. chap. n. § 8. 

f To be sagacious is to, be a good observer. J. S. Mill has a passage 
which is so much in the spirit of the text that 1 cannot forbear to quote it. 
"The observer is not he who merely sees the thing which is before his 
eyes, but he who sees what parts that thing is composed of. To do this 
well is a rare talent. One person, from inattention, or attending only in 
the wrong place, overlooks half of what he sees ; another sets down much 
more than he sees, confounding it with what he imagines, or with what 
he infers ; another takes note of the kind of all the circumstances, but 
being inexpert in estimating their degree, leaves the quantity of each 
▼ague and uncertain ; another sees indeed the whole, but makes such 
an awkward division of it into parts, throwing things into one mass 
which require to be separated, and separating others which might more 
conveniently be considered as one, that the result is much the same, 
sometimes even worse, than if no analysis had been attempted at all. It 
would be possible to point out what qualities of mind, and modes of 
mental culture, fit a person for being a good observer : that, however, is 
a question not of Logic, but of the Theory of Education, in the most en- 
larged sense of the term. There is not properly an Art of Observing. 
There may be rules for observing. But these, like rules for inventing, are 
properly instructions for the preparation of one's own mind ; for putting 
it into the state in which it will be most fitted to observe, or most likely to 
invent. They are. therefore, essentially rules of self -education, which is 
a different thing from Logic. They do not tench how to do the thing, 
but how to make ourselves capable of doing it. They are an art of 
strengthening the limbs, not an art of using them. The extent and minute- 
ness of observation which may be requisite, and the degree of decomposi- 
tion to which it may be neces.sary to carry the menial analysis, depend on 
•the particular purpose in view. To ascxTtain the state of the whole uni- 
verse at any particular moment is impossible, but would also be useless. 
In making chemical experiments, we do not think it necessary to note the 
position of the planets ; because ex peri inue has shown, as a very superficial 
experience is sufficient to show, that in such cases that circumstance is not 
material to the n'sult : and accordingly, in the nges when man believed in 
the occult influences of the heavenly bodies, it might have been unphilo- 
sophical to omit ascertaining the precise condition of those bodies at the 
moment of the experiment." (Logic, bk. in. chap. vii. g 1. Cf. also bk. 
rv. chap, ii.) 



832 PSYCHOLOGY, 

— we see that the second or minor premise, the ^snbsump- 
tion ' as it is sometimes called, is the one requiring the sa- 
gacity ; the first or major the one requiring the fertility, or 
fulness of learning. Usually the learning is more apt to be 
ready than the sagacity, the ability to seize fresh aspects 
in concrete things, being rarer than the ability to learn old 
rules ; so that, in most actual cases of reasoning, the minor 
premise, or the way of conceiving the subject, is the one 
that makes the novel step in thought. This is, to be sure, 
not always the case ; for the fact that M carries P with it 
may also be unfamiliar and now forn^ulated for the first 
time. 

The perception that S is M is a mode of conceiving S. 
The statement that M is P is an abstract or general proposi- 
tion. A word about both is necessary. 

WHAT IS MEANT B7 A MODE OF CONCETVlNa. 

When we conceive of 8 merely as M (of vermilion 
merely as a mercury-compound, for example), we neglect 
all the other attributes which it may have, and attend 
exclusively to this one. We mutilate the fulness of 
S's reality. Every reality has an infinity of aspects or 
properties. Even so simple a fact as a line which you trace 
in the air may be considered in respect to its form, its 
length, its direction, and its location. When we roach 
more complex facts, the number of ways in which we may 
regard them is literally endless. Vermilion is not only a 
mercury-compound, it is vividly red, heavy, and expensive, 
it comes from China, and so on, in irrfinitum. All objects are 
well-springs of properties, which are only little by little 
developed to our knowledge, and it i^ truly said that to 
know one thing thoroughly would be to know the whole 
universe. Mediately or immediately, that one thing is re- ' 
lated to everything else ; and to know aR about it, all its 
relations need be. known. But each relation forms one of 
its attributes, one angle by which some one may conceive it, 
and while so conceiving it may Ignore the rest of it. A man 
is such a complex fact. But out of the complexity all that 
an army commissary picks out as important for his purposes 
is his property of eating so many pounds a day ; the general. 



BEASOmifG. 333 

of marcliing so many miles; the chair-maker, of having 
Buch a shape ; the orator, of responding to such and such 
feelings ; the theatre-manager, of being willing to pay just 
Buch a price, and no more, for an evening^s amusement. 
Each of these persons singles out the particular side of the 
entire man which has a bearing on Ma concerns, and not till 
this side is distinctly and separately conceived can the 
proper practical conclusions /or thcU reasoner be drawn ; and 
when they are drawn the man's other attributes may be ig- 
nored. 

All ways of conceiving a concrete fact, if they are true 
ways at all, are equally true ways. There is no property 
ABSOLUTELY essential to any one thing. The same property 
which figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion be- 
comes a very inessential feature upon another. Now that 
I am writing, it is essential that I conceive my paper as a 
surface for inscription. If I failed to do that, I should have 
to stop my work But if I wished to light a fire, and no 
other materials were by, the essential way of conceiving 
the paper would be as combustible material ; and I need 
then have no thought of any of its other destinations. It is 
really aU that it is : a combustible, a writing surface, a thin 
thing, a hydrocarbonaceous thing, a thing eight inches one 
way and ten another, a thing just one furlong east of a certain 
Btone.in my neighbor's field, an American thing, etc., etc., 
ad infinitum. Whichever one of these aspects of its being I 
temporarily class it under, makes me unjust to the other 
aspects. But as I always am classing it under one aspect 
or another, I am always unjust, always partial, always ex- 
clusive. My excuse is necessity — the necessity which my 
finite and practical nature lays upon me. My thinking is 
first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I 
can only do one thing at a time. A God, who is supposed 
to drive the whole universe abreast, may also be supposed, 
without detriment to his activity, to see all parts of it at 
once and without emphasis. But were our human attention 
so to disperse itself we should simply stare vacantly at 
things at large and forfeit our opportunity of doing any 
particidar act. Mr. Warner, in his Adirondack story, shot a 
bear by aiming, not at his eye or heart, but * at him gen- 



334 P8TCH0L0QY, 

erally.' But we cannot aim ' generally ' at the uniyerse ; 
or if we do, we miss our game. Oar scope is narrow, and 
we must attack things piecemeal, ignoring the solid fulness 
in which the elements of Nature exist, and stringing one 
after another of them together in a serial way, to suit our 
little interests as they change from hour to hour. In this, 
the partiality of one moment is partly atoned for by the 
different sort of partiality of the next To me now, writing 
these words, emphasis and selection seem to be the essence 
of the human mind. In other chapters other qualities have 
seemed, and will again seem, more important parts of psy- 
chology. 

Men are so ingrainedly partial that, for common-sense 
and scholasticism (which is only common-sense grown artic- 
ulate), the notion that there is no one quality genuinely, 
absolutely, and exclusively essential to anything is almost 
unthinkable. *' A thing's essence makes it what it is. With- 
out an exclusive essence it would be nothing in particular, 
would be quite nameless, we could not say it was this 
rather than that. What you Write on, for example, — why 
talk of its being combustible, rectangular, and the like, 
when you know that these are mere accidents, and that 
what it really is, and was made to be, is just paper and 
nothing else?*' The reader is pretty sure to make some 
such comment as this. But he is himself merely insisting 
on an aspect of the thing which suits his own petty purpose, 
that of naming the thing ; or else on an aspect which suits 
the manufacturer's purpose, that of producing an article 
for which there is a vvlgar demand. Meanwhile the reality 
overflows these purposes at every pore. Our usual purpose 
with it, our commonest title for it, and the properties which 
this title suggests, have in reality nothing sacramental. 
They characterize vs more than they characterize the thilig. 
But we are so stuck in our prejudices, so petrified intellect 
tually, that to our vulgarest names, with their suggestions, 
we ascribe an eternal and exclusive worth. The thing must 
be, essentially, what the vulgarest name connotes ; what 
less usual names connote, it can be only in an * accidental ' 
and relatively unreal sense.* 

♦ Readers brought up on Popular Science may think that the molecular 



BBABONING, 335 

Locke undermined the fallacy. But none of his succes- 
sors, so far as I know, have radically escaped it, or seen 
that the only meaning of essence is teleologicdl, and that dassi^ 
fication and conception are purely teledoguxd weapons of the 
fnind. The essence of a thing is that one of its properties 
which is so important for my interests that in comparison 
with it I may neglect the rest Amongst those other things 
which have this important property I class it, after this 
property I name it, as a thing endowed with this property 
I conceive it ; and whilst so classing, naming, and conceiv- 
ing it, all other truths about it become to me as naught* 
The properties which are important vary from man to man 
and from hour to hour.f Hence divers appellations and 



structure of things is their real essence in an absolute sense, and that water 
is H-O-H more deeply and truly than it is a solvent of sugar or a 
alaker of thirst. Not a whit t It is o^^ of these things with equal reality, 
and the only reason why/<?r the chemist it is H-O-H primarily, and only 
secondarily the other things, is that/<7r his purpose ofdeduetian. and earn- 
pendious definition the H-O-H aspect of it is the more useful one to bear 
in mind. 

* " We find that we take for granted irresistibly that each kind [of thing] 
has some character which distinguishes it from other classes. . . . What 
is the foundation of this postulate ? What is the ground of this assumption 
that there must exist a definition which we have never seen, and which 
perhaps no one has seen in a satisfactory form ?....! reply that our con- 
viction that there must needs be characteristic marks by which things can 
be defined in words is founded upon the assumption of (he necessary possi- 
/fUity of reasoning.** (W. Whewell : Hist, of Scientific Ideas, bk. viii. chap. 
I, §9.) 

f I may quote a passage from an article entitled * The Sentiment of 
Rationality,* published in vol. iv oT Mind, 1879: **WhsLt\afi conception f 
It is a ieleological instrument. It is a partial aspect of a thing which 
for our purpose we regard as its essential aspect, as the representative 
of the entire thing. In comparison with this aspect, whatever other 
properties and qualities the thing may have are unimportant accidents 
which we may without blame ignore. But the essence, the ground 
of conception, varies with the end we have in view. A substance like 
oil has as many different essences as it has uses to different individuals. 
One man conceives it as a combustible, another as a lubricator, another as 
a food ; the chemist thinks of it as a hydrocarbon ; the furniture-maker 
as a darkener of wood ; the speculator as a commodity whose market-price 
today is this and to-morrow that. The soap-boiler, the physicist, the 
clothes-scourer severally ascribe to it other essences in relation to their 
needs. Uebem eg's doctrine that the essential quality of a thing is the 



336 P8TCH0L0QT. 

conceptions for the same thing. But many objects of daily 
use — as paper, ink, butter, horse-car — have properties of 
such constant unwavering importance, and have such stereo- 
typed names, that we end by believing that to conceive 
them in those ways is to conceive them in the only true 
way. Those are no truer ways of conceiving them than any 
others ; they are only more important ways, more fre- 
quently serviceable ways.* 



quality of most toorlh is strictly true ; but Ueberweg has failed to note 
that the worth is wholly relative to the temporary interests of the conceiver. 
And, even, when his interest is distinctly defined in his own mind, the 
discrimination of the quality in the object which has the closest connection 
with it is a thing which no rules can teach. The only a priori advice that 
can be given to a man embarking on life with a certain purpose is the 
somewhat barren counsel : Be sure that in the circumstances that meet 
you, you attend to the right ones for your purpose. To pick out the right 
ones is the measure of the man. ' Millions/ says Hartmann, ' stare at the 
phenomenon before a genicUer Kojtf pounces on the concept.' The genius 
is simply he to whom, when he opens his eyes upon the world, the ' right ' 
characters are the prominent ones. The fool is he who, with the same 
purposes as the genius, infallibly gets his attention tangled amid the 
accidents. " 

* Only if one of our purposes were itself truer than another, could one 
of our conceptions become the truer conception. To be a truer purpose, 
however, our purpose must conform more to some absolute standard of 
purpose in thiugs to which our purposes ought to conform. This shows 
that the whole doctrine of essential characters is intimately bound up 
with a teleological view of the world. Materialism becomes self-contra- 
dictory when it denies teleology, and yet in the same breath calls atoms, etc., 
the essential facts. The world contains consciousness as well as atoms — and 
the one must be written down as just as essential as the other, in the ab- 
sence of any declared purpose regarding them on the creator's part, or in 
the absence of any creator. As far as we ourselves go, the atoms are worth 
more for purposes of deduction, the consciousness for purposes of inspira- 
tion. We may fairly write the Universe in either way, thus : Atoms- 
producing-consciousness ; or CoNSCiousNESS-produced-by-atoms. Atoms 
alone, or consciousness alone, are precisely equal mutilations of the truth. 
If, without believing in a God, I still continue to talk of what the world 
* essentially is, ' I am just as much entitled to define it as a place in which 
my nose itches, or as a place where at a certain corner I can get a mess 
of oysters for twenty cents, as to call it an evolving nebula differentiating 
and integrating itself. It is hard to say which of the three abstractions is 
the more rotten or miserable substitute for the world's concrete fulness. 
To conceive it merely as * God's work ' w^ould be a similar mutilation of 
it, so long as we said not what Qod, or what kind of work. The only real 
truth about the world, apart from particular purposes, is the totcU truth. 



REASONING, 337 

So much for what is implied, when the reasoner con- 
ceives of the fact S before him as a case of which the essence 
is to be M. One word now as to what is involved in M's 
having properties, consequences, or implications, and we 
can go back to the study of the reasoning process again. 

WHAT 18 INVOIiVED US OENSBAIi FBOFOSITION8. 

M is not a concrete, or * self-sufficient,* as Mr. Clay 
would say. It is an abstract character which may exist, 
embedded with other characters, in many concretes. Whe- 
ther it be the character of being a writing surface, of being 
made in America or China, of being eight inches square, or 
of being in a certain part of space, this is always true of it. 
Now we might conceive of this being a world in which all 
such general characters were independent of each other, so 
that if any one of them were found in a subject 8, we never 
could be sure what others would be found alongside of it. 
On one occasion there might be P with M, on another Q, 
and so on. In such a world there would be no general 
sequences or coexistences, and no universal laws. Each 
grouping would be aui generis ; from the experience of the 
past no future could be predicted ; and reasoning, as we 
shall presently see, would be an impossibility. 

But the world we live in is not one of this sort Though 
many general characters seem indiflFerent to each other, 
there remain a number of them which afifect constant habits 
of mutual concomitance or repugance. They involve or 
imply each other. One of them is a sign to us that the 
other will be found. They hunt in couples, as it were ; and 
such a proposition as that M is P, or includes P, or precedes 
or accompanies P, if it prove to be true in one instance, 
may very likely be true in every other instance which we 
meet. This is, in fact, a world in which general laws obtain, 
in which universal propositions are true, and in which rea- 
soning is therefore possible. Fortunately for us : for since 
we cannot handle things as wholes, but only by conceiving 
them through some general character which for the time 
we call their essence, it would be a great pity if the matter 
ended there, and if the general character, once picked out 
an/i in our possession, helped us to no farther advance. In 



838 PSYCHOLOGY. 

Chapter XXYIII we shall have again to consider this har- 
mony between our reasoning faculty and the world in which 
its lot is cast* 

To revert now to our symbolic representation of the 
reasoning process : 

MisP 
SisM 



SisP 



M is discerned and picked out for the time being to be 
the essence of the concrete fact, phenomenon, or reality, S. 
But M in this world of ours is inevitably conjoined with P ; 
so that P is the next thing that we may expect to find con- 
joined with the fact S. We may conclude or infer P, 
through the intermediation of the M which our sagacity 
began by discerning, when S came before it, to be the 
essence of the case. 

Now note that if P have any value or importance for us, 
M was a very good character for our sagacity to pounce upon 
and abstract. If, on the contrary, P were of no importance, 
some other character than M would have been a better 
essence for us to conceive of S by. Psychologically, as a 
rule, P overshadows the process from the start We are 
seeking P, or something like P. But the bare totality of S 
does not yield it to our gaze ; and casting about for some 
point in S to take hold of, which will lead us to P, we hit, 
if we are sagacious, upon M, because M happens to be just 
the character which is knit up with P. Had we wished Q 
instead of P, and were N a property of S conjoined with Q, 
we ought to have ignored M, noticed N, and conceived of S 
as a sort of N exclusively. 

Keasoning is always for a subjective interest, to attain 
some particular conclusion, or to gratify some special 
curiosity. It not only breaks up the datum placed before 
it and conceives it abstractly ; it must conceive it rightly 
too ; and conceiving it rightly means conceiving it by that 
one particular abstract character which leads to the one 

♦ Compare Lotze, Metapbysik, ^g 58. 67, for some instniclive remarks 
on ways in which the world's constitution might diHer from what it actu- 
ally Is. Compare also Chapter XXVIII. 



REASONINO. 339 

sort of conclusion which it is the reasoner's temporary in- 
terest to attain.* 

The resvUs of reasoning may be hit upon by accident. 
The stereoscope was actually a result of reasoning; it is 
conceivable, however, that a man playing with pictures and 
mirrors might accidentally have hit upon ii Cats have been 
known to open doors by pulling latches, etc. But no cat, 
if the latch got out of order, could open the door again, 
unless some new accident of random fumbling taught her 
to associate some new total movement with the total phe- 
nomenon of the closed door. A reasoning man, however, 
would open the door by first analyzing the hindrance. He 
would ascertain what particular feature of the door was 
wrong. The lever, e.g., does not raise the latch sufficiently 
from its slot — case of insufficient elevation — raise door 
bodily on hinges ! Or door sticks at top by friction against 
lintel — press it bodily down! Now it is obvious that a 
child or an idiot might without this reasoning learn the nde 
for opening that particular door. I remember a clock which 
the maid-servant had discovered would not go unless it 
were supported so as to tilt slightly forwards. She had 
stumbled on this method after many weeks of groping. The 
reason of the stoppage was the friction of the pendulum- 
bob against the back of the clock-case, a reason which an 
educated man would have analyzed out in five minutes. I 

* Sometimes, it must be confessed, the conceiver's purpose falls short of 
reasoning and the only conclusion he cares to reach is the bare naming of 
the datum. ** What is that?" is our first question relative to any unknown 
thing. And the ease with which our curiosity is quenched as soon as we 
are supplied with any sort of a name to call the object by, is ridiculous 
enough. To quote from an unpublished essay by a former student of 
mine. Mr. R. W. Black : " The simplest end which a thing's predicate can 
serve is the satisfaction of the desire for unity itself, the mere desire that 
the thing shall be the same with something else. Why, the other day, 
when I mistook a portrait of Shakespeare for one of Hawthorne, was I not, 
on psychological principles, as right as if I had correctly named it ?— the 
two pictures had a common essence, bald forehead, mustache, flowing 
hair. Simply because the only end that could possibly be served by naming 
it Hawthorne was my desire to have it so. With reference to any other end 
that classification of it would not serve. And every unity, every identity, 
every classifio4ition is rightly called fanciful unless it serves some other end 
than the mere satisfaction, emotion, or inspiration caught by momentarily 
believing in it." 



340 PSYCHOLOOT, 

have a student's lamp of which the flame vibrates most un- 
pleasantly unless the collar which bears the chimney be 
raised about a sixteenth of an inch. I learned the remedy 
after much torment by accident, and now always keep the 
collar up with a small wedge. But my procedure is a mere 
association of two totals, diseased object and remedy. One 
learned in pneumatics could have named the cause of the 
disease, and thence inferred the remedy immediately. By 
many measurements of triangles one might find their area 
always equal to their height multiplied by half their base, 
and one might formulate an empirical law to that effect 
But a reasoner saves himself all this trouble by seeing that 
it is the essence {pro hoc vice) of a triangle to be the half of 
a parallelogram whose area is the height into the entire 
base. To see this he must invent additional lines ; and the 
geometer must often draw such to get at the essential prop- 
erty he may require in a figure. The essence consists in 
some relation of the figure to the new lines^ a relation not ob- 
vious at all until they are put in. The geometer's sagacity 
lies in the invention of the new lines. 

THUS, THEBE ABE TWO GREAT POINTS IN BEASONINO: 

Firsty an extracted character is taken as equivalent to the 
entire datum from which it comes ; and. 

Second, the character thus taken suggests a certain conse- 
quence more obviously than it tvas suggested by the total datum 
as it originally came. Take them again, successively. 

1. Suppose I say, when offered a piece of cloth, " I won't 
buy that; it looks as if it would fade," meaning merely 
that something about it suggests the idea of fading to my 
mind, — my judgment, though possibly correct, is not rea- 
soned, but purely empirical ; but, if I can say that into the 
color there enters a certain dye which I know to be chemi- 
cally unstable, and that there/ore the color will fade, my judg- 
ment is reasoned. The notion of the dye which is one of the 
parts of the cloth, is the connecting link between the latter 
and the notion of fading. So, again, an uneducated man 
will expect from past experience to see a piece of ice melt 
if placed near the fire, and the tip of his finger look coarse 



REASONING, 341 

if he views it through a convex glass. In neither of these 
cases could the result be anticipated without full previous 
acquaintance with the entire phenomenon. It is not a 
result of reasoning. 

But a man who should conceive heat as a mode of 
motion, and liquefaction as identical with increased motion 
of molecules ; who should know that curved surfaces bend 
light-rays in special ways, and that the apparent size of 
anything is connected with the amount of the * bend' of its 
light-rays as they enter the eye, — such a man would make 
the right inferences for all these objects, even though he 
had never in his life had any concrete experience of them ; 
and he would do this because the ideas which we have 
above supposed him to possess would mediate in his mind 
between the phenomena he starts with and the conclusions 
he draws. But these ideas or reasons for his conclusions 
are all mere extracted portions or circumstances singled 
out from the mass of characters which make up the entire 
phenomena. The motions which form heat, the bending 
of the light-waves, are, it is true, excessively recondite 
ingredients ; the hidden pendulum I spoke of above is less 
so ; and the sticking of a door on its sill in the earlier ex- 
ample would hardly be so at all. But each and all agree 
in this, that they bear a more evident rdafion to the con- 
clusion than did the immediate data in their full totality. 

The difficulty is, in each case, to extract from the im- 
mediate data that particular ingredient which shall have 
this very evident relation to the conclusion. Every phe- 
nomenon or so-called * fact ' has an infinity of aspects or 
properties, as we have seen, amongst which the fool, or 
man with little sagacity, will inevitably go astray. But no 
matter for this point now. The first thing is to have seen 
that every possible case of reasoning involves the extrac- 
tion of a particular partial aspect of the phenomena thought 
about, and that whilst Empirical Thought simply associates 
phenomena in their entirety, Seasoned Thought couples 
them by the conscious use of this extract 

2. And, now, to prove the second point:* Why are the 
couplings, consequences, and implications of extracts more 



842 PSYCHOLOGY. 

evident and obvious than those of entire phenomena ? For 
two reasons. 

First, the extracted characters are more general than 
the concretes, and the connections they may have are, 
therefore, more familiar to us, having been more often 
met in our experience. Think of heat as motion, and what- 
ever is true of motion will be true of heat ; but we have had 
a hundred experiences of motion for every one of heat 
Think of the rays passing through this lens as bending 
towards the perpendicular, and you substitute for the com- 
paratively unfamiliar lens the very familiar notion of a par- 
ticular change in direction of a line, of which notion every 
day brings us countless examples. 

The other reason why the relations of the extracted 
characters are so evident is that their properties are so 
few^ compared with the properties of the whole, from which 
we derived them. In every concrete total the characters 
and their consequences are so inexhaustibly numerous 
that we may lose our way among them before noticing 
the particular consequence it behooves us to draw. But, 
if we are lucky enough to single out the proper character, 
we take in, as it were, by a single glance all its possible 
consequences. Thus the character of scraping the sill 
has very few suggestions, prominent among which is the 
suggestion that the scraping will cease if we raise the door ; 
whilst the entire refractory door suggests an enormous num- 
ber of notions to the mind. 

Take another example. I am sitting in a railroad-car, 
waiting for the train to start It is winter, ancj the stove 
fills the car with pungent smoke. The brakeman enters, 
and my neighbor asks him to " stop that stove smoking." 
He replies that it will stop entirely as soon as the car begins 
to move. "Why so?" asks the passenger. "It altcays 
does," replies the brakeman. It is e\ddent from this 
'always' that the connection between car moving and 
smoke stopping was a purely empirical one in the brake- 
man's mind, bred of habit. But, if the passenger had been 
an acute reasoner, he, with no experience of what that stove 
always did, might have anticipated the brakeman's reply, 
and spared his own question. Had he singled out of all the 



REASONING, 343 

numerous points involved in a stove's not smoking the one 
special point of smoke pouring freely out of the stove-pipe's 
mouth, he would, probably, owing to the few associations 
of that idea, have been immediately reminded of the law 
that a fluid passes more rapidly out of a pipe's mouth if 
another fluid be at the same time streaming over that 
mouth ; and then the rapid draught of air over the stove- 
pipe's mouth, which is one of the points involved in the 
car's motion, would immediately have occurred to him. 

Thus a couple of extracted characters, with a couple of 
their few and obvious connections, would have formed the 
reasoned link in the passenger's mind between the phenom- 
ena, smoke stopping and car moving, which were only linked 
as wholes in the brakeman's mind. Such examples may seem 
trivial, but they contain the essence of the most refined and 
transcendental theorizing. The reason why physics grows 
more deductive the more the fundamental properties it as- 
sumes are of a mathematical sort, such as molecular mass 
or wave-length, is that the immediate consequences of these 
notions are so few that we can survey them all at once, and 
promptly pick out those which concern us. 

Sagacity ; or the Perception of the Eaaenoe, 

To reason, then, we must be able to extract characters, — 
not any characters, but the right characters for our conclu- 
sion. If we extract the wrong character, it wall not lead to 
that conclusion. Here, then, is the difficulty: How are 
characters extracted, and why does it require the advent of a 
i'enitis in many cases before the fitting character is Irrought to 
light ? Why cannot anybody reason as well as anybody 
else ? Why does it need a Newton to notice tlie law of the 
squares, a Darwin to notice the survival of the fittest ? To 
answer these questions we must begin a new research, and 
see how our insight into facts naturally grows. 

All our knowledge at first is vague. Wlien we say that 
a thing is vague, we mean that it has no subdivisions ab iuf 
tra, nor precise limitations ab extra ; but still all the forms 
of thought may apply to it. It may have unity, reality, ex- 
ternality, extent, and what not — thinghood, in a word, but 



344 PSYCHOLOGY, 

thinghood only as a whole.* In this vague way, probably, 
does the room appear to the babe who first begins to be 
conscious of it as something other than his moving nurse. 
It has no subdivisions in his mind, unless, perhaps, the 
window is able to attract his separate notice. In this vague 
way, certainly, does every entirely new experience appear 
to the adult. A library, a museum, a machine-shop, are 
mere confused wholes to the uninstructed, but the machin- 
ist, the antiquary, and the bookworm perhaps hardly no- 
tice the whole at all, so eager are they to pounce upon the 
details. Familiarity has in them bred discrimination* 
Such vague terms as * grass,' ' mould,' and * meat ' do not 
exist for the botanist or the anatomist They know too 
much about grasses, moulds, and muscles. A certain per- 
son said to Charles Kingsley, who was showing him the dis- 
section of a caterpillar, with its exquisite viscera, " Why, I 
thought it was nothing but skin and squash !" A layman 
present at a shipwreck, a battle, or a fire is helpless. Dis- 
crimination has been so little awakened in him by expe- 
rience that his consciousness leaves no single point of the 
complex situation accented aud standing out for him to be- 
gin to act upon. But the sailor, the fireman, and the gen- 
eral know directly at what corner to take up the business. 
They * see into the situation ' — that is, they analyze it — with 
their first glance. It is full of delicately diflFerenced ingre- 
dients which their education has little by little brought to 
their consciousness, but of which the novice gains no clear 
idea. 

How this power of analysis was brought about we saw 
in our cliapters on Discrimination and Attention. We dis- 
sociate the elements of originally vague totals by attending 
to them or noticing them alternately, of course. But what 
determines which element we shall attend to first? There 
are two immediate and obvious answers : first, our practical 
or instinctive interests ; and, second, our aesthetic interests. 
The dog singles out of any situation its sniells, and the horse 
its sounds, bcause they may reveal facts of practical mo- 
ment, and are infttinctively exciting to these several crea- 

* See above, p. 8. 



REABONINQ. 345 

tores. The infant notices the candle-flame or the window, 
and ignores the rest of the room, because those objects give 
him a vivid pleasure. Sc^he country boy dissociates the 
blackberry, the chestnut, and the wintergreen, from the 
vague mass of other shrubs and trees, for their practical 
uses, and the savage is delighted with the beads, the bits of 
looking-glass, brought by an exploring vessel, and gives no 
heed to the features of the vessel itself, which is too much 
beyond his sphere. These aesthetic and practical interests, 
then, are the weightiest factors in making particular ingre- 
dients stand out in high relief. What they lay their accent 
on, that we notice ; but what they are in themselves, we can* 
not say. We must content ourselves here with simply ac- 
cepting them as irreducible ultimate factors in determining 
the way our knowledge grows. 

Now, a creature which has few instinctive impulses, or 
interests, practical or sBsthetic, will dissociate few charac- 
ters, and will, at best, have limited reasoning powers ; 
whilst one whose interests are very varied will reason much 
better. Man, by his immensely varied instincts, practical 
wants, and {esthetic feelings, to which every sense contrib- 
utes, would, by dint of these alone, be sure to dissociate 
vastly more characters than any other animal ; and accord- 
ingly we find that the lowest savages reason incomparably 
better than the highest brutes. The diverse interests lead, 
too, to a diversification of experiences, whose accumulation 
becomes a condition for the play of that law of dissociation 
by varying concomitants of which I treated in a former chap- 
ter (see Vol I. p. 506). 

Tfie Help given by Association by Similarity. 

It is probable, also, that man's superior association by 
similarity has much to do with those discriminations of 
character on which his higher flights of reasoning are based. 
As this latter is aiv important matter, and as little or noth- 
ing was said of it in the chapter on Discrimination, it be- 
hooves me to dwell a little upon it here. ^^ 

What does the reader do when he wishes to see in what 
the precise likeness or diflFerence of two objects lies ? He 



y^ 



346 P8TCH0L0GT. 

transfers his attention as rapidly as possible, backwards 
and forwards, from one to the other. The rapid alteration 
in consciousness shakes out, as it were, the points of dif- 
ference or agreement, which wonld have slumbered forever 
unnoticed if the consciousness of the objects compared had 
occurred at widely distant periods of time. What does 
the scientific man do who searches for the reason or law 
embedded in a phenomenon? He deliberately accumu- 
lates all the instances he can find which have anj- analogy 
to that phenomenon ; and, by simultaneously filling his 
mind with them all, he frequently succeeds in detaching 
from the collection the peculiarity which he was unable 
to formulate in one alone ; even though that one had been 
preceded in his former experience by all of those with 
which he now at once confronts it. These examples show 
that the mere general fact of having occurred at some time 
in one's experience, with varying concomitants, is not by 
itself a sufficient reason for a character to be dissociated 
now. We need something more ; we need that the varying 
concomitants should in all their variety be brought into 
consciousness af OTice. Not till then will the clmraeter in 
question escape from its adhesion to each and all of them 
and stand alone. This will immediately be recognized by 
those who liave read Mill's Logic as the ground of Utility 
in his famous ' four methods of experimental inquirj-,' the 
methods of agreement, of difference, of residues, and of 
concomitant variations. Each of these gives a list of 
analogous instances out of the midst of which a souglit-for 
character may roll and strike the mind. 

Now it is obvious that any mind in which association by 
similarity is higlily developed is a mind which will spon- 
taneously form lists of instances like this. Take a present 
case A, with a character m in it. The mind maj' fail at first 
to notice this character m at all. But if A calls up C, D, 
E, and F, — these being phenomena which resemble A in 
possessing m, but which may not have entered for months 
into the experi^ce of the animal who now experiences A, 
why, plainly, sIRi association performs the part of the 
reader's deliberately rapid comparison referred to above, 
and of the systematic consideration of like cases by the 



REASONING. 847 

scientific investigator, and may lead to the noticing of m 
in an abstract way. Certainly this is obvious; and no 
conclusion is left to us but to assert that, after the few 
most powerful practical and aesthetic interests, our chief 
help towards noticing those special characters of phenom- 
ena, which, when once possessed and named, are used as 
reasons, class names, essences, or middle terms, /.9 this 
association by similarity. Without it, indeed, the deliberate 
procedure of the scientific man would be impossible : he 
could never collect his analogous instances. But it oper- 
ates of itself in highly-gifted minds without any delibera- 
tion, spontaneously collecting analogous instances, uniting 
in a moment what in nature the whole breadth of space and 
time keeps separate, and so permitting a perception of 
identical points in the midst of different circumstances, 
which minds governed wholly by the law of contiguity 
could never begin to attain. 




Fio. 80 

Figure 80 shows this. If m, in the present representa- 
tion A, calls up B, C, D, and E, which are similar to A in 
possessing it, and calls them up in rapid succession, then 
m, being associated almost simultaneously with such vary- 
ing concomitants, will ' roll out ' and attract our separate 
notice. 



848 P8TCH0L0QT, 

If so much is clear to the reader, he will be willing to 
lidmit that the mind in which this mode of association most 
prevails will, from its better opportunity of extricating 
characters, be the one most prone to reasoned thinking ; 
whilst, on the other hand, a mind in which we do not 
detect reasoned thinking will probably be one in which 
association by contiguity holds almost exclusive sway. 

Geniuses are, by common consent, considered to diffei 
from ordinary minds by an unusual development of assacia 
tion by similarity. One of Professor Bain's best strokes ol 
work is the exhibition of this truth.* It applies to geniuses 
in the line of reasoning as well as in other lines. And as the 
genius is to the vulgarian, so the vulgar human mind is to 
the intelligence of a brute. Compared with men, it is 
probable that brutes neither attend to absti£»ct characters, 
nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts prob- 
ably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete 
successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In 
other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclu- 
sively by contiguity. It will clear up still farther oui 
understanding of the reasoning process, if we devote a few 
pages to 

THE INTELLECTUAIj CONTRAST BETWEEN BBUTE AND MAN 

I will first try to show, by taking the best stories I cai 
find of animal sagacity, that the mental process involved 
may as a rule be perfectly accounted for by mere contigu- 
ous association, based on experience. Mr. Darwin, in his 
* Descent of Man,' instances the Arctic dogs, described by 
Dr. Hayes, who scatter, when drawing a sledge, as soon a& 
the ice begins to crack. This might be called by some an 
exercise of reason. The test would be, Would the most 
intelligent Eskimo dogs that ever lived act so when placed 
upon ice for the first time together ? A band of men from 
the tropics might do so easily. Recognizing cracking to 
be a sign of breaking, and seizing immediately the partial 
character that the point of rupture is the point of greatest 



*See his Study of Character, chap, xv; also Senses and Intellect 
'Intellect.' chap, ir, the latter half. 



REA80NIN0, 349 

strain, and that the massing of weight at a given point con- 
centrates there the strain, a Hindoo might qnicklj infer that 
scattering would stop the cracking, and, by crying out to 
his comrades to disperse, save the party from immersion. 
But in the dog's case we need only suppose that they 
have individually experienced wet skins after cracking, that 
they have often noticed cracking to begin when they were 
huddlea together, and that they have observed it to cease 
when they scattered. Naturally, therefore, the sound would 
redintegrate all these former experiences, including that of 
scattering, which latter they would promptly renew. It 
would be a case of immediate suggestion or of that ' Logic 
of Becepts ' as Mr. Bomanes calls it, of which we spoke 
above on p. 327. 

A friend of the writer gave as a proof of the almost 
human intelligence of his dog that he took him one day 
down to his boat on the shore, but found the boat full of 
dirt and water. He remembered that the sponge was up at 
the house, a third of a mile distant ; but, disliking to go back 
himself, he made various gestures of wiping out the boat 
and so forth, saying to his terrier, "Sponge, sponge; go 
fetch the sponge." But he had little expectation of a result, 
since the dog had never received the slightest training with 
the boat or the sponge. Nevertheless, off he trotted to the 
house, and, to his owner's great surprise and admiration, 
brought the sponge in his jaws. Sagacious as this was, it 
required nothing but ordinarj^ contiguous association of 
ideas. The terrier was only exceptional in the minuteness 
of his spontaneous observation. Most terriers would have 
taken no interest in the boat-cleaning operation, nor no- 
ticed what the sponge was for. This terrier, in having 
picked those details out of the crude mass of his boat-expe- 
rience distinctly enough to be reminded of them, was truly 
enough ahead of his peers on the line which leads to buman 
reason. But his act was not yet an act of reasoning proper. 
It might fairly have been called so if, unable to find the 
sponge at the house, he had brought back a dipper or a 
mop instead. Such a substitution would have shown that» 
embedded in the very different appearances of these articles, 
he had been able to discriminate the identical partial attri- 



850 P8TCH0L0QY. 

bute of capacity to take np water, and had reflected, "For 
the present purpose they are identical." This, which the 
dog did not do, any man bat the very stupidest could not 
fail to do. 

If the reader will take the trouble to analyze the best 
dog and elephant storiep he knows, he will find that, in most 
cases, this simple contiguous calling up of one whole bj 
another is .quite sufficient to explain the phenomena. 
Sometimes, it is true, we have to suppose the recognition of 
a property or character as such, but it is then always a char- 
acter which the peculiar practical interests of the animal 
may have singled out. A dog, noticing his master's hat on its 
peg, may possibly infer that he has not gone oiit. Intelligent 
dogs recognize by the tone of the master's voice whether 
the latter is angry or not. A dog will perceive whether 
you have kicked him by accident or by design, and behave 
accordingly. The character inferred by him, the particular 
mental state in you, however it be represented in his 
mind — it is represented probably by a * recept ' (p. 327) or 
set of practical tendencies, rather than by a definite con- 
cept or idea — is still a partial character extracted from the 
totality of your phenomenal being, and is his reason for 
crouching and skulking, or playing with you. Dogs, more- 
over, seem to have the feeling of the value of their master's 
personal property, or at least a particular interest in objects 
which their master uses. A dog left with his master's coat 
will defend it, though never taught to do so. I know of a 
dog accustomed to swim after sticks in the water, but who 
always refused to dive for stones. Nevertheless, when a fish- 
basket, which he had never been trained to carry, but mere- 
ly knew as his master's, fell over, he immediately dived after 
it and brought it up. Dogs thus discern, at any rate so far 
as to be able to act, this partial character of being i}alnaUe. 
which lies hidden in certain things.* Stories are t:^ld of 



* Whether the dog has the notion of your being angry or of your prop- 
erty being valuable in any such abstract way as we have these notions is 
more than doubtful. The conduct is more likely an impulsive result of a 
conspiracy of outward stimuli ; the beast feels like acting so when these 
stimuli are present, though conscious of no definite reason why. The 
distinction of recept and concept is useful here. Some breeds of dogs^ 



UBAaomNG. 361 

flogs carrying coppers to pastry-cooks to get buns, and it is 
said that a certain dog, if he gave two coppers, would never 

e.g. collies, seem instinctively to defend their master's property. The case 
is similar to that of a dog's barking at people after dark, at whom he would 
not hark in daylight. I have heard this quoted as evidence of the dog's 
reasoning power. It is oiUy, as Chapter III has shown us. the impulsive 
result of a summation of stimuli, and has no connection with reasoning. 

In certain stages of the hypnotic trance the subject seems to lapse into 
'iie non-analytic state. If a sheet of ruled foolscap paper, or a paper with 
A fine monotonous ornamental pattern printed on it, be shown to the sub- 
ject, and one of the ruled lines or elements of the pattern be pointed to for 
an instant, and the paper immediately removed, he will then almost always; 
when after a short interval the paper is presented to him again, pick out the 
indicated line or element with infallible correctness. The operator, mean- 
while, has either to keep his eye fixed upon it, or to make sure of its posi- 
tion by counting, in order not to lose its place. Just so we may rememl)er 
a friend's house in a street by the single character of its number mther 
than by its general look. The trance-subject would seem, in these instan- 
ces, to surrender himself to the general look. lie disperses his attention 
impartially over the sheet. The place of the particular liuo touched is part 
of a * total effect ' which he gets in its entirety, and which would be distort- 
ed if another line were touched instead. This total effect is lost upon the 
normal looker-on, bent as he is on concentration, analysis, and emphasis. 
Wliat wonder, then, that, under these experimental conditions, the tran^^ 
subject excels him in touching the right line again ? If he has time given 
him to count the line, he will excel the trance-subject ; but if the time be too 
short to count, he will best succeed by following the trance-method, ab- 
staining from analysis, and being guided by the * general look ' of the line's 
place on the sheet. One Is surprised at one's success in this the moment one 
gives up one's habitually analytic state of mind. 

Is it too much to say that we have in this dispersion of the attention 
and subjection to the ' general effect ' something like a relapse into the 
state of mind of brutes? The trance-subject never gives any other reason 
for his optical discriminations, save that * it looks so.' So a man, on a road 
once traversed inattentively before, takes a certain turn for no reason ex 
cept that he feels as if it must be right. He is guided by a sum of impres-* 
sions, not one of which is emphatic or distinguished from the rest, not one 
of which is essential, not one of which is conceived, but all of which 
together drive him to a conclusion to which nothing but Viat sum- total 
lends. Are not some of the wonderful discriminations of animals expH- 
cabb in the same way? The cow finds her own stanchions In the long 
3tab%e, the horse stops at the house he has once stopped at In the monoto- 
nous street, because no other stanchions, no other house, yield impartially aU 
the impressions of the previous experience. The man, however, by seek- 
ing to make some one impression characteristic and essential, prevents the 
rest from having their effect. So that, if the (for him) essential feature be 
forgotten or changed, he Is too apt to be thrown off altogether, and then 
Ihe brute or the trance-subject may seem to outstrip him in sagacity. 

Dr. Romanes's already quoted distinction between ' receptual ' and 



362 P87CH0L0QT. 

leaye without two buns. This was probably mere con- 
tiguous association, but it is possible that the animal noticed 
the character of duality, and identified it as the same 
in the coin and the cake. If so, it is the maximum of 
canine abstract thinking. Another story told to the writer 
is this : a dog was sent to a lumber-camp to fetch a wedge, 
with which he was known to be acquainted. After half an 
hour, not returning, he was sought and found biting and 
tugging at the handle of an axe which was driven deeply 
into a stump. The wedge could not be found. The teller 
of the story thought that the dog must have had a clear 
perception of the common character of serving to split 
which was involved in both the instruments, and, from their 
identity in this respect, inferred their identity for the pur- 
poses required. 

It cannot be denied that this interpretation is a possible 
one, but it seems to me far to transcend the limits of ordi- 
nary canine abstraction. The property in question was not 
one which had direct personal interest for the dog, such 
as that of belonging to his master is in the case of the 
coat or the basket If the dog in the sponge story had re- 
turned to the boat with a dipper it would have been no 
more remarkable. It seems more probable, therefore, that 
this wood-cutter's dog had also been accustomed to carry 
the axe, and now, excited by the vain hunt for the wedge, 
had discharged his carrying powers upon the former instru- 
ment in a sort of confusion — just as a man may pick up a 
sieve to carry water in, in the excitement of putting out a 
fire.* 



* conceptual ' thought (published since the body of my text and my note 
were written) connotes conveniently the difference which I seek to point 
out. See also his Mental Evolution in Man. p. 197 ff., for proofs of the 
fact that in a receptual way brutes cognize the mental states of other brutes 
and men. 

* This matter of confusion is important and interesting. Since confu- 
sion is mistaking the wrong part of the phenomenon for the whole, whilst 
reasoning is, according to our definition, based on the substitution of the 
right part for the whole, it might be said that confusion and reasoning 
are generically the same process. I believe that they are so, and that the 
only difference between a muddle-head and a genius is that between ex- 
tracting wrong characters and right ones. In other words, a muddle-head- 



REA80NIN0. 353 

Thus, then, the characters extracted by animals are 
eery few, and always related to their immediate interests 
or emotions. That dissociation by varying concomitants, 
which in man is based so largely on association by similarity, 
hardly seems to take place at all in the mind of brutes. 
One total thought suggests to them another total thought, 
and they find themselves acting with propriety, they know 
not why. The great, the fundamental, defect of their minds 
seems to be the inability of their groups of ideas to break 
across in unaccustomed places. They are enslaved to 
routine, to cut-and-dried thinking ; and if the most prosaic 
of human beings could be transported into his dog's mind, 
he would be appalled at the utter absence of fancy which 
reigns there.* Thoughts will not be found to call up their 
similars, but only their habitual successors. Sunsets will 
not suggest heroes' deaths, but supper-time. This is why 
man is tiie only metaphysical animal. To wonder why the 
universe should be as it is presupposes the notion of its being 
different, and a brute, which never reduces the actual to 
fluidity by breaking up its literal sequences in. his imagina- 
tion, can never form such a notion. He takes the world 
simply for granted, and never wonders at it at all. 

Professor Striimpell quotes a dog-story which is prob- 
ably a type of many others. The feat performed looks like 
abstract reasoning; but an acquaintance with all the cir- 
cumstances shows it to have been a random trick learned 
by habit The story is as follows : 

** I have two dogs, a small, long-legged pet dog and a rather large 
watch-dog. Immediately beyond the house-court is the garden, into 
which one enters through a low lattice-gate which is closed by a latch 



ed person is a genius spoiled in the making. I think it will be admitted 
that all eminently muddle-headed persons have the temperament of genius. 
They are constantly breaking away from the usual consecutions of con- 
cretes. A common associator by contiguity is too closely tied to routine to 
get muddle-headed. 

* The horse is a densely stupid animal, as far as everything goes except 
contiguous association. We reckon him intelligent, partly because he 
looks 80 handsome, partly because he has such a wonderful faculty of 
contiguous association and can be so quickly moulded into a mass of set 
habits. Had he anything of reasoning intelligence, he would be a lees 
faithful slave than he is. 



854 PSYCHOLOGY. 

on the yard-side. This latch is opened by lifting it. Besides this, 
moreover, the gate is fastened on the garden-side by a string nailed to 
the gate-post Here, as often as one wished, oould the following sight 
be observed. If the little dog was shut in the garden and he wished to 
get out, he placed himself before the gate and barked. Immediately 
the large dog in the court would hasten to him and raise the latch with 
his nose while the little dog on the garden-side leaped up and, catching 
the string in his teeth, bit it through ; whereupon the big one wedged 
his snout between the gate and the post, pushed the gate open, and the 
little dog slipped through. Certainly reasoning seems here to prevail. 
In face of it, however, and although the dogs arrived of themselves, and 
without human aid, at their solution of the gate question, I am able to 
point out that the complete action was pieced together out of accidental 
experiences which the dogs followed, I might say, unconsciously. While 
the large dog was young, he was allowed, like the little one, to go into 
the garden, and therefore the gate was usually not latched, but simply 
closed. Now if he saw anyone go in, he would follow by thrusting his 
snout between gate and post, and so pushing the gate open. When he 
was grown I forbade his being taken in, and bad the gate kept latched. 
But he naturally still tried to follow when anyone entered and tried iii 
the old fashion to open it, which he could no longer do. Now it fell 
out that once, while making the attempt, he raised his nose higher than 
usual and hit the latch from below so as to lift it off its hook, and the 
gate unclosed. .From thenceforth he made the same movement of the 
head when trying to open it, and, of course, with the same result. He 
now knew how to open the gate when it was latched. 

*^The little dog had been the large one's teacher in many things, 
especifilly in the chasing of cats and the catching of mice and moles; so 
when the little one was heard barking eagerly, the other always has- 
tened to him. If the barking came from the garden, he opened the gate 
to get inside. But meanwhile the little dog, who wanted to get out the 
moment the gate opened, slipped out between the big one's legs, and so 
the appearance of his having come with the intention of letting him out 
arose. And that it was simply an appearance transpired from the fact 
that when the little dog did not succeed at once in getting out, the large 
one ran in and nosed about the garden, plainly showing that he had ex- 
pected to find something there. In order to stop this opening of the 
gate I fastened a string on the garden-side which, tightly drawn, held 
the gate firm against the post, so that if the yard dog raised the latch 
and let go, it would every time fall back on to the hook. And this 
device was successful for quite a time, until it happened one day that 
on my return from a walk upon whidi the little dog had accompanied 
me I crossed the garden, and in passing through the gate the dog re- 
mained behind, and refused to come to my whistle. As it was begin- 
ning to rain, and I knew how he disliked to get wet, I closed the gate 
in order to punish him in this manner. But I had hardly reached the 
house ere he was before the gate, whining and crying most piteously. 



REASONmQ, 365 

for the rain was falling faster and faster. The big dog, to whom the 
rain was a matter of perfect indifference, was instantly on hand and 
tried his utmost to open the gate, but naturally without success. Al- 
most in despair the little dog bit at tbe gate, at the same time springing 
into the air in the attempt to jump over it, when he chanced to catch 
the string in his teeth ; it broke, and the gate flew open. Now he 
knew the secret and thenceforth bit the string whenever he wished to 
get out, so that I was obliged to change it. 

*' That the big dog in raising the latch did not in the least know t\\Kt 
the latch closed the gate, that the raising of the same opened it, but that 
he merely repeated the automatic blow with his snout which had once 
had such happy consequences, transpires from the following : the gate 
leading to the barn is fastened with a latch precisely like the one on 
the garden-gate, only placed a little higher, still easily within the dog^s 
reach. Here, too, occasionally the little dog is confined, and when he 
barks the big one makes every possible effort to open tlie gate, but it 
has never occurred to him to push the latch up. The brute cannot 
draw conclusions, that is, he cannot think."* 

Other classical differentice of man besides that of being 
the only reasoning animal, also seem consequences of his 
unrivalled powers of similar association. He has, e.g., been 
called ' tbe laughing animal.' But humor lias often been 
defined as the recognition of identities in things different 
Wben the man in Coriolanus says of that hero that " there 
is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger," 
both the invention of the phrase and its enjoyment by the 
hearer depend on a peculiarly perplexing power to associ- 
ate ideas by similarity. 

Man is known again as * the talking animal *; and lan- 

♦ Th Schumann : Journal Dahcim. No. 19, 1878. Quoted by Strttm- 
pcll : Die Geisteskrilfie der Mensohen verglichen mit denen der Thiere 
(Leipzig, 1878), p. 39. Cats are notorious for the skill with which they will 
open latches, locks, etc. Their feats are usually ascribed to their reason- 
ing powers. But Dr. Romanes well remarks (Menial Evolution, etc., p. 
351, note) that we ought first to be sure that tbe actions are not due to mere 
association. A cat is constantly playing with things with her paws ; a trick 
accidentally bit upon may be retained. Romanes notes the fact that the 
animals most .^^killed in this way need not be the most generally intelligent, 
but those which have the best corjw^eal members for handling things, 
cat's piws, horse's lips, elephant's trunk, cow's horns. The monkey has 
both the corporeal and the intellectual superiority. And my deprecatory 
remarks on animal reasoning in the text apply far less to the quadruraana 
than to quadrupeds.— On the possible fallacies in interpreting animals' 
minds, compare C. L. Morgan in Mind, xi. 174 (1886). 



366 PSTCHOLOOr, 

guage is assuredly a capital distinction between man and 
brute. But it may readily be shown how this distinction 
merely flows from those we have pointed out, easy disso- 
ciation of a representation into its ingredients, and associa- 
tion by similarity. 

Language is a system of signs, different from the things 
signified, but able to suggest them. 

No doubt brutes have a number of such signs. When 
a dog yelps in front of a door, and his master, understand- 
ing his desire, opens it, the dog may, after a certain number 
of repetitions, get to repeat in cold blood a yelp which was 
at first the involuntary interjectional expression of strong 
emotion. The same dog may be taught to * beg ' for food, 
and afterwards come to do so deliberately when hungry. 
The dog also learns to understand the signs of men, and 
the word * rat ' uttered to a terrier suggests exciting 
thoughts of the rat-hunt. If the dog had the varied im- 
pulse to vocal utterance which some other animals have, 
he would probably repeat the word *rat' whenever he 
spontaneously happened to think of a rat-hunt — he no 
doubt does have it as an auditory image, just as a parrot 
calls out different words spontaneously from its repertory, 
and having learned the name of a given dog will utter it on 
the sight of a different dog. In each of these separate cases 
the particular sign may be consciously noticed by the ani- 
mal, as distinct from the particular thing signified, and will 
thus, so far as it goes, be a true manifestation of language. 
But when we come to man we find a great difference. He 
has a deliberate intention to apply a sign to everything. The 
linguistic impulse is with him generalized and systematic. 
For things hitherto unnoticed or unfelt, he desires a sign 
before he has one. Even though the dog should possess 
his * yelp * for this thing, his * beg ' for that, and his audi- 
tory image ' rat ' for a third thing, the matter with him rests 
there. If a fourth thing interests him for which no sign 
happens already to have been learned, he remains tran- 
quilly without it and goes no further. But the man postu- 
lates it, its absence irritates him, and he ends by inventing 
it This GEXERAL PURPOSE constitutes, I take it, the peculiarity 
of human speech, and explains its prodigious development 



REASONING. 357 

Howy then, does the general purpose arise ? It arises 
as soon as the notion of a sign as svch^ apart from any par- 
ticular import, is born ; and this notion is bom by dis- 
sociation from the outstanding portions of a number of 
concrete cases of signification. The * yelp/ the * beg,' the 
' rat,' differ as to their several imports and natures. They 
agree only in so far as they have the same use — to he signs^ 
to stand for something more important than themselves. 
The dog whom this similarity could strike would have 
grasped the sign per se as such, and would probably 
thereupon become a general sign-maker, or speaker in 
the human sense. But how can the similarity strike 
him? Not without the juxtaposition of the similars (in 
virtue of the law we have laid down (p. 506), that in order 
to be segregated an experience must be repeated with 
varying concomitants) — not unless the 'yelp' of the dog 
at the moment it occurs recalls to him his * beg,' by the 
delicate bond of their subtle similarity of use — not till 
then can this thought flash through his mind : '' Why, yelp 
and beg, in spite of all their unlikeness, are yet alike in 
this : that they are actions, signs, which lead to important 
boons. Other boons, any boons, may then be got by other 
signs !" This reflection made, the gulf is passed. Animals 
probably never make it, because the bond of similarity is 
not delicate enough. Each sign is drowned in Us import, 
and never awakens other signs and other imports in jux- 
taposition. The rat-hunt idea is too absorbingly interest- 
ing in itself to be interrupted by anything so uncontiguous 
to it as the idea of the * beg for food,' or of * the door-open 
yelp,' nor in their turn do these awaken the rat-hunt idea. 

In the human child, however, these ruptures of contigu- 
ous association are very soon made ; far off cases of sign- 
using arise when we make a sign now ; and soon language 
is launched. The child in each case makes the discovery 
for himself. No one can help him except by furnishing 
him with the conditions. But as he is constituted, the con- 
ditions will sooner or later shoot together into the result* 

* There are two other conditions of language in the human being, addi- 
tional to association by similarity, that assist its action, or rather pave the 
way for it. These are: first, the great natural loquacity; and, second, the 



358 P8YCH0L0QT. 

The exceedingly interesting acconut which Dr. Howe 
gives of the education of his various, blind-deaf mutes illus- 
trates this point admirably. He began to teach Laura 
Bridgman by gumming raised letters on various familiar 
articles. The child was taught by mere contiguity to pick 
out a certain number of particular articles when made to 
feel the letters. But this was merely a collection of par- 
ticular signs, out of the mass of which the general purpose 
of signification had not yet been extracted by the child's 
mind. Dr. Howe compares his situation at this moment to 
that of one lowering a line to the bottom of the deep sea in 
which Laura's soul lay, and waiting until she should spon- 
taneously take hold of it and be raised into the light The 
moment came, * accompanied by a radiant flash of intelli- 
gence and glow of joy '; she seemed suddenly to become 
aware of the general purpose imbedded in the different de- 
tails of all these signs, and from that moment her education 
went on with extreme rapidity. 

Another of the great capacities in which man has been 
said to differ fundamentally from the animal is that of pos- 



great imitatlv^uesa of man. The first produces the original reflex inler- 
jectional sign; the second (as Bleek has well shown) fixes it, stamps it. and 
ends by multiplying the number of determinate specific signs which are a 
requisite preliminary to the general conscious purpose of sign-making, 
which I have called the characteristic human element in language. The 
way in which imitativeness fixes the meaning of signs is this: When a pri- 
meval man has a given emotion, he utters his natural interjection; or when 
(to avoid supposing that the reflex sounds are exceedingl}' determinate by 
nature) a group of such men experience a common emotion, and one takes, 
the lead in the cry, the others cry like him from sympathy or imitative- 
ness. Now, let one of the group hear another, who is in presence of the 
experience, utter the cry; he, even without the experience, will repeat the 
cry from pure imitativeness. But, as he repeats the sign, he will be re- 
minded by it of his own former experience. Thus, first, he has the sign 
with the emotion; then, without it; then, with it again. It is *' dissociated 
by change of concomitants "; he feels it as a separate entity and yet as hav- 
ing a connection with the emotion. Immediately it becomes possible for 
him to couple it deliberately with the emotion, in cases where the latter 
would either have provoked no interjectional cry or not the same one. In 
a word, his mental procedure tends to /a? this cry on that emotion; and 
when this occurs, in many instances, he is provided with a stock of signs, 
like the yelp, beg, rat of the dog, each of which suggests a determinate 
image. On this stock, then, similarity works in the way above exi)lained. 



REASONING. 359 

sessing self-consciousness or reflective knowledge of him- 
self as a thinker. But this capacity also flows from our 
criterion, for (without going into the matter very deeply) 
we may say that the brute never reflects on himself as a 
thinker, because he has never clearly dissociated, in the 
full concrete act of thought, the element of the thing 
thought of and the operation by which he thinks it They 
remain always fused, conglomerated — ^just as the interjec- 
tional vocal sign of the brute almost invariably merges in 
his mind with the thing signified, and is not independently 
attended to in ae.* 

Now, the dissociation of these two elements probably 
occurs first in thb child's mind on the occasion of some 
error or false expectation which would make him experience 
the shock of difference between merely imagining a thing 
and getting it. The thought experienced once with the 
concomitant reality, and then without it or with opposite 
concomitants, reminds the child of other cases in which the 
same provoking phenomenon occurred. Thus the general 
ingredient of error may be dissociated and noticed per ae, 
and from the notion of his error or wrong thought to that of 
his thought in general the transition is easy. The brute, no 
doubt, has plenty of instances of error and disappointment 
in his life, but the similar shock is in him most likely al- 
ways swallowed up in the accidents of the actual case. An 
expectation disappointed may breed dubiety as to the reali- 
zation of that particular thing when the dog next expects 
it. But that disappointment, that dubiety, while they are 
present in the mind, will not call up other cases, in which 
the material details were different, but this feature of pos- 

* See the ' Evolution of Self-consciousness ' in ' Philosophical Discus- 
sions.' by Chauncey Wright (New York: Ueury Holt & Co. , 1877). Dr. Ro- 
manes, in the book from which I have already quoted, seeks to show that 
the ' consciousness of truth as truth ' and the deliberate Intention to predi- 
cate (which are the characteristics of higher human reasoning) presuppose 
a consciousness of ideas as such, as things distinct from their objects ; and 
that this consciousness depends on our having made signs for them by 
language. My text seems to me to include Dr. Romanes's facts, and formu- 
lates them in what to me is a more elementary way, though the reader who 
wishes to understand the matter better should go to his clear and patient 
exposition also. 



360 PSYCHOLOOT, 

sible error was the same. The brute wfll, therefore, stop 
short of dissociating the general notion of error per ae^ and 
a fortiori will never attain the conception of Thought itself 
as such. 

We may then, we think, consider it proven that the most 
. / elementary single difference bettveen the humxin mind and that of 
\j brutes lies in this deficiency on the bride's part to associate ideas 
by similarity — characters, the abstraction of which depends 
on this sort of association^ must in the brute always remain 
drowned, swamped in the total phenomenon which they 
help constitute, and never used to reason from. If a char- 
acter stands out alone, it is always some obvious sensible 
quality like a sound or a smell which is instinctively excit- 
ing and lies in the line of the animal's propensities ; or it 
is some obvious sign which experience has habitually 
coupled with a consequence, such as, for the dog, the sight 
of his master's hat on and the master's going out. 

DIFPBRENT ORDEBS OF HUMAN QENI17S. 

But, now, since nature never makes a jump, it is evident 
that we should find the lowest men occupying in this respect 
an intermediate position between the brutes and the highest 
men. And so we do. Beyond the analogies which their own 
minds suggest by breaking up the literal sequence of their 
experience, there is a whole world of analogies which they 
can appreciate when imparted to them by their betters, but 
which they could never excogitate alone. This answers 
the question why Darwin and Newton had to be waited for 
so long. The flash of similarity between an apple and the 
moon, between the rivalry for food in nature and the rivalry 
for man's selection, was too recondite to have occurred to any 
but exceptional minds. Genivs, then, as has been already 
said, is identical tvith the possession of similar association 
to an extreme degree. Professor Bain says : " This I count 
the leading fact of genius. I consider it quite impossible 
to afford any explanation of intellectual originality except 
on the supposition of unusual energy on this point." Alike 
in the arts, in literature, in practical affairs, and in science, 
association by similarity is the prime condition of success. 



REASONING. 361 

But as, according to our view, there are two stages in 
reasoned thought, one where similarity merely operates to 
call up cognate thoughts, and another farther stage, where 
the bond of identity between the cognate thoughts is 
noticed ; so minis of genivs may he divided into two main 
sorts, those tvho notice the bond, and those who merdy obey it. 
The first areTte abstract reasoners, properly so called, 
the men of science, and philosophers — the analysts, in 
a word ; the latter are the poets, the critics — the artists, 
in a word, the men of intuitions. These judge rightly, 
classify cases, characterize them by the most striking ana- 
logic epithets, but go no further. At first sight it might 
seem that the analytic mind represented simply a higher 
intellectual stage, and that the intuitive mind represented 
an arrested stage of intellectual development ; but the dif- 
ference is not so simple as this. Professor Bain has said 
that a man's advance to the scientific stage (the stage of 
noticing and abstracting the bond of similarity) may often 
be due to an absence of certain emotional sensibilities. The 
sense of color, he says, may no less determine a mind away 
from science than it determines it toward painting. There 
must be a penury in one's interest in the details of particu- 
lar forms in order to permit the forces of the intellect to 
be concentrated on what is common to many forms.* In 
other words, supposing a mind fertile in the suggestion of 
analogies, but, at the same time, keenly interested in the 
particulars of each suggested image, that mind would be 
far less apt to single out the particular character which 
called up the analogy than one whose interests were less 
generally lively. A certain richness of the aesthetic nature 
may, therefore, easily keep one in the intuitive stage. All 
the poets are examples of this. Take Homer : 

'' Ulysses, too, spied round the house to see if any man were still 
alive and hiding, trying to get away from gloomy death. He found 
them all fallen in the blood and dirt, and in such number as the fish 
which the fishermen to the low shore, out of the foaming sea, drag 
with their meshy nets. These all, sick for the ocean water, are strewn 
around the sands, while the blazing sun takes their life from them. So 
there the suitors lay strewn round on one another." Or again : 

* Study of Clmracter, p. 317. 



362 P8T0H0L0GT 

*' And as when a Masonian or a Oarian woman stains ivory with 
purple to be a cheek-piece for horses, and it is kept in the chamber, and 
many horsemen have prayed to bear it ojff ; but it is kept a treasure for 
a king, both a trapping for his horse and a glory to the driver — in such 
wise were thy stout thighs, Menelaos, and legs and fair ankles stained 
with blood."* 

A man in whom all the accidents of an analogy rise up 
as vividly as this, may be excused for not attending to the 
ground of the analogy. But he need not on that account 
be deemed intellectually the inferior of a man of drier mind, 
in whom the ground is not as liable to be eclipsed by the 
general splendor. Earely are both- sorts of intellect, the 
splendid and the analytic, found in conjunction. Plato 
among philosophers, and M. Taine, who cannot quote a 
child's saying without describing the ^voix chardarde^ 
itonnee, heurevse' in which it is uttered, are only excep- 
tions whose strangeness proves the rule. 

An often-quoted writer has said that Shakespeare pos- 
sessed more intdlechial power than any one else that ever 
lived. If by this he meant the power to pass from given 
premises to right or congruous conclusions, it is no doubt 
true. The abrupt transitions in Shakespeare's thought 
astonish the reader by their unexpectedness no less than 
they delight him by their fitness. Why, for instance, does 
the death of Othello so stir the spectator's blood and leave 
him with a sense of reconcilement? Shakespeare himself 
could very likely not say why ; for his invention, though 
rational, was not ratiocinative. Wishing the curtain to fall 
upon a reinstated Othello, that speech about the turbaned 
Turk suddenly simply flashed across him as the right end of 
all that went before. The dry critic who comes after can, 
however, point out the subtle bonds of identity that guided 
Shakespeare's pen through that speech to the death of the 
Moor. Othello is sunk in ignominy, lapsed from his 
height at the beginning of the play. What better wa> 
to rescue him at last from this abasement than to make 
him for au instant identify himself in memory with the old 
Othello of better days, and then execute justice on his pres- 
ent disowned body, as he used then to smite all enemies of 



* Translated by my colleague. Professor G. H. Palmer. 



REA80NIN0, 363 

the State ? But Shakespeare, whose mind supplied these 
means, could probably not have told why they were so 
eflfective. 

But though this is true, and though it would be absurd 
in an absolute way to say that a given analytic mind was 
superior to any intuitional one, yet it is none the less true 
that the former represents the higher stage. Men, taken 
historically, reason by analogy long before they have learned 
to reason by abstract characters. Association by similarity 
and true reasoning may have identical results. If a philos- 
opher wishes to prove to you why you should do a certain 
thing, he may do so by using abstract considerations exclu- 
sively ; a savage will prove the same by reminding you of a 
similar case in which you notoriously do as he now pro- 
poses, and this with no ability to state the point in which 
the cases are similar. In all primitive literature, in all 
savage oratory, we find persuasion cari'ied on exclusively 
by parables and similes, and travellers in savage countries 
readily adopt the native custom. Take, for example, Dr. 
Livingstone's argument with the negro conjuror. The mis- 
sionary was trying to dissuade the savage from his fetichistic 
ways of invoking rain. "You see," said he, "that, after all 
your operations, sometimes it rains and sometimes it does 
not, exactly as when you have not operated at all." " But," 
replied the sorcerer, "it is just the same with you doctors; 
you give your remedies, and sometimes the patient gets well 
and sometimes he dies, just as when you do nothing at all." 
To that the pious missionary replied : " The doctor does his 
duty, after which God performs the cure if it pleases Him." 
" Well," rejoined the savage, " it is just so with me. I do 
what is necessary to procure rain, after which God sends it 
or withholds it according to His pleasure." * 

This is the stage in which proverbial philosophy reigns 
supreme. " An empty sack can't stand straight" will stand 
for the reason why a man with debts may lose his honesty ; 
and " a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" will serve 
to back up one's exhortations to prudence. Or we answer 
the question : " Why is snow white ?" by saying, " For the 

* Quoted by Renouvier, Critique Philosophique, October 19, 1879. 



864 PaYCHOLOOT. 

same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white" — 
in other words, instead of giving the reason for a fact, we 
give another ^cample of the same fact This offering a simi- 
lar instance, instead of a reason, has often been criticised 
as one of the forms of logical depravity in men. But mani- 
festly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an in- 
complete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary 
first step towards abstracting the reason imbedded in 
them alL 

A.S it is with reasons, so it is with words. The first 
words are probably always names of entire things and en* 
tire actions, of extensive coherent groups. A new experi* 
ence in the primitive man can only be talked about by 
him in terms of the old experiences which have received 
names. It reminds him of certain ones from among them, 
but the points in which it agrees with them are neither 
named nor dissociated. Pure similarity must work before 
the abstraction can work which is based upon it The first 
adjectives will therefore probably be total nouns embody- 
ing the striking character. The primeval man will say, 
not * the bread is hard,' but ' the bread is stone' ; not 
*the face is round,' but *the face is moon'; not *the 
fruit is sweet,' but *the fruit is sugar-cane.' The first 
words are thus neither particular nor general, but vag^idy 
concrete ; just as we speak of an * oval ' face, a * velvet ' 
skin, or an *iron' will, without meaning to connote any 
other attributes of the adjective-noun than those in which 
it does resemble the noun it is used to qualify. After 
a while certain of these adjectively-used nouns come only 
to signify the particular quality for whose sake they are 
oftenest used ; the entire thing which they originally meant 
receives another name, and they become true abstract 
and general terms. Oval, for example, with us suggests 
only shape. The first abstract qualities thus formed are, 
no doubt, qualities of one and the same sense found in 
different objects — as big, sweet ; next analogies between 
diflerent senses, as * sharp ' of taste, * high ' of sound, etc. ; 
then analogies of motor combinations, or form ot relation, 
as simple, confused, difficult, reciprocal, relative, spontane- 
ous, etc. The extreme degree of subtlety in analogy is 



BEABONINQ. 365 

reached iu such cases as when we say certain English art 
critics' writing reminds us of a close room in which pastilles 
have been burning, or that the mind of certain Frenchmen 
is like old Boquefort cheese. Here language utterly fails 
to hit upon the basis of resemblance. 

Over immense departments of our thought we are still, 
all of us, in the savage state. Similarity operates in us, but 
abstraction has not taken place. We know what the pres- 
ent case is like, we know what it reminds us of, we have an 
intuition of the right coursQ to take, if it be a practical mat- 
ter. But analytic thought has made no tracks, and we can- 
not justify ourselves to others. In ethical, psychological, 
and ffisthetic matters, to give a clear reason for one's judg- 
ment is universally recognized as a mark of rare genius. 
The helplessness of uneducated people to account for their 
likes and dislikes is often ludicrous. Ask the first Irish 
girl why she likes this country better or worse than her 
home, and see how much she can tell you. But if you ask 
your most educated friend why he prefers Titian to Paul 
Veronese, you will hardly get more of a reply ; and you will 
probably get absolutely none if you inquire why Beethoven 
reminds him of Michael Angelo, or how it comes that a 
bare figure with unduly flexed joints, by the latter, can so 
suggest the moral tragedy of life. His thought obeys a 
nexnSf but cannot name it. And so it is with all those judg- 
ments of experts^ which even though unmotived are so valu- 
able. Saturated with experience of a particular class of 
materials, an expert intuitively feels whether a newly-re- 
ported fact is probable or not, whether a proposed hypoth- 
esis is worthless or the reverse. He instinctively knows 
that, in a novel case, this and not that will be the promising 
course of action. The well-known story of the old judge 
advising the new one never to give reasons for his decisions, 
" the decisions will probably be right, the reasons will surely 
be wrong," illustrates this. The doctor will feel that the 
patient is doomed, the dentist will have a premonition that 
the tooth will break, though neither can articulate a reason 
for his foreboding. The reason lies imbedded, but not yet 
laid bare, in all the countless pre\'ious cases dimly sug- 
gested by the actual one, all calling up the same conclusion^ 



366 PsrcHOLoor. 

which the adept thus finds himself swept on to, he knows 
not how or why. 

A physiological condusion remains to he draton. If the 
principles laid down in Chapter XIV are true, then it fol- 
lows that the great cerebral difference between habitual and 
reasoned thinking must be this : that in the former an entire 
system of cells vibrating at any one moment discharges in 
its totality into another entire system, and that the order 
of the discharges tends to be a constant one in time ; whilst 
in the latter a part of the prior system still keeps vibrating 
in the midst of the subsequent system, and the order — 
which part this shall be, and what shall be its concomitants 
in the subsequent system — has little tendency to fixedness 
in time. This physical selection, so to call it, of one part 
to vibrate persistently whilst the others rise and subside, 
we found, in the chapter in question, to be the basis of 
similar association. (See especially pp. 578-81.) It would 
seem to be but a minor degree of that still more urgent 
and importunate localized Adbration which we can easiest 
conceive to underlie the mental fact of interest, attention, 
or dissociation. In terms of the brain-process, then, all 
these mental facts resolve themselves into a single peculi- 
arity: that of indeterminateness of connection between 
the different tracts, and tendency of action to focalize 
itself, so to speak, in small localities which vary infinitely 
sX different times, and from which irradiation may pro- 
ceed in countless shifting ways. (Compare figure 80, p. 
347.) To discover, or (what more befits the present stage 
of nerve-physiology) to adumbrate by some possible guess, 
on what chemical or molecular-mechanical fact this instable 
equilibrium of the human brain may depend, should be the 
next task of the physiologist who ponders over the passage 
from brute to man. Whatever the physical peculiarity in 
question may be, it is the cause why a man, whose brain 
has it, reasons so much, whilst his horse, whose brain lacks 
it, reasons so little. We can but bequeath the problem to 
abler hands than our own. 

But, meanwhile, this mode of stating the matter suggests 
a couple of other inferences. The first is brief. If focali^ 



BEA80NINQ. 36? 

zatixm of brain-activity be the fundamental fact of reasonable 
thought, we see why intense interest or concentrated pas- 
sion makes us think so much more truly and profoundly. 
The persistent focalizcUicyn of motion in certain tracts is the 
cerebral fact corresponding to the persistent domination in 
consciousness of the important feature of the subject 
When not * focalized,' we are scatter-brained; but when 
thoroughly impassioned, we never wander from the point 
None but congruous and relevant images arise. When 
roused by indignation or moral enthusiasm, how trenchant 
are our reflections, how smiting are our words ! The whole 
network of petty scruples and by-considerations which, at 
ordinary languid times, surrounded the matter like a cob- 
web, holding back our thought, as Gulliver was pinned to 
the earth by the myriad Lilliputian threads, are dashed 
through at a blow, and the subject stands with its essential 
and vital lines revealed. 

The last point is relative to the theory that what was 
acquired habit in the ancestor may become congenital ten- 
dency in the offspring. So vast a superstructure is raised 
upon this principle that the paucity of empirical evidence 
for it has alike been matter of regret to its adherents, and 
of triumph to its opponents. In Chapter XXVIII we shall 
see what we may call the whole beggarly array of proof. 
In the human race, where our opportunities for observation 
are the most complete, we seem to have no evidence what- 
ever which would support the hypothesis, unless it possibly 
be the law that city-bred children are more apt to be 
near-sighted than country children. In the mental world 
we certainly do not observe that the children of great 
travellers get their geography lessons with unusual ease, 
or that a baby whose ancestors have spoken German for 
thirty generations will, on that account, learn Italian any 
the less easily from its Italian nurse. But if the con- 
siderations we have been led to are true, they explain 
perfectly well why this law should not be verified in the 
human race, and why, therefore, in looking for evidence 
on the sul)ject, we should confine ourselves exclusively to 
lower animals. In them fixed habit is the essential and 



868 PSYCHOLOOT, 

characteristic law of nervous action. The brain grows to 
the exact modes in which it has been exercised, and the in- 
heritance of these modes — then called instincts — would 
have in it nothing surprising. But in man the negation of 
all fixed modes is the essential characteristic. He owes his 
whole pre-eminence as a reasoner, his whole human quality 
of intellect, we may say, to the facility with which a given 
mode of thought in him may suddenly be broken up into 
elements, which recombine anew. Only at the price of in- 
heriting no settled instinctive tendencies is he able to settle 
every novel case by the fresh discovery by his reason of 
novel principles. He is, par excellence, the edvjcable animal. 
If, then, the law that habits are inherited were found exem- 
plified in him, he would, in so far forth, fall short of his 
human perfections ; and, when we survey the human races, 
we actually do find that those which are most instinctive at 
the outset are those which, on the whole, are least educated 
in the end. An untutored Italian is, to a great extent, a 
man of the world ; he has instinctive perceptions, tendencies 
to behavior, reactions, in a word, upon his environment, 
which the untutored German wholly lacks. If the latter be 
not drilled, he is apt to be a thoroughly loutish personage ; 
but, on the other hand, the mere absence in his brain of 
definite innate tendencies enables him to advance by the de- 
velopment, through education, of his purely reasoned think- 
ing, into complex regions of consciousness that the Italian 
may probably never approach. 

We observe an identical difference between men as a 
whole and women as a whole. A young woman of twenty re- 
acts with intuitive promptitude and security in all the usual 
circumstances in which she may be placed.* Her likes 

♦ Social and domestic circumstaDces, that is, not material ones. Per 
ceptions of social relations seem very keen in persons whose dealings with 
the material world are confined to knowing a few useful objects, princi 
pally animals, plants, and weapons. Savages and boors are often as tact- 
ful and astute socially as trained diplomatists. In general, it is proDable 
that the consciousness of how one stands with other people occupies a rela- 
tively larger and larger part of the mind, the lower one goes in the scale 
of culture. Woman's intuitions, so fine in the sphere of personal relations, 
are seldom first-rate in the way of meclianics. All boys teach themselves 
liow a clock goes . few girls. Hence Dr. Whately's jest, " Woman is the 
unreasoning animal, and pokes the fire from on top." 



RBASONINQ, 369 

and dislikes are formed ; her opinions, to a great extent, the 
same that they will be through life. Her character is, in 
fact, finished in its essentials. How inferior to her is a boy 
of twenty in all these respects ! His character is still gelat- 
inous, uncertain what shape to assume, ' trying it on ' in 
every direction. Feeling his power, yet ignorant of the 
manner in which he shall express it, he is, when compared 
with his sister, a being of no definite contour. But this 
absence of prompt tendency in his brain to set into particu- 
lar modes is the very condition which insures that it shall 
ultimately become so much more efficient than the woman's. 
The very lack of preappointed trains of thought is the 
ground on which general principles and heads of classifi- 
cation grow up ; and the masculine brain deals with new 
and complex matter indirectly by means of these, in a 
manner which the feminine method of direct intuition, ad- 
mirably and rapidly as it performs within its limits, can 
vainly hope to cope with. 

In looking back over the subject of reasoning, one feels 
how intimately connected it is with conception ; and one 
realizes more than ever the deep reach of that principle of 
selection on which so much stress was laid towards the close 
of Chapter IX. As the art of reading (after a certain stage 
in one's education) is the art of skipping, so the art of being 
wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The first effect 
on the mind of growing cultivated is that processes once 
multiple get to be performed by a single act. Lazarus has 
called this the progressive 'condensation' of thought 
But in the psychological sense it is less a condensation than 
a loss, a genuine dropping out and throwing overboard of 
conscious content. Steps really sink from sight. An ad- 
vanced thinker sees the relations of his topics in such 
masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to 
explain to younger minds it is often hard to say which 
grows the more perplexed, he or the pupil. In every uni- 
versity there are admirable investigators who are notori- 
ously bad lecturers. The reason is that they never spon- 
taneously see the subject in the minute articulate way in 
which the student needs to have it offered to his slow 



870 PSTCHOLOGY, 

reception. Thej grope for the links, but the links do xxak 
come. Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's 
M^canique Celeste, said that whenever his author prefaced 
a proposition by the words ' it is evident/ he knew that 
many hours of hard study lay before him. 

When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred 
subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly re- 
markable for the summariness of its allusions and the 
rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half 
through a sentence the other knows his meaning and 
replies. Such genial play with such massive materials, 
such an easy flashing of light over far perspectives, such 
careless indifference to the dust and apparatus that ordi- 
narily surround the subject and seem to pertain to its 
essence, make these conversations seem true feasts for 
gods to a listener who is educated enough to follow them 
at all. His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmos- 
phere more broad and vast than is their wont On the 
other hand, the excessive explicitness and short-windedness 
of an ordinary man are as wonderful as they are tedious to 
the man of genius. But we need not go as far as the ways 
of genius. Ordinary social intercourse will do. There the 
charm of conversation is in direct proportion to the possi- 
bility of abridgment and elision, and in inverse ratio to the 
need of explicit statement. With old friends a word stands 
for a whole story or set of opinions. With new-comers 
everything must be gone over in detail. Some persons 
have a real mania for completeness, they must express 
every step. They are the most intolerable of companions, 
and although their mental energy may in its way be great, 
they always strike us as weak and second-rate. In short, 
the essence of plebeianism, that which separates vulgarity 
from aristocracy, is perhaps less a defect than an excess, 
the constant need to animadvert upon matters which for 
the aristocratic temperament do not exist. To ignore, to 
disdain to consider, to overlook, are the essence of the 
* gentleman.' Often most provokingly so ; for the things 
ignored may be of the deepest moral consequence. But in 
the very midst of our indignation with the gentleman, we 
have a consciousness that his preposterous inertia and neg' 



REASONING, 371 

ativeness in the actual emergency is, somehow or other, 
allied with his general superiority to ourselves. It is not 
only that the gentleman ignores considerations relative to 
conduct, sordid suspicions, fears, calculations, etc., which 
the vulgarian is fated to entertain ; it is that he is silent 
where the vulgarian talks ; that he gives nothing but results 
where the vulgarian is profuse of reasons ; that he does not 
explain or apologize ; that he uses one sentence instead of 
twenty ; and that, in a word, there is an amount of intersti- 
tifil thinking, so to call it, which it is quite impossible to 
get him to perform, bat which' is nearly all that the vul- 
garian mind performs at all. All this suppression of the 
secondary leaves the field dear^ — for higher flights, should 
they choose to come. But even if they never came, what 
thoughts there were would still manifest the arii^tocratic 
type and wear the well-bred form. So great is our sense 
of harmony and ease in passing from the company of a phi- 
listine to that of an aristocratic temperament, that we are 
almost tempted to deem the falsest views and tastes as held 
by a man of the world, truer than the truest as held by a 
common person. In the latter the best ideas are choked, 
obstructed, and contaminated by the redundancy of their 
paltry associates. The negative conditions, at least, of an 
atmosphere and a free outlook are present in the former. 
I may appear to have strayed from psychological an- 
alysis into jesthetic criticism. But the principle of selec- 
tion is so important that no illustrations seem redundant 
which may help to show how great is its scope. The 
upshot of what I say simply is that selection implies rejec- 
tion as well as choice ; and that the function of ignoring, of 
inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the 
function of attention itself. 



CHAPTER XXin. 
THE PRODUCTION OF MOVEMENT. 

I'HE reader will not have forgotten, in the jungle of 
purely inward processes and products through which the 
last chapters have borne him, that the final result of them 
all must be some form of bodily activity due to the escape 
of the central excitement through outgoing nerves. The 
whole neural organism, it will be. remembered, is, physio- 
logically considered, but a machine for converting stimuli 
into reactions ; and the intellectual part of our life is knit 
up with but the middle or ' central * portion of the machine's 
operations. Let us now turn to consider the final or emer- 
gent operations, the bodily activities, and the forms of con- 
sciousness connected therewithal. 

Every impression which impinges on the incoming 
nerves produces some discharge down the outgoing ones» 
whether we be aware of it or not. Using sweeping terms 
and ignoring exceptions, toe might say that every possible fed- 
ing produces a movement^ and that the movement is a movement 
of the entire organism, and of each and all its parts, AVhat 
happens patently when an explosion or a flash of lightning 
startles us, or when we are tickled, happens latently with 
every sensation which we receive. The only reason why we 
do not feel the startle or tickle in the case of insignificant 
sensations is partly its very small amount, partly our obtuse- 
ness. Professor Bain many years ago gave the name of the 
Law of Diffusion to this phenomenon of general discharge, 
and expressed it thus : " According as an imi)ression is ac- 
companied with Feeling, the aroused currents diffuse them- 
selves over the brain, leading to a general agitation of the 
moving organs, as well as affecting the viscera." 

872 



THE PRODUCTION OF MOVEMENT, 373 

In cases where the feeling is strong the law is too famil- 
iar to require proof. As Prof. Bain says : 

** £ach of us knows in our own experience that a sudden shock of 
feeling is accompanied with movements of the body generally, and with 
other effects. When no emotion is present, we are quiescent ; a slight 
feeling is accompanied with slight manifestations : a more intense shock 
has a more intense outburst. Every pleasure and every pain, and every 
mode of emotion, has a definite wave of effects, which our observation 
makes known to us ; and we apply the knowledge to infer other men^s 
feelings from their outward display. . . . The organs first and promi- 
nently affected, in the diffused wave of nervous influence, are the mov- 
ing members, and of these, by preference, the features of the face (with 
the ears in animals), whose movements constitute the expression of the 
countenance. But the influence extends to all the parts of the moving 
system, voluntary and involuntary ; while an important series of effects 
are produced on the glands and viscera — the stomach, lungs, heart , kid- 
neys, skin, together with the sexual and mammary organs. . . . The 
circumstance is seemingly universal, the proof of it does not require a 
citation of instances in detail ; on the objectors is thrown the burden of 
adducing unequivocal exceptions to the law." ♦ 

There are probably no exceptions to the diffusion of 
every impression through the nerve-centres. The effect of 
the wave through the centres may, however, often be to 
interfere with processes, and to diminish tensions already 
existing there ; and the outward consequences of such 
inhibitions may be the arrest of discharges from the 
inhibited regions and the checking of bodily activities 
already in process of occurrence. When this happens it 
probably is like the draining or siphoning of certain chan- 
nels by currents flowing through others. When, in walk- 
ing, we suddenly stand still because a sound, sight, smell, or 
thought catches our attention, something like this occurs. 
But there are cases of arrest of peripheral activity which 
depend, not on central inhibition, but on stimulation of 
centres which discharge outgoing currents of an inhibitory 
sort. Whenever we are startled, for example, our heart 
momentarily stops or slows its beating, and then palpitates 
with accelerated speed. The brief arrest is due to an out- 
going current down the pneumogastric nerve. This nerve, 
when stimulated, stops or slows the heart-beats, and this 

* Emotions and Will, pp. 4, 5. 



374 P87CH0L0O7. 

particular effect of startling fails to occur if the nerve 
be cut 

In general, however, the stimulating effects of a sense- 
impression preponderate over the inhibiting effects, so that 
we may roughly say, as we began by saying, that the wave 
of discharge produces an activity in all parts of the body. 
The task of tracing out ofl the effects of any one incoming 
sensation has not yet been performed by physiologists. 
Recent years have, however, begun to enlarge our informa- 
tion ; and although I must refer to special treatises for the 
full details, I can briefly string together here a number of 
separate observations which prove the truth of the law of 
diffusion. 

First take effects upon the circulation. Those upon the 
heart we have just seen. Haller long ago recorded that 
the blood from an open vein flowed out faster at the beat of 
a drum.* In Chapter III. (p. 98) we learned how instan- 
taneously, according to Mosso, the circulation in the brain 
is altered by changes of sensation and of the course of 
thought The effect of objects of fear, shame, and anger 
upon the blood-supply of the skin, especially the skin of 
the face, are too well known to need remark. Sensations of 
the higher senses produce, according to Couty and Char- 
pentier, the most varied effects upon the pulse-rate and 
blood-pressure in dogs. Fig. 81, a pulse-tracing from these 
authors, shows the tumultuous effect on a dog's heart of 
hearing the screams of another dog. The changes of 
blood-pressure still occurred when the i)neuniogastric 
nerves were cut. showing the vaso-motor effect to be direct 
and not dependent on the heart. When Mosso invented 
that simple instrument, the plethysmography for recording 
the fluctuations in volume of the members of the body, what 
most astonished him, he says, "in the first experiments 
which he made in Italy, was the extreme unrest of the 
blood-vessels of the hand, which at every smallest emotion, 
whether during waking or during sleep, changed their vol- 
ume in surprising fashicm." t Figure 82 (from Fer^J) 

♦ Cf. Fere . Sensation et Mouvement (18S7), p. 56. 
t La Paura (18S4), p. 117. Compare Fere: Sensation et Mouvement, 
ehap. XVII. 

j Revue Philosophique. xxiv. 570. 



THE PBODUCTION OF MOVEMENT. 



876 



1 ■ ^ 

sL 4, 


? 

r 


% C 




\ ^ 




1 




^ 




{ 


< 


\ 




1 




cr 






376 



PSYCHOLOGY. 



shows the way in which the pulse of one subject was 
modified by the exhibition of a red light lasting from the 
moment marked a to that marked b. 




Fio. 88. 



The effedts upon respiration of sudden sensory stimuli 
are also too well known to need elaborate comment. We 
* catch our breath ' at every sudden sound. We 'hold our 
breath ' whenever our attention and expectation are strongly 




Fio. 83.- ReBpiratory curve of B: a, with eyes open; 6, with eyes doBed. 



engaged, and we sigh when the tension of the situation is 
relieved. When a fearful object is before us we pant and 
cannot deeply inspire ; when the object makes us angrj- it 
is, on the contrary, the act of expiration which is hard. 
I subjoin a couple of figures from F^re which explain them- 



THE PRODUCTION OF MOVEMENT, 



377 



selves. They show the effects of light upon the breathing 
of two of his hysteric patients.* 




Fio. 84.— Respiratory curve of L: o, with yellow light; 6, with grreen light; c, with red 
light. The red has the strongest effect. 

On the. siveat-glandsy similar consequences of sensorial 
stimuli are observed. Tarchanoff, testing the condition of 
the sweat-glands by the power of the skin to start a gal- 

♦ Revue Phil., xxiv. pp. 5C6-7.— For further informatiom about the rela- 
tions between the brain and respiration, see Danilewsky's Essay in the Bio- 
logisches Ceiitralblatt, ii. 690. 



878 PBTCHOLOQT. 

vanic current through electrodes applied to its surface, 
found that " nearly every kind of nervous activity, from the 
simplest sensations and impressions, to voluntary motions 
and the highest forms of mental exertion, is accompanied 
by an increased activity in the glands of the skin." * On 
the pupU observations are recorded by Sanders which show 
that a transitory dilatation follows every sensorial stimulus 
applied during sleep, even if the stimulus be not strong 
enough to wake the subject up. At the moment of awak- 
ing there is a dilatation, even if strong light falls on the 
eye.t The pupil of children can easily be observed to 
dilate enormously under the influence of /ear. It is said to 
dilate in pain and fatigue ; and to contract, on the contrary^ 
in rage. 

As regards effects on the abdomincd viscera, they unques- 
tionably exist, but very few accurate observations have 
been made.j: 

The bladder, bowels, and uterus respond to sensations, 
even indifferent ones. MossoandPellicani, in their plethys- 
mographic investigations on the bladder of dogs, found 
all sorts of sensorial stimuli to produce reflex contractions 
of this organ, independent of those of the abdominal walls. 
They call the bladder * as good an sesthesiometer as the 
iris,' and refer to the not uncommon reflex effects of psy- 
chic stimuli in the human female upon this organ.§ M. 
F^r^ has registered the contractions of the sphincter ani 
which even indifferent sensations will produce. In some 
pregnant women the foetus is felt to move after almost 
every sensorial excitement received by the mother. The 
only natural explanation is that it is stimulated at such 
moments by reflex contractions of the womb.| That the 
glands are affected in emotion is patent enough in the case 
of the tears of grief, the dry mouth, moist skin, or diar- 



* Quoted from the report of Tarcbanoff's paper (in PflQger's Archiv. 
XL VI. 46) in the American Journal of Psych. , ii. 652. 

t Archiv f. Psychiatric, vii. 652 ; ix. 129. 

i Sensation et Mouvement, 57-8. 

g R. Accad. dei Lincei (1881-2). I follow the report in Hofmaon J^ 
Schwalbe's Jahresbericht, x. u. 98. 

I Of. Fere, Sensation et Mouvement, chap. xrv. 



THE PRODUCTION OF MOVEMENT. 379 

Thcea of fear, the biliary disturbances whicli sometimes 
follow upon rage, etc. The watering of the mouth at the 
sight of succulent food is well known. It is difficult to 
follow the smaller degrees of all these reflex changes, but 
it can hardly be doubted that they exist in some degree, 
even where they cease to be traceable, and that all our 
sensations have some visceral effects. The sneezing pro- 
duced by sunshine, the roughening of the skin (gooseflesh) 
which certain strokings, contacts, and sounds, musical or 
non-musical, provoke, are facts of the same order as the 
shuddering and standing up of the hair in fear, only of less 
degree. 

Effects on Voluntary Mvsdes. Every sensorial stimulus 
not only sends a special discharge into certain particular 
muscles dependent on the special nature of the stimulus in 
question — some of these special discharges we have studied 
in Chapter XI, others we shall examine under the heads 
of Instinct and Emotion — but it innervates the muscles 
generally. M. Fere has given very curious experimental 
proofs of this. The strength of contraction of the subject's 
hand was measured by a self -registering dynamometer. 
Ordinarily the maximum strength, under simple experimen- 
tal conditions, remains the same from day to day. But if 
simultaneously with the contraction the subject received a 
sensorial impression, the contraction was sometimes weak- 
ened, but more often increased. This reinforcing effect has 
received the name of dynamogeny. The dynamogenic value of 
simple musical notes seems to be proportional to their loud- 
ness and height. Where the notes are compounded into sad 
strains, the muscular strength diminishes. If the strains are 
gay, it is increased. — The dynamogenic value of colored lights 
varies with the color. In a subject* whose normal strength 
was expressed by 23, it became 24 when a blue light was 

*The figures given are from an hysterical subject, and the differenceB 
are greater than normal. M. Fer6 considers that the unstable nervous 
system of the hysteric (' ces grenouilles de la psychologic ') shows the law 
on a quantitatively exaggerated scale, without altering the qualitative rela- 
tions. The effects remind us a little of the influence of sensations upon 
minimal sensations of other orders discovered by Urbantschitsch, and re* 
ported on page 29 of this volume. 



\5tiO 



P87CH0L0OT, 



thrown on the eyes, 28 for green, 30 for yellow, 35 for orange, 
and 42 for red. Bed is thus the most exciting color. 
Among tastes, sweet has the lowest valne, next comes salt, 
then bitter, and finally sonr, though, as M. F^r^ remarks, 
snch a sonr as acetic acid excites the nerves of pain and 
smell as well as of taste. The stimulating effects of tobacco- 
smoke, alcohol, beef-extract (which is innutritious), etc., etc., 
may be partly due to a dynamogenic action of this sort — 
Of odors, that of musk seems to have a peculiar dynamo- 
genic power. Fig. 85 is a copy of one of M. F^r^'s dyna- 
mographic tracings, which explains itself. The smaller 
contractions are those without stimulus ; the stronger ones 
are due to the influence of red rays of light 



WiilMA/buwM^ 



Fio. 85. 

Everyone is familiar with the patellar r^lex, or jerk up- 
wards of the foot, which is produced by smartly tapping 
the tendon below the knee-pan when the leg hangs over 
the other knee. Drs. Weir Mitchell and Lombard have 
found that when other sensations come in simultaneously 
with the tap, the jerk is increased.* Heat, cold, pricking, 
itching, or faradic stimulation of the skin, sometimes strong 
optical impressions, music, all have this dynamogenic effect, 
which also results whenever voluntary movements are set 
up in other parts of the body, simultaneously with the 
tap.t 

These * dynamogenic ' effects, in which one stimulation 



♦Mitchell in (Philadelphia) Medical News (Feb. 13 and 20, 1886); Lom- 
bard in American Journal of Psychology (Oct. 1887). 

t Prof. H. P. Bowditch has made the interesting discovery that if the 
reinforcing movement be as much as 0.4 of a second late, the reinforce- 
ment fails to occur, and is transformed into a positive inhibition of the 
knee-jerk for retardations of between 0.4' and 1.7'. The knee-jerk fails 
to be modified at all by voluntary movements made later than 1 .7' after 
the patellar ligament is tapped (see Boston Med. and Surg. Journ., May 31 . 
1888). 



THE PRODUCTION OF MOVEMENT. 381 

simply reinforces another already under way, mnst not be 
confounded with reflex acts properly so called, in which new 
activities are originated by the stimulus. All instinctive 
performances and manifestations of emotion are reflex acts. 
But underneath those of which we are conscious there seem 
to go on continually others smaller in amount, which 
probably in most persons might be called fluctuations of 
muscular /owe, but which in certain neurotic subjects can 
be demonstrated ocularly. M. F^re figures some of them 
in the article to which I have already referred.* 

Looking back over all these facts, it is hard to doubt the 
truth of the law of diffusion, even where verification is be- 
yond reach. A process set up anywhere in the centres reverber- 
ates everywhere, and in some ivay or other affects the organism 
throughout, making its activities either greater or less. We 
are brought again to the assimilation which was expressed 
on a previous page of the nerve-central mass to a good con- 
ductor charged with electricity, of which the tension can- 
not be changed anywhere without changing it everywhere. 

Herr Schneider has tried to show, by an ingenious and 
suggestive zoological re>dew,t that all the special movements 
which highly evolved animals make are differentiated from 
the two originally simple movements, of contraction and ex- 
pansion, in which the entire body of simple organisms takes 
part. The tendency to contract is the source of all the 
self-protective impulses and reactions which are later de- 
veloped, including that of flight The tendency to expand 
splits up, on the contrary, into the impulses and instincts of 
an aggressive kind, feeding, fighting, sexual intercourse, etc. 
Schneider's articles are well worth reading, if only for the 
careful observations on animals which they embody. I cite 
them here as a sort of evolutionary reason to add to the 
mechanical a priori reason why there ought to be the 
diffusive wave which our a posteriori instances have sho\ni 
to exist. 

I will now proceed to a detailed study of the more im- 

* Revue Phil., xxiv. 572 «f. 

fin the Vierteljahrschriftfttrwiss. Philos., in. 294. 



PSYCHOLOGY. 



portant classes of moyement consequent upon cerebro- 
mental change. They may be enumerated as — 

1) Instinctiye or Impulsive Performances ; 

2) Expressions of Emotion ; and 

3) Voluntary Deeds; 

and each shall have a chapter to itself. 



CHAPTER XXIV * 

INSTINCT. 

Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such a 
loay as to produce, certain ends, tvithout foresigld of the ends^ 
and without previous education in the performance^ That 
iustincts, as thii8 defined, exist ou an enormoiiR scale in the 
animal kingdom needs no proof. They are the functional 
correlatives of structure. With the presence of a certain 
organ goes, one may sa^', almost always a native aptitude 
for its use. 

*• Hiis the bird a gland for the secretion of oil ? She knows instiuc- 
lively how to press the oil from the gland, and apply it to the feather. 
Ha8 the rattlesnaice the groi»ved tooth and gland of i>oison ^ He knows 
without instruction how to make lx)th structure and function most ef- 
fective against his enemies. Has thesilk-worm the function of secret- 
ing the fluid silk ? At the proi)er time she winds the cocoon such as she 
has never seen, as thousands before have done ; and thus without in- 
struction, pattern, or exixirience, forms a safe abode for herw^lf in the 
period of transformation. Has the hawk talons ? She knows by in- 
stinct how to wield them effectively against the helpless quarry."! 

A very common way of talking about these admirably 
definite tendencies to act is by naming abstractly the pur- 
pose they subserve, such as self-preser\'ation, or defence, or 
care for eggs and young — and saying the animal has an in- 
stinctive fear of death or love of life, or that she has an in- 
stinct of self-preservation, or an instinct of maternity and 
the like. But this represents the animal as obeying ab- 
stractions which not once in a million cases is it possible it 
can have framed. The strict physiological way of interpret- 

* This chapter has already appeared (almost exactly as now printed) in 
the form of magazine articles in S<*ribner's Magazine and in the Popular 
Science Monthly for 1887. 

t P. A. Cliadbourne : Instinct, p. 28 (New York. 1872). 

888 



384 PSYCHOLOGY. 

ing the facts leads to far clearer result8.'"/ rAg aetio ns toe call 
instinctive aU conform to the general reflex tyr)e : they are calledT"" 
Iprt^^ hv determ inate ae nsory stir ^uli y^ "^i — ^-^^^ *^" 'rjj^ 
"^nimar s body, or at a distance iii his environm enCT The 
" eat f lUis atier the mouse, runs or shows fight before the 
dog, avoids falling from walls and trees, shuns fire and 
water, etc., not because he has any notion either of life or 
of death, or of self, or of preservation^ He has probably at- 
tained to no one of these conceptions in such a way as to re- 
act definitely upon it. . He acts in each case separately, 
and simply because he cannot help it ; being so framed that 
when that particular running thing called a mouse appears 
in his field of vision he must pursue ; that when that par- 
ticular barking and obstreperous thing called a dog api)ears 
there he must retire, if at a distance, and scratch if close by ; 
that he must withdraw his feet from water and his face 
from flame, etc. His nervous system is to a great extent a 
preorganized 'bundle of such reactions — they are as fatal as 
sneezing, and as e&actly correlated to their special excitants 
as it is to its owr^Tj^ Although the naturalist may, for his own 
convenience, class these reactions under general heads, he 
must not forget that in the animal it is a particular sensation 
or perception or image which calls them forth. 

At first this \dew astounds us by the enormous number 
of special adjustments it supposes animals to possess ready- 
made in anticipation of the outer things among which they 
are to dwell. Can mutual dependence be so intricate and 
go so far? Is each thing born fitted to particular other 
things^ and to them exclusively, as locks are fitted to their 
keys? ' Undoubtedly this must be believed to be so. Each 
nook and cranny of creation, down to our very skin and 
entrails, has its living inhabitants, with organs suited to 
the place, to devour ahd digest the food it harbors and to 
meet the dangers it conceals ; and the minuteness of adaj)- 
tation thus shown in the way of structure knows no bounds. 
Even so are there no bounds to the minuteness of adapta- 
tion in the way of conduct which the several inhabitants 
display. 

The older writings on instinct are ineffectual wastes of 
words, because their authors never came down to this defi* 



INSTINCT, 385 

nite and simple point of ^^ew, but smothered everything in 
vague wonder at the clairvoyant and prophetic power of 
the animals — so superior to anything in man — and at the 
beneficence of God in endowing them with such a gift. But 
God's beneficence endows them, first of all, with a nervous 
system ; and, turning our attention to this, makes instinct 
immediately appear neither more iior less wonderful than 
all the other facts of life. . 

'frEvery instirict is an impulse. \ Whether we shall call such 
impulses as blushing, sneezing, )Boughing, smiling, or dodg- 
ing, or keeping time to music, instincts or not, is a mere 
matter of terminology. The process is the same through- 
out. (In his delightfully fresh and interesting work, Der 
Thierische Wille, Herr G. H. Schneider subdivides im- 
pulses {Triehe) into se nsation-im pulses, perception-im- 
pulses, and idea-impulses. To crouch from cold is a sen- 
sation-impulse ; to turn and follow, if we see people run- 
ning one way, is a perception-impulse ; /to cast about for 
cover, if it begins to blow and rain, is an imagination-im- 
pulse. A single complex instinctive action mAy involve 
successively the awakening of impulses of all three classes. 
Thus a hungry lion starts to seek prey by the awakening in 
him of imagination cou})led with desire ; he begins to stalk 
it when, on eye, ear, or nostril, he gets an impression of its 
presence at a certain distance ; he springs uj)on it, either 
when the booty takes ahirm and fiees, or when the distance 
is sufliciently reduced; [he proceeds to /mr and dri?our it ^^u 
the moment he gets a sensation of its contact witli his 
claws and fangSy/ Seeking, stalking, springing, and devour- 
ing are just so many different kinds of muscular contrac- 
tion, and neither kind is called forth by the stimulus ap- 
propriate to the other. 

Schneider says of the hamster, which stores com in its 
hole : 

*' If wo analyze the propensity of storing, wo find that it consists of 
thn^o impulses : First, an impulse to pirh' up the nutritious object, tlue 
to perception ; second, an imi>ulse to carry it off int^ th(j dwelling- place, 
due to the id^a of tlys latter ; and third, an impulse to lay it ttoum 
there, due to the sight^f the place. It lies in the nature of tht? ham- 
ster that it sliouhl never see ii full ear of corn without feeling a desire 



386 P8YCn0L0GT. 

to strip it ; it lies in its nature to feel, as soon as its cheek-pouches are 
filled, an irresistible desire to hurry to its home ; and finally, it lies in 
its nature that the sight of the storehouse should awaken the impulse 
to empty the cheeks" (p. 208). 

In certain animals of a low order#tlie feeling of having 
executed one impulsive step is such an indispensable part 
of the stimulus of the next one, that the animal cannot 
make any variation in the order of its performance. 

Noio, why do the various anirndls do what seem to us such 
strange things^ in the presence of such outlandish stimuli ? 
Why does the hen, for example, submit herself to the 
tedium of incubating such a fearfully uninteresting set of 
objects as a nestful of eggs, unless she have some sort of a 
prophetic inkling of the result? iShe only answer is ad 
hominem. "We can only interpret the instincts of brutes by 
what we know of instincts in ourselve^ Why do men al- 
ways lie down, when they can, on soft beds rather than on 
hard floors? Why do they sit round the stove on a cold 
day ? Why, in a room, do they place themselves, ninety- 
nine times out of a hundred, with their faces towards its 
middle rather than to the wall ? Why do they prefer saddle 
of mutton and champagne to hard-tack and ditch-water ? 
Why does tlie maiden interest the youth so that everything 
about her seems more important and significant than any- 
thing else in the world ?; Nothing more can be said than 
that these are human waj^s, and that every creature likes its 
own ways, and takes to the following them as a matter of 
course. Science may come and consider these ways, and 
find that most of them are us^ul. But it is not for the 
sake of their utility that they are followed, but because at 
the moment of following them we feel that that is the only 
ap])r()|)riiite and natural thing to do. Not one man in a 
billion, when taking his dinner, ever thinks of utilitj-. He 
eats because the food tastes good and makes him want 
more. If you ask him why he should want to eat more of 
what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philoso- 
pher he will probably laugh at you for a fool. The con- 
nection between the savory sensation and the act it awakens 
is for him absolute and selbstverstandlich, an 'a priori syn- 



INSTINCT, 387 

thesis ' of the most perfect sort, ueeding no proof but its 
own evidence, ilt takes, in short, what Berkeley calls a 
mind debauchea by learning to carry the process of making 
thenatural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any 
instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can 
such questions occur as : Why do we smile, when pleased, 
and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd 
as we talk to a single friend? Why doeQ .a particular 
maiden turn our wits so upside-down ? The common man 
can only say, ** Of course we smile, of course our heart pal- 
pitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, 
that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably 
and flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved !" 

AnA so, probably, does each animal feel about the par- 
ticular things it tends to do in presence of particular ob- 
jects. They, too, are a priori syntheses. To the lion it is 
the lioness which is made to be loved ; to the bear, the she- 
bear. To the broody hen the notion would probably seem 
monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to 
whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and 
precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon pbject which 
it is to her.* 

Thus we may be sure that, however mysterious some 
animalsMnstin^ts-may appear to us, our instincts will appear 
no less mysterious to them." -And we may conclude that, to 
the animal which obeys it, dvery impulse and every step of 
every instinct shines with its own sufiicient light, and seems 
at the moment the only eternally right and proper thing to 
do. It 18 done for its own sake exclusively. What volup- 

* "It would be very Bimple-mindcd to suppose that bees follow their 
queen, and protect her and care for her, because they are aware that with- 
out her llie hive would become extiuct. The odor or the aspect of Iheii 
queen is manifestly agreeable to the bees— that is why they love her so. 
Docs not all true lovo base itself on agreeable perceptions much more than 
on representations of utility ?" (G. II. Schneider, Der Thierische Wille, 
p. 187.) A priori, there is no reason to suppose that any sensation might not 
in 9ome animal cause any emotion and any impulse. To us it seems un- 
natural that an odor should directly excite anger or fear; or a color, lust 
Yet there arc creatures to which some smells are quite as frightful as any 
Bounds, and very likely others to which color is as much a sexual irritant 
as form. 



388 P8YCH0L0QY, 

tuous thrill may not sliake a fly, when she at last discovers 
tlie one particular leaf, or carrion, or bit of dung, that out 
of all the world can stimulate her ovipositor to its dis- 
charge ? Does not the discharge then seem to her the only 
fitting thing ? And need she care or know anything about 
the future maggot and its food ? 

Since the egg-laying instincts are simple examples to con- 
eider, a few quotations about them from Schneider may be 
serviceable : 

(* The phenomenon so often talked al>out, so variously interpreted, 
80 surrounded with mystification, that an insect should always lay her 
eggs in a spot appropriate to the nourishment of her young, is no more 
marvellous than the phenomenon that every animal pairs with a mate 
capable of bcarip^ posterity, or feeds on materials capable of affording 
him nourishmentJ. . . Not only the choice of a place for laying the 
eggs, but all the various acts for depositing and protecting them, are 
occasioned by the perception of the proper object, and the relation of 
this perception to the various stages of maternal impulse. When the 
burying beetle perceives a carrion, she is not only impelled to approach 
it and lodge her eggs in it, but also to go through the movements re- 
quisite for burying it; just as a bird who sees his hen-bird is impelled 
to caress her, to strut around her, dance before her, or in some other 
way to woo her; just as a tiger, when he sees an antelope, is impelled 
to stalk it, to pounce upon it, and to strangle it. When the tailor-bee 
cuts out pieces of roso-leaf, bends them, carries them into a carerpillar- 
or mouse-hole in trees or in the earth, covers tlieir seams again with 
other pieces, and so makes a thiml)le-shai)e<l cjise — when she fills this 
with honey and lays an egg in it, all these various appropriate expres- 
sions of her will arc to be exi)Iaine(l by supposing that at the time when 
the eggs are rijie within her, the appearance of a suitable caterpillar- or 
mouse-hole and the perceptjon of rose-leaves are so correlated in the 
insect with the several impulses in question, that the performances fol- 
low as a matter of course when the i)erceptions take place. . . . 

*' The perception of the empty nest, or of a single egg. seems in }>irds 
to stand in such a close relation to the pji^^iol^j^gj^ functions of ovipa- 
ration, that it serves as a ilirect stimulus to these functions, whil<'the 
jKirception of a suflii-iont nuni))er of eggs has just the opposite elTt'Ct. 
It is well known that hens and ducks lay more eggs if wc keep remov- 
ing them than if we leave th<*ni in the nest. The impulse to sit arises, 
as a rule, when a bird sees a certain number of eggs in her nest. If 
this miinlMT is not yet to be seen there, the ducks oontinue to lay, 
although thny perhaps have laid twice as many eggs as they are aecus- 
tome<l to sit ui>on. . . . That sitting, also, is independent of any idea of 
purpose and is a pure perception-impulse is evident, , among otlier things. 



INSTINCT. 389 

from the fact that many binls, e.g. wild ducks, steal eggs from each 
other. . . . The bodily disposition to sit is, it is true, one condi- 
tion [since broody hens will sit where there are no eggsj, but ihe 
perception of the eggs is the other condition of the activity of 
the incubating impulse. The propensity of the cuckoo and of the 
cow-bird to lay their eggs in the nests of other si)ecies must also be 
interpreted as a pure perception-impulse. These birds have no bodily 
disposition to become broody, and there is therefore in them no connec- 
tion between the perception of an egg and the impulse to sit upon it 
Eggs ripen, however, in their oviducts, and the body tends to get rid of 
them. And since the two birds just namea do not drop their eggs any- 
where on the ground, but in nests, which are the only places where they 
may preserve the species, it might easily appear that such preservation 
of the species was what they had in view, and that they acted with full 
consciousness of the purpose. But this is not so. . . . The cuckoo is 
simply excitod by the perception of quite determinate sorts of nest, 
which already contain eggs, to drop her own into them, and throw the 
others out, because this perception is a direct stimulus to these acts. 
It is impossible that she should have any notion of the other bird com-* 
ing and sitting on her egg.'* * 

INSTINCTS NOT AIiWAYS BLIND OB INVABIABIiE. 

Remember that nothing is said yet of the oiiglh of in- 
stincts, but only of the constitution of those that exist fully 
formed. How stands it with the instincts of mankind? 

Nothing is commoner than the remark that Man differs 
from lower creatures by the almost total absence of instincts, 
and the assumption of their work in him by * reas(m.* A 
fruitless discussion might be waged on this point by two 
theorizers who were careful not to define their terms. 
* Reason ' might be used, as it often has been, since Kant, 
not as the mere power of * inferring,' but also as a name for 
tlie tendency fo obey impulses of a certain lofty sort, such as 
duty, or universal ends. -(TALud * instinct ' might have its sig- 
nificance so broadened as to cover all impulses whatever, 
even the impulse to act from the idea of a distiiijt fact, as 
well as the impulse to act from a present sensati(m.>.Were 
the word instinct used in this broad way, it would of course^ 
\h) impossible to restrict it, as we began by doing, to actions 
done with no prevision of an end. We must of course 
avoid a quarrel about words, and the facts of the case are 

* Der ThUrische Wille, pp. 282-8. 



390 P8TCH0L0OT. 4f 

\ really tolerably plain. ^^An has a far greater variety of 
-^ i impulses than any lowenmimal ; and any one of these im- 
' pulses, taken in itself, is as ' blind ' as the lowest instinct 
can be ; but, owing to man's memory, power of reflection, 
and power of inference, they come each one to be felt by 
him, after he has once yielded to them and experienced 
their results, in connection with t^ foresight of those results. 
In this condition an impulse acted out may be said to be 
acted out, in part at least, for the sake of its results, (it is 
V obvious that every instinctive' act, in an animal imth memory^ 
yj^mxtst cease to he * Uind ' after being once repeaiedl and must be 
|\ accompanied with foresight of its * end ' just so far as that 
|\end may have fallen under the animal's cognizanc^ An 
' insect that lays her eggs in a place where she ne?er sees 
them hatched must always do so * blindly ; ' but a hen who has 
already hatched a brood can hardly be assumed to sit with 
1 perfect * blindness ' on her second nestTToome expectation 
^ of consequences must in every case like this be aroused ; 
and this expectation, according as it is that of something 
desired *or of something disliked, must necessarily either 
re-enforce or inhibit the mere impuls^LJThe hen*s idea of 
the chickens would probably encour^igfe her to sit ; a rat's 
memory, on the other hand, of a former escape from a trap 
would neutralize his impulse to take bait from anything 
that reminded him of that trap. If a boy sees a fat hop- 
ping-toad, he probably has incontinently an impulse (espe- 
cially if with other boys) to smash the creature with a stone, 
which impulse we may suppose him blindly to obey. But 
something in the expressicm of the dying toad's clasped 
hands suggests the meanness of the act, or reminds him of 
sayings he has heard about the sufferings of animals being 
like his own ; so that, when next hq is tempted by a toad, 
an idea arises which, far from spurring him again to the 
torment, prompts kindly actions, and may even make him 
the toad's champion against less reflecting boys. 

plain, then, that, no matter hoiv well endoiced an animal 

inaUy he in the xoay of instincts, his resultant actions 

mitch' modified if the instincts combine tvith experience, 

if in addition to impulses he have memories, associations, 

inferences, and expectations, on any considerable scale..' An 



tMe toad s 

fmay origin 
y^OiU be mtic 



1N8TINCT. 391 

object O, on -^bicli he has an instinctiye impulse to react in 
the manner A, would directly provoke him to that reaction. 
But O has meantime become for him a sign of the nearness 
of P, on which he has an equally strong impulse to react in 
the manner B, quite unlike A, So that when he meets O 
the immediate impulse A and the remote impulse B strug- 
gle in his breast for the master}'. The fatality and imifor- 
mity said to be characteristic of instinctive actions will be 
so little manifest tl^at one might be tempted to deny to him 
altogether the possession of any instinct about the object 
O. Yet how false this judgment would be ! The instinct 
about O is there ; only by the complication of the associa- 
tive machinery it has come into conflict with another in- 
stinct about P. 

Here we immediately reap the good fruits of our simple 
physiological conception of what an instinct is. If it be a 
mere excito-motor impulse, due to the pre-existeiice of a 
certain * reflex arc' in the nerve-centres of the creature, of 
course it must follow the law of all such reflex arcs. One 
liability of ijuch arcs is to have their activity * inhibited,* by 
other processes going on at the same time. It makes no 
difference whether the arc be organized at birth, or ripen 
spontaneously later, or be due to acquired habit, it must 
take its chances with all the other arcs, and sometimes 
succeed, and sometimes fail, in drafting off the currents 
through itself. The, mystical view of an instinct would 
make it invariable. /The physiological view would require 
it to show occasiouaVirregularities in any animal in whom 
the number of separate instincts, and the possible entrance 
of the same stimulus into several of them, were great. And 
such irregularities are what every superior animal's in- 
stincts do show in abundance.* 



* In the instincts of mammals, and even of lower creatures, the uniform- 
ity and infallibility which, a generation ago, were considered as esBential 
characters do not exist. The minuter study of recent years has found con- 
tinuity, transition, variation, and mistake, wherever it has looked for them, 
and decided that what is called an instinct is usually only a tendency to 
act in a way of which the average is pretty constant, but which need not 
be matheniHlically * true.' Cf. on this point Darwin's Origin of Species : 
Romanes's Mental £vol., chaps, zi to xvi incl., and Appendix ; W. L. 
Lindsay's Mind in Lower Animals, vol. i. 13&-141 ; n. chaps, v, zx ,* 




392 P8YCU0L0QT, 

I Wherever the mind is elevated enough i^ discriminate ; 
whenever several distinct sensory elements must combine 

r to discharge the reflex-arc ; wherever, instead of plumping 
into action instantly at the first rough intimation of what 
sort of a thing is there, the agent waits to see which one of 
its kind it is and what the circumstances are of its appearance; 
wherever different individuals and different circumstances 
can impel him in different ways ; wharever these are the 
conditions — we have a masking of the elementary constitu- 
tion of the instinctive life. j|fThe whole story of our dealings 
with the lower wild animals is the history of our taking 
advantage of the way in which they judge of everything by 
its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill them. 
Nature, in them, has left matters in this rough way, and 
made them act always in the manner which would be 
oficMsi right There are more worms unattached to hooks 
than impaled upon them ; therefore, on the whole, says 
Nature to her fishy children, bite at every worm and take 
your chances. But as her children get higher, and th^ 
lives more precious, she reduces the risks. Since what 
seems to be the same object may be now a genuine food 
and now a bait ; since in gregarious species each individual 
may prove to be either the friend or the rival, according to 
the circumstances, of anotlier ; since any entirely jinknowii^,^ 
object may be fraught with weal oV wbe,\^(«^Mre imptanis 
contrary impulses to act on many dasses of things, and leaves 
it to slight alterations in the conditions of the individual 
case to decide which impulse shall carry the day., Thus, 
greediness and suspicion, curiosity and timidity; coyness 
and desire, bashfulness and vanity, sociability and pu|^ 
nacity, seem to shoot over into each other as quickly, and 
to remain in as unstable equilibrium, in the higher birds 

,^nd mammals as in man^ They are all impulses, congenital, .. 

' blind lit first, and productive of motor reactions of a rigor- 
ously determinate sort. Each one of them, then, is an 
instivct, as instincts are commonly defined. But tliey con- 
tradict each otlier — * experience * in each particular oppor- 

and K. Semper's ConditioDs of Existence in Animals, where a great many 
instances will be found. 



INSTINCT. 393 

tanitj of application usually deciding the issue. The aninuA 
that exhibit^ them loses the * instinctive ' demeanor and appears 
to lead a life of hesitation and choice, an intellectual life ; """ 
not^ hoivever, because he has no instincts — rather because he has 
ffo many that they block each other's patK^ 

Thus, then, without troubling ourselves about the words 
instinct and reason, we maj- confidently say that however 
uncertain man's reactions upon his environment may some- 
times seem in comparison with those of lower creatures, the 
uncertainty is probably not due to their possession of any 
principles of action which he lacks. (On the contrary, man 
^possesses all the impnlses that they have, and a great many more 
besides. In other words, thorp is no material antagonism 
between instinct aud reasonJ Reason, per se, can inhibit 
no impulses ; the only thing fliat can neutralize an impulse ^ 
is an impulse the other wav-n/lleason may, however, make 
an inference which will excite flo'. imaginaJtion so as to set loose 
the impulse the other way ; and thus, though the animal 
richest in reason might be also the animal richest in in- 
stinctive impulses too, he would never seem the fatal au* 
tomaton which a merely instinctive animal would be. 

Let us now turn to human impulses with a little more 
detail. All wo have ascertained so far is that impulses of 
an originally instinctive character may exist, and yet not 
betray themselves by automatic fatality of conduct. But 
in man what impulses do exist ? In the light of what has 
been said, it is obvious that an existing impulse may not 
always be superficially apparent even when its object is 
there. And we shall see that some impulses may be masked 
by causes of which we have not yet npoken. 



TWO PKLNCIPIiES OF NON-UNIFOBMITY IN INSTINCTS. 

Were one devising an abstract scheme, nothing would 
be easier than to discover from an animal's actions just how 
many instincts he i)()ssessed. He would react in one way 
only upon each class of objects with which his life had to 
deal ; he would react in identically the sam^ way upon 
every specimen of a class ; and he would react invariably 
during his whole life. There would be no gaps among his 



A 



T 



394 P87CH0L0OT, 

insidncts ; all would come to light without perversion or 
disguise. But there are no such abstract animals, and no- 
where does the instinctive life display itself in sucli a way. 
Not only, as we have seen, may objects of the same class 
arouse reactions of opposite sorts in consequence of slight 
changes in the circumstances, in the individual object, or in 
the agent's inward condition; but two other principles of 
which we have not yet spoken, may come into play and 
produce results so striking that observers as eminent as 
Messrs. D. A. Spalding and liomaues do not hesitate to 
call them 'derangements of the mental constitution,' and 
to conclude that the instinctive machinery has got out 
of gear. 

These principles are those 

1. Of the inkibition of instivds by habits: ^md 

2. Of the tranmtorive.sii ttf itwfuwts. 

Taken in conjuncti(m with the two former principles — 
that the same object may excite ambiguous impulses, or sug- 
gest an impulse ditterent from that which it excites, by sug* 
gesting a remote object — they explain any amount of de- 
parture from uniformity of conduct, without implying any 
getting out of gear of the elementary impulses from which 
the conduct flows. 

( 1. The law of inhibition of instincts by habits is this: 
Wlien objects of a certain chtss elicil/rom an animal a certain r 
sort <if react ion, it often happens that the animal l^ecomes partial 
to the first specimen of the class on which it has reacted, and uilj^ 
not afterward react on any other specimen. 

The selection of a ])articular hole to live in, of a partic-l 
,ular mate, of a particular feediug-grouudj a ])Mrticular v;iri(»ty 
of diet, a ])articular anything, in short, out of a possible multi- 
tude, is a very wi(le-s]»read tendtMiry among animals, even 
th()s«> low down in the scale. The limpet will return t(» the 
same sticking- place in its rock, and the lobster to its favonte 
nook on the sea-bottom. The rabbit will deposit its dm.g in 
the same corner ; the bird makes its nest on the same bough. 
But (Mich of these pr(^ferenc(»,s carries with it an insensibility 
to other opportunities and occasions — an insensibility which 
can only be described physiologically as an inhibition of 



iscr. / 395 



/ 



new impulses by the habit of okl ones already formed* 
The possession of homes and wives of our ovm makes us 
strangely insensible to the charms of those of other people. 
Few of us are adventurous in the matter of food; in fact, 
most of us think there is something disgusting in a bill of 
fare to which we are unused. Strangers, we are apt to 
think, cannot be worth knowing, especiaffy if they come 
from distant cities, etc. /The original impulse which got ua 
liomes, wives, dietaries, and friends at all, seems to exhaust 
itself in its first achievements and to leave no surplus 
energy for reacting on new cases. \ And so it comes about 
that, witnessing this torpor, an observer of mankind might 
sa}' that no instinctive propensity toward certain objects ex- 
isted at all. It existed, but it t*xisted miJuceUaneously, or as 

jm instinct pure and simple, only before habit was formed. 

£a habit, once gi-afted on an instinctive tendency, restricts - 
the range of the tendency itself, and keeps us from reacting 
on any but the habitual object, although other objects 
might just as well have been chosen had they been the first- 
comer^ . 

r Another sort of aiTost of instinct by habit is where the 
3ame class of objects awakens contrary instinctive impulses. 
Hero the impulse first followed toward a given individual , 
of the class is apt to keep him from ever awakening the 
opposite impulse in us. In fact, the whole class may be 
protected ^y this individual specimen from the application 
to it of the other impulse. yAnimals, for example, awaken in 

_a child the oi^osite.impulses of ffijjxingand fondling. But 
if a child, in his first attempts to pat a dog, gets snapped at 
or bitten, so that the impulse of fear is strongly aroused, it 
may be that for years to come no dog will excite in him the 
impulse to fondle again?\ On the other hand, the greatest 
natural enemies, if caref lilly introduced to each other when 
young and guided at the outset by superior authority, set- 
tle down into those * happy families ' of friends which we 
see in our menageries. Young animals, immediately after 
birth, have no instinct of fear, but sliow their dependence 
by allowing themselves to bo freely handlecL Later, how- 
ever, they grow *wild,' and, if 'left to themselves, will not 
let man approach them. I am told by farmers in ih» 



396 P8TCH0L00T. 

Adirondack wilderness that it is a very serious matter if a 
cow wanders off and calves in the woods and is not found 
for a week or more. The calf, bv that time, is as wild and 
almost as fleet as a deer, and hard to capture without vio- 
lence. But calves rarely show any particular wildness to 
the men who have been in contact with them during the 
first days of their life, when the instinct to attach them- 
selves is uppermost, nor do they dread strangers as they 
would if brought up wild. 

Chickens give a curious illustration of the same law. 
Mr. Spalding's wonderful article on instinct shall supply us 

i with the facts. 'These little creatures show opposite in- 
stincts of attachment and fear, either of which may be 

' aroused by the same object, man.) If a chick is born in the 
absence of the hen, it 

** will follow any moving object. And, when guide<l by sight alone, 
they 8oem to have no more disposition to follow a hen than to follow a 
duck or a human beinj?. Unreflecting lookers-on, when they saw chick- 
ens a day old running after mo," says Mr. Spalding, **and older ones 
following me for miles, and answering to my whistle, imagined that I 
must have some occult power over the creatures : whereas I had simply 
allowed them to follow me from the first. There is the instinct to follow; 
and the ear, prior to experience, attaches them to the right object." ♦ 

But if a man presents himself for the first time when 
the instinct of fear is strong, the phenomena are altogether 
reversed. Mr. Spalding kept three chickens hooded until 
they were nearly four days old: and thus describes their 
behavior : 1 

'• Each of them, on being unhooded,* evinced the greatest terror to 
me, dashing off in the opposite direction whenever 1 sought to approach 
It. The table on which they were unhooded stood b<*fore a window, and 
each in its turn beat against the window like a wild bird. One of them 
darte<l l>ehind some lx>oks, and, squ«»ozing itsolf into a corner, remained 
cowering for a length of time We might gu(»ss at the meaning of this 
strange and exceptional ^^ildn(^ss : but the <Mld fact is enough ftu* my 
present purpose. Whatever might have lx»en the meaning of this 
marked change in their mental constitution had they been unhooded 
on the previous day they would have run to me iustead of from me — it 
could not have been the effect of ex[)<»rience< it must have resulted 
wholly from changes in their own organizations." \ 

• Spalding, Macmlllan*s Magazine, Feb. 1878, p. 287. 
t Ibid. p. 289. 



INSTINCT. 397 

Their case was precisely analogous to that of the Adi- 
I rondack calves. vThe two opposite instincts relative to the 
\ same object ripen in succession!^ If the first one engenders 
a habit, that habit will inhibit the application of the second \ 
instinct t<j that object. All animals are tame during the \ 
earliest phase of their infancy. Habits formed then limit 
ijthe effects of whatever instincts of wildness may later be 
evolved. 

Mr. Komanes gives some very curious examples of tte 
way in which instinctive tendencies may be altered by the 
habits to which their first * object© ' have given rise. The 
cases are a little more complicated than those mentioned in 
the text, inasmuch as the object reacted on not only starts 
a habit which inhibits other kinds of impulse toward it (al- 
though such other kinds might be natural), but even modi- 
fies by its own peculiar conduct the constitution of the 
[ impulse which it actually awakens. 

Two of the instances in question are those of hens who 
hatched out broods of chicks after having [in three previ- 
ous years) hatched ducks. They strove to coax or to com- 
pel their new progeny to enter the water, and seemed much 
I)erplexed at their unwillingness. Another hen adopted a 
brood of young ferrets which, having lost their mother, 
were put under her. During all the time they were left 
with her she had to sit on the nest, for they could not wan- 
der like young ('hicks. . She obeyed their hoarse growling 
as she would have obeyed her chickens' peep. She combed 
out their hair with her bill, and " used frequently to stop 
and look with one eye at the wriggling nestful, with an in- 
quiring gaze, expressive of astonishment.*' At other times 
she would fly up with a loud scream, doubtless because the 
orphans had nii)ped her in their search for teats. Finally, 
a Brahma hen nursed a young peacock during the enor- 
mous period of eighteen months, and never laid any eggs 
during all this time. The abnormal degree of pride which 
she showed in her wonderful chicken is described by Dr. 
Bomanes as ludicrous.^ 



* For the cases iu full see Mental Evolution in Animals, pp. 21&-217. 



398 PSrCHOLOOY. 

2. This leads us to tlie lata j^.traMitormess, which \8 
this : ' Many instincts ripen at a certain o^ge and then fade avxxjL 
A consequence of this law is that if, during the time of 
such an instinct's vivacitj, objects adequate to arouse it are 
met with, a habit of acting on them is formed, which re- 
mains when the original instinct has passed away ; but that 
if no such objects are met with, then no habit will be 
formed ; and, later on in life, when the animal meets the 
objects, he will altogether fail to react, as at the earlier 
epoch he would instinctively have done. \ ^ 

No doubt such a law is restricted. Some instincts are 
far less transient than others — those connected with feed- 
ing and * self-preservation ' may hardly be transient at all, 
and some, after fading out for a time, recur as strong as 
ever, e.g., the instincts of pairing and rearing young. The 
law, however, though not absolute, is certainly very wide- 
spread, and a few examples will illustrate just what it 
means. 

In the chickens and calves above mentioned, it is ob- 
vious that the instinct to follow and become attached fades 
out after a few days, and that the instinct of flight then 
takes its place, the conduct of the creature toward man be- 
ing decided by the formation or non-formation of a certain 
habit during those days. The transiency of the chicken's 
instinct to follow is also proved by its conduct toward the 
hen. Mr. Spalding kept some chickens shut up till they 
were comparatively old, and, speaking of these, he says : 

'* A chicken that has not heard the call of the mother till until eight 
or ten days old then hears it as if it heard it not. I regret to find that 
on this point my notes are not so full as I could wish, or as they might 
have been. There is, however, an account of one chicken that could 
not be returne<l to the mother when ten days old. The hen followed it, 
and tried to entice it in every way ; still, it continually left her and ran 
to the house or to any person of whom it caught sight. This it per- 
sisted in doing, though beaten back with a small branch dozens of 
times, and, indeed, cruelly maltreat(Kl. It was also placed under the 
mother at night, but it again left her in the morning." 

The instinct of sucking is ripe in all mammals at birth, 
and leads to that habit of taking the breast which, in the 
human infant, may b> prolonged by daily exercise long be- 



INSTINCT, 399 

joud its usual term of a year or a year and a half. But the 
instinct itself is transient, in the sense that if, for any rea- 
son, the child be fed by spoon during the first few days of 
its life and not put to the breast, it may be no easy matter 
after that to make it suck at all. So of calves. If their 
mother die, or be dry, or refuse to let them suck for a day 
or two, so that they are fed by hand, it becomes hani to 
get them to suck at all when a new nurse is provided. \jThe y 
ease with which sucking creatures are weaned, by simply "^ 
breaking the habit and giving them food in a new way, 
shows^Jjhat the instinct, purely as such, must be entirely 
t^xtinct. 

Assuredly the simple fact that instincts are transient, 
and that the effect of later ones may be altered by the 
habits which earlier ones have left behind, is a far more 
philosophical explanation than the notion of an instinctive 
constitution vaguely JLderanged ' or 'thrown out of gear.' 

I have observed a Scotch terrier, born on the floor of a 
stable in December, and transferred six weeks later to a 
carpeted house, make, when he was less than four months 
old, a very elaborate pretence of burying things, such as 
gloves, etc., with which he had played till he was tired. 
He scratched the carpet with his forefeet, dropped the ob- 
ject from his mouth upon the spot, and then scratched all 
about it (with both fore- and hind-feet, if I remember 
rightly), and finally went away and let it lie. Of course, the 
act was entirely uselc^ss. I saw him perform it at that age, 
some four or five times, and never again in his life. The 
conditious were not present to fix a habit which should last 
when the ])roniptiug instinct died away. But suppose 
meat iustt»ad of a glove, earth instead of a carpet, hunger- 
pangs instf»jid of a fresh supper a few hours later, and it is 
easy to set* how this dog might have got into a habit of 
burying superfluous food, which might have lasted all his 
life. AVho can swear that the strictly instructive part of 
the food-burying proi)ensity in the wild Canidce may not be 
as short-lived as it was in this temer ? 

A similar instance is given by Dr. H. D. Schmidt* of 
New Orleans: 

* Traustictiuus of Americau Neurulogicul Asaocialiou, vol. i. p. 129 
(1875) 



400 P8TCH0L00T, 

** I may cite the example of a young Bquirrel which I had tamed, a 
number of years ago, when serving in the army, and when I had sufii- 
cient leisure and opportunity to study the habits of animals. In the 
autumn, before the winter sets in, adult squirrels bury as many nuts 
as they can collect, separately, in the ground. Holding the nut firmly 
between their teeth, they first scratch a hole in the gr3Sd, and, after 
pointing their ears in all directions to convince themselves that no 
enemy is near, they ram— the head, with the nut still between the front 
teeth, serving as a sledge-hammer — the nut into the ground, and then fill 
up the hole by means of their paws. The whole process is executed with 
great rapidity, and, as it appeared to me, always with exactly the same 
movements ; in fact, it is done so well that I could never discover the 
traces of the burial-ground. Now, as regards the young squirrel, which^ 
of course, never had been present at the burial of a nut, I observed that, 
after having eaten a number of hickory-nuts to appease its appetite, it 
would take one between its teeth, then sit upright and listen in all 
directions. Finding all right, it would scratch upon the smooth blanket 
on which I was playing with it as if to make a hole, then hammer with 
the nut between its teeth upon the blanket, and finally perform all the 
uY I motions required to fill up a hole — in the air; after which it would 
jump away, leaving the nut, of course, uncovered." 

The anecdote, of course, illustrates beautifully the close 
relation of instinct to reflex action — a particular perception 
calls forth particular movements, and that is all^ Dr. 
Schmidt writes me that the squirrel in question soon passed 
away from his observation. It may fairly be presumed 
that, if he had been long retained prisoner in a cage, he 
would soon have forgotten his gesticulations over the hick- 
ory-nuts. 

One might, indeed, go still further with safety, and ex- 
pect that, if such a captive squirrel were then set free, he 
would never afterwards acquire this peculiar instinct of his 
tribe.* 

Leaving lower animals aside, and turning to human in- 
stincts, we see the law of transiency corroborated on the 



/// 



♦ "Mr. Spalding,*' says Mr. Lewes (Problems of Life and Mind, prob. 
I. chap. II. § 22, note), "tells me of a friond of his wlio reared a gosling 
in the kitchen, away from all water ; when thi.s bird was some months 
old. and was taken to a pond, it not only refused to go into the water, but 
when thrown in scrambled out again, as a hen would have done. Here 
was an insthict entirely suppressed." See a similar observation on duck- 
lings in T. R. R. Stebbing : Essays on Darwinism (London, 1871), p. 78. 



INSTINCT, 401 

widest scale by the alternation of different interests and 
passions as human life goes on. With the child, life is all 
play and fairy-tales and learning the external properties of 
' things ;' with the youth, it is bodily exercises of a more 
systematic sort, novels of the real world, boon-fellowship 
and song, friendship and love, nature, travel and adven- 
ture, science and philosophy ; with the man, ambition and 
policy, acquisitiveness, responsibility to others, and the 
selfish zest of the battle of life. J If a boy grows up alone 
at the age of games and sports, and learns neither to play 
ball, nor row, nor sail, nor ride, nor skate, nor fish, nor 
shoot, probably he will be sfld entai;^ to the end of his days ; 
and, though the best of opportunities be afforded him for 
learning these things later, it is a hundred to one but he will 
pass them by and shrink back from the effort of taking 
those necessary first steps the prospect of which, at an 
earlier age, would have filled him with eager delight. ; The 
sexual passion expires after a protracted reign ; but *il is 
well known that its peculiar manifestations in a given in- 
dividual depend almost entirely on the habits he may form 
during the early period of its acti^itJy Exposure to bad 
company then makes him a loose liver all his days ; 
chastity kept at first makes the same easy later on. In all 
pedagogy the great thing is to strike the iron while hot, 
and to seize the wave of the pupil's interest in eacli succes- 
sive subject before its ebb has come, so that knowledge 
may be got and a habit of skill acquired — a headway of in- 
terest, in short, secured, on which afterward the iudindual 
may float. There is a happy moment for fixing skill in 
drawing, for making boys collectors in natural history, and 
presently dissectors and botanists ; then for initiating them 
into the harmonies of mechanics and the wonders of physi- 
cal and chemical law. Later, introspective psychology 
and the metaphysical and religious mysteries take their 
turn ; and, last of all, the drama of human affairs and 
worldly wisdom in the widest sense of the term. In each 
of us a saturation-point is soonjreached in all these things ; 
the impetus of our purely intellectual zeal expires, and un- 
less the to])ic be one associated with some urgent personal 
need that keeps our wits cojistantly whetted about it, we 



4()2 PSTOHOLOGT. 

settle into an equilibrium, and live on what we learned 
when our interest was fresh and instinctive, without adding 
to the store. Outside of their own business, the ideas 
gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically 
the only ideas they shall have in their lives. They cannot 
get anything new. Disinterested curiosity is past, the 
mental grooves and channels set, the power of assimilation 
gone. If by chance we ever do learn anything about some 
entirely new topic we are afilicted with a strange sense of 
insecurity, and we fear to advance a resolute opinion. But, 
with things learned in the plastic days of instinctive curi- 
osity we never lose entirely our sense of being at home^ 
There remains a kinship, a sentiment of intimate acquaint- 
ance, which, even when we know we have failed to keep 
abreast of the subject, flatters us with a sense of power 
over it, and makes us feel not altogether out of the pale. 

Whatever individual exceptions might be cited to this 
are of the sort that * prove the rule.' 

To detect the moment of the instinctive readiness for 
the subject is, then, the first duty of every educator. As 
for the pupils, |it would probably lead to a more earnest 
temper on the part of college students if they had less be- 
lief in their unlimited future intellectual potentialities, and 
could |)e brought to realize that whatever physics and polit- 
ical economy and philosophy they are now acquiring are, for 
better or worse, the physics and political economy and 
philosophy that ^vill have to serve them to the end. |j 

The natural conclusion to draw from this transiency of 
instincts is that viost instincts are implanted for the saice of 
giving rise to habits, and that, this purpose once accomplished^ 
the instincts themselves, as snch, have no raison d'etre in the 
ps7jchical economy, nnd consequently fade axvay: That occa- 
sionally an instinct sliould fade before circumstances per- 
mit of a habit being formed, or that, if the habit be formed, 
other factors than the pure instinct should modify its 
course, need not surprise us. Life is full of the imperfect 
adjustment to individual cases, of arrangements which, tak- 
ing the species as a whole, are quite orderly and regular. 
Instinct cannot be expected to escape this general risk. 



INSTINCT. 403 

SFBGIAIj HTTICAK INSTINOTS; 

Let UB now test our principles by tnmiug to human 
instincts in more detail. We cannot pretend in these pages 
to be minute or exhaustive. But we can say enough to set 
all the above generalities in a more favorable light But 
first, what kind of motor reactions upon objects shall we 
count as instincts? This, as aforesaid, is a somewhat 
arbitrary matter. Some of the actions aroused in us by 
objects go no further than our own bodies. Such is the 
bristling up of the attention when a novel object is per- 
ceived, or the * expression ' on the face or the breatliing 
apparatus of an emotion it may excite. These movements 
merge into ordinary reflex actions like laugliing when 
tickled, or making a wry face at a bad taste. Other actions 
take eflfect upon the outer world. Such are flight from a 
wild beast, imitation of what we see a comrade do, etc. On 
the whole it is best to be catholic, since it is very hard to 
draw an exact line ; and call both of these kinds of activity 
instinctive, so far as either may be n<ituraUy provoked by 
the presence of specific sorts of outward fact 

Professor Preyer, in his careful little work, * Die Seele 
des Kindes,' says "instinctive acts are in man few in 
number, and, apart from those connected with the sexual 
passion, diflicult to recognize after early youth is past" 
And he adds, " so much the more attention should we pay 
to the instinctive movements of new-born babies, suck- 
lings, and small children." That instinctive acts should be 
easiest rprognizal in childhood would be a very natural 
effect of our principles of transitoriness, and of the restric- 
tive influence of habits once acquired ; but we sjiall sQe how 
far they art* from being * few in number ' in man. Professor 
Preyer divides the movements of infants into impulsvye, 
reflex, and instinctive. By impulsive movements he means 
rajulovi movonients of limbs, body, and voice, with no aim, 
and before perception is aroused. Among the first reflex 
movements are crying cm contact with tlie air, sneezifig^ 
snuffling, snoring, coughing, sighing, sobbing, gagging, vomiting^ 
hiccuping, starting, moving Oie limbs when tickled, touched, or 
hUncn upon, etc., etc. 



i 



404 P8YCH0L0QT. 

Of the movements called by him instinctiye in the child. 
Professor Preyer gives a full account. Herr Schneider does 
the same ; and as their descriptions agree \idth each other 
and with what other writers about infancy say, I will base 
my own very brief statement on theirs. 
>^ Svcking : almost perfect at birth ; not coupled with any 
congenital tendency to seek the breast, this being a later 
acquisition. As we have seen, sucking is a transitory in- 
stinct. 

Biting an object placed in the mouth, cheunng and grind-- 
ing the teeth; licking sugar ; making characteristic grimaces 
over bitter and sweet tastes ; spitting out 

Clasping an object which touches the fingers or toes. 
Later, attempts to grasp at an object seen at a distance. 
Pointing at such objects, and making a peculiar sound ex- 
pressive of desire, which, in my own three children, was the 
first manifestation of speech, occurring many weeks before 
other significant sounds. 

Carrying to the movih of the object, when grasped. This 
instinct, guided and inhibited by the sense of taste, and 
combined with the instincts of biting, chewing, sucking, 
spitting-out, etc., and with the reflex act of swallowing, 
leads in the individual to a set of habits which constitute 
his function of alinientation, and which may or may not be 
gradually modified as life goes on. 

Crying at bodily discomfort, hunger, or pain, and at 
solitude. Smiling at being noticed, fondled, or smiled at 
by others. It seems very doubtful whether young infants 
have any instinctive fear of a terrible or scowling face. I 
have beeii unable to make my own children, under a year 
old, change their expression when I changed mine ; at most 
they manifested attention or curiosity. Preyer instances a 
protrusion of tJie lips, which, he says, may be so great as to 
remind one of that in the chimpanzee, as an instinctive 
expression of concentrated attention in the human infant 

Turning the head aside as a gesture of rejection, a gesture 
asually accompanied with a frown and a bending back ot 
the body, and with holding the breath. 

HMing head^creot. . 

Sitting up. 



INSTINCT. 405 

Locomotion. The early movements of children's limbs 
are more or less symmetrical. Later a baby will move his 
legs in alternation if suspended in the air. But until the 
impulse to walk awakens by the natural ripening of the 
nerve-centres, it seems to make no difference how often the 
child's feet may be placed in contact with the ground ; the 
legs remain limp, and do not respond to the sensation of 
contact in the soles by muscular contractions pressing doivU' 
tvards. No sooner, however, is the standing impulse bom, 
than the child stiffens his legs and presses downward as 
soon as he feels the floor. In some babies this is the first 
locomotory reaction. In others it is preceded by the in- 
stinct to creep, which arises, as I can testify, often in a verj- 
sudden way. Yesterday the baby sat quite contentedly 
wherever he was put ; to-day it has become impossible to 
keep him sitting at all, so irresistible is the impulse, aroused 
by the sight of the floor, to throw himself forward upon his 
hands. Usually the arms are too weak, and the ambitious 
little experimenter falls on his nose. But his perseverance 
is dauntless, and he ends in a few days by learning to travel 
rapidly around the room in the quadrupedal way. The 
position of the legs in * creeping ' varies much from one 
child to another. My own child, when creeping, was often 
obsei^v^ed to pick up objects from the floor with his mouth, 
a phenomenon which, as Dr. O. W. Holmes has remarked, 
like the early tendency to grasp with the toes, easily lends 
itself to interpretation as a reminiscence of prehuman an- 
cestral habits. 

The walking instinct may awaken with no less sudden- 
ness, and its entire education be completed within a week's 
compass, barring, of course, a little 'grogginess' in the 
gait. Individual infants vary enormously ; but on the whole 
it is safe to say that the mode of development of these 
locomoto*' instincts is inconsistent with the account given 
by the older English associatiouist school, of their being 
results of the individual's education, due altogether to the 
gradual association of certain perceptions with certain hap- 
hazard movements and certain resultant pleasures. Mr 




406 PSYCHOLOGY, 

Bain has tried,* by describing the demeanor of new-born 
lambs, to show that locomotion is learned by a very rapid 
experience. But the observation recorded proves the 
faculty to be almost perfect from the first ; and all others 
who have observed new-born calves, lambs, and pigs agree 
that in these animals the powers of standing and walking, 
and of interpreting the topographical significance of sights 
and sounds, are all but fully developed at bii'th. Often in 
animals who seem to be * learning ' to walk or fly the sem- 
blance is illusive. The awkwardness shown is not due to 
the fact that ' experience ' has not yet been there to asso- 
ciate the successful movements and exclude the failures, but 
to the fact that the animal is beginning his attempts before 
the co-ordinating centres have quite ripened for their work. 
Mr. Spalding's observations on this point are conclusive as 
to birds. 

** Birds," he says, ** do not learn to fly. Two years ago I shut up 
five unflwlged swallows in a small box, not much larger than the nt^t 
from which they were taken. The little t)ox, which had a wire front, 
was hung on the wall near the nest, and the young swallows were fed by 
their parents through tlie wires. In this confinement, where they could 
not even extend their wings, they were kept until after they were fully 
fledged. ... On going to set the prisoners free, one was found 
dead. . . . The remaining four were allowed to escape one at a time. 
Two of these were perceptibly wavering and unsteady in their flight. 
One of them, after a flight of some ninety yards. disai>peared among 
some trees." No. 3 and No. 4 ** never flew against anythmg, nor was 
there, in their avoiding objects, any appreciable dilTercMice between 
them and the old birds. No. 3 swept round the Wellingtonia, and No. 
4 rose over the hedge, just as we see the old swallows doing every hour 
of the day. I have this summer verifi(Hl these observations. Of two 
swallcjws I had simihirly confined, one, on Iniing sot fre^\ flew a yard or 
two close to the ground, rose in the direction of a l)0('eii-treo, which it 
graec^fuUy avoided ; it was seen for a considerable time sweeping round 
the beeches and performing magnificent evolutions in the air high aliove 
them. The other, which was observed to beat the air with its win^ 
more than usual, was soon lost to sight behind some trees. Titmice, 
tomtils, and wrens I have made the subjects of similar observations, and 
with similar results." * 

In the light of this report, one may well be tempted to 
make a prediction about the liuman child, and say that if a 

♦Senses and Intellect 3(1 ed. pp. 418-675. 
f Nature, xii. im (1S75). 



INSTINCT, 407 

baby were kept from getting on bis feet for two or three 
weeks after the first impulse to walk had shown itself in 
him, — d. small blister on each sole would do the business, — 
he might then be expected to walk about as well, through 
the mere ripening of his nerve-centres, as if the ordinary- 
process of * learniiig' had been allowed to occur during all 
the blistered time.^ It is to be hoped that some scientific 
widower, left alone with his offspring at the critical moment, 
may ere long test this suggestion on the li^'ing subject. 
Climbing on trees, fences, furniture, banisters, etc., is a well- 
marked instinctive propensity which ripens after the fourth 
year. 

Vocalization. This may be either musical or significant. 
Very few weeks after birth the baby begins to express its 
spirits by'emitting vowel sounds, as much during inspira- 
tion as during expiration, and will lie on its back cooing 
and gurgling to itself for nearly an hour. But this singing 
has nothing t<3 do with speech. Speech is sound significaiyf. 
During the second year a certain number of significant 
sounds are gradually acquired ; but talking proper does not * 
set in till the instinct to imitate soumh ripens in the nervous 
system ; and this ripening seems in some children to be 
quite abrupt. Then speech grows rapidly in extent and 
perfection. The child imitates every word he hears uttered, 
and repeats it again and again with the most evident plea- 
sure at his new power. At this time it is quite imix>ssible 
to talk unth him, for his condition is that of 'Echolalia,' — 
instead of answering the question, he simply reiterates it. 
The result is, however, that his vocabulary increases very 
fast ; and little by little, with teaching from above, the 
young prattler understands, puts words together to express 
his own wants and perceptions, and even makes intelligent 
replies. From a speechless, he has become a speaking, 
animal. The interesting point with regard to this instinct 
is the oftentimes very sudden birth of the impulse to imi- 
tate sounds. Up to the date of its awakening the child may 
have been as devoid of it as a dog. Four days later his 
whole energy may be poured into thiy ::©w channel. The 
habits of articulation formed dni-jjig the plastic age of 
childhood are in most persons sutlicient to inhibit the for- 



408 PSTCHOLOOY, , >■ 

p. ' 
mation of new ones of a fiindamentallj different 4brt— witv 

ness the inevitable * foreign accent ' which d'-Hrifrnishes 
the speech of those who learn a language after oarlj youth 
Imitation. The child's first words are in part vocables 
of his own invention, which his parents adopt, aiid wliicli, 
as far as they go, form a new human tongue upuu the earth : 
and in part they are his more or less successful imitations 
of words he hears the parents use. But the instinct of 
imitaJting gestures develops earlier than that of imitating 
sounds, — unless the sympathetic crying of a baby when it 
hears another cry may be reckoned as imitation of a sound. 
Professor Preyer speaks of his child imitating the protru- 
sion of the father's lips in its fifteenth week. The various 
accomplishments of infancy, making ' pat-a-cake,' saying 

* bye-bye,' * blowing out the candle,' etc., usually fall well 
inside the limits of the first year. Later come all the various 
imitative games in which childhood revels, playing * horse,* 

* soldiers,' etc., etc. And from this time onward man is 
essentially the imitative animal. His whole educability 
and in fact the whole history of civilization depend on 
this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, 
and acquisitiveness reinforce. * Humani nihil a me olienum 
puto,' is the motto of each indi\'idual of the species ; and 
makes him, whenever another indi\idual shows a power 
or superiority of any kind, restless until he can exhibit it 
himself. But apart from this kind of imitation, of which 
the psychological roots are complex, there is the more 
direct propensity to speak and walk and behave like 
others, usually without any conscious intention of so 
doing. And there is the imitative tendency which shows 
itself in large masses of men, and produces panics, and 
orgies, and frenzies of violence, and which only the 
rarest individuals can actively withstand. This sort of 
imitativeness is possessed by man in common with other 
gregarious animals, and is an instinct in the fullest sense 
of the term, being a blind impulse to act as soon as a cer- 
tain perception occurs. It is particularly hard not to imi- 
tate gaping, laughing, or looking and running in a certain 
direction, if we see others doing so. Certain mesmerized 
subjects must automatically imitate whatever motion tbeir 



V 



INSTINCT. 409 

operator makes before their eyes,* A successful piece of 
mimicry gives to both bystanders and mimic a peculiar 
kind of aesthetic pleasure. The dramatic impulse, the ten- 
dency to pretend one is someone else, contains this pleasure 
of mimicry as one of its elements. Another element seems 
to be a peculiar sense of power in stretching one's oiivti 
personality so as to include that of a strange person. In 
young children this instinct often knows no bounds. For 
a few months in one of my children's third year, he liter- 
ally hardly ever appeared in his own person. It was 
always, " Play I am So-and-so, and you are So-and-so, and 
the chair is such a thing, and then we'll do this or that." 
If you called him by his name, H., you invariably got the 
reply, " I'm not H., I'm a hyena, or a horse-car," or what- 
ever the feigned object might be. He outwore this impulse 
after a time ; but while it lasted, it had every appearance 
of being the automatic result of ideas, often suggested by 
perceptions, working out irresistible motor effects. Imita- 
tion shades into 

Emulation or Rivalry^ a very intense instinct, especially 
rifa with young children, or at least especially undisguised. 
Everyone knows it. Nine-tenths of the work of the world 
is done by it. We know that if we do not do the task some- 
one else will do it and get the credit, so we do it. It has 
very little connection with sympathy, but rather more with 
pugnapity, which we proceed in turn to consider. 

Pugnacity ; anger ; resentment. In many respects man 
is the most ruthlessly ferocious of beasts. As with all 
gregarious animals, * two souls,' as Faust says, * dwell with- 
in his breast,' the one of sociability and helpfulness, the 
other of jealousy and antagonism to his mates. Though in 
a general way he cannot live without them, yet, as regards 
certain individuals, it often falls out that he cannot live 
with them either. Constrained to be a member of a tribe, 
he still has a right to decide, as far as in him lies, of which 
other members the tribe shall consist. Killing off a few 



* See, for some cxcelleDt pedagogic remnrks about doing yowntHf what 
you want to get your pupils to do, and not simply telling them to do it, 
Baumann. Ilaudbuch der Moral (1879), p. 82 ff. 



410 P8TCH0L0G7. 

obnoxious ones may often better the chances of those that 
remain. And killing off a neighboring tribe from whom 
no good thing comes, but only competition, may materially 
better the lot of the whole tribe. Hence the gory cradle, 
the bellum amnmm contra omnes, in which our race was 
reared ; hence the fickleness of human ties, the ease with 
which the foe of yesterday becomes the ally of to-day, the 
friend of to-day the enemy of to-morrow ; hence the fact that 
we, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of 
one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more 
pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with 
us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoulder- 
ing and sinister traits of character by means of which they 
lived through so many massacres^ harming others, but 
themselves unharmed. " ] 

Sympathy is a n emotion as to wtose instinctiveness psy- 
chologists have held hot debate, some of them contending 
that it is no primitive endowment, but, originally at least, 
the result of a rapid calculation of the good consequences 
to ourselves of the sympathetic act. Such a calculation, 
at first conscious, would grow more unconscious as it be- 
came more habitual, and at last, tradition and association 
aiding, might prompt to actions which could not be distin- 
guished from immediate impulses^ It is hardly needful to 
argue against the falsity of this view. fSome forms of sym- 
pathy, that of mother with child, for example, are sui-ely 
primitive, and not intelligent forecasts of board and lodg- 
ing and other support to be reaped in old age. Danger to 
the child blindly and instantaneously stimulates the mother 
to actions of alarm or defence^ Menace or harm to the 
adult beloved or friend excites us in a corresponding 
way, often against all the dictates of prudence. It is true 
that sympathy does not necessarily follow fiom the mere 
fact of gregariousness. Cattle do not help a wounded com- 
rade ; on the contrary, they are more likeh' to dispatch 
him. But a dog will lick another sick dog, and even bring 
him food ; and the sympathy of mcmkeys is proved by 
many observations to be stroug. In man, then, we may lay 
it down tliat the sight of sufiering or danger to others is 
a direct exciter of interest, and an immediate stimulus, if 



Vis. 



INSTINCT, 411 

no complication liinders, to acts of reliefl There is noth- 
in*; uuacc'ountable or pathological abour this — nothing to 
justify Professor Bain's assimilation of it to the * fixed 
ideas ' of insanity, as * clashing ^vith the regular outgoings 
of the willj' It may be as primitive as any other * outgo- 
ing/ and may be due to a random variation selected, quite 
as probably as gregariousness and maternal love are, eveu 
in Spencer's opinion, due to such variations. 

It is true that sympathy is u^uliarly liable to inhibi- 
tion from other instincts whi^'h if^ ^[jmnlnH may call forth. 
The traveller whom the good Samaritan rescued may well 
have prompted such instinctive fear or disgust in the priest 
and Levite who passed him by, that their sympathy could 
not come to the front. Then, of course, habits, reasoned 
reflections, and calculations may either check or reinforce 
one's sympathj' ; as may also the instincts of love or hate, 
if these exist, for the suflering individual. The hunting 
and pugnacious instincts, when aroused, also inhibit our 
sympathy absolutely. This accounts for the cruelty of 
collections of men hounding each other on to bait or tor- 
ture a victim. The blood mounts to the eyes, and sympa- 
thy's chance is gone.* 

The huntimj inftfincf has an equally remote origin in the 
1^ y evolution of the race.t The hunting and the fighting in- 

* Sympathy has been enonnously wHtten about In books on Ethics. A 
very gmul ivci'iii chapter is that by Thos. Fowler: The Principles of Morals, 
pari II. chap. ii. 

f **I uiu8t now refer to a very general passion which occurs in lx)ys wlio 
are lm)ught up naturally, especially in the country. Everyone knows 
what pleasure a boy takes in the sight of a butterfly, fish, crnb or other 
animal, or of a bird's nest, and what a strong propensity he has for pulling 
apart, breaking, opening, and destroying all t-oniplex objects, how he de- 
lights in pulling out the wings and legs of flies, and tormenting one animal 
or another, how greedy he is to steal secret dainties, with what irresistible 
strength the plundering of birds* nests attracts him without his having the 
least intention of eating the eggs or the young birds. This fact has long; 
been familiar, and is daily remarked by teachers ; but an explanation ot 
these imi)ulses which follow upon a mere perception of the objects, with 
out in most easels any representation bein-r aroused of a future pleasure to 
l>e gained. 1ms as yet Ijeen given by no nu , and yet the impulses are very 
easy to explain. In many cases *: '"ill tx- '.;>id that the lM)y pulls things 
apart from curiosity. Quite omt - i" i .\ nence comes this curiosity, thia 
irresistible desire to open eve'> iliiii;^ and iscr •' hat is inside ? What makes 



f 



/ 



412 parcuoLOOT. 



f>; 



stinct combine in many manifestations. /Xhey both support 
the emotion of anger ; they combine in tKje fascination which 
stories of atrocity have for most minda ; and the utterly 
blind excitement of giving the rein to our fury when our blood 
is up (an excitement whose intensity is greater than that 
of any other human passion save one) is only explicable as an 
impulse aboriginal in character, and having more to do with 
immediate and overwhelming tendencies to muscular dis- 
charge than to any possible reminiscences of effects of ex- 
perience, oi: association of ideas. I say this here, because 
the pleasure of disinterested cruelty has been thought a 
paradox, and writers have sought to show that it is no 
primitive attribute of our nature, but rather a resultant 
of the subtile combination of other less malignant ele- 
ments of mind. This is a hopeless task. \ll evolution and 
the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction 
of prey and of human rivals vivst have been among the 
most important of man's primitive functions, the fighting 
and the chasing instincts must have become ingrained. 
Certain perceptions viiL8t immediately, and without the in- 
tervention of inferences and ideas, have prompted emotions 
and motor discharges ; and both the latter niust, from 
the nature of the case, have been very violent, and therefore, 
when unchecked, of an intensely pleasurable kind. It isjusf 
because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of 
us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially where a fight 
or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.X 

the boy take the eggs from the nest and destroy them ^hen he never thinks 
of eating theiu ? These are effects of an hereditary instinct, so strong that 
warnings and punishments are unable to counteract it " (Schneider: Der 
Kenschliche Wille, p. 224. See also Der Thierische V» Hie, pp. 180-2.) 

* It is not surprising, in view of the facts of animal Mstory and evolu- 
tion, that the very special object blood should have become the stimulus 
for a very special interest and excitement. That the sight of it should 
make people faint is strange. Less so that a child who sees his blood flow 
should forthwith become much more frightened than by the mere feeling 
of the cut. Horned cattle often, though not always, become furiously 
excited at the smell of blood. In some abnormal human beings the sight 
or thought of it exerts a baleful fascination. '* B and his father i»ere at a 
DeighlK)r's one evening, and, while paring apples, the old man accic^entally 
cut his hand so severely as to cause the* blood to tlow profusely. B was 
observed to become restless, nervous, pale, and to have undergone a peculiar 



INSTINCT, 413 

As Boclief oacauld says, there is something in the misfor- 
tunes of our very friends that does not altogether displease 
us ; and an apostle of peace will feel a certain vicious thrill 
run through him, and enjoy a vicarious brutality, as he turns 
to the column in his newspaper at the top of which * Shock- 
ing Atrocity ' stands printed in large capitals. See how the 
crowd flocks round a street-brawl ! Consider the enormous 
annual sale of revolvers to persons, not one in a thousand 
of whom has any serious intention of using them, but of 
whom each one has his carnivorous self-consciousness 
agreeably tickled by the notion, as he clutches the handle 
of his weapon, that he will be rather a dangerous customer 
to meet, ^^ee the ignoble crew that escorts every great 
pugilist — parasites who feel as if the glory of his bnitality 
rubbed off upon them, and whose darling hope, from day to 
day, is to arrange some set-to of which they may share the 
rapture without enduring the pains ! The first blows at a 
prize-fight are apt to make a refined spectator sick ; but his 
blood is soon up in favor of one party, and it will then seem 
as if the other fellow could not be banged and pounded and 
mangled enough — the refined spectator would like to rein- 
force the blows himself. i Over the sinister orgies of blood 
of certain depraved and insane persons let a curtain be 
drawn, as well as over the ferocity with which otherwise 
fairly decent men may be animated, when (at the sacking of 
a town, for instance), the excitement of victory long de- 



changc in demeanor. Taking advantage of the distnic^lion productMl by 
the accident, B escaped from the house and proceeded to a neighboring 
farm-yard, where he cut the throat of a horse, killing it." Dr. I> II. Tuke, 
commenting on this man's case (Journal of Mental Science, Octolier, 
1885), speaks of the influence of blood upon him— his whole life iiad been 
one chain of cowardly atrocities— and continues . ** There can be no doubt 
that with some individuals it constitutes a ftiscination. . . . We might 
Bpeak of a mnniii mnguinis. Dr. Savage admitted a man fmm France into 
Bethlehem Hospital some time ago, one of whose c»arliest symptoms of in- 
sanity wa.« ;].?•* -J. for blooti, which he endeavored to satisfy by going to 
an abat\»ir in Paris. The man whose case I have brought forward had the 
same passion for gloating over blood, but hjul no attack of acute mania. 
The si.L'ht of blood was distinctly a delight to him, and at any time bloo<l 
arousal in him the worst elements of his nature. Instances will easily be 
recall-'d in which murderers, undoubtedly insane, have described the in- 
tense pleasure they experienced in the warm blood of children. ". 



414 P8TCHOL0OT. 

layed, the sadden freedom of rapine and of lust, the con- 
ta^on of a crowd, and the impulse to imitate and outdo, all 
combine to swell the blind drunkenness of the killing-in- 
stinct, and carry it to its extreme. No ! those who try to 
account for this from above downwards, as if it resulted from 
the consequences of the victory being rapidly inferred, and 
from the agreeable sentiments associated with them in the 
imagination, have missed the root of the matter. jDur fe- 
rocity is blind, and can only be explained from hdow. Could 
we trace it back through our line of descent, we should see 
it taking more and more the form of a fatal reflex response, 
and at the same time becoming more and more the pure 
and direct emotion that it is.7 

In childhood it takes tifis form. The boys who pull 
out grasshoppers' legs and butterflies' wings, and disem- 
bowel every frog they catch, have no thonght at all about the 
matter. The creatures tempt their hands to a fascinating 
occupation, to which they have to yield. It is with them 
as with the * boy-fiend ' Jesse Pomeroy, who cut a little 
girl's throat, * just to see how she'd act.' The normal pro-i 
vocatives of the impulse are all living beasts, great and 
small, toward which a contrary habit has not been formed i 
— all human beings in whom we perceive a certain intent 
towards m, and a large number of human beings who oflend 
us peremptorily, either by their look, or gait, or by some 
circumstance in their lives which we dislike. Inhibited by 
sympathy, and by reflection calling j]) impulses of an op- 
posite kind, civilized men lose the liai itof acting out their 
pugnacious instincts in a perfectly natural way, and a pass- 
ing feeling of anger, with its comparatively faint bcxlily ex- 



* " Bombouuel, lijiving rolled with a panther lo the b<>vd»:r of a nivine, 
gets his head away from the open month of the animal, and by a prodi- 
gious elTort rolls her into the abyss. He gets up, blinded, spiltini: a mass of 
blood, not knowing exactly what the situation is. lie think- n»r.< (^f one 
thing, that he shall probably die of his wounds, but th»* 'K-h'««. 'i> ■■■ x be 
must take vengeance on the panther. ' I didn't think of my ])ii\ 1. . « ^lls 
us. • Possessed entirely by the fury with which I wastra:!8port«'«i I ■.; w 
my hunting-knife, and not understanding what had become uf thi 1 .1^ . I 
sought for her on every side in order to continue the struggle, i. » .'i^ i- 
this plight that the Anibs found me when they arrived.'" (Q'loli-* '•} 
Guyau, La Morale sans Obligation, etc., p. 210.) 






INSTINCT. 4i8 

pressions, may be the limit of their physical combativeness. 
Such a feeling as this may, however, be aroused by a wide 
range of objects. Inanimate things, combinations of color 
and sound, bad bills of fare, may in persons who combine 
fastidious taste with an irascible temperament produce 
real ebullitions of rage. Though the female sex is often 
said to have less pugnacity than the male, the difference 
seems connected more with the extent of the motor con- 
sequences of the impulse than with its frequency. . "Women 
take offence and get angry, if anything, more easily than men, 
but their auger is inhibited by fear and otljer principles of 
their nature from expressing itself in blowsy i The hunting- 
instinct proper seems to be decidedly weaker in them than, 
in men^ The latter instinct is easily restricted by habit to 
certain objects, which become legitimate *game,' while 
other things are spared. If the hunting-instinct be not ex- 
ercised at all, it may even entirely die out, and a man may 
enjoy letting a wild creature live, even though he might easily 
kill it. Such a type is now becoming frequent ; but there 
is no doubt that in the eyes of a child of nature such a 
personage would seem a sort of moral monster. ^ 

^\tir is a reaction aroused by the same objects that 
arouse ferocity. The antagonism of the two is an interest- 
ing study in instinctive dynamics. AVe both fear, and wish 
to kill, anything that may kill us ; and the question which 
of the two impulses we shall follow is usually decided by 
some one of those collateral circumstances of the particular 
case, to be moved by which is the mark of superior mental 
natures. Of course this introduces uncertainty into the 
reaction ; but it is an uncertainty found in the higher 
brutes as well as in men, and ought not to be taken as 
proof that we are less instinctive than theyy Fear has 
'bodily oxj)ressions of an extremely energetic kind, and 
stands, beside lust and anger, as one of the three most ex- 
citing emotions of which our nature is susceptible. The 
progress from brute to man is characterized by nothing so 
much as by the decrease in frequency of proper occasions 
for fear. In civilized life, in particular, it has at last be- 
come possible for large numbers of people to pass from the 
cradle to the jj^rave wnthout ever having had a pang of genu- 




416 ^PSTCHOLOOT 

ine fear. Many of us need an attack of mental disease to 
teach us the meaning of the word. Hence the possibility 
of so much blindly optimistic philosophy- and religion. 
The atrocities of life become ' like a tale of little meaning 
though the words are strong ;' we doubt if anything like U8 
ever really was within the tiger's jaws, and conclude that 
the horrors we hear of are but a sort of painted tapestry 
tor the chambers in which we lie so comfortably at peace 
with ourselves and with the world. 

Be this as it may, fear is a genuine instinct, and one of 

the^&arliest shown by the human child.' Noises seem es- 

i pecially to call it forth. Most noises fr6m the outer world, 

Ito a child bred in the house, have no exact significance. 

iThey are simply startling. To quote a good observer, M. 

Perez : 

** Children between three and ten months are less often alarmed by 
visual than by auditory impressions. In cats, from tho fifteenth day, 
the contrary is the case. A child, three and a half months old, in the 
midst of the turmoil of a conflagration, in presence of the devouring 
flames and ruined walls, showed neither astonishment nor fear, but 
smiled at the woman who was taking care of him. while his parents 
were busy. The noise, however, of the trumpet of the firemen, who 
were approaching, and that of the wheels of the engine, made him 
start aiicl cry. At this age I have never yet seen an infant startled at a 
flash of lightning, even when intense; but I have seen many of them 
alarmed at the voice of the thunder. .... Thus fear coines rather by 
the ears than by the eyes, to the child without experiences It is nat- 
ural that this should be reversed, or reduced, in animals organized to 
perceive danger afar. Accordingly, although I have liever seen a child 
frightened at his first sight of fire, I have many a time seen young dogs, 
young cats, young chickens, and young birds frightened tliereby. ... I 
picked up some years ago a lost cat about a year old. Some months 
afterward at the onset of cold weather I lit the fire in the grate of my 
study, which was her reception-room. She first looked at the flame in 
a very frightened way. I brought her near to it. She leaped away 
and ran to hide under the bed. Although the fire was lighted every day, 
it was not until the end of the winter that I could prevail upon her to 
stay upon a chair near it. The next winter, however, all apprehension 
. had disappeared. . . . Let us, then, conclude tlmt there are hereditury 
^^\ dispositions i.o fear, which are indeixjudent of experience, but whieii 
experiences may end by attenuating very considerably. In the human 
infant I believe them to be particularly connected with the ear"* 

* Psychologic de TEnfant, pp. 73-74. In an account of a young gorilla 
quoted from Falkenstein,by R. Hartmaun (' Anthropoid Apes, ' International 



INSTINCT. 4n 

The effect of noise in heightening any terror we may 
feel in adult years is very marked. The holding of the 
storm, whether on sea or land, is a principal cause of our 
anxiety when exposed to it. The writer has been interested 
in noticing in his own person, while lying in bed, and kept 
awake by the wind outside, how invariably each loud gust 
of it arrested momentarily his heart. A dog, attacking us, 
is much more dreadful by reason of the noises he makes. 

Strange men^ and strange animals, either large or small, 
excite fear, but especially men or animals advancing toward 
us in a threatening way. i This is entirely instinctive and 
antecedent to experience/ Some children will cry with 
terror at their very first sight of a cat or dog, and it will 
often be impossible for weeks to make them touch it 
Others will wish to fondle it almost immediately. Certain 
kinds of * vermin,' especially spiders and snakes, seem to 
excite a fear unusually diiEcult to overcome. It is impos- 
sible to say how much of this difference is instinctive and 
how much the result of stories heard about these creatures. 
That the fear of * vermin ' ripens gradually, seemed to me 
to be proved in a child of my own to whom I gave a live 
frog once, at the age of six to eight months, and again when 
he was a year and a half old. The first time he seized it 
promptly, and holding it, in spite of its struggling, at lasi 
got its head into his mouth. He then let it crawl up his 
breast, and get upon his face, without showing alarm. But 
the second time, although he had seen no frog and heard 
no story about a frog between whiles, it was almost impos- 
sible to induce him to touch it. Another child, a year old, 
eagerly took some very large spiders into his hand. At 
present he is afraid, but has been exposed meanwhile to 
the teachings of the nursery. One of my children from her 
birth upwards saw daily the pet pug-dog of tlie house, and 
never betrayed the slightest fear until she was (if I recol- 

Bcieutific Series, vol. Lii (New York, 1886). p. 265), ft is said: *' He very 
much disliked strnugc noises. Thunder, the rain falling on the skylight, 
And especially the long-drawn note of a pipe or trumpet, threw him into 
such agitation as to cause a sudden affection of the digestive organs, and 
it became expedient to keep him at a distance. When he was slightly in- 
dispotied, we made use of this kind of music with results as successful aa 
If wc had administered purgative medicine." 



418 PBTCHOLOOY. 

lect rightly) about eight months old. Then the instinct 
suddenly seemed to develop, and with such intensity that 
familiarity had no mitigating effect She screamed when- 
ever the dog entered the room, and for many months re- 
mained afraid to touch him. It is needless to say that no 
change in the pug's unfailingly friendly conduct had any- 
thing to do with this change of feeling in the child. 

Preyer tells of a young cluld screaming with fear on 
being carried near to the sea. /^he great source of terror 
to infancy is solitudg) The teleology of this is obvious, as 
is also that of the infant's expression of dismaj- — the never- 
*^ failing cry — on waking up and finding himself alone. 
\^ I Black things^ and especially dark pUices, holes, caverns, 
etcVr arouse a peculiarly gruesome fearJ This fear, as well 
as that of solitude, of being * lost,' are explained after a 
Jashion by ancestral experience^ Says Schneider : 

** It is a fact that men, especially in childhood, fear to go into a dark 
cavern or a gloomy wood. This feeling of fear arises, to be sure, 
partly from the fact that we easily susjx'Ct tliat dangerous beasts may 
lurk in these localities — a suspicion due to stories we have heard and 
read. But, on tlie other hand, it is quite sure that this fear at a certain 
perception is also directly inherited. Children who have been carefully 
guarded from all ghost-stories are nevertheless terrified and cry if led 
into a dark place, especially if sounds are made there. Even an adult 
can easily observe that an uncomfortable timidity steals over him in a 
lonely wo(m1 at ni«:ht, although he may have the fixed conviction that 
not the slighti'st danger is near. 

*'This feeling of fear occurs in many men even in their own house 
after dark, although it is much stronger in a dark cavern or forest. The 
fact of such instinctive fear is easily explicable when we consider that 
our savage ancestors through innumerable generations were accustomed 
to meet with dangerous beasts in caverns, especially bears, and were 
for the most ])art attackeil by such beasts during the night and in the 
woods, and that tnus an in.separable association between the perceptions 
of darkness of caverns and wooils, and fear took place, and was 
inherited."* 

I{i(jh places cause fear of a peculiarly sickeni^ig sort, 
though hore, again, individuals diflfer enormously. The 
utterly bliud iustiuctive character of the motor fmpulses 
here is shown , by the fact that they are almost always 

♦ Der Meiischliche Wille. p. 224. 



IIS'STINCT. 410 

entirely unreasonable, but that reason is powerless to 
suppress tliem. That they are a mere incidental peculiarity 
of the nervous system, like liability to sea-sickness, or love 
of music, with no teleological significance, seems more than 
probable. The fear in question varies so much from one per- 
son to another, and its detrimental effects are so much more 
obvious than its uses, that it is hard to see how it could be 
a selected instinct. Man is anatomically one of the best 
fitted of animals for climbing about high places. The best 
psychical complement to this equipment would seem to be 
a ' level h^ad ' when there, not a dread of going there at 
all. In fact, the teleology of fear, beyond a certain 
point, is very dubious. Professor Mosso, in his interesting 
monograph, * La Paura ' (which has been translated into 
French), concludes that many of its manifestations must be 
considered pathological rather than useful ; Bain, in several 
places, expresses the same opinion ; and this, I think, is 
surely the view which any observer without o priori preju- 
dices must take. A certain amount of timidity obviously 
adapts us to the world we live in, but the fear-pen oxysm is 
surely altogether harmful to him who is its prey. 

Fear of the supernatural is one variety of fear, -It i? 
difiicult to assign any noniuil object for this fear, unless it 
were a genuine ghost. But, in sj)ito of psyrhical research- 
societies, science has not yet adopted ghosts ; so we can only 
say that certain ideas of supernatural agency, assochited 
with real circumstances, produce a peculiar kind of horror. 
This horror is i)rol)ably explicable as the result of a combi- 
nation of simpler horrors. To l)ring the ghostly terror to its 
maximum, many usual elements of the dreadful must com- 
bine, such as loneliness, darkness, inexplicable sounds, espe- 
cially of a dismal character, mo^dng figures half discerned 
(or,if discerned,of dreadful aspect), and a vertiginous bafliing 
of the expectation. This last element, which is intellectual^ 
is very important. It produces a strange emotional 
• curdle ' in our blood to see a process with which we are 
familiar deliberately taking an unwonted course. Any 
one's heart would stop beating if he perceived his chair 
sliding unassisted across the floor. The lower animals 
appear to be sensitive to the mysteriously exceptional as 



420 P8TCH0L0OY. 

well as ourselves. My friend Professor W. K. Brooks, of 
the Johns Hopkins University, told me of his large and 
noble dog being frightened into a sort of epileptic fit by a 
bone being drawn across the floor by a thread which the 
dog did not see. Darwin and Bomanes have given similar 
experiences.* The idea of the supernatural involves that 
the usual should be set at naught In the witch and hob- 
goblin supernatural, other elements still of /ear are brought 
in — caverns, slime and ooze, vermin, corpses, and the like.f 
A human corpse seems normally to produce an instinctive 
dread, which is no doubt somewhat due to its mysteriousness, 
and which familiarity rapidly dispels. But, in view of the 
fact that cadaveric, reptilian, and underground horrors play 
so specific and constant a part in many nightmares and 
forms of delirium, it seems not altogether unwise to ask 
whether these forms of dreadful circumstance may not at a 
former period have been more normal objects of the envi- 
ronment than now. The ordinary cock-sure evolutionist 
ought to have no difliculty in explaining tliese terrors, and 
the scenery that provokes them, as rela])8es into the 
consciousness of the cave-men, a consciousness usually 
overlaid in us by experiences of more recent date. 

There are certain other pathological fears, dnd certain 
peculiarities in the expression of ordinary fear, which 
might receive an explanatory light from ancestral con- 
ditions, even infra-human ones. In ordinary fear, one may 



* Cf Romanes. Meulul Evolution, etc., p. 156. 

fin the 'Overland Monlbly'for 1887, a most interesting article on 
Laura Hridgman's writings has been published by Mr. K C. Sandford. 
Among other reminiscences of her early childhood, while she still knew 
nothing of the sign-language, the wonderful blind deaf-mute records the 
following item in her quaint language : "My father [he was n farmer and 
probably did his own butchering] used to enter his kitchen bringing some 
killed animals in and deiK)8ited them on one of sides of the room many 
limes. As I perceived it it make me shudder with terror because I did not 
know what the matter was. I haled to approach the dead. One morning 
I went to take a short walk with my Mother I went into a snug house for 
some time. They look me into a room where there was a cotiin. I put 
my hand in the coflln & felt something so queer. It frightened me 
unpleasjuitiy. I found something dead wrapped in a silk h'd'k'f so care- 
fully. It must have been a body that had had vitality. ... I did not like 
♦o venture to eicamine the body for I was confounded." 



INSTINCT 421 

either ran, or remain semi-paralyzed. The latter condition 
reminds us of the so-called death-shamming instinct shown 
by many animals. Dr. Lindsay, in his work * Mind in 
Animals/ says this must require great self-command in 
those that practise it But it is really no feigning of death 
at all, and requires no self-command. It is simply a terror- 
paralysis which has been bo useful as to become hereditary. 
The beast of prey does not think the motionless bird, insect, 
or crustacean dead. He simply fails to notice them at all ; 
because his senses, like ours, are much more strongly 
excited by a moving object than by a still one. It is the 
same instinct which leads a boy playing * I spy ' to hold 
his very breath when the seeker is near, and which makes 
the beast of prey himself in many cases motioulessly lie in 
wait for his victim or silently * stalk ' it, by rapid ap- 
proaches alternated with periods of immobility. It is the 
opposite of the instinct which makes us jump up and down 
and move our arms when we wish to attract the notice of 
some one passing far away, and makes the shipwrecked 
sailor frantically wave a cloth upon the raft where he is 
floating when a distant sail appears. Now, may not the 
statue-like, crouching immobility of some niohmcholiacs, 
insane with general anxiety and fear of everything, be in 
some way connected with this old instinct ? They can give 
no reason for their fear to move ; but immobility makes them 
feel safer and more comfortable. Is not this the mental 
state of the * feigning ' animal ? 

Again, take the strange symptom which has been de- 
scribed of late years by tlie rather absurd name of agora" 
pholna. The patient is seized with palpitation and ter- 
ror at the sight of any open place or broad street which 
he has to cross alone. He trembles, his knees bend, he 
may even faint at the idea. Where he has sufficient self- 
command he sometimes accomplishes the object by keep- 
ing safe under the lee of a vehicle going across, or join- 
ing himself to a knot of other people. But usually he 
slinks round the sides of the square, hugging the houses 
as closely as he can. This emotion has no utility^ in a 
civilized man, but when we notice the chronic agora- 
phobia of our domestic cats, and see the tenacious way 




422 P8TCH0L0GT, 

in which many wild animals, especially rodents, cling to 
cover, and only venture on a dash across the open as a 
desperate measure — even then making for ever}' stone or 
bunch of weeds which may give a momentary shelter — when 
we see this we are strongly tempted to ask whether such an 
odd kind of fear in us be not due to the accidental resur- 
rection, through disease, of a sort of instinct which may in 
>8ome of our ancestors Lave had a permanent and on the 
^/ whole a useful part to play ? 

/^w Appropriation or Acquisitiveness, ^"l^he beginnings of ac- 
/ quisitiveness are seen in the impulse which very j'oung 
/ children display, to snatch at, or beg for, any object whicli 
pleases their attention. Later, when they begin to speak, 
among the first words they emphasize are ' me ' and * mine.' * 
Their earliest quarrels with each other are about questions 
of ownership ; and parents of twins soon learn that it con- 
duces to a quiet house to buy all presents in impartial du- 
plicate. Of the later evolution of the proprietary instinct I 
need not speak. Everyone knows how difficult a thing it is 
not to covet whatever pleasing thing we see, and how the 
sweetness of the thing often is as gall to us so long as it is 
another's. When another is in possession, the impulse to 
appropriate the thing often turns into the impulse to harm 
him — what is called envy, or jealousy, ensues. In civilized 
life the impulse to own is usually checked by a variety of 
considerations, and only passes over into action under cir- 
cumstances legitimated by habit and common consent, an 
additional example of the way in which one instinctive ten- 
dency may be inhibited by others. A variety of the propri- 
etary instinct is the impulse to form collections of the same 
sort of thing. It differs much in individuals, and shows in 
a striking way how instinct and habit interact. For, al- 

* I lately saw a boy of five (who had been told the siory of He<rtor and 
Achilles) teaching his younger brother, aged three, how to play lleclor, 
wl He he himself should play Achilles, and chase him round the walls of 
Troy. Having armed themselves. Achilles advanced, shouting "Where's 
my Patroklos ? " Whereupon the would-be Hector piped up, quite distract- 
ed from his role, "Where's my Patroklos? I want a Pntroklos ! I want a 
Patroklos I "—and broke up the game. Of what kind of a thing a Patrokloa 
might be he had, of course, no notion— enough that his brother had one. 
for him to claim one too. 



INSTINCT, 423 

though a collection of any given thing — like postage-stamps 
— need not be begun by any given person, yet the chances 
are that if accidentally it he begun by a person with the col- 
lecting instinct, it will probably be continued. The chief 
interest of the objects, in the collector's eyes, is that they 
are a collection, and that they are his. Rivalry, to be sure, 
inflames this, as it does every other passion, yet the objects 
of a collector's mania need not be necessarily such as are 
generally in demand. Boys will collect anything that they 
see another boy collect, from pieces of chalk and peach-pite 
up to books and photographs. Out of a hundred students 
whom I questioned, only four or five had never collected 
anything.* 

The associationist psychology denies that there is any 
blind primitive instinct to appropriate, and would explain all 
acquisitiveness, in the first instance, as a desire to secure the 
* pleasures ' which the objects possessed may yield ; and, sec- 
ondly, as the association of the idea of pleasantness with the 
holding of the thing, even though the pleasure originally got 
by it was only gained through its expense or destruction. 
Thus the miser is shown to us as one who has transferred 
to the gold by which he may buy the goods of this life all 
the emotions which the goods themselves would yield ; and 
who thereafter loves the gold for its own sake, preferring 
the means of ])leasure to the pleasure itself. There can be 
little doubt that much of this analysis a broader view of 
the facts would have dispelled. * The miser ' is an abstrac- 
tion. There are all kinds of misers. The common sort, 
the excessively niggardly man, simply exhibits the psycho- 
logical law that the potential has often a far greater influ- 
ence over our mind than the actual. A man will not marry 
now, because to do so puts an end to his indefinite potenti- 
alities of choice of a partner. He prefers the latter. He 
will not use open fires or wear his good clothes, because the 
day may come when he will have to use the furnace or 
dress in a worn-out coat, * and then where will he be ? ' 



• In • The Nation ' for September 3, 1886. President G. S. Hall has 
giyen some account of a statistical research on Bostou fchool-boys, by Miss 
Wiltsc. from %vhich it appears that only nineteen out of two hundred and 
twenty-nine had made no collections. 




424 P8YCU0L0QT, 

For him, better the actual evil than the fear of it ; and so 
it is with the common lot of misers. Better to live poor 
now, witli the poicer of living rich, than to live rich at the 
risk of losing the power. These men value their gold, not 
for its own sake, but for its powers. Demonetize it, and see 
how quickly they will get rid of it ! The associationist the- 
ory is, as regards them, entirely at fault : they care noth- 
ing for the gold in se. 

With other misers there combines itself with this pref- 
erence of the power over the act the far more instinctive 
element of the simple collecting propensity. Everj' one 
collects money, and when a man of petty ways is smitten 
with the collecting mania for this object he necessarily be- 
comes a miser. Here again the associationist psj^chology 
is wholly at fault The hoarding instinct prevails widely 
among animals as well as among men. Professor Silliman 
has thus described one of the hoards of the California 
wood-rat, made in an empty stove of an unoccupied house : 

** I found the outside to be composed entirely of spikes, all laid 
with symmetry, so as to present the points of the nails outward. In the 
centre of this mass was the nest, composed of finely-divided fibres of 
hemp-packing. Interlaced with the spikes were the following : al)out 
two dozen knives, forks, and spoons ; all the butcher's knives, three 
in number : a large carving-knife, fork, and steel ; several large plugs 
of tobacco, ... an old purse containing some silver, matches, and 
tobacco : nearly all the small tools from the tool-closets, with several 
large augers, ... all of which must have been transported some dis- 
tance, as they were originally stored in different parti) of the house. . . . 
The outside casing of a silver watoh was disposed of in one part of 
the pile, th(^ glass of the same watch in another, and tlie works^ 
in still another.''* 

In every lunatic asylum we find the collecting instinct 
developing itself in an equally absurd way. Certain pa- 
tients will spend all their time picking pins from the 
floor and hoarding them. Others collect bits of thread, 
buttons, or rags, and prize them exceedingly. Now, 'the 
Miser' prtr excellence of the popular imagination and of 
melodrama, the monster of squalor and misanthropy, is 
simidy Olio of these mentally deranged persons. His in- 
tellect may in many mattt^rs be clear, but his instincts, 

* Quoted iu Lindsay, ' Miud in Lower Animals,' vol. ii. p. 151. 



INSTINCT. 4-26 

especially that of ownership, are insane, and their insanity 
has no more to do with the association of ideas than with 
the precession of the equinoxes. As a matter of fact his 
hoarding usually is directed to money ; but it also includes 
almost anything besides. Lately in a Massachusetts town 
there died a miser who principally hoarded newspapers. 
These had ended by so filling all the rooms of his good- 
sized house from floor to ceiling that his living-space was 
restricted to a few narrow channels between them. Even 
as I write, the morning paper gives an account of the 
emptying of a miser's den in Boston bj' the City Board of 
Health. What the owner hoarded is thus described : 

" He gathered old newspapers, wrapping-paper, incapacitated um- 
brellas, canes, pieces of common wire, cast-off clothing, empty barrels, 
pieces of iron, old bones, battered tin-ware, fractured pots, and bushels 
of such miscellany as is to be found only at the city *dump.* The 
empty barrels were filled, shelves were filled, every hole and corner was 
filled, and in order to make more storage-room, * the hermit ' covered 
his store-room with a network of ropes, and hung the ropes as full as 
they could hold of his curious collections. There was nothing one could 
think of that wasn't in tliat room. As a wood-sawyer, the old man liad 
never thrown away a saw-blade or a wood-buck. The bucks were rheu- 
matic and couldn't stand up, and the saw-blades were worn down to 
almost nothing in the middle. Some had been actually worn in two, 
but the ends were carefully saved and stored away. As a coal-heaver, 
the old man had never cast off a worn-out basket, and there were 
dozens of the remains of the old things, patche<l up with canvas and 
rope-yarns, in the store-room. There were at least two dozen old hats, 
fur, cloth, silk, and straw,'' etc. 

Of course there may be a great many * associations of 
ideas ' in the miser's mind about the things he hoards. He 
is a thinking being, and must associate things; but, without 
an entirely blind impulse in this direction behind all his 
ideas, such practical results could never be reached.* 

Kkphrnfinia, as it is called, is an uncontrollable impulse 
to appropriate, occurring in persons whose * associations 
of ideas' would naturally all be of a counteracting sort. 



* Cf . Flint, Miud, vol. i. pp. 830-883 ; Sully, ibid. p. 567. Most 
people probably have the impulse to keep bits of useless finery, old tools, 
pieces ( ^ once useful apparatus, etc. : but it is uormally cither inhibited at 
the outse by rellection, or, if yielded to, the objects soon grow displeasing 
%Dd are ih own away. 



y 



426 P8YCH0L00Y. 

Kleptomaniacs often promptly restore, or permit to be re- 
stored, what they have taken ; so the impulse need not be 
to keep, but only to take. But elsewhere hoarding com- 
plicates the result. A gentleman, with whose case I am 
acquainted, was discovered, after his death, to have a hoard 
in his barn of all sorts of articles, mainly of a trumpery 
sort, but including pieces of silver which he had stolen 
from his own dining-room, and utensils which he had stolei? 
from his own kitchen, and for which he had afterward 
bought substitutes wjth his own money. 

Constrvctiveness is as genuine and irresistible an instinct 
in man as in the bee or the beaver. Whatever things are 
plastic to his hands, those things he must remodel into 
shapes of his own, and the result of the remodelling, how- 
ever useless it may be, gives him more pleasure than the 
original thing. The mania of young children for breaking 
and pulling apart whatever is given them is more often 
the expression of a rudimentary constructive impulse than 
of a destructive one. * Blocks ' are the playthings of 
which they are least apt to tire. Clothes, weapons, 
tools, habitations, and works of art are the result of the 
discoveries to which the plastic instinct leads, each individ- 
ual starting where his forerunners left off, and tradition 
preserving all that ouce is gained. Clothing, where not 
necessitated by cold, is nothing but a sort of attempt to rer 
model the human bod}- itself — an attempt still better shown 
in the various tattooiugs, tooth-filings, scarrings, and other 
mutilations that are practised by savage tribes. As for 
habitation, there can be no doubt that the instinct to seek 
a sheltered nook, open only on one side, into which he way 
retire and be safe, is in man quite as specific as the in- 
stinct of birds to build a nest. It is not necessarily in the 
shape of a shelter from wet and cold that the need odm^'s 
before him, but he feels less exposed and more >it lionur 
when not altogether uninclosed than when lying ail abm.-rd. 
Of course the utilitarian origin of this instiuct is obvitais. 
But to stick to bare facts at present and ^ot to trace 
origins, we must admit that this instinct now exip^ ?, ancl 
probably always has existed, since man was man. Habits 



mSTIXCT. 427 

of the most complicated kind are reared upon it. But 
even in the midst of these habits we see the blind instinct 
cropping out ; as, for example, in the fact that we feign a 
shelter within a shelter, by backing up beds in rooms with 
their heads against the wall, and never lying in them the 
other way — just as dogs prefer to get uniler or upon some 
piece of furniture to sleep, instead of lying in the middle 
of the room. The first habitations were caves and leafy 
grottoes, bettered by the hands ; and we see children to- 
day, when playing in wild places, take the greatest delight 
in disco verijig and appropriating such retreats and * play- 
ing house ' there. 

Play. AThe impulse to play in special ways is certainly 
instinctiveJ A boy can no more help running after another 
boy who runs provokingly near him, than a kitten can help 
running after a rolling ball. A child trying to get into its 
own hand some object which it sees another child pick up, 
and the latter trying to get away with the prize, are just as 
much slave? of an automatic prompting as are two chickens 
or fishes, of. which one has taken a big morsel into its mouth 
and decam ps with it, while the other darts after in pursuit 
All simple active games are attempts to gain the excitement 
yielded hy certain primitive instincts, through feigning that 
the occasions for their exercise are there. They involve 
imitation,, hunting, fighting, rivalry, acquisitiveness, and 
construction, combined in various ways ; their special rules 
are habits, discovered by accident, selected by intelligence, 
and propagated by tradition ; but unless they were founded 
in automatic impulses, games would lose most of their zesi 
The sexes differ somewhat in their play-impulses. As 
Schneider says : 

** The little boy imitates soldiers, models clay into an oven, builds 
bouses, makes a wagon out of chairs, rides on horseback upon a stick, 
drives nails with the hammer, harnesses his brethren and comrades 
together and plays the stage-driver, or lets himself be captured as a 
wild horse by some one else. The girl, on the contrary, plays with her 
doll, washes and dresses it, strokes it, chisps and kisses it, puts it to 
bed and tucks it in, sings it a cradle-song, or speaks with it as if it 
were a living being. . . . This fact that a sexual difference exists in 
the play-impulse, that a boy get« more pleasure from a horse and 




428 ■ ParCUOLOQT, 

rider and a soldier than from a doll, while with the girl the opposite is 
the case, is proof that an hereditary connection exists between the 
perception of certain things (horse, doll, etc.), and the feeling of pleas- 
ure, as well as between this latter and the impulse to play." * 

There is another sort of human play, into which higher 
fiesthetic feelings enter. I refer to that love of festi^-ities, 
ceremonies, ordeals, etc., which seems to be universal in our 
species. The lowest savages have their dances, more. or 
less formally conducted. . The various religions have their 
solemn rites and exercises, and civic and military power 
symbolize their grandeur by processions and celebrations 
of divers sorts. We have our operas and parties and mas- 
querades. An element common to all these ceremonial 
games, as they may be called, is the excitement of con- 
certed action as one of an organized crowd. The same 
acts, performed with a crowd, seem io mean vastly more 
than when performed alone. A walk with the people on 
a holiday afternoon, an excursion to drink be6r or coflFee 
at a popular * resort,' or an ordinary ball-room, are ex- 
amples of this. Not only are we amused at seeing so 
many strangers, but there is a distinct stimulation at 
feeling our share in their collective life. The percep- 
tion of them is the stimulus ; and our reaction upon it is 
oui' tendency to join them and do what they are doing, 
and our unwillingness to be the first to leave oft' and go 
home alone. This seems a primitive element in our nature, 
as it is difficult to trace any association of ideas that could 
lead up to it; although, once granting it to exist, it is very 
easy to see what its uses to a tribe might be in facilitating 
pr()in])t and vigorous collective action. The formation of 
armies and tlie undertaking of military expeditions would 
be among its fruits. In the ceremonial games it is but the 
im])ulsive starting-point. ANyjliat particular things the crowd 
then shall do, depends for tliV most part (m the initiative of 
individuals, fixed by iniitatitm and habit, and continued by 
tradition. The co-opoiation of other aesthetic pleasures 
with games, ceremonial or other, has a great deal to do 
with the selection of such as shall become stereotyped and 



DiT Mcnsclilirlu Willi-, p. 205. 



INSTINCT, 429 

liabitual. The .pecxiliar form of excitement called by Pro- 
fessf)!" Baiu the emotion of puYstdt-y the pleasure of a cre»- 
cvr?(/c, is the soul of many common games. The immense • 
extent of the play-activities in human life is too ob^-ious to 
be more than mentioned.* 

Curiosity, Already pretty low down among vertebrate^ *^ 
we find that any object ma^ excite attentipn, provided it be 
only .novels and that attention may be followefl by approach 
and exploration by nostril, lips, or touch. Curiosity 'and 
fear form a couple of antagonistic emotions liable to be 
a\vakened by the same outward thing, and manifestK both 
useful to their possessor. The spectacle of their alternation 
is often amusing enough, as in the timid approaches and 
scared' wheelings which sheep or cattle will make in the 
presence of some new object they are investigating. I have 
seen alligators in the water act in precisely th^ same way 
towards a man seated on the beach in front of them — grad- 
ually drawing near as long as he kept still, frantically 
careering back as soon as he made a movement. Inasmuch 
as new objects may always be advantageous, it is better 
tliat an animal should not absolutely fear them. But, inas- 
much as they may also possibly be harmful, it is better 
tliat he should not be quite indifferent to them either, but 
on the whole remaining on the qui vive, ascertain as much 
about them, and what they may be likely to bring forth, as 
he can, before settling down to rest in their presence. 
Some such susceptibility for being excited and irritated by 
the mere novelty, as such, of any movable feature of the . 
environment must form the instinctive basis of all human 
curiosity; though, of course, the superstructure absorbs 
contributions from so many other factors of the emotional 
life that the original root may be hard to find. With what 

* Pro feasor Lazarus (Die Reize des Spieles. Berlin. 1883. p. 44) deuieB 
Ibat we have an iiisUnct to play, and says Ihe root of Ibe matter is the af)er^ 
tian to remain unoccvpied, which substitutes a sham occupation when do 
real one is ready. No doubt this is true; but why the particular forms of 
sham occupation? Tim elements of all bodily p^mes and of ceremonial 
games arc given by direct excito-motor ntimulations — just as when puppies 
chase one another and swallows have a parliament. 




430 PSYCHOLOGY, 

is called scientific curiosity, and with metaphysical wonder, 
the practical instinctive root has probably nothing to do. 
The stimuli here are not objects, but ways of conceiving 
objects; and the emotions and actions they give rise to are 
to be classed, with many other aesthetic manifestations, sen- 
sitive and motor, as incidental features of our mental life. 
The philosophic brain responds to an inconsistency or a 
gap in its knowledge, just as the musical brain responds to 
a discord in what it hears. At certain ages the sensitiveness 
to particular gaps and the pleasure of resolving particular 
puzzles reach their maximum, and then it is that stores of 
scientific knowledge are easiest and most naturally laid in. 
But these effects may have had nothing to do with the uses 
for which the brain was originally given ; and it is probably 
only within a few centuries, since religious beliefs and 
economic applications of science have played a prominent 
part in the conflicts of one race with another, that they may 
have helped to 'select' for survival a particular type of 
brain. I shall have to consider this matter of incidental 
and supernumerary faculties in Chapter XXVIII. 

Sociability and Shyness. As a gregarious animal, man 
is excited both by the absence and by the presence of his 
kind. To be alone is one of the greatest of evils for him. 
Solitary confinement is by many regarded as a mode of 
torture too cruel and unnatural for civilized countries to 
adopt. To one long pent up on a desert island, the sight 
of a human footprint or a human form in the distance 
would be the most tumultuously exciting of experiences.. 
In morbid states of mind, one of the commonest symptoms 
is the fear of being alone. This fear may be assuaged by 
the presence of a little child, or even of a baby. In a case 
of hydrophobia known to the writer, the patient insisted 
on keeping his room croivded with neighbors all the while, 
so intense was his fear of solitude. In a gregarious ani- 
mal, the j)ercepti()n that he is alone excites him to vigorous 
activity. Mr. Galton thus describes the behanor of the 
South Afri(^an cattle whom he had such good opportunities 
for observing : 

** Although the ox has little affection for, or interest in, his fellows, 
he cannot endure even a momentary separation from his herd. If he 



INSTINCT. 431 

oe separated from it by stratagem or force, he exhibits every shgn of 
mental agony; he strives with all his might to get back again, and when 
he succeeds he plunges into its middle to bathe his whole body with the 
comfort of closest companionship/* * 

Man IS also excited by the presence of his kind. The 
bizarre actions of dogs meeting strange dogs are not alto- 
gether without a parallel in our own constitution. We 
cannot meet strangers without a certain tension, or talk to 
them exactly as to our familiars. This is particularly the 
case if the stranger be an important personage. It may then 
happen that we not only shrink from meeting his eye, but 
actually cannot collect our wits or do ourselves any sort 
of justice in his presence. 

*' This odd state of mind," says Dar^in,t •* is chiefly recognized by 
the face reddening, by the eyes being averted or cast down, and by 
awkward, nervous movements of the body. . . . Shyness seems to de- 
pend on sensitiveness to the opinion, whether good or bad, of others, 
more especifilly with resi)ect to external appearance. Strangers neither 
know nor care anything about our conduct or character, but they may, 
and often do, criticise our appearance. . . . The consciousness of any- 
thing peculiar, or oven new, in the dress, or any slight blemish on the 
person, and more especially on the face — points which are likely to 
attract the attention of strangers — makes the shy intolerably shy. J On 
the other hand, in those cases in which conduct, and not personal ap- 
pearance, is concerned, we are much more apt to be shy in the pres- 
ence of acquaintances whose judgment we in some degree value than 
in that of strangers. . . . Some persons, however, are so sensitive that 
the mere act of speaking to almost any one is sufficient to rouse their 
self-consciousness, and a slight blush is the result. Disapprobation . . . 
causes shyness and blushing much more readily than does approbation. 
. . . Persons who are exceedingly shy are rarely shy in the presence of 
those with whom they are quite familiar, and of whose good opinion 
and sympathy they ire quite as8ure<l ; for instance, a girl in presence 
of her mother. . . J Shyness ... is closely related to fear ; yet it is 
distinct from fear in the ordinary sense. A shy man dreads the notice 
of strangers, but can hardly he said to be afraid of them ; he may be as 
bold as a hero in battle, and yet have no self-confidence about trifles in 
the presence of strangers. Almost every one is extremely nervous 

* Inciuiries into Human Faculty, p. 72. 

t Expression of the Emotions (New York, 1878), p. 880. 

X '* Tlie r(irtainty that we are well dressed." a charming woman ^insBflld. 
" gives lis a peace of heart compared to which that yielded by liie cousola 
UoDs of religion is as nothing. " ^ 

/ 

i 




432 P8TCH0L0QT, 

when first addressing a public assembly, and most men remain so 
through their lives." 

As Mr. Darwin observes, a real dread of definite conse- 
quences may enter into this ' stage-fright * and complicate 
the shyness. Even so our shyness before an important per- 
sonage may be complicated by what Professor Bain calls 
* servile terror,' based on representation of definite dangers 
if we fail to please. But both stage-fright and sernle terror 
may exist with the most indefinite apprehensions of danger, 
and, in fact, when our reason tells us there is no occasion 
for alarm. We must, therefore, admit a certain amount of 
purely instinctive perturbation and constraint, due to the 
consciousness that we have become objects for other people's 
eyes. Mr. Darwin goes on to say : " Shyness comes on at 
a very early age. In one of my own children, two years and 
three months old, I saw a trace of what certainly appeared 
to be shyness directed toward myself, after an absence from 
home of only a week." Everj' parent has noticed the same 
sort of thing. Considering the despotic powers of rulers in 
savage tribes, respect and awe must, from time immemorial, 
have been emotions excited by certain individuals ; and 
stage-fright, servile terror, and shyness, must have had as 
copious opportunities for exercise as at the present time. 
Whether these impulses could ever have been useful, and 
selected for usefulness, is a question which, it would seem, 
can only be answered in the negative. Apparently they 
are pure hindrances, like fainting at sight of blood or dis- 
ease, sea-sickness, a dizz^' head on high places, and cer- 
tain squeamishnesses of sDsthetic taste. They are lywidental 
emotions, in spite of which we get along. But they seem 
to play an important part in the production of two other 
propensities, about the instinctive character of which a good 
deal of controversy has prevailed. I refer to cleanliness 
and modesty, to which we must proceed, but not before we 
have said a word about another impulse closely allied to 
shyness, I mean — 

Secref'iveness, which, although often due to intelligent 
calculation and the dread of betraying our interests in some 
more or less definitely foreseen way, is quite as often a blind 



/ 



(\ 



1N8TINCT. 433 

propensity, serving no usefnl purpose, and is so stubborn 
and ineradicable a part of the character as fully to deserve 
a place among the instincts. Its natural stimuli are unfa- 
miliar human beings, especially those whom we respect. Its 
reactions are the arrest of whatever we are saying or doing 
when such strangers draw nigh, coupled often with the pre- 
tense that we were not saying or doing that thing, but possibly 
something diflerent. Often there is added to this a disposi- 
tion to mendacity when asked to give an account of ourselves. 
With many persons the first impulse, when the door-bell 
rings, or a visitor is suddenly announced, is to scuttle out 
of the room, so as not to be *caughtJ|l( When a person at 
whom we have been looking becomesfiware of us, our im- 
mediate impulse may be to look the other way, and pretend 
we have not seen him. i Many friends have ccmfessed to 
me that this is a frequent phenomenon with them in 
meeting acquaintances in the street, especially unfamiliar 
ones. The bow is a secondary correction of the primary 
feint that we do not see the other person. Probably most 
readers will recognize in themselves, at least, the starts the 
nascent disposition, on many occasions, to act in each and all 
of these several ways. That the * start ' is neutralized by 
second thought^)roves it to come from a deeper region 
than thought. /FThere is unquestionably a native impulse 
in every one tor conceal love-affairs, and the acquired im- 
pulse to conceal pecuniary affairs seems in many to be 
almost equally strong! I It is to be noted that even where 
a given habit of concealment is reflective and deliberate, 
its motive is far less often definite prudence than a vague 
aversion to have one's sanctity invaded and one's personal 
concerns fingered and turned over by other people. Thus, 
some persons will never leave anjiihing with their name 
written on it, where others may pick it up — even in the 
woods, an old envelope must not be thrown on the ground. 
Many cut all tlie leaves of a book of which they may be 
reading a single chapter, so that no one shall know which 
one they have singled out, and all this with no definite notion 
of harm. The impulse to conceal is more apt to be pro- 
voked by superiors than by equals or inferiors. How dif- 
ferently do boys talk together when their parents are not 




434 PSYCHOLOGY. 

by ! Servants see more of their masters* characters than 
masters of servants'. * Where we conceal from our equals 
and familiars, there is probably always a definite element 
of prudential prevision involved. Collective secrecy, mys- 
tery, enters into the emotional interest of many games, and 
is one of the elements of the importance men attach to 
freemasonries of various sorts, being delightful apart from 
any end. 

Cleanliness. Seeing how very filthy savages and excep* 
tional individuals among civilized people may be, philoso- 
phers have doubted whether any genuine instinct of clean- 
liness exists, and whether education and habit be not re- 
sponsible for whatever amount of it is found. Were it an 
instinct, its stimulus would be dirt, and its characteristic 
reaction the shrinking from contact therewith, and the 
cleaning of it away after contact had occurred. Now, if 
some animals are cleanly, men may be so, and there can be 
no doubt that some kinds of matter are natively repugnant, 
both to sight, touch, and smell — excrementitious and putrid 
things, blood, pus, entrails, and diseased tissues, for exam- 
ple. It is true that the slirinking from contact with these 
things may be inhibited \ery easily, as by a medical educa- 
tion ; and it is equally true that the impulse to clean them 
away may be inhibited by so slight an obstacle as the thought 
of the coldness of the ablution, or the necessity of getting 
up to perform it. It is also true than an impulse to clean- 
liness, habitually checked, will become obsolete fast enough. 
But none of these facts prove the impulse never to have been 

♦ Thackeray, in his exquisite Roundabout Paper, ' On a Chalk Mark on 
the Door,' says: "You get truth habitually from equals only; so, my 
good Mr. Holy shade. dooTt talk to me about the habitual candor of the 
young Etonian of high birth, or I have my 6wn opinion of pour candor or 
discernment when you do. No. Tom Bowling is the soul of honor, and 
has been true to Black-eyed Syousan since the last time they parted at 
Wapping Old Stairs ; but do you suppose Tom is perfectly frank, familiar, 
and above-board in his conversation with Admiral Nelson, K.C.B. ? 
There are secrets, prevarications, fibs. If you will, between Tom and the 
admiral— between your crew (of "lervants) and their captain. 1 know I 
hire a worthy, clean, agreeable, and conscientious male or female hypo- 
crite at so many guineas a year to do so and so for me. Were he other 
than hypocrite, I would send him about his business." 



INSTINCT. 435 

there.* It seems to be there in all cases ; and then to be 
particularly amenable to outside influences, the child hav- 
ing his own degree of squeamishness about what he shall 
touch or eat, and later being either hardened or made more 
fastidious still by the habits ho is forced to acquire and the 
examples among which he lives. 

Examples get their hold on him in this way, that a partic- 
ularly enl-smelling or catarrhal or lousy comrade is rather 
offensive to him, and that he sees the odiousness in another 
of an amount of dirt to which he would have no sponta- 
neous objection if it were on his own skin. That toe dislike 
in others things which we tolerate in ourselves is a law of our 
aesthetic nature about which there can be no doubt But 
as soon as generalization and reflection step in, this judging 
of others leads to a new way of regarding ourselves. " Who 
taught you politeness? The impolite," is, I believe, a 
Chinese proverb. The concept, ' dirty fellow,' which we 
have formed, becomes one under which we personally 
shrink from being classed; and so we 'wash up,' and set 
ourselves right, at moments when our social self-conscious- 
ness is awakened, in a manner toward which no strictly in- 
stinctive native prompting exists. But the standard of 
cleanliness attained in this way is not likely to go beyond 
the mutual tolerance for one another of the members of the 
tribe, and hence may comport a good deal of actual filth. 

Modesty, Shame. Whether there be an instinctive impulse 
to hide certain parts of the body and certain acts is perhaps 
even more open to doubt than whether there be an instinct 
of cleanliness. Anthropologists have denied it, and in the 
utter shamelessness of infancy and of many savage tribes 
liave seemed to find a good basis for their views. It must, 
liowever, be remembered that infancy proves nothing, and 
that, as far as sexual modesty goes, the sexual impulse itself 
works directly against it at times of excitement, and with 
reference to certain people; and that habits of immodesty 

* Tlio insane symptom called "mysophobia," or dread of foulness, 
which leads a patient to wash his hands perhaps a hundred limes a day, 
hardly seems explicable with(mt supposing a primitive impure to clean 
one's self of which it is, as it were, the convulsive exagireration 




436 PSYCHOLOGY, 

contracted with those people may forever afterwards inhibit 
it any impulse to be modest towards them. This would ac- 
count for a great deal of actual immodesty, even if an origi- 
nal modest impulse were there. On the other hand, the 
modest impulse, if it do exist, must be admitted to have a 
siugularly ill-defined sphere of influence, both as regards the 
presences that call it forth, and as regards the acts to 
which it leads. Ethnology shows it to have very little 
backbone of its own, and to follow easily fashion and ex- 
ample. Still, it is hard to see the ubiquity of 8ome sort of 
tribute to shame, however perverted — as where female 
modesty consists in covering the face alone, or immodesty 
in appearing before strangers unpainted — and to believe it 
to have no impulsive root whatever. Now, what may the 
impulsive root be ? I believe that, for one thing, it is shyness* 
the feeling of dread that unfamiliar persons, as explained 
above, may inspire us withal. Such persons are the origi- 
nal stimuli to our modesty.* But the actions of modesty 
are quite different from the actions of shyness. Thej' con- 
sist of the restraint of certain bodily functions, and of the 
covering of certain jDarts ; and why do such particular 
actions necessarily ensue ? That there inay be in the human 
animal, as such, a * blind ' and immediate automatic impulse 
to such restraints and coverings in respect-inspiring pres- 
ences is a possibility diflScult of actual disproof. But it 
seems more likely, from the facts, that the actions of 
modesty are suggested to us in a roundabout way ; and 
that, even more than those of cleanliness, they arise from 
I the application in the second instance to ourselves,of judg- 
' ments primarily passed upon our mates. It is not easy to 
believe that, even among the nakedest savages, an unusual 
degree of cynicism and indecency in an indi\ddual should 
not beget a certain degree of contempt, and cheapen him 
in his neighbor's eyes. Human nature is sufficiently homo- 

* " We often tind modesty comiog Id only in the presence of foreigners, 
especially of clothed Europeans. Only before these do the Indian women 
in Brazil cover themselves with their girdle, only before these do the 
women on Timor conceal their bosom. In Austnilia we find the same 
thing happening." (Th. Waitz, Anthropologic dcr N»iturv(5lker. vol. L p. 
858.) The author gives bibliographical references, which I omit. 



INSTINCT, 437 

geneous for us to be sure that everywhere reserve must in- 
spire some respect, aud that persons who suffer everj' liberty 
are persons whom others disregard. Not to be like such 
people, then, would be one of the first resolutions sug- 
gested by social self-consciousness to a child of nature just 
emerging from the unreflective state. And the resolution 
would probably acquire effective pungency for the first 
time when the social self-consciousness was sharpened into 
a real fit of shj^ness by some person being present whom it 
was important not to disgust or displease. Public opinion 
would of course go on to build its positive precepts upon 
this germ ; and, through a variety of examples and experi- 
ences, the ritual of modesty would grow, until it reached 
the New England pitch of sensitiveness and range, making 
us say stomach instead of belly, limb instead of leg, retire 
instead of go to bed, and forbidding us to call a female dog 
by name. 

At bottom this amounts to the admission that, though 
in some shape or other a natural and inevitable feature of 
human life, modesty need not necessarily be an instinct in 

the pure and simple excito-motor sense of the term. 

/ 
/ 

Love. I Of all propensities, the sexual impulses bear on 
flieir face the most obvious signs of being instinctive, in 
the sense of blind, automatic, and untaught.] The teleology 
they contain is often at variance with the wislies of the in- 
dividuals concerned ; and the actions are performed for no 
assignable reason but because Nature urges just that way. 
Here, if ever, then, we ought to find those characters of 
fatality, infallibility, and uniformity, which, we are told, 
make of actions done from instinct a class so utterly apart. 
But is this so? The facts are just the reverse : the sexual 
instinct is particularly liable to be checked and modified 
by slight differences in the individual stimulus, by the 
inward condition of the agent himself, by habits once ac- 
quired, and by the antagonism of contrary impulses operat- 
ing on the mind. One of these is the ordinary sh^'ness 
recently described ; another is what might be called the 
anti'Sexual hisfmcfy the instinct of personal isolation, the 
actual repulsiveness to us of the idea of intimate contact 



X 




438 PBYCHOLOGT, 

with most of the persons we meet, especially those ol 
our own sex.* Thus it comes about that this strongest 
passion of all, so far from being the most * irresistible,' 
may, on the contrary, be the hardest one to give rein to, 
and that individuals in whom the inhibiting influences are 
potent may pass through life and never find an occasion to 
have it gratified. There could be no better proof of the 
truth of that proposition with which we began our study 
of the instinctive life in man, that irregularity of behavior 
may come as well from the possession of too many instincts 
as from the lack of any at all. 

The instinct of personal isolation, of which we have 
spoken, exists more strongly in men leith respect to one 
another, and more strongly in women with respect to men. 
In women it is called coyness, and has to be positively 
overcome by a process of wooing before the sexual instinct 
inhibits it and takes its place. As Darwdn has shown in 
his book on the * Descent of Man and Sexual Selection,' it 
has played a vital part in the amelioration of all higher 
animal types, and is to a great degree responsible for what- 
ever degree of chastity the human race may show. It 
illustrates strikingly, however, the law of the inhibition of^ 
instincts by habits — for, once broken through with a givejj 
person, it is not apt to assert itself again ; and habituaMy 
broken through, as by prostitutes, w^ith various persons, it 
may altogether decay. Habit also fixes it in us toward 
certain individuals : nothing is so particularly displeasing 
as the notion of close personal contact with those whom 
we have long known in a respectful and distant way. 
The fondness of the ancients and of modern Orientals for 
forms of unnatural vice, of which the notion affects us vdih 
horror, is probably a mere case of the way in which this 
instinct may be inhibited by habit We can hardly sup- 
pose that the ancients had by gift of Nature a propensity 
of which we are devoid, and .were all victims of what is 
now a pathological aberration limited to individuals. It is 
more probable that with them the instinct of physical aver- 

* To most of us it is even unpleasant to sit down in a chair still warm 
from occupancy by another person's body. To many, hand-shaking Ib 
disa.G^reeable.y 



INSriNCT, 

sion toward a certain class of objects was inhibited early in 
life by habits^ formed under the influence of example; and that 
then a kind of sexual appetite, of which very likely most 
men possess the germinal possibility, developed itself in an 
unrestricted way. That the development of it in an abnormal 
way may check its development in the normal way, seems 
to be a well-ascertained medical fact And that the direc- 
tion of the sexual instinct towards one individual tends to 
inhibit its application to other individuals, is a law, upon 
which, though it suffers many exceptions, the whole regime 
of monogamy is based. These details are a little unpleas- 
ant to discuss, but they show so beautifully the correctness 
of the general principles in the light of which our review 
has been made, that it was impossible to pass them over 
unremarked. 

Jealoitsy is unquestionably instinctive. 

Parentxd Love is an instinct stronger in woman than in 
naaiu^tjeast in the early childhood of its object I need 
do little morfe than quote Schneider's lively description of 
it as it exists in her : 

** As soon as a wife becomes a mother her whole thought and feel- 
ing, her whole being, is altered. Until then she had only thought of 
her own well-being, of the satisfaction of her vanity ; the whole world 
appeared made only for her ; everything that went on about her was 
only noticc^d so far as it had |)ersonal reference to herself ; she asked 
of every one that he should appear interested in her, pay her the requi- 
site attention, and as far as possible fulfil her wishes. Now, how- 
ever, the centre of the world is no longer herself, but her child. She 
does not think of her own hunger, she must first be sure that the child 
is fed. It is nothing to her that she herself is tired and needs rest, so 
long as she sees that the chiUVs sleep is disturbed ; the moment it stirs 
she awakes, though far stronger noises fail to arouse her now. She, 
who formerly could not bear the slightest carelessness of dress, and 
touched everything with gloves, allows herself to be soiled by the in- 
fant, and does not shrink from seizing its clouts with her nuked hands. 
Now, she has the greatest patience with the ugly, piping cry-baby 
{SchreihaJs), whereas until now every discordant sound, every slightly 
unpleasant noise, made her nervous. Every limb of the still hideous 
little being appears to her beautiful, every movement fills her with de- 
light. She has, in one word, trans/erred her entire egoism to the child, 
and lives only in it. Tl\ivs, at least, it is in all unspoiled, naturally-bred 




440 PB70H0L007. 

mothers, who, alas I seem to be growing rarer ; and thus it is with all 
the higher animal-mothers. The maternal joys of a cat, for example, 
are not to be disguised. With an expression pf infinite comfort she 
stretches out her fore-legs to offer her teats to her children, and mores 
her tail with delight when the little hungry mouths tug and suck. . . . 
But not only the contact, the bare look of the offspring affords end- 
less delight, not only because the mother thinks that the child will some 
day grow great and handsome and bring her many joys, but because 
she has received from Nature an instinctive love for her children. She 
does not herself know why she is so happy, and why the look of the 
child and the care of it are so agreeable, any more than the young man 
can give an account of why he loves a maiden, and is so happy when 
she is near. Few mothers, in caring for their child, think of the proper 
purpose of maternal love for the preservation of the species. Such a 
thought may arise in the father's mind ; seldom in that of the mother. 
The latter feels only . . . that it is an everlasting delight to hold the 
being which she has brought forth protectingly in her arms, to dress it, 
to wash it, to rock it to sleep, or to still its hunger." 

So far the worthy Schneider, to whose words may be 
added this remark, that the passionate devotion of a mother 
— ill herself, perhaps — to a sick or dyinf^ child is peril ips 
the most simply beautiful moral spectacle that human life 
affords. Contemning every danger, triumphing over every 
difficulty, outlasting all fatigue, woman's love is here in- 
vincibly superior to anything that man can show: 

These are the most prominent of the tendencies Avliich 
are worthy of being called instinctive in the human species.* 



* Some will, of course, find the list too large, others too small. With 
the boundaries of iustinct fading into rellex action below, and into ac- 
quired habit or suggested atttivity above, it is likely that there will always 
be controversy al)out just what to include under the class-name. Shall wa 
add the propensity to walk along a curbstone or any other narrow path, to 
the list of instincts ? Shall we subtract secret iven ess. as due to shyness cr 
to fear? Who knows? Meanwhile our physiological method has this in- 
estimable advantage, that such questions of limit have neither theoretical 
nor practical importance. The facts once noted, it mattei*s lutle how they 
are named. Most authors give a shorter list than that in the text. The 
phrenologists add adhesiveness, iuhabiliveuess, love of approbation, etc., 
etc., to their list of ' sentiments.' which in the main agree with our list of 
instincts. Fortlage, hi his System der Psychologic, classes among the 
TriebeeW the vegetative physiological functions. JSantlus (Zur Psychologie 
der Meuschlichen Triebe. Leipsic, 1864) says there are at bottom but three 
instmcts, that of 'Being.' that of 'Function,' and that of 'Life.' The 
* Instinct of Being' he subdivides \i\io anirtml, embracing the activitits cf 



INSTINCT, ^i 441 

It will be observed that no other mainmol^ 90/ ewn tits 
monkey y shows so large an array. In a perfeor1y*rounded 
development, every one of these instincts would start 
habit toward certain objects and inhibit a habit toward cer-* 
tain othersJ Usually this is the case ; but, in the one- 
sided development of civilized life, it happens that the 
timely age goes by in a sort of starvation of objects, and 
the individual then grows up with gaps in his psychic con- 
stitution which future experiences can never fill. Compare 
the accomplished gentleman with the poor artisan or trades- 
man of a city: during the adolescence of the former, 
objects appropriate to his growing interests, bodily and 
mental, were offered as fast as the interests awoke, and, as 
a consequence, he is armed and equipped at every angle to 
meet the world. Sport came to the rescue and completed 
his education where real things were lacking. He has 
tasted of the essence of ever}' side of human life, being 
sailor, hunter, athlete, scholar, fighter, talker, dandy, man 
^ affairs, etc., all in one. Over the city poor boy's youth 
no such golden opportunities were hung, and in his man- 
hood no desires for most of them exist Fortunate it is for 
him if gaps are the only anomalies his instinctive life pre- 
sents ; perversions are too often the fruit of his unnatural 
bringing up. 

aU the senses ; and psychical, cmbraclDg the acts of the intellect and of 
the 'transeinpirir consciousness.' The 'Instinct of Function* he divides 
Into sexual, incUnaiiorutl (friendship, attachment, honor) ; and moral (re- 
ligion, philanthropy, faith, truth, moral free<iom. etc.)< The 'Instinct of 
Life ' embraces consertaiion (nutrition, motion) ; sockUnlity (imitation, 
juridical and ethical arrangements) ; and personal interest (love of inde- 
pendence and freedom, acquisitiveness, self-defence). iSuch a muddled 
list as this shows how great are the advantages of the physiological analy^si8 
we have usrd. 




CHAPTEE XXV.* 

THE EMOTIONS. 

In RpeakiDg of the instincts it has been impossible tc 
keep them separate from the emotional excitements which 
go with them. Objects of rage, love, fear, etc., not only 
prompt a man to outward deeds, but provoke characteristic 
alterations in his attitude and visage, and affect his breath- 
ing, circulation, and other organic functions in specific ways. 
When the outward deeds are inhibited, these latter emotional 
expressions still remain, and we read the anger in the face, 
though the blow may not be struck, and the fear betrays 
itself in voice and color, though one may suppress all other 
sign. Instinctive reactions and emotional expressiofis thus 
shade imperceptibly into each other. Every diject that excites 
an instinct eoocites an emotion as taeU. Emotions, however, 
fall short of instincts, in that the emotionakjj^ction usually 
terminates in the subject's own body, whilst the instinctive 
reaction is apt to go farther and enter into practical rela- 
tions with the exciting object. 

Emotional reactions are often excited by objects with 
which we have no practical dealings. A ludicrous object, 
for example, or a beautiful object are not necessarily ol^- 
jects to which we do anything ; we simply laugh, or stand 
in admiration, as the case may be. The class of emotional, 
is thus rather larger than tliat of instinctive, impulses, 
commonly so called. Its stimuli are more numerous, and 
its expressions are more internal and delicate, and often 
less practical. The physiological plan and essence of the 
two classes of impulse, however, is the same. 

As with instincts, so Avith emotions, the mere memory or 
imagination of the object may suffice to liberate the excite- 

* Parts «>f ibia chapter have already ai>i)earcd in an article publiahed 
in lb84 iu Mind. 

4tt 



THE EMOTIONS, 443 

ment. One may get angrier in thinking ov^r one's insult 
than at the moment of receiving it ; and we melt more over 
a mother who is dead than we ever did when she was living. 
In the rest of the chapter I shall use the word object of 
emotion indiiferently to mean one which is physically 
present or one which is merely thought of. 

It would be tedious to go through a complete list of the 
reactions which characterize the various emotions. For 
that the special treatises must be refeiTed to. A few ex- 
amples of their variety, however, ought to find a place 
here. Let me begin with the manifet^tations of Grief as 
a Danish physiologist, C. Lange, describes them : * 

" The chief feature in the physiognomy of grief is perhaps its para- 
lyzing effect on the voluntary movements. This effect is by no means 
a.s extreme as that which fright pn^duces, being seldom more than that 
degree of weakening wliich makes it cost an effort to perform pctions 
usually done with ease. It is, in other words, a feeling of weariness; 
and (as in all weariness) movements are made slowly, heavily, without 
strength, unwillingly, and with exertion, and are limited to the fewest 
IX)SHible. By this the grieving person gets his outward stamp : he walks 
slowly, unsteadily, dragging his feet and hanging his arms. His voice is 
weak and without resonance, in consequence of the feeble acHvity of the 
muscles of expiration and of the larynx. He prefers to sit still, sunk in 
himself and silent. The tonicity or * latent innervation * of the muscles 
is strikingly diminished. The neck is bent, the head hangs ('bowe<l 
down ' with grief), the relaxation of the cheek- and jaw-muscles makes 
the face look long and narrow, the jaw may even hang open. The (?yes 
appear large, as is always the case where the orbicul/iris muscle is para- 
lyzed, but they may often be partly covennl by the upper lid which 
droops in consequence of the laming of its own levator. With this 
condition of weakness of the voluntary nerve- and muscle-apparatus 
of the whole bo<ly, there coexists, as aforesaid, just as in all states of 
similar motor weakness, a subjective feeling of weariness and heavi- 
ness, of something which weighs upon one; one feels 'downcast,' 
' oppressed,' * laden,' one speakft of his * weight of sorrow,' one mu.st 
* bear up ' under it, just as one must * keep down ' his anger. Many 
there are who * succumb' to sorrow to such a degree that they literally 
cannot stand upright, but sink or lean against surrounding objects, fall 
on their knees, or, like Romeo in the monk's cell, throw themselves 
upon the earth in their despair. 

** But this weakness of the entire voluntary motor apparatus (the 
80-calle<i apparatus of * animal ' life) is only one side of the physiology 
of grief. Another side, hardly less important, and in its consequences 

*UeberQeniQthsbeweguDgeD, uebersetztvon U. Kurella (Leipzig, 1887). 




444 P8YCH0L00T. 

perhaps even more so, belongs to another snbdiyision of the motor af^pa- 
ratus, namely, the involantary or *• organic * muscles, especially those 
which are found in the walls of the blood-vessels, and the use of which 
is, by contracting, to diminish the latter's calibre. These muscles and 
their nerves, forming together the * vaso-motor apparatus,^ act in grief 
contrarily to the voluntary motor apparatus. Instead of being paralyzed, 
like the latter, the vascular muscles are more strongly contracted than 
usual, so that the tissues and organs of the body become ansBmic. The 
immediate consequence of this bloodlessness is pallor and shrunken- 
ness, and the pale color and collapsed features are the peculiarities 
which, in connection with the relaxation of the visage, give to the victim 
of grief his characteristic physiognomy, and often give an impression 
of emaciation which ensues to<r rapidly to be possibly due to real dis- 
turbance of nutrition, or waste uncompensated by repair. Another 
regulav consequence of the bloodlessness of the skin is a feeling of cold, 
and shivering. A constant symptom of grief is sensitiveness to cold, 
and difficulty in keeping warm. In grief, the inner organs are nnqnes- 
tionably anssmic as well as the skin. This is of course not obvious to 
the eye, but many phenomena prove it. Such is the diminution of the 
various secretions, at least of such as are accessible to observation. 
The mouth grows dry, the tongue sticky, and a bitter taste ensues 
which, it would appear, is only a consequence of the tongue^s dryness. 
[The expression * bitter sorrow' may possibly arise from this.] In 
nursing women the milk diminishes or altogether dries up. There is 
one of the most regular manifestations of grief, which apparently con- 
tradicts these other physiological phenomena, and that is the weeping, 
with its profuse secretion of tears, its swollen reddened face, red eyes, 
and augmented secretion from the nasal mucous membrane." 

Lange goes on to suggest that this may be a reaction 
from a previously contracted vaso-motor state. The expla- 
nation seems a forced qne. The fact is that there are 
changeable expressions of grief. The weeping is as apt as 
not to be immediate, especially in women and children. 
Some men can never w<pep. The tearful and the dry phases 
alternate in all who can weep, sobbing storms being fol- 
lowed by periods of calm ; and the shrunken, cold, and 
pale condition which Lange describes so well is more char- 
acteristic of a severe settled sorrow than of an acute mental 
j)ain. Properly we have two distinct emotions here, both 
prompted by the same object, it is true, but affecting differ- 
ent persons, or the same person at different times, and 
feding quite differently whilst they last, as anyone's con- 
sciousness will testify. There is an excitement during the 
crying fit which is not Avithout a certain pungent pleasure 



THE EMOTIONS, 446 

of its own ; but it would take a genius for felicity to dis- 
cover any dasli of redeeming quality in the feeling of dry 
and shrunken sorrow. — Our author continues : 

** If the smaller vessels of the luugs contract so that these organs 
become anaemic, we have (as is usual under such conditions) the feeling 
of insufficient breath, and of oppression of the chest, and these tor- 
menting sensations increase the sufferings of the griever, who seeks 
relief by long-drawn sighs, instinctively, like every one who lacks 
breath from whatever cause.* 

* The bronchial tubes may be contracted as well as the ramifications of 
the pulmonary artery. Professor J. Henle has, amongst his Anthropolo- 
gische Vortrilge, an exquisite one on the * Natural History of the Sigh/ in 
which he represents our inspirations as the result of a battle between the 
red muscles of our skeleton, ribs, and diaphragm, and the white ones of 
the lungs, which seek to narrow the calibre of the air-tubes. "In the 
normal state the fonner easily conquer, but under other conditions they 
either conquer with difficulty or are defeated. . . . The contrasted emo- 
tions express themselves in similarly contrasted wise, by spasm and paraly- 
sis of the unstriped muscles, and for the most part alike in all the organs 
which are provided with them, as arteries, skin, and bronchial tubes. The 
contrast among the emotions is generally expressed by dividing them into 
exciting and depressing ones. It is a remarkable fact that the depressing 
emotions, like fear, horror, disgust, increase the contraction of these smooth 
muscles, whilst the exciting emotions, like joy, anger, etc , make them 
relax. Contrasts of temperature act similarly, cold like the depressing, 
and warmth like the exciting, emotions. Cold produces pallor and goose- 
flesh, warmth smooths out the skin and widens the vessels. If one notices 
the uncomfortable mood brought about by strained expectation, anxiety 
before a public address, vexation at an unmerited affront, etc., one finds that 
the suffering part of it concentrates it8(»lf principally in the chest, and that 
it consists in a soreness, hardly to be called pain, fell in the middle of the 
breast and due to an unpleasant resistance which is offered to the move- 
ments of inspiration, and sets a limit to their extent. The insufficiency of 
the diaphragm is obtruded upon consciousness, and we try by the aid of 
the external voluntary chest-muscles to draw a deeper breath. [This is the 
sigh.] If w^e fail, the unpleasantness of the situation is inoroa.«4ed. for then te 
our mental distress is added the corjwreally repugnant feeling of lack of air, 
a slight degree of suffocation. If, on the contrary, the outer nuis(>Ies over- 
come the resistance of the inner ones, the oppres.sed breast is lightened. 
We think we speak symbolically when we speak of a stone weighing on 
our lieart, or of a burden rolled from off our breast. But really we only 
express the exact fact, for we should have to raise the entire weight of the 
atmosphere (al)out 820 kilog-) at each inspiration, if the air did not balance 
it by streaming into our lungs." (P. Oo.) It must not be forgotten that an 
inhibition of the inspiratory centre similar to that produced by exciting 
the superior larynireal nerve may possibly play a part in these phenomena. 
For a very interesting discussion of the respiratory difficulty and itsconnec- 




446 PSYCHO LOQY 

** The anaemia of the brain in grief is shown by intellectujtl inertia, 
dullness, a feeling of mental weariness, effort, and indisposition to 
work, often by sleeplessness. Indeed it is the anaemia of the motor 
centres of the brain which lies at the bottom of all that weakening of 
the voluntary powers of motion which we described in the first instance.** 

My impression is that Dr. Lange simplifies and univer- 
salizes the phenomena a little too much in this description, 
and in particular that he very likely overdoes the anaemia- 
business. But such as it is, his account may stand as a 
favorable specimen of the sort of descriptive work to which 
the emotions have given rise. 

Take next another emotion, Fear, and read what MrJiat- 
win says of its effects : *"'"^' 

*' Fear is often preceded by astonishment, and is so far akin to it 
that both lead to the senses of sight and hearing being instantly aroused. 
In both cases the eyes and mouth are widely opened and the eyebrows 
raised. The frightened man at first stands like a statue, motionless and 
breathless, or crouches down as if instinctively to escape observation. 
The heart beats quickly and violently, so that it palpitates or knocks 
against the ribs ; but it is very doubtful if it then \^rks more efficiently 
than usual, so as to send a greater supply of blood to all parts of the 
body ; for the skin instantly becomes pale as during incipient faint ness. 
This paleness of the surface, however, is probably in large part, or is ex- 
clusively, due to the vaso-motor centre being affected in such a manner 
as to cause the contraction of the small arteries of the skin. That the 
skin is much affected under the sense of great fear, we see in the mar- 
vellous manner in which perspiration immediately exudes from it. Thia 
exudation is all the more remarkable, as the surface is then cold, and 
hence the term, a cold sweat ; whereas the sudoritic glands are properly 
excited into action when the surface is heated. The hairs also on the 
skin stand erect, and the superficial muscles shiver. In connection with 
the disturbed action of the heart the breathing is hurried. The salivary 
glands act imperfectly; the mouth becomes dry and is often opened and 
shut. I have also not iced that under slight fear there is strong tendency to 
yawn. One of the best marked symptoms is the trembling of all the mus- 
cles of the body ; and this is often tiist seen in the lips. From this cause, 
and from the dryness of the mouth, the voice becomes husky or indis- 
tmct or may altogether fail. * Obstupui steteruntque comae, et vox fau- 
cibus ha*sit.' ... As fear increases into an agony of terror, we behold, 
as under all violent emotions, diversified results. The heart beats wild- 



tion with anxiety and fear, sec ' A Case of Hydrophobia * by the lamented 
Tlios. B. Curtis in the Boston Med. and Suia:. Journal, Nov. 7 and H 
1878, aud remarks thereon by James J. Putnam, ibid. Nov. 21. 



THE EMOTIONS. 447 

(y or must fail to act and faintness ensue ; there is a death-like pallor ; 
the breathing is labored ; the wings of the nostrils are widely dilated ; 
there is a gasping and convulsive motion of the lips, a tremor on the 
hollow cheeky a gulping and catching of the throat ; the uncovered and 
protruding eyeballs are fixed on the object of terror ; or they may roll 
restlessly from side to side, hue illuc volens oculos totuinque pererrat. 
The pupils are said to be enormously dilated. All the muscles of the 
body may become rigid or may be thrown into convulsive movements. 
The hands are alternately clenched and opened, often with a twitching 
movement. The arms may be protruded as if to avert some dreadful 
danger, or may be thrown wildly over the head. The Rev. Mr.'Hagen- 
auer has seen this latter action in a terrified Australian. In other cases 
there is a sudden and uncontrollable tendency to headlong flight ; and 
so strong is this that the boldest soldiers may be seized with a sudden 
panic."* 

Finally take Hatred, and read the synopsis of its possible 
effects as given by Sig. Mantegazza : t 

** Withdrawal of the head backwards, withdrawal of the trunk;"" 
projection forwards of the hands, as if to defend one's self against the 
hated object : contraction or closure of the eyes ; elevation of the upper 
lip and closure of the nose, — these are all elementary movements of turn- 
ing away. Next threatening movements, as : intwise frowning ; eyes 
wide open ; display of teeth ; grinding teeth and contracting jaws ; 
opened mouth with tongue advanced : clenched fists ; threatening action 
of arms ; stamping with the feet ; deep inspirations— panting ; growling 
-and various cries ; automatic repetition of one word or syllable ; sud- 
den weakness and trembling of voice ; spitting. Finally, various mis- 
cellaneous reactions and vaso-motor symptoms: general trembling ; con- 
vulsions of lips and facial muscles, of limbs and of trunk; acts of violence 
to one's self, as biting fist or nails ; sardonic laughter ; bright redn^s 
of face ; sudden pallor of face ; extreme dilatation of nostrils ; stand- 
ing up of hair on head." 

Were we to go through the whole list of emotions which 
have been named by men, and study their organic mani- 
festations, we should but ring the changes on the elements 
which these three typical cases involve. Rigidity of this 
musclo, relaxation of that, constriction of arteries here, dila- 
tation there, breathing of this sort or that, pulse slowing 
or quickening, this gland secreting and that one dry, etc., 
etc. We should, moreover, find that our descriptions had no 



♦Oriffin of the Emotions. Diirwin, pp. 290-2. 

t La Physiononiic ul I'Expression deii Sentiments (Paris, 1885), p. 140. 




448 P87CH0L00T. 

absolute truth ; that they only applied to the average man ; 
that every one of us, almost, has some personal idiosyncrasy 
of expression, laughing or sobbing differently from his 
neighbor, or reddening or growing pale where others do 
not. We should find a like variation in the objects which 
excite emotion in different persons. Jokes at which one 
explodes with laughter nauseate another, and seem blas- 
phemous to a third ; and occasions which overwhelm me with 
fear or bashfulness are just what give you tlie full sense of 
ease and power. The internal shadings of emotional feel- 
ing, moreover, merge endlessly into each other. Language 
has discriminated some of them, as hatred, antipathy, ani- 
mosity, dislike, aversion, malice, spite, vengefulness, ab- 
horrence, etc., etc. ; but in the dictionaries of synonyms we 
find these feelings distinguished more by their severally 
appropriate objective stimuli than by their conscious or 
subjective tone. 

The result of all this flux is that the merely descriptive 
literature of the emotions is one of the most tedious parts 
of psychology. And not only is it tedious, but you feel 
that its subdivisions are to a great extent either fictitious 
or unimportant, and that its pretences to accuracy are a 
sham. But unfortunately there is little psychological writ- 
ing about the emotions which is not merelj^ descriptive. 
As emotions are described in novels, they interest us, for 
we are made to share them. We have grown acquainted 
with the concrete objects and emergencies which call • 
them forth, and any knowing touch of introspection which 
may grace the page meets with a quick and feeling 
response. Confessedly literarj^ works of aphoristic philos- 
ophy also flash lights into our emotional life, and give us a 
fitful delight But as far as "scientific psychology" of the 
emotions goes, I may have been surfeited by U)o much 
reading of classic works on the subject, but I should as 
lief read verbal descriptions of the shapes of the rocks on 
a New Hampshire farm as toil through them again. They 
give one nowhere a central point of view, or a deductive 
or generative principle. They distinguish and refine and 
specify in infinitum without ever getting on to another logi- 
cal level. Whereas the beautv of all trulv scientific work 



THB EMOTIONS. 449 

is to get to ever deeper levels. Is there no way out from this 
level of individual description in the case of the emotions ? 
I believe there is a way out, but I fear that few will take it. 
The trouble with the emotions in psychology is that 
they are regarded too much as absolutely individual things. 
So long as they are set down as so many eternal and sacred 
psychic entities, like the old immutable species in natural 
history, so long all that can be done with them is reverently 
to catalogue their separate characters, points, and effects. 
But if we regard them as products of more general causes 
(as ' species ' are now regarded as products of heredity and 
variation), the mere distinguishing and cataloguing becomes 
of subsidiary importance. Having the goose which lays 
the golden eggs, the description of each egg already laid is 
a minor matter. Now the general causes of the emotions 
are indubitably physiological. Prof. C. Lange, of Copen- 
hagen, in the pamphlet from which I have already quoted, 
published in 1886 a physiological theory of their constitu- 
tion and conditioning, which I had already broached the 
previous year in an article in Mind. None of the criti- 
cisms which I have heard of it have made me doubt its 
essential truth. I will therefore devote the next few pages 
to explaining what it is. I shall limit myself in the first 
instance to what may be called the coarser emotions, grief, 
fear, lage, love, in which every one recognizes a strong 
organic reverberation, and afterwards speak of the subtler 
emotions, or of those whose organic reverberation is less 
obvious and strong. 

ISMOnON FOLLOWS UPON THIC BODILY BXFBS88ION IN 
THE COAB8EB EMOTIONS AT LEAST. 

Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emo- 
tions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the 
mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter 
state of *mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My 
theory, on the contrary, is that the l)odUy changes follow di- 
rectly the perception of the exciting fact, and thai our feeling of 
the same changes as they occur is the emotion. Common-sense 
says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep ; we meet a 




450 PSYCHOLOGY. 

bear, are frightened and run ; we are instdted by a riyal, 
are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended 
says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one 
mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that 
the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, 
and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry 
because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because 
we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, be- 
cause we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. 
Without the bodily states following on the perception, the 
latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, 
destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the 
bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem 
it right to strike, but we should not actually /ed afraid or 
angry. 

Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure 
to meet with immediate disbelief. And yet neither many 
nor far-fetched considerations are required to mitigate ite 
paradoxical character, and possibly to produce conviction 
of its truth. 

To begin with, no reader of the last two chapters will 
be inclined to doubt the fact that objects do excite bodily 
changes by a preorgauized mechanism, or the farther fact 
that the changes are so indefinitely numerovs and sitbtle that the 
entire organism may he called a saunding-boardy which every 
change of consciousness, however slight, may make rever- 
berate. The various permutations and combinations of 
which these organic activities are susceptible make it ab- 
stractly possible that no shade of emotion, however slight, 
should be without a bodily reverberation as unique, when 
taken in its totality, as is the mental mood itself. The 
immense number of parts modified in each emotion is what 
makes it so difficult for us to reproduce in cold blood the 
total and integral expression of any one of them. We may 
catch the trick with the voluntary muscles, but fail with 
the skin, glands, heart, and other viscera. Just as an arti- 
ficially imitated sneeze lacks sojiiething of the reality, so 
the attempt to imitate an emotion in the absence of its 
normal instigating cause is apt to be rather * hollow.' 

The next thing to be noticed is this, that every one tf the 



THE EMOTIONS. 461 

bodily chariaes. whatsoever it frf, <>? ttft.^^ n^^tuly or nhMvurply^ ihf. 
momervt it occur s. If the reader has never paid attention to 
this matter, he will be both interested and astonished to 
leam how many different local bodily feelings he can detect 
in himself as characteristic of his various emotional moods. 
It would be perhaps too much to expect him to arrest the 
tide of any strong gust of passion for the sake of any such 
curious analysis as this ; but he can observe more tranquil 
states, and that may be assumed here to be true of the 
greater which is shown to be true of the less. Our whole 
cubic capacity is sensibly alive ; and each morsel of it con- 
tributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, 
painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every 
one of us unfailingly carries with him. It is surprising what 
little items give accent to these complexes of sensibility. 
When worried by any slight trouble, one may find that the 
focus of one's bodily consciousness is the contraction, often 
quite inconsiderable, of the eyes and brows. When mo- 
mentarily embarrassed, it is something in the pharynx that 
compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a 
slight cough; and so on for as many more instances as 
might be named. Our concern here being with the general 
view rather than with the details, I will not linger to discuss 
these, but, assuming the point admitted that every change 
that occurs must be felt, I will pass on. 

I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole 
theory, which is this : J/ we fancy some strong emotion^ and 
then try to abstract from our consciousness of it aU the feelings 
of its bodily symptoms, toe find we have nothing left behind, no 
* mind-stuff ' out of which the emotion can be constituted, 
and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception 
is all that remains. It is true that, although most people 
when asked say that their introspection verifies this state- 
ment, some persist in saying theirs does not. Many cannot 
be made to understand the question. When you beg them 
to imjigine away every feeling of laughter and of tendency 
to laugh from their consciousness of the ludicrousness of 
an object, and then to tell you what the feeling of its ludi- 
crousness would be like, whether it be anything more than 
the perception that the object belongs to the class * funny/ 




462 PSTCHOLOQT. 

they persist in replying that the thing proposed is a 
physical impossibility, and that they always must laugh if 
they see a funny object. Of course the task proposed is 
not the practical one of seeing a ludicrous object and anni- 
hilating one's tendency to laugh. It is the purely specu- 
lative one of subtracting certain elements of feeling from 
an emotional state supposed to exist in its fulness, and say- 
ing what the residual elements are. I cannot help think- 
ing that all who rightly apprehend this problem will agree 
with the proposition above laid down. What kind of an 
emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of 
quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of 
trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh 
nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible 
for me to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and pic- 
ture no ebullition in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dil- 
atation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse 
to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm 
breathing, and a placid face ? The present writer, for one, 
certainly cannot The rage is as completely evaporated as 
the sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the only 
thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some 
cold-blooded and dispassionate judicial sentence, confined 
entirely to the intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain 
person or persons merit chastisement for their sins. In 
like manner of grief : what would it be without its tears, its 
sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast- 
bone ? A f eelingless cognition that certain circumstances are 
deplorable, and nothing more. Every passion in turn tells 
the same story. A purely disembodied human emotion is 
a nonentity. I do not say that it is a contradiction in the 
nature of things, or that pure spirits are necessarily con- 
demned to cold intellectual lives ; but I say that for ?«?, 
emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable. 
The more closely I scrutinize my states, the more persuaded 
I become that whatever moods, affections, and passions I 
have are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, 
those bodily changes whicli we ordinarily call their expres- 
sion or consequence ; and the more it seems to me that if I 
were to become corporeally amesthetic, I should be ex- 



THB EMOTIONS. 

olnded from the life of the affectionsy harsh and tender 
alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or in- 
tellectual form. Such an existence, although it seems to 
have been the ideal of ancient sages, is too apathetic to be 
keenly sought after by those born after the revival of the 
worship of sensibility, a few generations ago. 

Let not this view be called materialistic. It is neither 
more nor less materialistic than any other view which says 
that our emotions are conditioned by nervous processes. 
No reader of this book is likely to rebel against such a 
saying so long as it is expressed in general terms ; and 
if any one still finds materialism in the thesis now de- 
fended, that must be because of the special processes in- 
voked. They are sensational processes, processes due to 
inward currents set up by physical happenings. Such 
processes have, it is true, always been regarded by the 
platonizers in psychology as having something peculiarly 
base about them. But our emotions must always be in^ 
wardly what they are, whatever be the physiological ground 
of their apparition. If they are deep, pure, worthy, spirit- 
ual facts on any conceivable theory of their physiological 
source, they remain no less deep, pure, spiritual, and 
worthy of regard on this present sensational theory. They 
carry their own inner measure of worth with them ; and it 
is just as logical to use the present theory of the emotions 
for proving that sensational processes need not be vile and 
material, as to use their vileness and materiality as a proof 
that such a theory cannot be true. 

I f such a theory is true, then e ach emotion is thft r esult- 
ant or a"sum oi elements, and each ele me nt is cau se rSy a 
ph ysiolofflcal process of a sort alrea dy^ well known The 
elements are all organic changes, and eacli of thein ia the 
reflex effect of the exciting object Definite questions now 
immediately arise — questions very different from those 
which were the only possible ones without this view. Those 
were questions of classification : " Which are the proper gen ■ 
era of emotion, and which the species under each ?" or of 
description : " By what expression is each emotion char^ 
acterized?'* The questions now are causal: Just what 
changes does this object and what changes does that object 




454 > PSYCHOLOOY. 

excite ?" and '' How come tliej to excite these particiilai 
changes and not others ?" We step from a superficial to a 
deep order of inquiry. Classification and description are 
the lowest stage of science. They sink into the background 
the moment questions of genesis are formulated, and remain 
important only so far as they facilitate our answering these. 
Now the moment the genesis of an emotion is accounted for, 
as the arousal by an object of a lot of reflex acts which aro 
forthwith felt, toe immediately see why there is no limit to the 
number of possible different emotions which muy exists and why 
the emotions 0/ different individuals may t^ary indefinitdy^ both 
as to their constitution and as to objects which call them 
forth. For there is nothing sacramental or eternally fixed 
in reflex action. Any sort of reflex effect is possible, and 
X reflexes actually vary indefinitely, as we know. 

**We have all seen men dumb, instead of talkative, with joy; we 
have seen fright drive the blood into the head of its victim, instead of 
making him pale ; we have seen grief run restlessly about lamenting, 
instead of sitting bowed down and mute ; etc. , etc. , and this naturally 
enough, for one and the same cause can work differently on different 
men's blood-vessels (since these do not always react alike), whilst more- 
over the impulse on its way through the brjiin to the vaso-motor centre 
is differently influenced by different earlier impressions in the form of 
•recollections or associations of ideas." * 

In short, any dassijication of the emotions is seen to be as 
true and as * natural ' as any other^ if it only serves some pur- 
pose ; and such a question as " What is the * real ' or * typical * 
expression of anger, or fear ?" is seen to have no objective 
meaning at all. Instead of it we now have the question as 
to how any given * expression ' of anger or fear may have 
come to exist ; and that is a real question of physiological 
mechanics on the one hand, and of history on the other, 
which (like all real questions) is in essence answerable, 
although the answer may be hard to find. On a later page 
I shall mention the attempts to answer it which have been 
made. 

DIFFICULTY OF TESTING THE THBOBY EXPEBIMBNTAUiT. 

I have thus fairly propounded what seems to me the 
most fruitful way of conceiving of the emotions. It must 

* Langc, op, eU. p. 75. 



THE EMOTIONS. 465 

be admitted that it is so far only a hypothesis, only pos- 
siUij a true conception, and that much is lacking to its 
definite proof. The only way coercively to disprove it, 
however, would be to take some emotion, and then exhibit 
qualities of feeling in it which should be demonstrMy ad- 
ditional to all those which could possibly be derived from 
the organs affected at the time. But to detect with cer- 
tainty such purely spiritual qualities of feeling would 
obviously be a task beyond human power. We have, as 
Professor Lauge says, absolutely no immediate criterion by 
which to distinguish between spiritual and corporeal feel- 
iiigs; and, I may add, the more we sharpen our introspection, 
the more localized all our qualities of feeling become (see 
above. Vol. I. p. 300) and the more difficult the discrimina- 
tion consequently grows.* 

A positive proof of the theory would, on the other hand, 
be given if we could find a subject absolutely anaesthetic 
inside and out, but not paralytic, so that emotion-inspiring 
objects might evoke the usual bodily expressions from him, 
but who, on being consulted, should say that no subjective 
emotional affection was felt. Such a man would be like one 
who, because he eats, appears to bystanders to be hungry, 
but who afterwards confesses that lie had no appetite at 
all. Cases like this are extremely hard to find. Medical 
literature contains reports, so far as I know, of but three. 
In the famous one of Remigius Leins no mention is made 
by the reporters of his emotional condition. In Dr. G. 
Winter's case t the patient is said to be inert and phle^:. 
niatic, but no particular attention, as I learn from Dr. W., 
was paid to his i)sychic condition. In the extraordinary 
case reported by Professor Strumpell (to which I must refer 
later in another connection) I we read that the patient, a 
shoemaker's apprentice of fifteen, entirely ansesthetic, inside 

* Professor IlOffding, in his excellent treatise on Psychology, udmitfl 
(p. 842; the mixture of bodily sensation with purely spiritualtaffection in 
the emotions. He does not, however, discuss the difficulties of discerning 
the spiritual affection (nor even show that he lias fairly considered them; 
in his contention that it exists. 

f Ein Fall von allgemeiner Anaestliesie (rieidelberg, 1882). 

X Ziemssen's Deutsches Archiv far kliuische Mcdicin, xxii. 821. 



456 P8T0H0L0QT. 

and out, with the exception of one eye and one ear, had 
shown shame on the occasion of soiling his bed, and grirf^ 
when a formerly favorite dish was set before him, at the 
thought that he could no longer taste its flavor. Dr. Strum- 
pell is also kind enough to inform me that he manifested 
surprise^ fear, and anger on certain occasions. In observ- 
ing him, however, no such theory as the present one seems 
to have been thought of ; and it always remains possible 
that, just as he satisfied his natural appetites and neces- 
sities in cold blood, with no inward feeling, so his emotional 
expressions may have been accompanied by a quite cold 
heart ^ Any new case which turns up of generalized ansBS- 
thesia ought to be carefully examined as to the inward 
emotional sensibility as distinct from the 'expressions ' of 
emotion which circumstances may bring forth. 

Objections Considered. 

Let me now notice a few objections. The replies will 

make the theory still more plausible. 

First Objection. There is no real evidence, it may be said, 

* Tlie not very uncommon cases of hysterical hemianesthesia are not 
complete enough to be utilized in this inquiry. Moreover, the recent re- 
searches, of which some account was given in Chapter IV, tend to show 
tliat hysterical anaesthesia is not a real absence of sensibility, but a * disso- 
ciatiou, as M. Pierre Janet calls it. or splitting-off of certain sensatiooB 
from the rest of the person's consciousness, this r^t forming the self which 
remains connected with the ordinary organs of expression. The split-off 
consciousness forms a secondary self ; and M. Janet writes me that he sees 
no reason \vhy sensations whose ' dissociation ' from the body of conscious- 
ness makes the patient practically anaesthetic, might not, nevertheless, 
contribute to the emotional life of the patient. They do still contribute to 
the function of locomotion; for in his patient L. there was no ataxia in spite 
of the anaesthesia. M. Janet writes me. apropos of his anaesthetic patient 
L.. that she seemed to ' suffer by hallucination.' '* I have often pricked or 
bnmed her without warning, and when she did not see me. She never 
moved, and evidently perceived nothing. But if afterwards in her move- 
ments she caught sight of her wounded arm, and saw on her skin a little 
drop of blood resulting from a slight cut, she would begin to cry out and 
lament as if she suffered a great deal. ' My blood flows,' she said one day ; 
'1 mu«l be suffering a great deal I' She suffered by hallucination. This 
sort of suffering is very general in hysterics. It is enough for them to re- 
ceive the slightest hint of a moditication in their body, when their imagina- 
tion tills up the rest and invents changes that were not felt.' See the 
remarks published at a later date in Janet's Automatisme Psychologiqu^ 
pp 214-15. 



THE EMOTIONS, ^5/ 

for the agsmnption that particnlar perceptions do prodnoe 
wide-spread bodily effects by a sort of immediate physical 
influence, antecedent to the arousal of an emotion or emo- 
tional idea ? 

Beply. There is most assuredly such evidence. In 
listening to poetry, drama, or heroic narrative we are often 
surprised at the cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave 
flows over us, and at the heart-swelling and the lachrymal 
effusion that unexpectedly catch us at intervals. In listen- 
ing to music the same is even more strikingly true. If we 
abruptly see a dark moving form in the woods, our heart 
stops beating, and we catch our breath instantly and before 
any articulate idea of danger can arise. If our friend goes 
near to the edge oi a precipice, we get the well-known feel- 
ing of ' all-overishnessw* and we shrink back, although we 
positivelv know him to be safe, and have no distinct imagi« 
nation of his fall The writer well remembers his aston- 
ishment, when a boy of seven or eight, at fainting when he 
saw a horse bled. The blood was in a bucket, with a stick 
in it, and, if memory does not deceive him, he stirred 
it round and saw it drip from the stick with no feeling 
save that of childish curiosity. Suddenly the world grew 
black before his eyes, his ears began to buzz, and he knew 
no more. He had never heard of the sight of blood pro- 
ducing faintness or sickness, and he had so little repugnance 
to it, and so little apprehension of any other sort of danger 
from it, that even at that tender age, as he well remembers, 
he could not help wondering how the mere physical pres- 
ence of a pailful of crimson fluid could occasion in him 
•iuch formidable bodily effects. 

Professor Lange writes : 

** No one has ever thought of separating the emotion produced by 
An unusually loud sound from the true inward affections. No one 
hesitates to call it a sort of fright, and it shows the ordinary signs of 
friglit. And yet it is by no means combined with the idea of danger, 
or in any way occasioned by associations, memories, or other mental 
processes. The phenomena of fright follow the noise immediately with- 
out a trace of ^spirituaP fear. Many men can never grow used to 
standing beside a cannon when it is fired off, although they perfectly 
know that there is danger neither for themselves nor for others--the 
hare sound is too much for them." * 

* Od. dt, p. 68. ' 




458 P8YCH0L0O7. 

Imagine two steel knife-blades with their keen edges 
crossing each other at right angles, and moving to and fro. 
Our whole nervous organization is * on-edge ' at the thought ; 
and jet what emotion can be there except the unpleasant 
nervous feeling itself, or the dread that more of it may come ? 
The entire fund and capital of the emotion here is the 
Benseless bodily effect which the blades immediately arouse. 
This case is typical of a class : where an ideal emotion 
seems to precede the bodily symptoms, it is often nothing 
but an anticipation of the symptoms themselves. One who 
has already fainted at the sight of blood may witness the 
preparations for a surgical operation with uncontrollable 
heart-sinking and anxiety. He anticipates certain feelings, 
and the anticipation precipitates their arrival. In cases of 
morbid terror the subjects often confess that what possesses 
them seems, more than anything, to be fear of the fear itself. 
In the various forms of what Professor Bain calls * tender 
emotion,' although the appropriate object must usually be 
directly contemplated before the emotion can be aroused, 
yet sometimes thinking of the symptoms of the emotion 
itself may have the same effect. In sentimental natures 
the thought of 'yearning* will produce real 'yearning/ 
And, not to speak of coarser examples, a mother's imagi- 
nation of the caresses she bestows on her child may arouse 
a sj)asm of parental longing. 

In such cases as these we see plainly how the emotion 
both begins and ends with what we call its effects or mani- 
festations. It has no mental status except as either the 
vivid feeling of the manifestations, or the idea of them ; 
and the latter thus constitute its entire material, and sum 
and substance. And these cases ought to make us see 
how in all cases the feeling of the manifestations may play 
a much deeper part in the constitution of the emotion than 
we are wont to suppose. 

The best proof that the immediate cause of emotion i^ 
a physical effect on the nerves is furnished by those pafko^ 
logical cases in which the eviotion is objectless. One of the 
chief merits, in fact, of the view which I propose seems 
to be that we can so easily formulate by its means pathrv 



THE EMOTIONS. 469 

logical cases and normal cases under a common scheme. 
In every asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived 
fear, anger, melancholy, or conceit ; and others of an 
equally unmotived apathy which persists in spite of the 
best of outward reasons why it should give way. In the 
iormer cases we must suppose the nervous machinerj' to be 
so ' labile ' in some one emotional direction that almost 
every stimulus (however inappropriate) causes it to upset 
in that way, and to engender the particular complex 
of feelings of which the psychic body of the emotion 
consists. Thus, to take one special instance, if inability 
to draw deep breath, fluttering of the heart, and that 
peculiar epigastric change felt as 'precordial anxiety,' 
with an irresistible tendency to take a somewhat crouching 
attitude and to sit still, and with perhaps other visceral 
processes not now known, all spontaneously occur together 
in a certain person ; his feeling of their combination is the 
emotion of dread, and he is the victim of what is known as 
morbid fear. A friend who has had occasional attacks of 
this most distressing of all maladies tells me that in his 
case the whole drama seems to centre about the region of 
the heart and respiratory apparatus, that his main effort 
during the attacks is to get control of his inspirations and 
to slow his heart, and that the moment he attains to breath- 
ing deeply and to holding himself erect, the dread, ipso 
facto, seems to depart* 

The emotion here is nothing but the feeling of a bodilj 
state, and it has a purely bodily cause. 



* It must he confessed that there are cases of morbid fear in which 
objectively the heart is not much perturbed. These, however, fail to prove 
anything against our theory, for it is of course possible tliat the cortical 
centres normally percipient of dread as a complex of cardi»(^ and other 
organic sensations due to real bodily change, should become jurtmariiy ex- 
cited in brain -disease, and give rise to an hallucination of the changes 
t)ciDg there. — an hallucination of dread, consequently, coexistent with a 
comparatively calm pulse, etc. 1 say it is possible, for 1 am ignomnt of 
observations which might test the fact. Trance, ecstasy, etc.. offer analo- 
gous examples, — not to speak of ordiinuy dreaming. Under ail these con- 
ditions one may have the liveliest subjective feelings, either ot eye or ear, 
ur of the more visceral and emotional sort, as a result of pure nerve-central 
activity, and yet, as I believe, with complete peripheral repose. 




460 PaTCHOLOQT. 

' ' All physicians who have been much engaged in general practioe 
have seen cases of dyspepsia in which constant low spirits and occa 
«ional attacks of terror rendered the patient^s condition pitiable in the 
extreme. I have observed these cases often, and have watched them 
closely, and I have never seen greater suffering of any kind than I have 
witnessed during these attacks. . . . Thus, a man is suffering from 
what we call nervous dyspepsia. Some day, we will suppose in the 
middle of the afternoon, without any warning or visible cause, one of 
these attacks of terror comes on. The first thing the man feels is great 
but vague discomfort. Then he notices that his heart is beating much 
too violently. At the same time shocks or flashes as of electrical dv^ 
onarges, so, violent as to be almost painful, pass one after another 
through his body and limbs. Then in a few minutes he falls into a 
condition of the most intense fear. He is not afraid of anything ; he is 
simply afraid. His mine is perfectly clear. He looks for a cause of 
his wretched condition, bat sees none. Presently his terror is sndi 
(hat he trembles violently and utters low moans ; his body is damp 
with perspiration; his mouth is perfectly dry ; and at this stage therp 
are no tears in his eyes, though his suffeoing is intense. When tha 
climax of the attack is reached and passed, there is a copious flow ot 
tears, or else a mental condition in which the person weeps upon the 
least provocation. At this stage a large quantity of pale urine is passed. 
Then the heart's action becomes again normal, and the attack passeb 
off." ♦ 

Again: 

** There are outbreaks of rage so groundless and unbridled that 
ail must admit them to be expressions of disease. For the medical 
layman hardly anything can be more instructive than the observation 
of such a pathological attack of rage, especially when it presents itself 
pure and unmixed with other psychical disturbances. This happens in 
that rather rare disease named transitory mania. The patient predis- 
pased to this — otherwise an entirely reasonable person — will be attacked 
suddenly without the slightest outward provocation, and thrown (to use 
the words of the latest writer on the subject, O. Schwartzer, Die transito- 
rische Tobsucht, Wien, 1880), * into a paroxysm of the wildest rage, with 
a fearrul and blindly furious itn pulse to do violence and destroy.' 
He flies at those about him; strikes, kicks, and throttles whomever he 
can catch ; dashes every object about which lie can lay his hands on; 
breaks and crushes what is near him; tears his clothes; shouts, howls, 
and roars, with eyes that flash and roll, and shows meanwhile all those 
symptoms of vaso-motor congestion which we have learned to know as 
the concomitants of anger. His face is red, swollen, his cheeks hot» his 
eyes protuberant and their whites bloodshot, the heart beats vio- 

••R. M. Bucke: Man's Moral Nature (N. Y., ISTO), p. 9J. 



THB BM0TI0N8 461 

lently, the pnlse marks 100-120 strokes a minntes. The arteries of the 
neck are full and pulsating, the veins are swollen, the saliva flows. The 
fit lasts only a few hours, and ends suddenly with a sleep of from 8 to 
12 hours, on waking from which the patient has entirely forgotten what 
has happened," * 

In these (outwardly) causeless emotional conditions the 
particular paths which are explosive are discharged by any 
and every incoming sensation. Just as, when we are seasick, 
every smell, every taste, every sound, every sight, every 
movement, every sensible experience whatever, augments 
our nausea, so the morbid terror or anger is increased by 
each and every sensation which stirs up the nerve-centres. 
Absolute quiet is the only treatment for the time. It 
seems impossible not to admit that in all this the bodily 
condition takes the lead, and that the mental emotion fol- 
lows. The intdlect may, in fact, be so little a£fected as to 
play the cold-blooded spectator all the while, and note the 
absence of a real object for the emotion, t 

A few words from Henle may close my reply to this first 
objection : 

*' Does it not seem as if the excitations of tbe bodily nerves met the 
ideas half way, in order to raise the latter to the height of emotions ? 
[Note how justly this expresses our theory I] That they do so is proved 
by the cases in which particular nerves, when specially irritable, share 
in the emotion and determine its quality. When one is suffering from 
an open wound, any grievous or horrid spectacle will cause pain in the 



* Lange, op, cit. p. 61. 

f I am inclined to think that in some hysteriform conditions of grief, 
rage, etc.. the visceral disturbances are less strong than those which go to 
outward expression. We have then a tremendous verbal display with a 
hollow inside. Whilst the bystanders are wrung with compassion, or 
pale with alarm, the subject all the while lets himself go, but feels his iusiu- 
cerity, and wonders how long he can keep up the performance. The attacks 
are often surprisingly sv dden in their onset. The treatment here is to in- 
timidate the patient by a stronger will. Take out your temper, if he takes 
out his—" Nay. if thoult mouth, I'll rant as well as thou.'' These are the 
cases of apparently great bodily manifestation with comparatively Httle 
real subjective emotion, which may be used to throw discredit on the the- 
or}' advanced in the text. — It is probable that the viteeral manifestations in 
these cases are quite disproportionately slight, compared with those of the 
vocal organs. The subject's state is somewhat similar to that of an actor 
who does not feel his part 




462 PBTCnOLOQT. 

wound. In sufferers from heart-disease there is developed a psychic 
excitability, which is often incomprehensible to the patients themselres, 
but which comes from the heart's liability to palpitate. I said that the 
very quality of the emotion is determined by the organs disposed to 
participate in it. Just as surely as a dark foreboding, rightly grounded 
on inference from the constellations, will be accompanied by a feeling 
of oppression in the chest, so surely will a similar feeling of oppression, 
when due to disease of the thoracic organs, be accompanied by ground- 
less forebodings. So small a thing as a bubble of air rising from the 
stomach through the cesophagus, and loitering on its way a few minutes 
and exerting pressure on the heart, is able during sleep to occasion a 
nightmare, and during waking to produce a vague anxiety. On the 
other hand, we see that joyous thoughts dilate our blood-vessels, and 
that a suitable quantity of wine, because it dilates the vessels, also dis- 
poses us to joyous thoughts. If both the jest and the wine work to- 
gether, they supplement each other in producing the emotional effect, 
and our demands on the jest are the more modest in proportion as the 
wine takes upon itself a larger part of the task.'* * 

Second Objection. If our theory be true, a necessary 
corollary of it ought to be this : that any voluntary and 
cold-blooded arousal of the so-called manifestations of a 
special emotion ought to give us the emotion itself. Novir 
this (the objection says) is not found to be the case. An 
actor can perfectly simulate an emotion and yet be inwardly 
cold ; and we can all pretend to cry and not feel grief ; 
and feign laughter without being amused. 

Reply, In the majority of emotions this test is inappli- 
cable ; for many of the manifestations are in organs over 
which we have no voluntary control. Few people in pre- 
tending to cry can shed real tears, for example. But, 
within the limits in which it can be verified, experience 
corroborates rather than disproves the corollary from our 
theory, upon which the present objection rests. Every 
one knows how panic is increased by flight, and how the 
giving way to the symptoms of grief or anger increases 
those passions themselves. Each tit of sobbing makes the 
sorrow more acute, and calls forth another fit stronger still, 
until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and with the 



♦ Op. eit. p. 72. — Lange lays great stress ou the neurotic drugs, as parts 
of his proof that influences of a physical nature upon the body are the 
first thing in order in the production of emotions. 



THE EMOTIONS. 468 

apparent exhaustion of the machinery. In rage, it is no- 
torious how we 'work ourselves up' to a climax by re- 
peated outbreaks of expression. Befuse to express a pas- 
sion, and it dies. Count ten before venting your anger, 
and its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to keep up 
courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, 
sit all day in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to every- 
thing with a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers. 
There is no more valuable precept in moral education than 
this, as all who have experience know : if we wish to con- 
quer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we 
must assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, 
go through the outtvard movements of those contrary dispo- 
sitions which we prefer to cultivate. The reward of persis- 
tency will infallibly come, in the fading out of the sullen- 
ness or depression, and the advent of real cheerfulness and 
kindliness in their stead. Smooth the brow, brighten the 
eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of 
the frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial com- 
pliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it do not 
gradually thaw ! 

This is recognized by all psychologists, only they fail to 
see Its full import. Professor Bain writes, for example : 

** We find that a feeble [emotional] wave ... is suspended inwardly 
by being arrest<»d outwanlly ; the currents of the brain and the agita- 
tion of the centres die away if the external vent is resisted at every 
point. It is by such restraint that we are in the habit of suppressing 
pity, anger, fear, pride— on many trifling occasions. If so, it is a fact 
that the suppression of the actual movements has a tendency to sup- 
press the nervous currents that incite them, so that the external quies- 
cence is followed by the internal. The effect would not happen in any 
case if there were not some dependence qf the cerebral uHive upon the ' 
free outward vent or manifestatifyn. ... By the same interposition 
we may summon up a dormant feeling. By acting out the external 
manifestations, we gradually infect the nerves leading to them, and 
finally waken up the diffusive current by a sort of action ah extra. . . . 
Thus it is that we are sometimes able to assume a cheerful tone of mind 
by forcing a hilarious expression.* 



* Emotions and Will, pp. 861-8. 




404 P8T0H0L00T. 

We have a mass of other testimony of similar e£fect. 
Burke, in his treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, writes 
as follows of the physiognomist Campanella : 

** This man, it seems, had not only made very accurate observations 
on human faces, but was very expert in mimicking such as were in any 
way remarkable. When he had a mind to penetrate into the inclinations 
of those he had to deal with, he composed his face, his gesture, and his 
whole body, as nearly as he could, ihto the exact similitude of the per- 
son he intended to examine ; and then carefully observed what turn of 
mind he seemed to acquire by the change. So that, says my author, he 
was able to enter into the dispositions and thoughts of people as effec- 
tually as if he had been changed into the very men. I have often ob- 
served [Burke now goes on in his own person] that, on mimicking the 
looks and gestures of angry, or placid, or frightened, or daring men, I 
have involuntarily found my mind turned to that passion whose appear- 
ance I strove to imitate ; nay, I am convinced it is hard to avoid it, 
though one strove to separate the passion from its corresponding ges- 
tures."* 

Against this it is to be said that many actors who per- 
fectly mimic the outward appearances of emotion in face, 
gait, and voice declare that they feel no emotion at alL 
Others, however, according to Mr. Wm. Archer, who has 
made a very instructive statistical inquiry among them, 
say that the emotion of the part masters them whenever 
they play it well.f Thus : 

***I often turn pale,' writes Miss Isabel Bateman, *in scenes of 
terror or great excitement. I have been told this many times, and I 
can feel myself getting very cold and shivering and pale in thrilling 
situations.' ' When I am playing rage or terror,' writes Mr. Lionel 
Brough, * I believe I do turn pale. My mouth gets dry, my tongue 
cleaves to my palate. In Bob Acres, for instance (in the last act), I 

* Quoted by Dugald Stewart, Elements, etc. (Hamilton's ed.). m. 140 
Fechner (Vorschule der Aesthetik, 156) says almost the same thing of him- 
self : "One may tin d by one's own observation that i\iG imitation of the 
bodily expression of a mental condition makes us understand it much 
better than the merely looking on. . . . When I walk behind some one 
whom I do not know, and imitate as accurately as possible his gait and 
carriage, I get the most curious impression of feeling as the person himself 
must feel. To go tripping and mincing after the fashion of a young wo- 
man puts one, so to speak, in a feminine mood of mind." 

t 'The Anatomy of Acting,' in Longman's Magazine, voj. xi. pp. 266^ 
875. 496 (1888). since republished in book form. 



THB BM0TI0N8. 466 

have to continually moisten my mouth, or I shall become inarticulate. 
I have to '* swallow the Inmp,^* as I call it.' All artists who have had 
much experience of emotional parts are absolutely unanimous. . . . 
' Playing with the brain/ says Miss Alma Murray, ' is far less fatiguing 
than playing with the heart. An adventuress taxes the physique far 
less than a sympathetic heroine. Muscular exertion has comparatively 
little to do with it.' . . . * Emotion while acting/ writes Mr. Howe, * will 
induce perspiration much more than physical exertion. I always per- 
spired profusely while acting Joseph Surface, which requires little or 
n© exertion.' ... * I suffer from fatigue,' writes Mr. Forbes Robertson, 
* in proportion to the amount of emotion I may have been called upon 
to go through, and not from physical exertion.' . . . * Though I have 
played Othello,' writes Mr. Coleman, * ever since I was seventeen (at 
nineteen I had the honor of acting the Moor to Macready's lago), hus- 
band my resources as I may, this is the one part, the part of parts, 
which always leaves me physically prostrate. I have never been able to 
find a pigment that would stay on my face, though I have tried every 
preparation in existence. Even the titanic Edwin Forrest told me that 
he was always knocked over in Othello, and I have heard Charles 
Eean, Phelps, Brooke, Dillion, say the same thing. On the other hand, 
I have frequently acted Richard III. without turning a hair.' " ♦ 

The explanation for the discrepancy amongst actors is 
probably that which these quotations suggest. The via- 
ceral and organic part of the expression can be suppressed 
in some men, but not in others, and on this it is probable 
that the chief part of the felt emotion depends. Coquelin 
and the other actors who are inwardly cold are probably 
able to affect the dissociation in a complete way. Prof. 
Sikorsky of Kieff han contributed an important article on 
the facial expression of the insane to the Neurologisches 
Centralblatt for 1887. Having practised facial mimicry 
himself a great deal, he says : 

** When 1 contract my facial muscles in any mimetic combination, / 
feel no emotional excitement, so that the mimicry is in the fullest sense 
of the word artificial, although quite irreproachable from the expressive 
point of view. " f 

We find, however, from the context that Prof. S.'s prac- 
tice before the mirror has developed in him such a virtu- 
osity in the control of his facial muscles that he can entirely 
disregard their natural association and contract them in 
any order of grouping, on either side of the face isolatedly, 

* P. 394. t P. 4M. 




466 P8TCH0L0OT. 

and each one alone. Probably in liim the facial mimicry 
is an entirely restricted and localized thing, without sym- 
pathetic changes of any sort elsewhere. 

Third Objection. Manifesting an emotion, so far from 
increasing it, makes it cease. Bage evaporates after a good 
outburst ; it is pent-up emotions that '' work like madness 
in the brain." 

Reply. The objection fails to discriminate between 
what is felt during and what is felt after the manifestation. 
During the manifestation the emotion is always felt. In 
the normal course of things this, being the natural channel 
of discharge, exhausts the nerve-centres, and emotional 
calm ensues. But if tears pr anger are simply suppressed, 
whilst the object of grief or rage remains unchanged before 
the mind, the current which would have invaded the nor- 
mal channels turns into others, for it must find some out- 
let of escape. It may then work different and worse effects 
later on. Thus vengeful brooding may replace a burst of 
indignation ; a dry heat may consume the frame of one who 
fain would weep, or he may, as Dante says, turn to stone 
within ; and then tears or a storming fit may bring a grate- 
ful relief. This is when the current is strong enough to 
strike into a pathological path when the normal one is 
Jammed. When this is so, an immediate outpour may be 
best. But here, to quote Prof. Bain again : 

** There is nothing more implied than the fact that an emotion may 
be too strong to be rosist<?d, and wo only waste our strength in the 
endeavor. If we are really able to stem the torrent, there is no more 
reason for refraining from the attempt than in the case of weaker 
feelings. And undoubtedly the habUtml control of the emotions is not 
to be attained without a systematic restraint, extended to weak and 
strong." 

When we teach children to repress their emotional talk 
and display, it is not that they ma,j/eel more — quite the 
reverse. It is that they may think more ; for, to a certain 
extent, whatever currents are diverted from the regions 
below, must swell the activity of the thought-tracts of the 
brain. In apoplexies and other brain injuries we get the 
opposite ctondition — an obstruction, namely, to the passage 



THB EMOTIONS. 467 

of currents among the thought-tracts, and with this an in- 
creased tendency of objects to start downward currents 
into tlie organs of the body. The consequence is tears, 
laughter, and temper-fits, on the most insignificant provo- 
cation, accompanying a proportional feebleness in logical 
thought and the power of volitional attention and decision, — 
just the sort of thing from which we try to wean our child. 
It is true that we say of certain persons that " they would 
feel more if they expressed less." And in another class of 
persons the explosive energy with which passion manifests 
itself on critical occasions seems correlated with the way 
in which they bottle it up during the intervals. But these 
are only eccentric types of character, and within each type 
the law of the last paragraph prevails. The sentimentalist 
is so constructed that ' gushing ' is his or her normal mode 
of expression. Putting a stopper on the 'gush ' will only 
to a limited extent cause more ' real ' activities to take its 
place ; in the main it will simply produce listlessness. On 
the other hand, the ponderous and bilious ' slumbering vol- 
cano,' let him repress the expression of his passions as he 
will, will find them expire if they get no vent at all ; whilst 
if the rare occasions multiply which he deems worthy of 
their outbreak, he will find them grow in intensity as life 
proceeds. On the whole, I cannot see that this third ob- 
jection carries any weight. 

If our hypothesis is true, it makes us realize more deeply 
than evi^r how much our mental life is knit up with our 
corporeal frame, in the strictest sense of the term. Bap- 
tnre, love, ambition, indignation, and pride, considered as 
feelings, are fruits of the same soil with the grossest bodily 
sensatious of pleasure and of pain. But the reader will 
remember that we agreed at the outset to afiirm this only 
of wliat we then called the * coarser ' emotions, and that 
those inward states of emotional sensibility which appeared 
devoid at first sight of bodily results should be left out of 
our account. We must now say a word or two about these 
latter feelings, the ' subtler ' emotions, as we then agreed to 
call them. 




468 P8YCH0L0QT. 



THE SuiSTJjIIB IBMOnONS. 

Trhese are the moral, intellectaal, and sesthetic feelinga 
Concords of sounds, of colors, of lines, logical consistencies, 
teleological fitnesses, affect ns with a pleasure that seems 
ingrained in the very form of the representation itself, and 
to borrow nothing from any reverberation surging up from 
the parts below the brain. The Herbartian psychologists 
have distinguished feelings due to the /orm in which ideas 
may be arranged. A mathematical demonstration may be 
as ' pretty,' and an act of justice as ' neat,' as a drawing or 
a tune, although the prettiness and neatness seem to have 
nothing to do with sensation. We have, then, or some of 
us seem to have, genuinely cerebral forms of pleasure and 
displeasure, apparently not agreeing in their mode of pro- 
duction with the * coarser * emotions we have been analyzing. 
And it is certain that readers whom our reasons have hitherto 
failed to convince will now start up at this admission, and 
consider that by it we give up our whole case. Since musi- 
cal perceptions, since logical ideas, can immediately arouse 
a form of emotional feeling, they will say, is it not more 
natural to suppose that in the case of the so-called * coarser * 
emotions, prompted by other kinds of objects, the emotional 
feeling is equally immediate, and the bodily expression 
something that comes later and is added on? 

In reply to this we must immediately insist that »sthetic 
emotion, pure and simple^ the pleasure given us by certain 
lines and masses, and combinations of colors and sounds, is 
an absolutely sensational experience, an optical or auricular 
feeling that is primary, and not due to the repercussion 
backwards of other sensations elsewhere consecutively 
aroused. To this simple primary and immediate pleasure 
in certain pure sensations and harmonious combinations 
of them, there may, it is true, be added secondary pleas- 
ures ; and in the practical enjoyment of works of art by 
the masses of mankind these secondary pleasures play a 
great part The more classic one's taste is, however, the 
less relatively important are the secondary pleasures felt to 
be in comparison with those of the primary sensation as it 



THE EMOTIONS, 469 

comes in.* Classicism and romanticism have their battles 
over this point Complex suggestiveness, the a'wakening of 

* Even the feelings of the lower senses v^hy have this secondary escort, 
due to the arousing of associational trains which reverberate. A flavor 
may fairly shake us by the ghosts of ' banquet halls deserted/ which it sud- 
denly calls up; or a smell may make us feel almost sick with the waft it 
brings over our memory of ' gardens that are ruins, and pleasure-houses that 
aredust.* ''In the Pyrenees/' says M. Guyau, "after a summer-day's tramp 
carried to the extreme of fatigue, I met a shepherd and asked him for some 
milk. He went to fetch from his hut, under which a brook ran, a Jar of 
milk plunged in the water and kept at a coldness which was almost icy. 
In drinking this fresh milk into which ail the mountain had put its perfume, 
and of which each savory swallow seemed to give new life, I certainly ex- 
perienced a series of feelings which the word agreeable is insuflicient to 
designate. It was like a pastoral symphony, apprehended by the taste in- 
stead of by the ear" (quoted by F. Paulhan from ' Les Probl^mes de T^s- 
thetique Contemporaine, p. 68).— Compare the dithyrambic about whiskey 
of Col. K. Ingersoll, to which the presidential campaign of 1888 gave such 
notoriety : "I send you some of the most wonderful whiskey that ever 
drove the skeleton from a feast or painted landscapes in the brain of man. 
It is the mingled souls of wheat and corn. In it you will And the sunshine 
and shadow that chase each other over the billowy tields, the breath of 
June, the carol of the lark, the dews of the night, the wealth of summer, 
and autumn's rich content— all golden with imprisoned light. Drink it, 
and you will hear the voice of men and maidens singing the * Harvest 
Home,* mingled with the laughter of children. Drink it, and you will feel 
within your blood the star-lit dawns, the dreamy, tawny dusks of many 
perfect days. For forty years this liquid joy has been within the happy 
staves of oak, longing to touch the lips of man."— It is in this way that I 
should reply to Mr. Gurney'a criticism on my theory. My ** view," this 
writer says (Mind, ix. 425). " goes far to confound the two things which in 
my opinion it is the prime necessity of musical psychology to distinguish 
— the effect chiefly sensuous of mere streams or masses of flnely colored 
sound, and the distinctive musical emotion to which ihc form of a sequence 
of sound, its melodic and harmonic individuality, even realized in complete 
silence, is the vital and essential object. It is with the former of these two 
very diflferent things that the physical reactions, the stirring of the hair — 
the tingling and the shiver — are by far most markedly connected. ... If I 
may speak of myself, there is plenty of music from which I have received 
as much emotion in silent representation as when presented by the flnest 
orchestra; but it is with the latter condition that I almost exclusively asso- 
ciate the cutaneous tingling and hair-stirring. But to call iny enjoyment 
of the /arm, of the note-etfter-noteness of a melody a mere critical ' judgment 
of right ' [see below, p. 472] would really be to deny to me the power of 
expressing a fact of simple and intimate expression in English. It is quint- 
essentially emotion. . . . Now there are hundreds of other bits of music 
.... which I judge to be right without receiving an iota of the emotion. 
For purposes of emotion they are to me like geometrical demonstrations or 



470 P8YCH0L00Y. 

yistas of memory and association, and the stirring of oni 
flesh with picturesque mystery and gloom, make a work of 
8iTt romantic. The classic taste brands these effects as coarse 
and tawdry, and prefers the naked beauty of the optical and 
auditory sensations, unadorned with frippery or foliage. To 
the romantic mind, on the contrary, the immediate beauty 
of these sensations seems dry and thin. I am of course not 
discussing which view is right, but only showing that the dis- 
crimination between the primary feeling of beauty, as a 
pure incoming sensible quality, and the secondary emotions 
which are grafted thereupon, is one that must be made. 

These secondary emotions themselves are assuredly for 
the most part constituted of other incoming sensations 
aroused by the diffusive wave of reflex effects which the 
beautiful object sets up. A glow, a pang in the breast, 
a shudder, a fulness of the breathing, a flutter of the 
heart, a shiver down the back, a moistening of the eyes, a 
stirring in the hypogastrium, and a thousand unnamable 
symptoms besides, may be felt the moment the beauty 
excites us. And these symptoms also result when we are ex- 
cited by moral perceptions, as of pathos, magnanimity, or 
courage. The voice breaks and the sob rises in the strug- 
gling chest, or the nostril dilates and the fiDgers tighten, 
whilst the heart beats, etc., etc. 

As far as these ingredients of the subtler emotions go, 
then, the latter form no exception to our account, but 
rather an additional illustration thereof. In all cases of 
intellectual or moral rapture we find that, unless there be 
coupled a bodily reverberation of some kind with the mere 

like acta of integrity performed iu Peru." The Beetboveu-rigbtness of which 
Guriiey tlieu goes ou to speak, jis something ditferent from the Clemeuti- 
rigbtiu'ss (even wben tlie res])eciive pieces are only beard in idea), is prob 
ably ii purely auditory-He asatiotuU Ibing. Tbe Clemeuti-rigbtuess also ; 
only, for reasons impossible to assign, Ibe Clementi form does not give the 
same sort of purely auditory siitisfaction iis tbe Beelhoven form, and might 
belter be described perhaps negatively as iwn-wrong, i.e., free from posi- 
tively unpleasant acoustic quality. In organizations as musical as 3Ir. 
Gurney's, purely acoustic form gives so intense a degree of sensible pleas- 
ure that the lower bodily reverbenitiou is of no account. But I repeal that 
I see notliing in the facts wbich Mr. Gurney cites to lead one to believe 
Id an emotion divorced from sensational proce^sea of any kind. 



THE EMOTIONS. 471 

thought of the object and cognition of its quality ; unless 
we actually laugh at the neatness of the demonstration or 
witticism ; unless we thrill at the case of justice, or tingle 
at the act of magnanimity; our state of mind can hardly be 
called emotional at all. It is in fact a mere intellectual 
perception of how certain things are to be called — neat, 
right, witty, generous, and the like. Such a judicial state 
of mind as this is to be classed among awarenesses of truth; 
it is a cognitive act. As a matter of fact, however, the 
moral and intellectual cognitions hardly ever do exist thus 
unaccompanied. The bodily sounding-board is at work, as 
careful introspection will show, far more than we usually 
suppose. Still, where long familiarity with a certain class 
of effects, even aesthetic ones, has blunted mere emotional 
excitability as much as it has sharpened taste and judg- 
ment, we do get the intellectual emotion, if such it can be 
called, pure and undeiiled. And the dryness of it, the 
paleness, the absence of all glow, as it may exist in a 
thoroughly expert critic's mind, not only shows us what 
an altogether different thing it is from the ' coarser ' emo- 
tions we considered first, but makes us suspect that almost 
the entire diflfereuce lies in the fact that the bodily sound- 
ing-board, vibrating in the one case, is in the other mute. 
"Not so very bad" is, in a person of consummate taste, 
apt to be the highest limit of approving expression. " Sien 
ne me chogve"' is said to have been Chopin's superlative of 
praise of new music. A sentimental layman would feel, 
and ought to feel, horrified, on being admitted into such a 
critic's mind, to see how cold, how thin, how void of human 
significance, are the motives for favor or disfavor that 
there prevail. The capacity to make a nice spot on the 
wall will outweigh a picture's whole content; a foolish 
trick of words will preserve a poem ; an utterly meaning- 
less fitness of sequence in one musical composition set at 
naught any amount of *exi)ressiveness' in another. 

I remember seeing an English couple sit for more than 
an hour on a piercing February day in the Academ}^ 2^ 
Venice before the celebrated * Assumption ' by Titian ; 
and when I, after being chased from room to room by the 
cold, concluded to get into the sunshine as fast as possible 



472 P8TCH0L0O7, 

and let the pictures go, but before leaving drew reyerentlj 
near to them to learn with what superior forms of suscepti- 
bility they might be endowed, all I overheard was the 
woman's voice murmuring : " What a deprecatory expression 
her face wears I What self -abnegation/ How untoorthy 
she feels of the honor she is receiving!" Their honest 
hearts had been kept warm all the time by a glow of spuri* 
ous sentiment that would have fairly made old Titian sicL 
Mr. Buskin somewhere makes the (for him terrible) admis- 
sion that religious people as a rule care little for pictures, 
and that when they do care for them they generally prefer 
the worst ones to the best. Yes ! in every art, in every 
science, there is the keen perception of certain relations 
being right or not, and there is the emotional flush and thrill 
consequent thereupon. And these are two things, not one. 
In the former of them it is that experts and masters are at 
home. The latter accompaniments are bodily commotions 
that they may hardly feel, but that may be experienced in 
their fulness by cretins and philistines in whom the critical 
judgment is at its lowest ebb. The ' marvels * of Science, 
about which so much edifying popular literature is written, 
are apt to be * caviare ' to the men in the laboratories. And 
even divine Philosophy itself, which common mortals con- 
sider so * sublime ' an occupation, on account of the vast- 
ness of its data and outlook, is too apt to the practical 
philosopher himself to be but a sharpening and tightening 
business, a matter of * points,' of screwing down things, of 
splittiug hairs, and of the * intent ' rather than the * extent * 
of conceptions. Very little emotion here! — except the 
effort of settiug the attention fine, and the feeling of ease 
and relief (mainly in the breathiug apparatus) when the 
inconsistencies are overcome and the thoughts run smoothly 
for a while. Emotion and cognition seem then parted even 
in this last retreat ; and cerebral processes are almost feel- 
ingless, so far as we can judge, until they summon help 
from parts below. 

A NO BFEOIAL BBAIN-CBNTBES FOB EMOTION. 

If the neural process underlying emotional conscious- 
ness be what I have now sought to prove it, the physi- 



THE EMOTIONS. 473 

ology of the brain becomes a simpler matter than has been 
hitherto supposed. Sensational, associational, and motor 
elements are all that the organ need contain. The physi- 
ologists who, during the past few years, have been so in- 
dustriously exploring the brain's functions, have limited 
their explanations to its cognitive and volitional per- 
formances. Dividing the brain into sensory and motor 
centres, they have found their division to be exactly paral- 
leled by the analysis made by empirical psychology of 
the perceptive and volitional parts of the mind into their 
simplest elements. But the emotions have been so ignored 
in all these researches that one is tempted to suppose that 
if these investigators were asked for a theory of them 
in brahMerms, they would have to reply, either that they 
had as yet bestowed no thought upon the subject, or that 
they had found it so difficult to make distinct hypotheses 
that the matter lay among the problems of the future, only 
to be taken up after the simpler ones of the present should 
have been definitively solved. 

And yet it is even now certain that of two things con- 
cerning the emotions, one must be true. Either separate 
and special centres, affected to them alone, are their brain- 
seat, or else they correspond to processes occurring in the 
motor and sensory centres already assigned, or in others 
like them, not yet known. If the former be the case, we 
must deny the view that is current, and hold the coi*tex to 
be something more than the surface of * projection * for every 
sensitive spot and every muscle in the body. If the latter 
be the case, we must ask whether the emotional process 
in the sensory or motor centre be an altogether peculiar 
one, or whether it resembles the ordiuary perceptive pro- 
cesses of which those centres are already recognized to be 
the seat Now if the theory I have defended be true, the 
latter alternative is all that it demands. Supposing the 
cortex to contain parts, liabl4|to be excited by changes 
in each special sense-organ, in each portion of the skin, 
in each muscle, each joint, and each viscus, and to contain 
absolutely nothing else, we still have a scheme capable of 
representing? the process of the emotions. An object falls 
on a sense-organ, affects a cortical part, and is perceived ; 



474 PSYCHOLOOY. 

or else the latter, excited inwardly, gives rise to an idea of 
the same object. Quick as a flash, the reflex cuirents pass 
down through their preordained channels, alter the con- 
dition of muscle, skin, and viscus ; and these alterations, 
perceived, like the original object, in as many portions of 
the cortex, combine with it in consciousness and transform 
it from an object-simply-apprehended into' an object- 
emotionally-felt. No new principles have to be invoked, 
nothing postulated beyond the ordinary reflex circuits, and 
the local centres admitted in one shape or another by all 
to exist 

SMOTIONAIi PTFFERENCES BBTWAEN INDIVIDITAXS. 

The revivabUity in memory of the emotions, like that of all 
the feelings of the lower senses, is very small. We can 
remember that we underwent grief or rapture, but not just 
how the grief or rapture felt^ This difficult ideal reviva- 
bility is, however, more than compensated in the case of 
the emotions by a very easy actval revivability. That 
is, we can produce, not remembrances of the old grief 
or rapture, but new griefs and raptures, by summoning up 
a lively thought of their exciting causet The cause is now 
only an idea, but this idea produces the same organic 
irradiations, or almost the same, which were produced by 
its original, so that the emotion is again a reality. We 
have * recaptured ' it. Shame, love, and anger are particu- 
larly liable to be thus revived by ideas of their object 
Professor Bain admits * that " in their strict character of 
emotion proper, they [the emotions] have the minimum of 
revivability ; but being always incorporated with the sensa- 
tions of the higher senses, they share in the superior reviv- 
ability of sights and sounds." But he fails to point out 
that the revived sights and sounds may be ideal without 
ceasing to be distinct^ whilst the emotion, to be distinct, 
must become real again. Erof. Bain seems to forj^'et that 
an 'ideal emotion' and a real emotion prompted by an 
ideal object are two vcrv different things. 



* In his chapter od ' Ideal Emotion/ to which the reader is referred for 
farther details ou this subiect. 



THE EMOTIOm. 478 

An emoticynal temperament on the one hand, and a 
Uvdy iinagination for objects and circumsianoea on the other, 
are thus the conditionSy necessary and sufficient^ for an 
abundant emotional life. No matter how emotional the 
temperament may be, if the imagination be poor, the oc- 
casions for touching off the emotional trains will fail to be 
realized, and the life will be pro tanto cold and dry. This 
is perhaps a reason why it may be better that a man of 
thought should not have too strong a visualizing power. 
He is less likely to have his trains of meditation disturbed 
by emotional interruptions. It will be remembered that 
Mr. Galton found the members of the Royal Society and of 
the French Academy of Sciences to be below par in \isual- 
izing power. If I may speak of myself, I am far less able 
to visualize now, at the age of 46, than in my earlier years ; 
and I am strongly inclined to believe that the relative slug- 
gishness of my emotional Life at present is quite as much 
connected with this fact as it is with the invading torpor of 
hoary eld, or with the omnibus-horse routine of settled pro- 
fessional and domestic life. I say this because I occasion- 
all}' have a flash of the old stronger visual imagery, and I 
notice that the emotional commentary, so to call it, is then 
liable to become much more acute than is its present wont 
Charcot's patient, whose case is given above on p. 58 ff., 
complained of his incapacity for emotional feeling after his 
optical images were gone. His mother's death, which in 
former times would have wrung his heart, left him quite 
cold ; largely, as he himself suggests, because he could form 
no definite visual image of the event, and of the effect of 
the loss on the rest of the family at home. 

One final generality about the emotions remains to be 
noted : They fJunt themselves by repetition more rapidly than 
any other sort of feeling. This is due not only to the gen- 
eral law of * acconimodntion ' to their stimulus which we: 
saw to obtain of all feelings whatever, but to the j^culiar 
fact that the * diffusive wave ' of reflex effects tends alwaya 
to become more narrow. It seems as if it were essentially 
meant to be a provisional arrangement, on the basis of 
which precise and determinate reactions might arise. The 
more we exercise ourselves at anything, the fe's^eit \si\)Ai^<»«k 




476 P8TCH0L0GT. 

we employ ; and just so, the oftener we meet an object, 
the more definitely we think and behave about it; and 
the less is the organic perturbation to which it gives rise. 
The first time we saw it we could perhaps neither act nor 
think at all, and had no reaction but organic perturbation. 
The emotions of startled surprise, wonder, or curiosity were 
the result. Now we look on with absolutely no emotion.* 
This tendency to economy in the nerve-paths through which 
our sensations and ideas discharge, is the basis of all growth 
in efficiency, readiness, and skill. Where would the general, 
the surgeon, the presiding chairman, be, if their nerve-cur- 
rents kept running down into their viscera, instead of keep- 
ing up amid their convolutions ? But what they gain for prac- 
tice by this law, they lose, it must be confessed, for feeling. 
For the world-worn and experienced man, the sense of 
pleasure which he gets from the free and powerful flow of 
thoughts, overcoming obstacles as they arise, is the only 
compensation for that freshness of the heart which he once 
enjoyed. This free and powerful flow means that brain- 
paths of association and memory have more and more 
organized themselves in him, and that through them the 
stimulus is drafted off into nerves which lead merely to the 
writing finger or the speaking tongue, t The trains of intd- 
lectual association, the memories, the logical relations, may, 

•Those feelings which Prof. Bain calls ' emotions of relativity,* excite 
ment of novelty, wonder, rapture of freedom, sense of power, hardly 
survive any repetition of the experience. But as the text goes on to ex- 
plain, and as Goethe as quoted hy Prof. HOffding says, this is because ** the 
soul is inwardly grown larger without knowing it, ami can no longer lye 
filled hy that lirst sensation. The man thinks that he has lost, but really he 
has gained. What he has lost in rapture, he has gained in inward growth." 
"It is," as Prof. IlOilding himself adds in a beautiful figure of speech, 
** with our virgin feelings, as with the first breath drawn by the new-born 
child, in which the lung expands itself .so that it can never be emptied to 
the same degree again. No later breath can feel just like that first one." On 
this whole .subject of emotional blunting, compare HOffding's Psychclogie, 
VI. E., and Bain's Emotions and Will, chapter iv. of the first part. 

fM. Fr. Puulhan, in a little work full of accurate observations of de- 
tail (Les Phenomenes Affectifs et les Lois de leur Apparition), seems to me 
rather to turn the tnith upside down by his formula that emotions are due 
to an inhibition of impulsive tendencies. Oiu kind of emotion, namely, 
uneasiness, annoyance, distress, does occur when any definite impulsive 
tendency is checked, auduUof M. P.*a illustrations are drawn from this 



THE EMOTIONS, 477 

however, be voluminous in the extreme. Past emotions 
may be among the things remembered. The more of all 
these trains an object can set going in us, the richer our 
cognitive intimacy with it is. This cerebral sense of rich- 
ness seems itself to be a source of pleasure, possibly 
even apart from the euphoria which from time to time comes 
up from respiratory organs. If there he such a thing as a 
purely spiritual emotion, I should be inclined to restrict 
it to this cerebral sense of abundance and ease, tbis 
feeling, as Sir W. Hamilton would call it, of unimpeded 
and not overstrained activity of thought. Under ordinary 
conditions, it is a fine and serene but not an excited state 
of consciousness. In certain intoxications it becomes 
exciting, and it may be intensely exciting. I can hardly 
imagine a more frenzied excitement than that which 
goes with the consciousness of seeing absolute truth, which 
characterizes the coming to from nitrous-oxide drunken- 
ness. Chloroform, ether, and alcohol all produce this 
deepening sense of insight into truth ; and with all of them 
it may be a * strong ' emotion ; but then there also come 
with it all sorts of strange bodily feelings and changes in 
the incoming sensibilities. I cannot see my way to affirming 
that the emotion is independent of these. I will concede, 
however, that if its independence is anywhere to be main- 
tained, these theoretic raptmr^a Mem tk^ pl%ed at which 
to begin the defence. 

THE GENESIS OP THE VARIOUS EMOTIONS. 

On a former page (pp. 453-4) I said that two questions, 
and only two, are important, if we regard the emotions as 
constituted by feelings due to the diflFusive wave. 

(1) What special diffusive effects do the various special ob- 
jective and subjective experiences excite ? and 

(2) How come they to excite them ? 

The works on physiognomy and expression are all of 
them attempts to answer question 1. As is but natural, the 

sort. The otlier einotiouH arc themselves primary impulsive tenciencies, of 
a diffusive sort (Involving, as M. P. rightly says, a mvUiplicite des ph^ 
nomenes); and just iu proportion as more and more of these multiple ten- 
dencies are checked, and replaced by some few narrow forms of discharge* 
does the original emotion tend to disappear. 



478 PBYQROLOQT, 

effects upon the face have received the most careful atten- 
tion. The reader who wishes details additional to those 
given above on pp. 443-7 is referred to the works men- 
tioned in the note below.* 

As regards question 2, some little progress has of recent 
years been made in answering it Two things are certain : 

a. The facial muscles of expression are not given ns 
simply for expression's sake ;t 

h. Each muscle is not affected to some one emotion ex- 
clusively, as certain writers have thought. 

Some movements of expression can be accounted for 
as weakened repetitions of movements which formerly (when 
they were stronger) tvere of utility to the stibject. Others 
are similarly weakened repetitions of movements which 
under other conditions were physiologically necessary effects. 
Of the latter reactions the respiratory disturbances in 
anger and fear might be taken as examples — organic 
reminiscences, as it were, reverberations in imagination 
of the blowings of the man making a series^of combative 
efforts, of the pantings of one in precipitate flight Such 
at least is a suggestion made by Mr. Spencer which has 
found approval. And he also was the first, so far as I 
know, to suggest that other movements in anger and fear 
could be explained by the nascent excitation of formerly 
useful acts. 

" To have in a slight degree," he says, ** such psychical states as ac- 
company the reception of wounds, and are experienced during flight, is 
to be in a state of what we call fear. And to have in a slight degree 
such psychical states as the processes of catching, killing, and eating 
imply, is to have the desires to catch, kill, and eat. That the pro- 
pensities to the acts are nothing else than nascent excitations of the 



* A list of the older writings on the subject is given in MautegazzA's 
work, La Pbysionomie et I'Exprcssion, chap, i : others in Darwin's tirst 
chapter. Bell's Anatomy of Expression, Mosso's La Pnurn. Piderit's 
WisseuschaftJiches System der iMimik und Pliysiognomik, Duchenne's 
Mecanisme de la Pbysionomie Ilu^ine, are, besides Lauge and Darwin, 
the most useful works with which I am acquainted. Compare also Sully: 
Sensation and Intuition, chap. ii. 

f One must remember, however, that just in so far forth as sexual 
selection may have played a i>art in determining the human organism, selec- 
tion of expressive faces must have increased the avenige mobility of the 
human countenance. 



THB EMOTIONS. 479 

psychical stnte involved in the acts, is proved by the natural language 
of the propensities. Fear, when strong, expresses itself in cries, in 
efforts to escape, in palpitations, in tremblings ; and these are just the 
manifestations that go along with an actual suffering of the evil feared. 
The destructive passion is shown in a general tension of the muscular 
system, in gnashing of teeth and protrusion of the claws, in dilated eyes 
and nostrils, in growls ; and these are weaker forms of the actions that 
accompany the killing of prey. To such objective evidences every one 
can add subjective evidences. Every one can testify that the psychical 
state called fear consists of mental representations of certain painful 
results ; and that the one called anger consists of mental representa- 
tions of the actions and impressions which would occur while inflicting 
some kind of pain." ♦ 

About fear I shall have more to say presently. Mean- 
while the principle of revival in iveakened form of reactions 
nae/ul in more violent dealings tvith the object inspiring the 
emotion, has found many applications. So slight a symptom 
as the snarl or sneer, the one-sided uncovering of the upper 
teeth, is accounted for by Darwin as a survival from the time 
when our ancestors had large canines, and unfleshed them 
(as dogs now do) for attack. Similarly the raising of the 
eyebrows in outward attention, the opening of the mouth 
in astonishment, come, according to the same author, from 
the utility of these movements in extreme cases. The raising 
of the eyebrows goes with the opening of the eye for better 
vision ; the opening of the mouth with the intensest listening, 
and with the rapid catching of the breath which precedes 
muscular eflfort. The distention of the nostrils in anger 
is inter})reted by Spencer as an echo of the way in which 
our ancestors had to breathe when, during combat, their 
" mouth was filled up by a part of an antagonist's body 
that had been seized (!).*' The trembling of fear is supposed 
by Mantegazza to be for the sake of warming the blood(!). 
The reddening of the face and neck is called by Wundt a 
compensatory arrangement for relieving the brain of the 
blood-pressure which the simultaneous excitement of the 
heart brings with it. The effusion of tears is explained 
both by this author and by Darwin to be a blood-with- 
drawing agency of a similar sort. The contraction of the 
muscles around the eyes, of which the primitive use is to 



♦Psychol.. §218. 



4«0 PBTCHOLOGT, 

protect those organs from being too much gorged with 
blood during the screaming fits of infancy, survives in 
adult life in the shape of the frown, which instantly comes 
over the brow when anything difficult or displeasing pre- 
sents itself either to thought or action. 

'' As the habit of contracting the brows has been followed by infants 
during innumerable generations, at the commencement of every crying 
or screaming fit/' says Darwin, ** it has become firmly associated with 
the incipient sense of something distressing or disagreeable. Hence, 
under similar circumstances, it would be apt to be continued during 
maturity, although never then developed, into a crying fit. Screaming 
or weeping begins to be voluntarily restrained at an early i)eriod of life, 
whereas frowning is hardly ever restrained at any age." ♦ 

The intermittent expirations which constitute laughter 
have, according to Dr. Hecker, the purpose of counteract- 
ing the anaemia of the brain, which he supposes to be 
brought about by the action of the joyous or comic stimulus 
upou the VHSo- motor nerves.t A smile is the weak vestige 
of a laugh. The tight closure of the mouth in all effort is 
useful for retaining the air in the lungs so as to fix the chest 
and give a firm basis of insertion for the muscles of the 
flanks. Accordingly, we see the lips compress themselves 
upon every slight occasion of resolve. The blood-pressure 
has to be high during the sexual embrace ; hence the palpi- 

* Weepiiiir in cliihiliood is Hlmost as regular a symptom of anger as it 
is of grief, which would account (ou Darwin's principles) for the frown of 
anger. Mr. Spencer has an account of the angry frown as having aris<.*n 
through the survival of the fittest, by its utility in keepiuir the sun out of 
one's eyes when engaged in mortal combat (I). (Principles of l*sychoh>gy, ii. 
646.) Professor Mosso objects to any explanation of the frown by its 
utility for vision, that it is coupled, during emotional exciienient. with 
a dilatation of the pupil which is very unfavorable for distinct vision, and 
that this ought to have been weeded out by natural selection, if natural 
selection had the power to fix the frown (see La Paura, chap. ix. § vi). 
Unfortunately this very able author speaks as if all the emotions affected 
the pupil in the same way. Fear certainly does make ii dilate. But 
Gratiolet is quoted by Darwin and others as saying that the pupils con- 
tract in anger. I have made no observations of my own on the point, and 
Mosso '8 earlier paper on the pupil (Turin, 1875) I have not seen. I must 
repeat, with Darwin, that we need more minute observations on this 
subject. 

t Physiologie u. Psychologic des Lachens und des Eomischen (Berlin^ 
1878), pp. 13 15. 



THE EMOTION. 481 

tatioDS, and hence also the tendency to caressing action, 
which accompanies tender emotion in its fainter forms. 
Other examples might be given; but these are quite 
enough to show the scope of the principle of revival of 
useful action in weaker form. 

Another principle, to which Darwin perhaps hardly 
does sufficient justice, may be called the principle of 
reacting similarly to arudogoua-feding atimvli. There is a 
whole vocabulary of descriptive adjectives common to im- 
pressions belonging to different sensible spheres — experi- 
ences of all classes are sweety impressions of all classes rich 
or sdidy sensations of all classes sharp. Wundt and Piderit 
accordingly explain many of our most expressive reactions 
upon moral causes as symbolic gustatory movements. As 
soon as any experience arises which has an affinity with the 
feeling of sweet, or bitter, or sour, the same movements are 
executed which would result from the taste in point.* 
" All the states of mind which language designates by the 
metaphors bitter, harsh, sweet, combine themselves, there- 
fore, with the corresponding mimetic movements of the 
mouth.'* Certainly the emotions of disgust and satisfac- 
tion do express themselves in this mimetic way. Disgust is 
an incipient regurgitation or retching, limiting its expres- 
sion often to the grimace of the lips and nose ; satisfaction 
goes with a sucking smile, or tasting motion of the lips. 
In Mantegazza's loose if learned work, the attempt is made, 
much less successfully, to bring in the eye and ear as ad- 
ditional sources of symbolically expressive reaction. The 
ordinary gesture of negation — among us, moving the head 
about its axis from side to side — is a reaction originally used 
by babies to keep disagreeables from getting into their 
mouth, and may be observed in perfection in any nursery.t 



* 1 hese movements are explained tcleologically, in the first instance, 
by the efforts which the tongue is forced to make to adapt itself to the 
better perception or avoidance of the sapid body. (Cf. Physiol. Psych., u. 
423.) 

t Professor Henle derives the negative wag of the head from an incipi- 
ent shudder, and remarks how fortunate is the abbreviation, as when a lady 
declines a partner in the ballroom. The clapping of the hands for ap- 
plause he explains as a Bymbolic abridgment of an embrace. The pro* 



482 P87CH0L0GT. 

It is now evoked where the stimulus is only an unwelcome 
idea. Similarly the nod forward in affirmation is after the 
analogy of taking food into the mouth. The connection of • 
the expression of moral or social disdain or dislike, es- 
pecially in women, with movements having a perfectly defi- 
nite original olfactory function, is too obvious for comment. 
Winking is the effect of any threatening surprise, not only 
of what puts the eyes in danger ; and a momentary aver- 
sion of the eyes is very apt to be one's first symptom of re- 
sponse to an unexpectedly unwelcome proposition. — ^These 
may suffice as examples of movements expressive from 
analogy. 

But if certain of our emotional reactions can be ex- 
plained by the two principles invoked — and the reader will 
himself have felt how conjectural and fallible in some of 
the instances the explanation is — there remain many reac- 
tions which cannot so be explained at all, and these we must 
write down for the present as purely idiopathic effects of 
the stimulus. Amongst them are the effects on the viscera 
and internal glands, the dryness of the mouth and diar- 
rhoea and nausea of fear, the liver-disturbances which some- 
times produce jaundice after excessive rage, the urinary 
secretion of sanguine excitement, and the bladder-contrac- 
tion of apprehension, the gaping of expectancy, the * lump 
in the throat * of grief, the tickling there and the swallow- 
ing of embarrassment, the * precordial ' anxiety * of dread, 
the changes in the i)upil, the various sweatings of the skin, 
cold or hot, local or general, and its flushings, together 
with other symptoms which probably exist but are too 
hidden to have been noticed or named. It seems as if even 
the changes of blood-pressure and heart-beat during emo- 
tional excitement might, instead of being teleologically de- 
termined, prove to be purely mechanical or physiological 
outpourings through the easiest drainage-channels — the 
pneumogastrics and sympathetic nerves happening under 
ordinary circumstances to be such channels. 

tnision of the lips {der prufeiuU Zug) which goes with all sorts of dubious 
and questioning states of mind is derived by Dr. Piderit from the tasting 
movement which we can see on any one's mouth when deciding whether a 
wine is good or not. 



THE EMOTIONS. 483 

Mr. Spencer argues that the smallest muscles must be 
such channels ; and instances the tail in dogs, cats, and 
birds, the ears in horses, the crest in parro'ts, the face and 
fingers in man, as the first organs to be moved by emotional 
stimuli.* This principle (if it be one) would apply still 
more easily to the muscles of the smaller arteries (though 
not exactly to the heart) ; whilst the great variability of the 
circulatory symptoms would also suggei^t that they are de- 
termined by causes into which utility does not enter. The 
quickening of the heart lends itself, it is true, rather easily 
to explanation by inherited habit, organic memory of more 
violent excitement; and Darwin speaks in favor of this 
view (see his Expression, etc., pp. 74-6). But, on the 
other hand, we have so many cases of reaction which are 
indisputably pathological, as we may say, and which could 
never be serviceable or derived from what was serviceable, 
that I think we should be cautious about pushing our ex- 
planations of the varied heart-beat too far in the teleological 
direction. Trembling, which is found in many excitements 
besides that of terror, is, pace Mr. Spencer and Sig. Mante- 
gazza, quite pathological. So are terror's other strong 
symptoms. Professor Mosso, as the total result of his 
study, writes as follows : 

** We have seen that the graver the peril becomes, the more do the 
reactions which are positively harmful to the animal prevail in number 
and in efficacy. We already saw that the trembling and the palsy make 
it incapable of flight or defence ; we have also convinced ourselves that 
in the most dtjcisive moments of danger we are less able to see [or to 
think) than when we are tranquil. In face of such facts we must admit 
that the phenomena of fear cannot all be accounted for by 'selection.' 
Their extreme dt^grec« are morbid phenomena which show an imi)erfec- 
tion in the organism. We might almost say that Nature had not been 



* Loc. eit. ^ 497. Why a dog's face-muscles are not more mobile than 
they are Mr. Spencer fails to explain, as also why different stimuli 'should 
innervate these small muscles in such different ways, if easy drainage be 
the only principle involved. Charles Bell accounted for the special part 
played by the facial muscles in expression by their being aeeetsary intvieU$ 
of respiration, governed by nerves whose origin is close to the respiratory 
centre in the medulla oblongata. They are an adjuvant of voice, and like 
it their function is oommunicntion. (See Bell's Anatomy of Expression. 
Appendix by Alexander Shaw.) 



484 P87CH0L0Q7. 

able to frame a substance which should be excitable enough to com- 
pose the brain and spinal marrow, and yet which should not be so ex- 
cited by exceptional stimulation as to overstep in its reactions thoee 
physiological bounds which are useful to the conservation of the crea- 
ture."* 

Professor Bain, if I mistake not, had long previously 
commented upon fear in a similar way. 

Mr. Darwin accounts for many emotional expressions 
by what he calls the principle of antithesis. In virtue of 
this principle, if a certain stimulus prompted a certain set 
of movements, then a contrary-feeling stimulus would 
prompt exactly the opposite movements, although these 
might otherwise have neither utility nor significance. It is 
in this wise that Darwin explains the expression of impo- 
tence, raised eyebrows, and shrugged shoulders, dropped 
arms and open palms, as being the antithesis of the frown- 
ing brow, the thrown-back shoulders, and clenched fists of 
rage, which is the emotion of power. No doubt a certain 
number of movements can be formulated under this law ; 
but whether it expresses a earned principle is more than 
doubtful. It has been by most critics considered the least 
successful of Darwin's speculations on this subject. 

To sum up, we see the reason for a few emotional re- 
actions ; for others a possible species of reason may be 
guessed ; but others remain for which no plausible reason 
can even be conceived. These may be reactions which are 
purely mechanical results of the way in which our nervous 
centres are framed, reactions which, although permanent 
in us now, may be called accidental as far as their origin 
goes. In fact, in an organism as complex as the nervous 
system there mnst be many such reactions, incidental to 
others evolved for utilit^^'s sake, but which would never 
themselves have been evolved independently, for any utility 
they mif^ht ])ossess. Sea-sickness, the Jove of music, of 
the various intoxicants, nay, the eutire jrsthetic life of man, 
shall have to trace to this accidental origin. t It would be 
foolish to suj)pose that none of the reartions called emo- 
tional could have arisen in this 5'?(^M"i-acci(leiital way. 

* La Paura, Appendice, p. 295. \ See below, p. 827- 



THE BMOTlOim. 486 

This is all I have to say about the emotions. If one 
should seek to name each particular one of them of which 
the human heart is the seat, it is plain that the limit to their 
number would lie in the introspective vocabulary of the 
seeker, each race of men having found names for some 
shade of feeling which other races have left undiscrimi- 
nated. If then we should seek to break the emotioDs, thus 
enumerated, into groups, according to their affinities, it is 
again plain that all sorts of groupings would be pos- 
sible, according as we chose this character or that as a 
basis, and that all groupings would be equally real and 
true. The only question would be, does this grouping or 
that suit our purpose best? The reader may then class 
the emotions as he will, as sad or joyous, sthenic or 
asthenic, natural or acquired, inspired by animate or inani- 
mate things, formal or material, sensuous or ideal, direct 
or reflective, egoistic or non-egoistic, retrospective, pros- 
pective or immediate, organismally or environmentally 
initiated, or what more besides. All these are divisions 
which have been actually proposed. Each of them has its 
merits, and each one brings together some emotions which 
the others keep apart For a fuller account, and for other 
classificatory schemes, I refer to the Appendix to Bain's 
Emotions and the Will, and to Mercier's, Stanley's, and 
Read's articles on the Emotions, in Mind, vols, ix, x, and XL 
In vol. IX. p. 421 there is also an article by the lamented 
Edmund Gurney in criticism of the view which in this 
chapter I continue to defend. 



CHAPTER XXVL» 

WILL. 

Desibe, wish, will, are states of mind which everyone 
knows, and which no definition can make plainer. We de- 
sire to feel, to have, to do, all sorts of things which at the 
moment are not felt, had, or done. If with the desire there 
goes a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply vnsh ; 
but if we believe that the end is in our power, we tviU that 
the desii'ed feeling, having, or doing shall be real ; and real 
it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing 
or after certain preliminaries have been fulfilled. 

' The only ends which follow immediately upon our will- 
ing seem to be movements of our own bodies. Whatever 
feelings and havings we may will to get, come in as results 
of preliminary movements which we make for the purpose. 
This fact is too familiar to need illustration; so that we maj' 
start with the proposition that the only direct outward 
eflfects of our will are bodily movements. The mechanism 
of production of these voluntary movements is what befalls 
us to study now. The subject involves a good many sepa- 
rate points which it is diflScult to arrange in any continu- 
ous logical order. I will treat of them successively in the 
mere order of convenience ; trusting that at the end the 
reader will gain a clear and connected view. 

The movements we have studied hitherto have been 
automatic and reflex, and (on the first occasion of their per- 
formance, at any rate) unforeseen by the agent. The move- 
ments to the study of which we now address ourselves, 
being desired and intended beforehand, are of course done 

* Parts of this chapter have appeared in an essay called " The Feelinp 
of Effort," published in the Anniversary Memoirs of the Boston Society of 
Natural History, lb«U ; and parts in Scribner's Magazine for Feb. li<SS. 

486 



WILL. 487 

with full prevision of what they are to be. It follows from 
this that voluntary movement must be seamdary, not primary 
functions of our organism. This is the first point to under- 
stand in the psychology of Volition, Keflex, instinctive, 
and emotional movements are all primary performances. 
The nerve-centres are so organized that certain stimuli pull 
the trigger of certain explosive parts ; and a creature going 
through one of these explosions for the first time under- 
goes an entirely novel experience. The other day I was 
standing at a railroad station with a little child, when an 
express-train went thundering by. The child, who was 
near the edge of the platform, started, winked, had his 
breathing convulsed, turned pale, burst out crying, and ran 
frantically towards me and hid his face. I have no doubt 
that this youngster was almost as much astonished by his 
own behavior as he was by the train, and more than I was, 
who stood by. Of course if such a reaction has many times 
occurred we learn what to expect of ourselves, and can then 
foresee our conduct, even though it remain as involuntary 
and uncontrollable as it was before. But if, in voluntary 
action properly so-called, the act must be foreseen, it fol- 
lows that no creature not endowed with divinatory power 
can perform an act voluntarily for the first time. Well, we 
are no more endowed with prophetic vision of what move- 
ments lie in our power, than we are endowed with pro- 
phetic vision of what sensations we are capable of receiving. 
As we must wait for the sensations to be given us, so we 
must wait for the movements to be performed involun- 
tarily,* before we can frame ideas of what either of 
these things are. We learn all our possibilities by the 
way of experience. When a particular movement, having 
once occurred in a random, reflex, or involuntary waj-, has 
left an image of itself in the memory, then the movement 
can be desired again, proposed as an end, and deliberately 
willed. But it is impossible to see how it could be willed 
before. 



* I am abstracting at present for simplicity's sake, and so as to keep to 
the elements of the matter, from the learning of acts by seeing others do 
them. 



1 

488 PsrcBOLoor. 

A supply of ideas of the various movements thai are possible 
Iffi in the memory by experiences of their involuntary perform-- 
ance is thus the first prerequisite of the voluntary life. 

Now the same movement involuntarily performed may 
leave many different kinds of ideas of itself in the memory. 
If performed by another person, we of course see it, or we 
fed it if the moving part strikes another part of our own 
body. Similarly we have an auditory image of its effects 
if it produces sounds, as for example when it is one of the 
movements made in vocalization, or in playing on a musical 
instrument. All these remote effects of the movement, as 
we may call them, are also produced by movements which 
we ourselves perform ; and they leave innumerable ideas 
in our mind by which we distinguish each movement 
from the rest. It looks distinct ; it feels distinct to some 
distant part of the body which it strikes ; or it sounds dis- 
tinct. These remote effects would then, rigorously speak- 
ing, suffice to furnish the mind with the supply of ideas 
required. 

But in addition to these impressions upon remote or- 
gans of sense, we have, whenever we perform a movement 
ourselves, another set of impressions, those, namely, which 
come up from the parts that are actually moved. These 
kincEsthetic impressions, as Dr. Bastian has called them, are 
so many resident effects of the motion. Not only are our 
muscles supplied with afferent as well as with efferent 
nerves, but the tendons, the ligaments, the articular sur- 
faces, and the skin about the joints are all sensitive, and, 
being stretched and squeezed in ways characteristic of each 
particular movement, give us as many distinctive feelings 
as there are mo^ ements possible to perform. 

It is by these resident impressions that we are made 
conscious of passive movements — movements communicated 
to our limbs by others. If you lie with closed eyes, and 
another person noiselessly places your arm or leg in any 
arbitrarily chosen attitude, you receive an accurate feeling 
of what attitude it is, aud can immediately reproduce it 
yourself in the arm or leg of the opposite side. Similarly 
a man waked suddenly from sleep in the dark is aware of 
how he linds himself lying. At least this is what happens 



WILL, 489 

when the nervous apparatus is normal. But in cases of 
disease we sometimes find that the resident impressions do 
not normally excite the centres, and that then the sense of 
attitude is lost. It is only recently that pathologists have 
begun to study these anaesthesias with the delicacy which 
they require ; and we have doubtless yet a great deal to 
learn about them. The skin may be anaesthetic, and the 
muscles may not feel the cramp-like pain which is pro- 
duced by faradic currents sent through them, and yet the 
sense of passive movement may be retained. It seems, in 
fact, to persist more obstinately than the other forms of 
sensibility, for cases are comparatively common in which 
all the other feelings in the limb but this one of attitude are 
lost. In Chapter XX I have tried to make it appear that 
the articular surfaces are probably the most important 
source of the resident kinaesthetic feelings. But the 
determination of their special organ is indifferent to our 
present quest. It is enough to know that the existence 
of these feelings cannot be denied. 

When the feelings of passive movement as well as all 
the other feelings of a limb are lost, we get such results as 
are given in the following account by Professor A. Striim- 
pell of his wonderful anaesthetic boy, whose only sources of 
feeling were the right eye and the left ear :* 

'' Passive movements could be imprinted on all the extremities to the 
greatest extent, without attracting the patient's notice. Only in 
violent forced hyperextension of the joints, especially of the knees, 
there arose a dull vague feeling of strain, but this was seldom precisely 
localized. We have often, after bandagirg the eyes of the patient, 
carried him about the room, laid him on a table, given to his arms and 
legs the most fantastic and apparently the most inconvenient attitudes, 
without his having a suspicion of it. The expression of astonishment 
'in his face, when all at once the removal of the handkerchief revealed 
his situation, is indescribable in words. Only when his head was made 
to hang away down he immediately spoke of dizziness, but could not 
assign its ground. Later he sometimes inferred from the sounds con- 
nected with the manipulation that something special was being done 
with him .... He had no feelings of muscular fatigue. If, with his 
eyes shut, we told him to raise his arm and to keep it up, he did so 
without trouble. After one or two minutes, however, the arm began to 



* Deutsches Archlv f. Klin. Medicin, xxn. 821. 



490 P8TCH0L00T, 

tremble aod sink without his being aware of it. He asRerted still hiB 
ability to keep it up. . . . Passively holding still bis fingers did not 
affect him. He thought constantly tliat he opened and shut his hand, 
whereas it was really fixed." 

Or '^e read of cases Uke this : 

** Voluntary movements cannot be estimated the moment the patient 
ceases to take note of them by his eyes. Thus, after having made him 
close his eyes, if one asks him to move one of his limbs either wholly or 
in part, he does it but cannot tell whether the effected movement is 
large or small, strong or weak, or even if it has taken place at all. And 
when he opens his eyes after moving his leg from right to left, for 
• example, he declares that he had a very inexact notion of the extent of 

the effected movement If, having the intention of executing a 

certain movement, I prevent him, he does not perceive it, and supposes 
the limb to have taken the position he intended to give it." '*' 

Or this : 

"The patient, when his eyes were closed in the middle of an 
unpractised movement, remained with the extremity in the position it 
had when the eyes closed and did not complete the movement properly. 
Then after some oscillations the limb gradually sank by reason of its 
weight (the sense of fatigue being absent). Of thi5; the patient was not 
aware, and wondered, when he opened his eyes, at the altered position 
of his limb." f 

A similar coudition can be readily reproduced experi- 
mentally in many hj^pnotic subjects. All that is needed is 
to tell a suitably predisposed person during the hypnotic 
trance that he cannot feel his limb, and he will be quite 
unaware of the attitudes into which you may throw itj 

All these cases, whether spontaneous or experimental, 
show the absolute need of guiding sensations of some kind 
for the successful carrying out of a concatenated series of 
movements. It is, in fact, easy to see that, just as where the 
chain of movements is automatic (see above, Vol. I. p. 116), 
each later movement of the chain has to be discharged by 
the impression which the next earlier one makes in being 



* Landry : Memoire svir la Paralysie du Sens Musculaire, Gazette dcs 
Hdpitnux, 1855. p. 270. 

t Tilkacs : Uober die Verspfttung der Emptindungsleitung. Archiv ftx 
Psychiatrie, Bd. x. Heft 2, p. 538. Concerning all such cases see the re 
marks made above on pp. 205-6. 

t Proceedings of American Soc. for Psychical Research, p. 95. 



WILL, 491 

executed, so also, where the chain is voluntary, we need to 
know at each movement just where tee are in it^ if we are to 
will intelligently what the next link shall be. A man with 
no feeling of his movements might lead oflf never so well, 
and yet be sure to get lost soon and go astray.* But 
patients like those described, who get no kinsesthetic 
impressions, can still be guided by the sense of sight 
Thus Striimpell says of his boy : 

*'0no could always observe how his eye was directed first to the 
object held before him, then to his own arm; and how it never ceased 

*In realily the movement cannot even be started correct!}'' in some 
cases without the kinsesthetic impression. Thus Dr. Strampell relates 
how turning over the boy's hand made him bend the little finger instead of 
the forefinger, when his eye was closed. " Ordered to point, e.g., towards 
the left with his left arm, the arm was usually raised straight foi-ward, and 
then wandered about in groping uncertainty, sometimes getting the right 
position aud then leaving it again. Similarly with the lower limbs. If the 
patieut, lying in bed, had. immediately after the tying of his eyes, to lay 
the left leg over the right, it often happened that he moved it farther over 
towards the left, and that it lay over the side of the bed in apparently 
the most intolerably-uncomfortable position. The turning of the head, 
too. from right to left, or towards certain objects known to the patient»only 
ensued correctly when the patient, immediately before his eye was bandaged, 
specially refreshed his perception as to what the required movement was 
to be.'' In another auiesthetic of Dr. StrQmpeirs (described in the same 
essay) the arm could not be moved at all unless the eyes were opened* 
however energetic the volition. The variations in these hysteric cases aro 
great. Some patients cannot move the anaesthetic part at all when the eyes 
are closed Others move it perfectly well, and can even write continuous 
sentences with the anaesthetic hand. The causes of such differences are as 
yet incompletely unexplored. M. Binet suggests (Revue Philosophique, 
XXV. 478) that in those who cannot move the hand at all the sensation of 
light is required as a 'dynamogenic ' agent (see above, p 877); and that in 
those who can move it skilfully the anaesthesia is only a pseudo- insensi- 
bility and that the limb is in reality governed by a dissociated or secondary 
consciousness. This latter explanation is certainly correct. Professor 
G. E. Mttller (PflQger's Archiv, xlv. 90) invokes the fact of individual 
differences of imagination to account for the cases who cannot write at all. 
Their kinsesthetic images properly so called may be weak, he says, and 
their optical images insufficiently powerful to supplement them without a 
• fillip ' from sen.sation. Janet's observation that hysteric anaisthesias may 
carry amnesias with them would perfectly legitimate Mailer's supposition. 
What we now want is a minute examination of the individual cases. 
3Ieanwhile Binet's article above referred to. and Bastian's paper in Brain 
for April 1887, contain important discussions of the question. In a later 
note I shall return to the subject again (see p. 520). 



492 PaTCHOLOQT, 

to follow the latter during its entire movement. All his volantarj 
movements took place under the unremitting lead of the eye, which as 
an indispensable guide, was never untrue to its functions.'' 

So in the Landry case : 

•' With his eyes open, he easily opposes the thumb to each of the 
other fingers ; with his eyes closed, the movement of opposition occurs, 
but the thumb only by chance meets the finger which it seeks. With 
his eyes open he is able, without hesitation, to bring his two hands 
together ; but when his eyes are closed his hands seek one another in 
space, and only meet by chance.'' 

In Charles Bell's well-known old case of anaesthesia the 
woman could only hold her baby safely in her arms so long 
as she looked at it I have myself reproduced a similar 
condition in two hypnotic subjects whose arm and hand 
were made anaesthetic without being paralyzed. They could 
write their names when looking, but not when their eyes 
were closed. The modern mode of teaching deaf mutes to 
articulate consists in making them attentive to certain 
laryngeal, labial, thoracic, and other sensations, the repro- 
duction of which becomes a guide to their vocalization. 
Normally it is the remoter sensations which we receive by 
the ear which keep us from going astray in our speech. 
The phenomena of aphasia show this to be the usual case.* 

This is perhaps all tliat need be said about the existence 
of passive sensations of movement and their indispensable- 
ness for our voluutary activity. We may consequently set 
it doAvn as certain that, ivhether or no there be anything else in 
the mi 71(1 at the moment when v:e consciously toill a ceiiain act^ 
a mental conception made tip of memory -images of these sensa- 
tions, defning ichich special act it is, must be there. 

Now is there anything else in the mind when toe tmU to do an 
act ? We must proceed in this chapter from the simpler to 
the more complicated cases. My first thesis accordingly is, 
that there need be nothing else, and that in perfectly simple vol- 



* Professor Beaunis found that the accuracy with which a certain tenor 
sang was not lost when his vocal cords were made anfesthetic by cocain. 
He concludes that the guiding sensations here are resident in the lar^^ngeal 
muscles themselves. Tbey are much more probably In the ear. (Beaunia^ 
Les Sensations Internes (1889), p. 253). 



WILL, 493 

untary acts there is nothing dae^ in the mind but the kincesthetic 
idea, thus defined, of what the act is to be. 

A powerful tradition in Psychology will have it that 
something additional to these images of passive sensation 
is essential to the mental determination of a voluntary act 
There must, of course, be a special current of energy going 
out from the brain into the appropriate muscles during the 
act ; and this outgoing current (it is supposed) must have 
in each particular case a feeling sui generis attached to it, or 
else (it is said) the mind could never tell which particular 
current, the current to this muscle or the current to that one, 
was the right one to use. This feeling of the current of out- 
going energy has received from Wundt the name of the 
feeling of innervation. I disbelieve in its existence, and must 
proceed to criticise the notion of it, at what I fear may to 
some prove tedious length. 

At first sight there is something extremely plausiblo in 
the feeling of innervation. The passive feelings of move- 
ment with which we have hitherto been dealing all come 
after the movement's performance. But wherever a move- 
ment is difficult and precise, we become, as a matter of fact, 
acutely aware in advance of the amount and direction of 
energy which it is to involve. One has only to play ten- 
pins or billiards, or throw a ball, to catch his will in the 
act, as it were, of balancing tentatively its possible eflforts, 
and ideally rehearsing various muscular contractions nearly 
correct, until it gets just the right one before it, when it 
says * Now go ! ' This premonitory weighing feels so much 
like a succession of tentative sallyings forth of power into 
the outer world, followed by correction just in time to avoid 
the irrevocal)le deed, that the notion that outgoing nerve- 
currents rather than mere vestiges of former passive sensi- 
bility accompany it, is a most natural one to entertain. 

We find accordingly that most authors have taken the 
existence of feelings of innervation as a matter of course^ 
Bain, Wundt, Helmholtz, and Mach defend them most 
explicitly. But in spite of the authority which such writers 
deservedly wield, I cannot help thinking that they are in 
this instance wrong,— that the discharge into the motor 
nerves is insentient, and that all our ideas of movement, in- 



494 PSYCHOLOGY. 

eluding those of the effort which it requires, as well as those 
of its direction, its extent, its strength, and its velocity, are 
images of peripheral sensations^ either * remote^ or resident in 
the moving parts, or in other parts which sympatheiioaUy act 
xoith them in conseqvemxof the ' diffusive wave,* 

A priori, as I shall show, there is no reason why there 
should be a consciousness of the motor discharge, and there 
is a reason why there should not be such a consciousness. 
The presumption is thus against the existence of the feeling 
of innervation ; and the burden of proving it falls upon those 
who believe in ii If the positive empirical e^^dence which 
they offer prove also insufficient, then their case falls to the 
ground, and the feeling in question must be ruled out of 
court 

In the first place, then, let me show that the assumption 
of the feding of innervation is unnecessary. 

I cannot help suspecting that the scholastic prejudice 
that * the effect must be already in some way contained in the 
cause * has had something to do with making psychologists 
so ready to admit the feeling of innervation. The outgoing 
current being the effect, what psychic antecedent could 
contain or prefigure it better than a feeling of it? But 
if we take a wide ^dew, and consider the psychic ante- 
cedents of our actiAdties at large, we see that the scholastic 
maxim breaks down everywhere, and that its verification 
in this instance would rather violate than illustrate the 
general rule. In the diffusive wave, in reflex action, and 
in emotional expression, the movements which are the 
effects are iu no manner contained by anticipation in the 
stimuli which are their cause. The latter are subjective 
sensations or objective perceptions, which do not in the 
slightest degree resemble or prefigure the movements. But 
we get them, and, presto ! there the movements are! They 
are knocked out of us, they surprise us. It is just cause 
for wonder, as our chapter on Instinct has shown us, 
that such bodily consequences should follow such men- 
tal antecedents. We explain the mystery tant bien que 
imd by our evolutionary theories, saying that lucky varia- 
tions and heredity have gradually brought it about that 



WILL. 495 

this particular pair of terms should have grown into a urn- 
form sequence. Meanwhile why any state of consciousness 
at aU should precede a movement, we know not — the two 
things seem so essentially discontinuous. But if a state of 
consciousness there must be, why then it may, for aught 
we can see, as easily be one sort of a state as another. It 
is swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat for a man (all 
of whose muscles will on certain occasions contract at a 
sudden touch or sound) to suppose that on another occasion 
the idea of the feelings about to be produced by their con- 
traction is an insufficient mental signal for the latter^ and to 
insist tUat an additional antecedent is needed in the shape 
of 'a feeling of the outgoing discharge.' 

No ! for aught we can see, and in the light of gi^neral 
analogy, the kinsesthetic ideas, as we have defined them, or 
images of incoming feelings of attitude and motion, are as 
likely as any feelings of innervation are, to be the last 
psychic antecedents and determiners of the various cur- 
rents downwards into the muscles from the brain. The 
question ''What are the antecedents and determinants?" is 
a question of fact, to be decided by whatever empirical evi- 
dence may be found.* 

* As the feeling of heat, for example, is the last psychic aDteoedent of 
sweating, as the feeling of bright light is that of the pupil's contraction, as 
the sight or smell of carrion is that of the movements of disgust, as the 
remembrance of a blunder may be that of a blush, so the idea of a move- 
ment's sensible effects might be that of the movement itself. It is true 
that the idea of Hweating will not commonly make us sweat, nor that of 
blushing make us blush. But in certain nauseated states the idea of vom- 
iting will make us vomit; and a kind of sequence which is in this case 
realized only exceptionally might be the rule with the so-called voluntary 
muscles It all depends on the nervous connections between the centres 
of ideation and the discharging paths. These may differ from one sort of 
centre to another. They do differ somewhat from one individual to an- 
other. Many persons never blush at the idea of their blunders, but only 
when the actual blunder is committed; others blush at the idea; and some 
do not blush at all. According to Lotze, with some persons " It is possible 
to weep at will by trying to recall that peculiar feeling in the trigeminal 
nerve which habitually precedes tears. Some can even succeed in sweating 
voluntarily, by the lively recollection of the characteristic skin -sensations, 
and the voluntary reproduction of an indescribable sort of feeling of relax- 
ation, which ordinarily precedes the flow of perspiration." (Med. Psych., 
p. 803.) The commoner type of exceptional case is that in which the idea 
of the stimuli^, not that of the effects, provokes the effects. Thus wo 



496 P8TCH0L00T, 

But before considering the empirical evidence, let me 
go on to show that there is a certain a priori reason why 
the kinoesthetic images ought to be the last psychic antecedents q/ 
the outgoing currents, and why we should expect these currents 
to be insentient; why, in short, the soi-disant fedings of inner- 
vation should not exist. 

It is a general principle in Psychology that conseious- 
less deserts all processes where it can no longer be of use. 
The tendency of consciousness to a minimum of complica- 
tion is in fact a dominating law. The law of parsimony in 
logic is only its best known case. We grow unconscious 
of every feeling which is useless as a sign to lead us to our 
ends, and where one sign will suffice others drop out, and 
that one remains, to work alone. . We observe this in the 
whole history of sense-perception, and in the acquisition 
of every art We ignore which eye we see with, because a 
fixed mechanical association has been formed between our 
motions and each retinal image. Our motions are the 
ends of our seeing, our retinal images the signals to these 
ends. If each retinal image, whichever it be, can suggest 
automatically a motion in the right direction, what need 
for us to know whether it be in the right eye or the left ? 

read of persona who oontroot their pupils at will by strongly imagining a 
brilliant light. A gentleman once informed me (strangely enough I can- 
not recAll who he was, but I have an impression of his being a medicul man) 
that he could sweat at will by imagining himself on the brinlc of a precipice. 
The sweating palms of fear are sometimes producible by imagining a ter- 
rible object (cf. Manouvrier in Rev. Phil., xxii. 208). One of my students, 
whose eyes were made to water by sitting in the dentist's chair before a 
bright window, can now shed tears by imagining that .»»ituation agam. 
One might doubtless collect a large number of idiosyncratic cases of this 
sort. They teach us how greatly the centres vary in their i>ower to dis- 
charge through certain channels. All that we need, now. to account for 
the diiferences observed between the psychic antecedents of the volun- 
tary and involuntary movements is that centres producing ideas of the 
movement's sensible effects should be able to instigate the former, but be 
out of gear with the latter, unless in exceptional individuals. The famous 
case of Col. Townscnd. who could stop his heart at will, is well known. 
Scp, on this whole matter, D. H. Tuke: Illustrations of the Influence of 
the Mind on the Body, chap. xiv. § 3; also J. Braid: Observations on 
Trance or Human Hybernation (1850). The latest reported case of voluu- 
tary control of the heart is by Dr. 8. A. Pease, in Boston Medical and Sur- 
gical Journal. May 80. 1889. 



WILL, 497 

That knowledge would be superfluous complication. So in 
acquiring any art or voluntary function. The marksman 
ends by thinking only of the exact position of the goal, the 
singer only of the perfect sound, the balancer only of the 
point of the pole whose oscillations he must counteract. 
The associated mechanism has become so perfect in all 
these persons that each variation in the thought of the 
end is functionally correlated with the one movement 
fitted to bring the latter about Whilst they were tyros, 
they thought of their means as well as their end: the 
marksman of the position of his gun or bow, or the weight 
of his stone ; the pianist of the visible position of the note 
on the keyboard; the singer of his throat or breathing; the 
balancer of his feet on the rope, or his hand or chin under 
the pole. But little by little they succeeded in dropping 
all this supernumerary consciousness, and they became 
secure in their movements exactly in proportion as they 
did so. 

Now if we analyze the nervous mechanism of voluntary 
action, we shall see that by virtue of this principle of par- 
simony in consciousness the motor discharge ought to be 
devoid of sentience. If we call the immediate psychic an- 
tecedent of a movement the latter's mental eve, all that is 
needed for invariability of sequence on the movement's 
part is ^ fixed connection between each several mental cue, 
and one particular movement. For a movement to be pro- 
duced with perfect precision, it suffices that it obey in- 
stantly its own mental cue and nothing else, and that this 
mental cue be incapable of awakening any other movement 
Now the simplest possible arrangement for producing vol- 
untary movements would be that the memory-images of 
the movement's distinctive peripheral effiects, whether resi- 
dent or remote,* themselves should severally constitute the 
mental cues, and that no other psychic facts should inter- 
vene or be mixed up with them. For a million difierent 
voluntary movements, we should then need a million dis- 

* Prof. Uarless, in an article whicli in many respects forestalls what T^ 
have to say (Der Apparat des Willens, in Fichte's Zeitschrift f. Philos., 
Bd. 38, 1861), uses the convenient word EffecUbUd to designate these 

images. 



498 PaTCHOLOQT. 

tinct processes in the brain-cortex (each corresponding to 
the idea or memory-image of one movement), and a million 
distinct paths of discharge. Everything would then be 
unambiguously determined, and if the idea were right, the 
movement would be right too. Everything after the idea 
might then be quite insentient, and the motor discharge 
itself could be unconsciously performed. 

The partisans of the feeling of innervation, however, 
say that the motor discharge itself must be felt, and that 
it, and not the idea of the movement's distinctive effects, 
must be the proper mental cue. Thus the principle of 
parsimony is sacrificed, and all economy and simplicity are 
lost. For what can be gained by the interposition of this 
relay of feeling between the idea of the movement and the 
movement? Nothing on the score of economy of nerve- 
tracts ; for it takes just as many of them to associate a 
million ideas of movement with a million motor centres, 
each with a specific feeling of innervation attached to its 
discharge, as to associate the same million ideas with a 
million insentient motor centres. And nothing on the score 
of precision ; for the only conceivable way in which the 
feelings of innervation might further precision would be by 
giving to a mind whose idea of a movement was vague, a sort 
of halting stage with sharper imagery on which to collect 
its wits before uttering its^a/. But not only are the con- 
scious discriminations between our kinaosthetic ideas much 
sharper than any one pretends the shades of difference be- 
tween feelings of innervation to be, but even were this not 
the case, it is impossible to see how a mind with its idea 
vaguely conceived could tell out of a lot of Innervations- 
ge/Uhle, were they never so sharply differentiated, which one 
fitted that idea exactly, and which did not. A sharply con- 
ceived idea will, on the other hand, directly awaken a dis- 
tinct movement as easily as it will awaken a distinct feeling 
of innervation. If feelings can go astray through vague- 
ness, surely the fewer steps of feeling there are interposed 
the more securely we shall act. We ought then, on a 
priori grounds alone, to regard the InnervaiionsgefUJd as 
a pure encumbrance, and to presume that the peripheral 
ideas of movement are sufficient mental cues. 



WILL, 499 

The presumption being thus against the feelings of in- 
nervation, those who defend their existence are bound to 
prove it by positive evidence. The evidence might be di- 
rect or indirect If we could introspectively feel them as 
something plainly distinct from the peripheral feelings and 
ideas of movement which nobody denies to be there, that 
would be evidence both direct and conclusive. Unfor- 
tunately it does not exist 

There is no introspective evidence of the feeling of innerva- 
tion. Wherever we look for it and think we have grasped 
it, we find that we have really got a peripheral feeling or 
image instead — an image of the way in which we feel when 
the innervation is over, and the movement is in process of 
doing or is done. Our idea of raising our arm, for example, 
or of crooking our finger, is a sense, more or less vivid, of 
how the raised arm or the crooked finger feels. There is 
no other mental material out of which such an idea might 
be made. We cannot possibly have any idea of our ears' 
motion until our ears have moved ; and this is true of every 
other organ as well. 

Since the time of Hume it has been a commonplace in 
psychology that we are only conversant with the outward 
results of our volition, and not with the hidden inner 
machinery of nerves and muscles which are what it prima- 
rily sets at work.* The believers in the feeling of inner- 
vation readily admit this, but seem hardly alive to itp con- 
sequences. It seems to me that one immediate conse- 
quence ought to be to make us doubt the existence of the 
feeling in dispute. Whoever says that in raising his arm 
he is ignorant of how many muscles he contracts, in what 
order of sequence, and in what degrees of intensity, ex- 
pressively avows a colossal amount of unconsciousness of 
the processes of motor discharge. Each separate muscle 
at any rate cannot have its distinct feeling of innervation. 
W"uu lit who makes such enormous use of these hypo- 



* The best racnlern statemeut I know is by Jaccoud: Des Parapl6gie8 et 
de I'Ataxie du Moiiveuient (Paris. 1864), p. 591. 

t Leidesdorf u. Meynerfs Vierteljsch. f. Psycliiatrie, Bd. i. Heft i. 8. 
36-7 (1867). Physiologische Psychologie. Ist ed. S. 316. 



600 P87CH0L0QT. 

thetical feelings in his psychologic construction of space, ia 
himself led to admit that they have no differences of quality, 
but feel alike in all muscles, and vary only in their degrees 
of intensity. They are used by the mind as guides, not 
of ivhixih movement, but of hoio strong a movement, it is 
making, or shall make. But does not this virtually sur- 
render their existence altogether ? * 

For if anything be obvious to introspection it is that 
the degree of strength of our muscular contractions is com- 
pletely revealed to us by afferent feelings coming from the 
muscles themselves and their insertions, from the vicinity 
of the joints, and from the general fixation of the larynx, 
chest, face, and body, in the phenomenon of effort, objec- 
tively considered. When a certain degree of energy of con- 
traction rather than another is thought of by us, this com- 
plex aggregate of afferent feelings, forming the material of 
our thought, renders absolutely precise and distinctive our 
mental image of the exact strength of movement to be 
made, and the exact amount of resistance to be overcome. 

Let the reader try to direct his will towards a particu- 
lar movement, and then notice what constituted the direc- 
tion of the will. Was it anything over and above the no- 
tion of the different feelings to which the movement when 
effected would give rise ? If we abstract from these feel- 
ings, will any sign, principle, or means of orientation be 
left by which the will may innervate the right muscles 
with the right intensity, and not go astray into the wrong 
ones? Strip off these images of result, and so far from 
lea^4ng us with a complete assortment of directions into 
which our will may launch itself, you leave our conscious- 
ness in an absolute and total vacuum. If I will to write 
"Peter" rather than "Paul," it is the thought of certain 
digital sensations, of certain alphabetic sounds, of certain 
appearances on the paper, and of no others, which im- 
mediately precedes the motion of my pen. 

• Professor Fouillee, who defends them in the Revue Philosophiquo, 
XXVIII. 561 fif. also admits (p. 574) that they are the same whatever be th» 
movement, and that all our discrimination of which movement we are inner- 
vating is afferent, consisting of sensations after, and of sensory images 
before, the act. 



WILL. 601 

If I will to utter the word Pavl rather than PeteVy it is 
the thought of my voice falling on my ear, and of certain 
muscular feelings in my tongue, lips, and larynx, which 
guide the utterance. All these are incoming feelings, and 
between the thought of them, by which the act is mentally 
specified with all possible completeness, and the act itself, 
there is no room for any third order of mental phenome- 
non. There is indeed the Jiat^ the element of consent, 
or resolve that the act shall ensue. This, doubtless, to 
the reader's mind, as to my own, constitutes the essence of 
the voluntariness of the act This fiat will be treated of 
in detail farther on. It may be entirely neglected here, 
for it is a constant coefficient, affecting all voluntary 
actions alike, and incapable of serving to distinguish them. 
No one will pretend that its quality varies according as the 
right arm, for example, or the left is used. 

An anticipatory imagCy iheriy of the sensorial consequences 
of a movement, plvs {on certain occasions) the fiat that these 
consequences shall become oettuil, is the only psychic state 
which introspection lets tis discern as the forerunner of our 
vduntiiry acts. There is no introspective evidence what- 
ever of any still later or concomitant feeling attached to 
the efferent discharge. The various degrees of difficulty with 
wliich the fiat is given form a complication of the utmost 
importance, to be discussed farther on. 

Now the reader may still shake his head and say ; 
'* But can j^ou seriously mean that all the W9nderfully 
exact adjustment of my action's strength to its ends is not 
a matter of out^oiiitij iuuervation? Here is a caniioii-ball, 
and h(ire a pasteboard box : instantly and accurately I 
lift eacli from the table, the ball not refusing to rise 
because my iunervation was too weak, the box not flying 
abruptly iuto the air because it was too strong. Could 
representations of the movement's different sensory effects 
in the two cases be so delicately foreshadowed in the 
mind? or being there, is it credible that they should, 
all unaided, so delicately graduate the stimulation of the 
unconscious motor centres to their work ? " Even so ! 
I reply to l)oth queries. We have a most extremely deli- 
cate foreshadowing of the sensory effects. Why else the 




602 PSYCHOLOGY. 

start of surprise that runs through us if some one has 
filled the light-seeming box with sand before we try to 
lift it, or has substituted for the cannon-ball which we 
know a painted wooden imitation? Surprise can only 
come from getting a sensation which differs from the one 
we expect But the truth is that when we know the objects 
well, the very slightest difference from the expected weight 
will surprise us, or at least attract our notice. With un- 
known objects we begin by expecting the weight made 
probable by their appearance. The expectation of this 
sensation innervates our lift, and we ' set * it rather small 
at first. An instant verifies whether it is too small Our 
expectation rises, i.e., we think in a twinkling of a setting 
of the chest and teeth, a bracing of the back, and a more 
violent feeling in the arms. Quicker than thought we have 
them, and with them the burden ascends into the air.* 
Bernhardt f has shown in a rough experimental way that 
our estimation of the amount of a resistance is as delicately 
graduated when our wills are passive, and our limbs made 
to contract by direct local faradization, as when we our- 

♦ Cf. Souriau in Rev. Philosophique, xxir. 454— Professor G. E. 
Htiller thus describes some of his experiments with weights : If, after 
lifting a weight of 8000 grams a number of times w^e suddenly gel a weight 
of only 500 grams to lift, *• this latter weight is then lifted with h velocity 
which strikes every onlooker, so that the receptacle for the weiirht with all 
its OTiitents often flies high up as if it carried the arm along with it, and 
the energy with which it is raised is sometimes so entirely out of propor- 
tion to th^fc^ight itself, that the contents of the receptarle are slung out 
upon the table in spite of the mechanical obstacles which such a result has 
to overcome. A more palpable proof that the trouble here is a wrong adap- 
tation of the motor impulse could not be given." Ptll\ger s Archiv, xlv. 
47. Compare also p. 57, and the quotation from iieriug on the same 
page. 

t Archiv fttr Psychiatrie, iii. 618-685. Bernhardt strangely enough 
seems to think that what his experiments disprove is the existence of affer- 
ent muscilar feelings, not those of efferent innervation— apparently becjiuse 
he deema that the peculiar thrill of the electricity ought to overpower all 
other afferent feelings from the part But it is far more natural to inter- 
pret his results the other way, even aside from the certainty yielded by 
other evidence that passive muscular feelings exist. This other evidence. 
after being compendiously summed up by Sachs in Reichert und Du 
Bois' Archiv (1874), pp 174-188, is, as far as the anatomical and physio- 
logical grounds go. again thrown into doubt by Mays, Zeitschrift f. Bir> 
logic, Bd. XX. 



WILL. 503 

selves innervate them. Ferrier * has repeated and verified 
the observations. They admit of no great precision, and 
too much stress should not be laid upon them either way ; 
but at the very least they tend to show that no added deli- 
cacy would accrue to our perception from the consciousness 
of the efferent process, even if it existed. 

Since there is no direct introspective evidence for the 
feelings of innervation, is there any indirect or circumstan- 
tial evidence ? Much is offered ; but on critical examina- 
tion it breaks down. Let us see what it is. Wundt says 
that were our motor feelings of an afferent nature, 

**it ought to be expected that they would increase and diminish with 
the amount of outer or inner work actually effected in contraction. 
This, however, is not the case, but the strength of the motor sensation 
is purely proportional to the strength of the impulse to movement, 
which starts from the central organ innervating the motor nerves. 
This may be proved by observations made by physicians in cases of 
morbid alteration in the muscular effect. A patient whose arm or leg 
is half paralyzed, so that he can only move the limb with great effort, 
has a distinct feeling of this effort : the limb seems to him heavier than 
before, appearing as if weighted with lead ; he has, therefore, a sense 
of more work effected than formerly, and yet the effected work is either 
the same or even less. Only he must, to get even this effect, exert a 
stronger innervation, a stronger motor impulse, than formerly."! 

In complete paralysis, also, patients will be conscious 
of putting forth the greatest exertion to move a limb which 
remains absolutely still upon the bed, and from which of 
course no afferent muscular or other feelings can come.:j: 

But Dr. Ferrier in his Functions of the Brain (Am. Ed. 



♦ Fuuclions of tlie Braiu, p. 228. 

X Vorlesungeu Qber Menschen und Thierseele, i. 222. 

X lu some iDstances we get an opposite result. Dr. H. Charlton Bastian 
(British Medical Journal (1869), p. 461, note), says: 

*• Ask a man whose lower extremities are completely paralyzed, whether, 
when he ineffectually wills to move either of these limbs, he is conscious 
of an expenditure of energy in any degree proportionate to that which he 
would have experienced if his muscles had naturally responded to his voli- 
tion. He will tell us rather that he has a sense only of his utter jwwer- 
lessncss, and that his volition is a mere mental act, carrying with it no feel- 
ings of expended energy such as he is accustomed to experience when his 
muscles are in ix)werful action, and from which action and its consequences 
alone, as I think, he can derive any adequate notion of resistance*' 




\ 



604 P87CH0L0GY 



pp. 222-4) disposes very easUy of this line of argameni 
He says : 

*' It is necessary, however, to exclude movements aUogether before 
such an explanation [as Wundt^s] can be adopted. Now, though the 
hemiplegic patient cannot move his paralyzed limb, though he is con* 
scions of trying hard, yet he will be found to be making powerful mus- 
cular exertion of some kind. Vulpian has called attention to the fact, 
and I have repeatedly verified it, that when a hemiplegic patient is 
desired to close his paralyzed fist, in his endeavors to do so he uncon- 
sciously performs this action with the sound one. It is, in fact, almost 
impossible to exclude such a source of complication, and unless this is 
taken into account very erroneous conclusions as to the cause of the 
sense of effort may be drawn. In the fact of muscular contraction and 
the concomitant centripetal impressions, even though the action is not 
such as is desired, the conditions of the consciousness of effort exist 
without our being obliged to regard it as depending on central innerva- 
tion or outgoing currents. 

^^It is, however, easy to make an experiment of a simple nature 
which will satisfactorily account for the sense of effort, even when these 
unconscious contractions of the other side, such as hemiplegics make, 
are entirely excluded. 

*' If the reader will extend his right arm and hold his forefinger in 
the position required for pulling the trigger of a pistol, he may without 
actually moving his tinger, but by simply making believe, experience a 
consciousness of energy put forth. Here, then, is a clear case of con- 
sciousness of energy without actual contraction of the muscles either of 
the one hand or the other, and without any perceptible bodily strain. 
If the reader will again perform the experiment, and pay careful atten- 
tion to the condition of his respiration, he will observe that his con- 
sciousness of effort coincides with a fixation of the muscles of his chest, 
and that in proportion to the amount of energy he feels he is putting 
forth, he is keei)ing his glottis closed and actively contracting his res- 
piratory muscles. Let him place his finger as before, and continue 
breathing all the time, and he will find that however much he may 
direct his attention to his finger, he will experience not the slightest 
trace of consciousness of effort until he has actually moved the finger 
itself, and then it is referred locally to the muscles in action. It is only 
when this essential and ever-present respiratory factor is, as it has been, 
overlooked, that the consciousness of effort can with any degree of 
plausibility be ascribed to the outgoing current. In the contraction of 
the res])iratory muscles there are the necessary conditions of centripetal 
impressions, and these are cap.able of originating the general sense of 
effort. When these active efforts are withheld, no consciousness of 
effort ever arises, except in so far as it is conditioned by the local con- 
traction of the group of muscles towards which the attention if directed, 



WILL. 505 

or by other muscular contractions called unconsciously into play in the 
attempt. 

'' I am unable to find a single case of consciousness of effort which 
is not explicable in one or other of the ways specified. In all instances 
the consciousness of effort is conditioned by the actual fact of muscular 
contraction. That it is dependent on centripetal impressions generated 
by the act of contraction, I have already endeavored to show. When 
the paths of the centripetal impressions or the cerebral centres of the 
same are destroyed, there is no vestige of a muscular sense. That the 
central organs for the apprehension of the impressions originating from 
muscular contraction are different from those which send out the motor 
impulse, has already been established. But when Wundt argues that 
this cannot be so, because then the sensation would always keep pace 
with the energy of muscular contraction, he overlooks the important 
factor of the fixation of the respiratory muscles, which is the basis of 
the general sense of effort in all its varying degrees." 

To these remarks of Ferrier's I have nothing to add.* 
Any one may verify them, and they prove conclusively that 
the consciousness of muscular exertion, being impossible 
without movement effected sometohere, must be an afferent 
and not an efferent sensation ; a consequence, and not an 
antecedent, of the movement itself. An idea of the amount 
of muscular exertion requisite to perform a certain move- 
ment can consequently be nothing other than an anticipa- 
tory image of the movement's sensible effects. 



* MQnsterberg's words may be added : ** In lifting an object in the 
hand I can discover no sensation of volitional energy 1 perceive in the 
^rst place a slight tension about the head, but that this results from a con- 
iraction In tlie bead muscles, and not from a feeling of the brain-discharge, 
Is shown by the simple fact that I get the tension on the right side of the 
Head when I move the right arm, whereas the motor discharge takes place 
in the opposite side of the brain. ... In maximal contractions ofbody- 
*nd limb-muscles there occur, as if it were to reinforce them, those special 
contractions of the muscles of the face [especially frowning and clinching 
teeth] and those tensions of the skin of the head. These sympathetic 
movements, felt particularly on the side which makes the effort, are perhaps 
the immedinte ground why we ascribe our awareness of maximal contrac- 
tion to the region of the head, and call It a consciousness of force, instead 
of a peripheral sensation." (Die Willenshandlung (1888), pp.78, 82.) Hen 
MUnsierberg's work is a little masterpiece, which appeared after my text 
was written. I shall have repeatedly to refer to it again, and cordially 
recommend to the reader its most thorough refutation of the Innervatlons- 
gefUhl-theorv. 




606 PSTCHOLOOT. 

Driven thus from tlie body at large, where next shall the 
circumstantial evidence for the feeling of innervation lodge 
itself? Where but in the muscles of the eye, from which 
small retreat it judges itself inexpugnable. Nevertheless, 
that fastness too must fall, and by the lightest of bom- 
bardments. But, before trying the bombardment, let us 
recall our general principles about optical vertigo, or illu- 
sory appearance of movement in objects. 

We judge that an object moves under two distinct sets 
of circumstances : 

1. When its image moves on the retina, and we know 
that the eye is stilL 

2. When its image is stationary on the retina, and we 
know that the eye is moving. In this case we feel that we 
fdUoiv the object. 

In either of these cases a mistaken judgment about the 
state of the eye will produce optical vertigo. 

If in case 1 we think our eye is still when it is really 
moving, we get a movement of the retinal image which 
we judge to be due to a real outward motion of the 
object. This is what happens after looking at rushing 
water, or through the windows of a mo\dng railroad car, or 
after turning on one's heel to giddiness. The eyes, without 
our intending to move them, go through a series of invol- 
untary rotations, continuing those they ware previously 
obliged to make to keep objects in view. If the objects had 
been whirling by to our right, our eyes when turned to 
stationary objects will still move slowly towards the right 
The retinal image upon them will then move like that of an 
object passing to the left. We then try to catch it by vol- 
untarily and rapidly rotating the eyes to the left, when the 
involuntary impulse again rotates the eyes to the right, con- 
tinuing the apparent motion ; and so the game goes on. 
(See above, ])p. 89-91.) 

If in case 2 we think our eyes moving when they are in 
reality still, we shall judge that we are following a moving 
object when we are but fixating a steadfast one. Illusions 
of this kind occur after sudden and complete paralysis of 
special eye muscles, and the partisans of feelings of efferent 



WILL, 507 

innervation regard them as experimenta crvcis. Helmlioltz 
writes : * 

"When the external rectus muscle of the right eye, or its nerve, is 
paralyzed, the eye can no longer be rotated to the right side. So long 
as the patient turns it only to the nasal side it makes regular move- 
ments, and he percei'/es correctly the position of objects in the visual 
field. So soon, however, as he tries to rotate it outwardly, i.e., towards 
the right, it ceases to obey his will, stands motionless in the middle of 
its course, and the objects appear flying to the right, although position 
of eye and retinal imago are unaltered.! 

** In such a case the exertion of the will is followed neither by actual 
movement of the eye, nor by contraction of the muscle in question, 
nor even by increased tension in it. The act of ^\!i\ prodticed absolutely 
no effect beyond the nervous system, and yet we judge of the direction 
of the line of vision as if the will had exercised its normal effects. We 
believe it to have moved to the right, and since the retinal image is 
unchanged, we attribute to the object the same movement we have er- 
roneously ascribed to the eye. . . . These phenomena leave no room 
for doubt that we only judge the direction of the line of sight by the 
effort of will with which we strive to change the position of our eyes. 
There are also certain weak feelings in our eyelids, . . . and further- 
more in excessive lateral rotations we feel a fatiguing strain in the 
muscles. But all these feelings are too faint and vague to be of use in 
the perception of direction. We feel then what impulse of the will, and 
how strong a one, wo apply to turn our eye into a given position." 

Partial paralysis of the same muscle, paresis^ as it has 
been called, seems to point even more conclusively to the 
same inference, that the will to innervate is felt independ- 
ently of all its aflferent results. I will quote the account 
given by a recent authority, % of the eflfects of this accident : 

** When the nerve going to an eye muscle, e.g., the external rectus 
of one side, falls into a state of paresis, the first result is that the same 
volitional stimulus, which under normal circumstances would have per- 
haps rotated the eye to its extreme position outwards, now is competent 
to effect only a moderate outward rotation, say of 20". If now, shutting 
the sound eye, the patient looks at an object situated just so far out- 



♦ Phy8iologi8che Optik, p. 600. 

t [The left and sound eye is here supposed covered. If both eyes look 
at tiie same field there are double images which still more perplex the judg- 
ment. The patient, however, learns to see correctly before many days or 
weeks are over. — W. J.] 

X Alfred Gracfe, in Handbuch dcr gcsammten Augenheilkunde, Bd. 
VI. pp. 18-21. 



608 P8TCH0L0QT. 

wards from the paretic eye that this latter must turn 20' in order to 
see it distinctly, the patient will feel as if he had moved it not only 20* 
towards the side, but into its extreme lateral position, for the impulse 
of innervation requisite for bringing it into view is a perfectly conscious 
act, whilst the diminished state of contraction of the paretic muscle lies 
for the present out of the ken of consciousness. The test proposed by 
von Graefe, of localization by the sense of touch, serves to render evi- 
dent the error which the patient now makes. If we direct him to touch 
rapidly the object looked at, with the fore-finger of the hand of the same 
side, the line through which the finger moves will not be the line of 
sight directed 20" outward, but will approach more nearly to the ex- 
treme possible outward line of vision/* 

A stone-cutter with the external rectus of the left eye 
paralyzed, will strike his hand instead of his chisel with his 
hammer, until experience has taught him wisdom. 

It appears as if here the judgment of direction could only 
arise from the excessive innervation of the rectus when the 
object is looked at. All the afferent feelings must be iden- 
tical with those experienced when the eye is sound and the 
judgment is correct. The eyeball is rotated just 20° in the 
one case as in the other, the image falls on the same part 
of the retina, the pressures on the eyeball and the tensions 
of the skin and conjunctiva are identical. There is only 
one feeling which can vary, and lead us to our mistake. 
That feeling must be the effort which the will makes, mod- 
erate in the one case, excessive in the other, but in both 
cases an efferent feeling, pure and simple. 

Beautiful and clear as this reasoning seems to be, it is 
based on am incomplete inventory of the afferent data. The 
writers have all omitted to consider what is going on in the 
other eye. This is kept covered during the experiments, to 
prevent double images, and other complications. But if its 
condition under these circumstances be examined, it will 
be found to present changes which must result in strong 
afferent feelings. And the taking account of these feelings 
demolishes in an instant all the conclusions which the au- 
thors from whom I have quoted base upon their supposed 
absence. This I will now proceed to show.* 



* Professor G. E. Mttller (Zur Grundlegung der Psychophysik (1878). 
p. 818, was the first to explain the phenomenon after the manner Rdvomtrd 



WILL. 509 

Take first the case of complete paralysis and assume the 
right eye aflfected. Suppose the patient desires to rotate 
his gaze to an object situated in the extreme right of the 
field of vision. As Hering has so beautifully shown, both 
eyes move by a common act of innervation, and in this 
instance both move towards the right But the paralyzed 
right eye stops short in the middle of its course, the object 
still appealing far to the sight of its fixation point. The 
left sound eye, meanwhile, although covered, continues its 
rotation until the extreme rightward limit thereof has been 
reached. To an observer looking at both eyes the left will 
seem to squint Of course this continued and extreme ro- 
tation produces afferent feelings of rightward motion in the 
eyeball, which momentarily overpower the faint feelings 
of central position in the diseased and uncovered eye. The 
patient feels by his left eyeball as if lie were following an 
object which by his right retina he perceives he does not 
overtake. All the conditions of optical vertigo are here 
present : the image stationary on the retina, and the erro- 
neous conviction that the eyes are moving. 

The objection that a feeling in the left eyeball ought not 
to produce a conviction that the right eye moves, will be 
considered in a moment. Let us meanwhile turn to the 

in the text. Still unaaiuainted with his book, I published my own simi- 
lar explanation two years later. 

** Professor Mach in his wonderfully original little work 'Beitrtlge zur 
Analyse der Empfindungen/ p 57, describes an artificial way of getting 
translocation, and explains the effect likewise by the feeling of innervation. 
** Turn your eyes," he says, " as far as possible towards the left and press 
against the right sides of the orbits two large lumps of putty. If you then 
try to look as quickly as possible towards the right, this succeeds, on ac- 
count of the incompletely spherical form of the eyes, only imperfectl}-, and 
the objects consequently appear translocated very considerably towards the 
right. The hare will to look rightwards gives to all images on the retina a 
greater rightwards value, to express it shortly. The experiment is at first 
surprising.*' — 1 regret to say that I cannot myself make it succeed— I know 
not for what reason. But even where it does succeed it seems to me that 
the conditions are much too complicated for Professor Mach's theoretic con- 
clusions to be safely drawn. The putty squeezed into the orbit, and the 
pressure of the eyeball against it must give rise to peripheral sensations 
itnmg enough, at any rate (if only of the right kind), to justify any amount 
of false perception of our eyeball's position, quite apart from the innerva- 
tion feelings which Professsor Mach supposes to coexist. 



610 PBTCHOLOQY. 

case of simple paresis with apparent translocation oi the 
field. 

Here the right eye succeeds in fixating the object, but 
observation of the left eye will reveal to an observer the 
fact that it squints just as violently inwards as in the former 
case. The direction which the finger of the patient takes 
in pointing to the object, is the direction of this squinting 
and covered left eye. As'Graefe says (although he fails to 
seize the true import of his own observation), " It appears 
to have been by no means sufficiently noticed how signifi* 
cantly the direction of the line of sight of the secondarily 
deviating eye [i.e., of the left,] and the line of direction of 
the pointed finger agree.*' 

The translocation would, in a word, be perfectly ex- 
plained could we suppose that the sensation of a certain 
degree of rotation in the left eyeball were able to suggest 
to the patient the position of an object whose image falls 
on the right retina alone.* Can, theuj a feeling in one eyo 



* An illusion in principle exactly analogous to that of the patient under 
discussion cuu be produced experimentally in anyone in a way which 
Heriug has described in his Lehre von Biuocularen Sehen, pp. 12-14. 1 wUJ 
quote Helmhottz's account of it, which is especially valuable as coming 
from a believer in the Innervationsgefuhl: "Let the two eyes first look 
parallel, then let the right eye be closed whilst the left still looks at the in- 
finitely distant object a. The directions of both eyes will thus remain un- 
altered, and a will be seen in its right place. Now accommodate the left 
eye for a point / [a needle in Hering's experiment] lying on the optical 
axis between it and a, only very near. The position of the left eye and it4 
optical axis, as well as the place of the retinal image upon tt . . . are 
wholly unaltered by this movement. But the consequence is that an ap- 
parent movement of the object occurs — a movement towards the left. Aa 
soon as we accommodate again for distance the object returns to its old 
place. Now what alters itself in this experiment is only the position of the 
closed right eye : its optical axis, when the effort is made to accommodate 
for the point/, nlsc converges towards this point. . . . Conversely it is 
possible for me to make my optical axes diverge, even with closed eyes, so 
that in the above experiment the right eye should turn far to the ri^ht of 
a. This divergence is but slowly reached, and gives me therefore no 
illusory movement. But when I suddenly relax my effort to make it. and 
the right optical axis springs back to the parallel position, I immediately 
see the object which the left eye fixates shift its position towards the left. 
Thus not only the position of the seeing eye a, but also that of the closed 
cje6, influences our judgment of the direction in which the seen object 



WILL, 611 

be confounded with a feeling in the other ? It most as- 
suredly can, for not only Donders and Adamiik, by their 
yivisections, but Hering by his exquisite optical experiments, 
have proved that the apparatus of innervation for both 
eyes is single, and that they function as one organ — a 
double eye, according to Hering, or what Helmholtz calls 
a Cydopenatige. The retinal feelings of this double organ, 
singly innervated, are naturally undistinguished as respects 
our knowing whether they belong to the left retina or to 
the right We use them only to tell us where their objects 
lie. • It takes long practice directed specially ad hoc to 
teach us on which retina the sensations severally fall. Simi- 
larly the different sensations which arise from the posi- 
tions of the eyeballs are used exclusively as signs of the 
position of objects ; an object directly fixated being local- 
ized habitually at the intersection of the two optical axes, 
but without any separate consciousness on our part that 
ihe position of one axis is different from another. All we 
^re aware of is a consolidated feeling of a certain * strain * 
in the eyeballs, accompanied by the perception that just 
430 far in front and so far to the right or to the left there is 
an object which we see. So that a * muscular ' process in 
one eye is as likely to combine with a retinal process in the 
other eye to effect a perceptive judgment, as two processes 
in one eye are likely so to combine. 

Another piece of circumstantial evidence for the feelings 
of innervation is that adduced by Professor Mach, as fol- 
lows : 

*' If wo stand on a bridge, and look at the water flowing beneath, 
wo usually feel ourselves at rest, whilst the water seems in motion. 
Prf>l')n;^»'(l l(M)kin^ at the water, however, commonly has for its result 
to make the bridge with the observer and surroundings suddenly seem 
to move in the direction opposed to that of the water, whilst the water 
itself assumes the appearance of standing still. The reUitive motion of 
the objects is in both cases the same, and there must therefore be some 



lies. Tho op(Mi cyo remaining fixed, and the closofi eye moving towards 
the riirht or left, the «»hje(t seen by I lie open eye appears also to move to- 
i^-ards the right or left " Physiol. Optik. pp. 007-«.) 




612 P8YCH0L00T, 

adequate physiological ground why sometimes one, sometimes the other 
part of them is felt to move. In order to investigate the matter con- 
veniently, I had the simple 
apparatus constructed which 
is represented in Fig. 86. An 
oil-cloth with a simple pattern 
is horizontally stretched over 
two cylinders (each 2 metres 
long and 8 feet apart) and kept 
in uniform motion by the help 
of a crank. Across the cloth, 
^®- ^ and some 30 cm. above it, is 

stretched a string, with a knot a;, which serves as a fixation-point for 
the eye of the observer. If the observer foUow with his eyes the 
pattern of the cloth as it moves, he sees it in movement, himself and the 
surroundings at rest. But if he looks at the knot^ he soon feels as 
if the entire room were moving contrary to the direction of the cloth, 
whilst the latter seems to stand still. This change in the mode of 
looking comes about in more or less time according to one's momentary 
disposition, but usually it takes but a few seconds. If one once under- 
stands the point, one can make the two appearances alternate at will 
Every following of the oil-cloth makes the observer stationary ; every 
fixation of the knot or inattention to the oil-clothj so that its pattens 
becomes blurred^ sets him in apparent motion." * 

Professor Mach proceeds to explain the phenomenon as 
follows: 



** Moving objects exert, as is well known, a peculiar motor stimulation 
upon the eye, they draw our attention and our look after them. If the 
look really follows them ... we assume that they move. But if the 
eye, instead of following the moving objects, remains steadfastly at 
rest, it must be that the constant stimulus to motion which it receives 
is neutralized by an equally constant current of innervation flowing 
into its motor apparatus. But this is just what would happen if the 
steadfastly fixated point were itself moving; uniformly in the other di- 
rection, and we were following it with our eyes. When this comes 
about, whatever motionless things are looked at must appear in mo- 
tion." t 

The knot x, the string, we ourselves, and all our sta* 



* Beltrflge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, p. 66. 
f P. n8. 



WILL. 618 

tionary surroundings thus appear in movement, according 
to Mach, because we are constantly innervating our eye- 
balls to resist the drag exerted upon them by the pattern 
or the flowing waves. I have myself repeated the observa- 
tion many times above flowing streams, but have never suc- 
ceeded in getting the full illusion as described by Mach. 
I gain a sense of the movement of the bridge and of my 
own body, but the river never seems absolutely to stop : it 
still moves in one direction, whilst I float away in the other. 
But, be the illusion partial or complete, a different ex- 
planation of it from Professor Mach's seems to me the 
more natural one to adopt. The illusion is said to cease 
when, our attention being fully fixed on the moving oil-cloth, 
we perceive the latter for what it is; and to recommence, on 
the contrary, when we perceive the oil-cloth as a vaguely 
moving background behind an object which we directly 
fixate and whose position with regard to our own body is 
unchanged. This, however, is the sort of consciousness 
which we have whenever we are ourselves borne in a vehicle, 
on horseback, or in a boat As we and our belongings go 
one way, the whole background goes the other. I should 
rather, therefore, explain Professor Mach's illusion as 
similar to the illusion at railroad-stations described above 
on page 90. The other train moves, but it makes ours seem 
to move, because, filling the window as it does, it stands for 
the time being as the total background. So here, the 
water or oil-cloth stands for us as background Hherhavpt 
whenever we seem to ourselves to be moving over it. The 
relative motion felt by the retina is assigned to that one of 
its components which we look at more in itself and less as 
a mere repoussoir. This may be the knot above the oil- 
cloth or the bridge beneath our feet, or it may be, on the 
other hand, the oil-cloth's pattern or the surface of the 
swirling stream. Similar changes may be produced in the 
apparent motion of the moon and the clouds through which 
it shines, by similarly altering the attention. Such altera- 
tions, however, in our conception of which part of the vis- 
ual field is substantive object and which part background, 
seem to have no connection with feelings of innervation. I 



614 P8TCH0L0GT, 

cannoty therefore, regard the obseryation of Prof. Mach as 
any proof that the latter feelings exist* 

The circumstantial evidence for the feeling of innervation 
thus seems to break down like the introspective evidence. 
But not only can we rebut experiments intended to prove 
it, we can also adduce experiments which disprove it A 
person who moves a limb voluntarily must innervate it in 
any case, and if he feels the innervation he ought to be able 
to use the feeling to define what his limb is about, even 
though the limb itself were anaesthetic. If, however, the 
limb be totally anaesthetic, it turns out that he does not 
know at all how much work it performs in its contraction — in 
other words, he has no perception of the amount of inner- 
vation which he exerts. A patient examined by Messrs. 
Gley and Marillier beautifully showed this. His entire 
arms, and his trunk down to the navel, were insensible both 
superficially and deeply, but his arms were not paralyzed : 

**We take three stone bottles — two of them are empty and weigh 
each 250 grams; the third is full of mercury and weighs 1850 grams. 
AVe ask L ... to estimate their weight and t^U us which is heaviest. 
He declares that he finds them all three alike. With many days of in- 
terval we made two series of six experiments each. The result was always 
the same. The experiment, it need hardly be said, was arranged in 



*I owe the interpretntiop in the text to my friend and former student.Mr. 
E. S. Drown, whom I set to observe the phenomenon before I had observed 
it myself. Concerning the vacillations in our interpretation of relative 
motion over retina and skin, see above, p. 173. 

Herr Ml\nsterber^' ffives udditional reasons against the feeling of in- 
nervation, of which I will quote ft couple. First, our ideas of movement are 
b.\\ faint ideas, resembling in this the copies of sensations in memory. Were 
they feelings of the outgoing discharge, they would be original states of 
consciousness, not copies ; anil ought by analogy to be nwVf like other 
original states— Second, our unstriped muscles yield no feelings in con- 
tracting, nor can they be contracted at will, differing thus in <My> peculiari- 
ties from the voluntary muscles. What more natuml than to suppose that 
the two peculiarities hang together, and that the reason why we cannot con- 
tract our intestines, for exam]>le. at will. is. that we have no memory -images 
of how their contraction feels ? Were the suppos<'d in nervation-feeling al 
ways the ' mental cue,' one doesn't see why we might not have it even 
where, as here, the contniclions themselves are unfelt, and why it might 
not bring the contractions about. (Die Willenshandlung, pp 87-8.) 



WILL, 615 

such wise that he could be informed neither by sight nor by hearing. 
He even declared, holding in his hand the bottleful of mercury, that 
he found it to have no weight. . . . We place successively in his hand 
(his eyes being still bandaged) a piece of modelling wax, a stick of hard 
wood, a thick India-rubber tube, a newspaper folded up lengthwise and 
rumpled, and we make him squeeze these several objects. He feels no 
difference of resistance and does not even perceive that anything is in 
his hand."* 

M. Gley in another place t quotes experiments by Dr, 
Bloch which prove that the sense which we have of our 
limbs' position owes absolutely nothing to the feeling of in- 
nervation put forth. Dr. Bloch stood opposite the angle of 
a -screen whose sides made an angle of about 90"^, and tried 
to place his hands symmetrically, or so that both should 
fall on corresponding spots of the two screen-sides, which 
were marked with squares for the purpose. The average 
error being noted, one hand was then passively carried by 
an assistant to a spot on its screen-side, and the other 
actively sought the corresponding spot on the opposite 
side. The accuracy of the correspondence proved to be 
as great as when both arms were innervated voluntarily, 
showing that the consciousness of innervation in the first 
of the two experiments added nothing to the sense of the 
limbs' position. Dr. Bloch then tried, pressing a certain 
number of pages of a book between the thumb and fore- 
finger of one hand, to press an equal number between the 
same fingers of the other hand. He did this just as w^ell 
when the fingers in question were drawn apart by India- 
rubber bauds as when they were uninterfered with, showing 
that the physiologically much greater innervation-current 
required in the former case had no effect upon the conscious- 
ness of the movement made, so far as its spatial character 
at any rate was concerned. J 



* Revue Philosophique, xxiii. 442. 

t Ibid. XX. 604. 

X Herr Sternberg (Pflttger's Arcliiv, xxxvii. p. 1) thinks that he proves 
the feeling of innervation by the fact that when we have willed to make a 
movement we generally think that it is made. We have already seen some 
of the facts on pp. 105-6, above. 8. cites from Exner the fact that if we 
put a piece of hard rubber between our back teeth and bite, our front teeth 
seem actually to apj)roach each other, although it is physically impossible 



616 P8YCH0L0O7. 

On the whole, then, it seems as probable as anything 
can well be, that these feelings of innervation do not exist 

for them to do so. He proposes the following experiment : Lay the palm 
of the hand on a tahle with the forefinger overlapping its edge and flexed 
back as far as possible, whilst the table keeps the other fingers extended ; 
then try to flex the terminal joint of the forefinger without looking. Tou 
do not do it, and yet you think that you do. Here again the innervation, 
according to the author, is felt as an executed movement. It seems to me, 
as I said In the previous place, that the illusion is in all these cases due to 
the inveterate association of ideas. Normally our will to move has always 
been followed by the sensation that we have moved, except when the 
simultaneous sensation of an external resistance was there. The result is 
that where we feel no external resistance, and the muscles and tendons 
tighten, the invariably associated idea is intense enough to be hallucinatory. 
In the experiment with the teeth, the resistance customarily met with when 
our masseters contract is a soft one. We do not close our teeth on a thing 
like hard rubber once in a million times ; so when we do so, we imagine 
the habitual result. — Persons with amputated l%mb% more often than not 
continue to feel them as if they were still there, and can, moreover, give 
themselves the feeling of moving them at will. The life-long sensorial 
associate of the idea of 'working one's toes,' e.g. (uncorrected by any 
opposite sensation, since no real sensation of non-movement can come 
from non-existing toes), follows the idea and swallows it up. The man 
thinks that his toes are ' working ' (cf. Proceedings of American Soc. for 
Psych. Research, p. 249). 

Ilerr Loeb also comes to the rescue of the feeling of innervation with 
observations of his own made after my text was written, but they convince 
me no more than the arguments of others. Loeb 's facts are these (PflQger's 
Archiv, xliv. p. 1): If we stand before a vertical surface, and if. with our 
hands at different heights, we simultaneously make with them what seem to us 
equally extensive movements, ibat movement always turns out really shorter 
which is made with the arm whose muscles (in virtue of the arm's position) 
are already the more contracted. The same result ensues when the arms are 
laterally uusymmetrical. Loeb assumes that both arms contract by virtue 
of a common innervation, but that although this innervation is relatively 
less effective upon the more contracted arm, our feeling of its equal 
strength overpowers the disparity of the incoming sensations of movement 
which the two limbs send back, and makes us think that the spaces they 
travei-se arc the same. " The sensation of the extent and direction of our 
voluntary movements depends accordingly upon the impulse of our will to 
move, and not upon the feelings set up by the motion in the activeorgan." 
Now if this is the elementary law which Loeb calls it, why does it only 
manifest its effect when both hands are moving simultaneously? Why 
not when the same hand makes succeasive movements? and especially why 
not when both hands move symmetrically or at the same level, but one of 
tliem is tceightedf A weighted hand surely requires a stronger innervation 
than an unweighted one to move an equal distance upwards ; and yet, as 
Loeb confesses, we do not tend to overestimate the path w^hich it trav- 
erses underthe.se circumstances. The fact is that the illusion which Loeb 



WILL. 517 

If the motor cells are distinct structures, they are as insen- 
tient as the motor nerve-trunks are after the posterior roots 
are cut. If they are not distinct structures, but are only 
the last sensory cells, those at the * mouth of the funnel,* * 
then their consciousness is that of kinsesthetic ideas and 
sensations merely, and this consciousness accompanies the 
rise of activity in them rather than its discharge. The en- 
tire content and material of our consciousness — conscious- 
ness of movement, as of all things else — is thus of periph- 
eral origin, and came to us in the first instance through 
the peripheral nerves. If it be asked what we gain by this 
sensationalistic conclusion, I reply that we gain at any rate 
simplicity and uniformity. In the chapters on Space, on 
Belief, on the Emotions, we found sensation to be a much 
richer thing than is commonly supposed ; and this chapter 
seems at this point to fall into line with those. Then, as 
for sensationalism being a degrading belief, which abol- 
ishes all inward originality and spontaneity, there is this 

has studied is a complex resultant of many factors. One of them, it seems 
to me, is an instinctive tendency to revert to the type of the bilateral 
movements of childhood. In adult life we move our arms for the most 
part in alternation ; but in infancy the free movements of the arms are 
almost always similar on both sides, symmetrical when the direction of 
motion is horizontal, and with the hands on the same level when it is ver- 
tical. The most natural innervation, when the movements are rapidly per- 
formed, is one which takes the movement back to this form. Our estima- 
lion meanwhile of the letigths severally traversed by the two bands is 
mainly based, as such estimations with closed eyes usually are (see Loeb's 
own earlier paper, Untereuchungen uber den Fuhlraum der Hand, in 
Pfltlger's Archiv, xli. 107), upon the apparent velocity and duration of 
the movement. The duration is the same for both hands, since the move- 
ments begin and end simultaneously. The velocities of the two hands are 
under the experimental conditions almost impossible of comparison. It is 
well known how imperfect a discrimination of weights we have when we 
• heft' them sinultaneously, one in either hand; and G. E. MOller has well 
shown (PtlQger's Archiv, xlv. 67) that the velocity of the lift is the main 
factor in determining our judgment of weight. It is hardly possible to 
conceive of more unfavorable conditions for making an accurate compari- 
son of the length of two movements than those which govern the experi- 
ments which are under discussion. The only prominent sign is the dura- 
tion, which would lead us to infer the equality of the two movements. We 
consequently deem them eq\ial, though a native tendency in our motor 
centres keeps them from being so. 

* This is by no means an un plausible opinion. See Vol I. p. 65. 



618 P87CH0L0OT. 

to be said, that the advocates of inward spontaneity may be 
turning their l^acks on its real citadel, when they make a 
fight, on its behalf, for the consciousness of energy put forth 
in the outgoing discharge. Let there be no such con- 
sciousness ; let all our thoughts of movements be of sen- 
sational constitution; still in the emphasizing, choosing, 
and espousing of one of them rather than another, in the 
saying to it, * be thou the reality for me,' there is ample 
scope for our inward initiative to be shown. Here, it seems 
to me, the true line between the passive materials and the 
activity of the spirit should be drawn. It is certainly 
false strategy to draw it between such ideas as are con- 
nected with the outgoing and such as are connected with 
the incoming neural wave.* 

If the ideas by which we discriminate between one 
movement and another, at the instant of deciding in our 
mind which one we shall perform, are always of sensorial 
origin, then the question arises, " Of which sensorial order 
need they be ? " It will be remembered that we distin- 
guished two orders of kinsesthetic impression, the remote 
ones, made by the movement on the eye or ear or distant 
skin, etc., and the resident ones, made on the moving parts 
themselves, muscles, joints, etc. Now do resident images, 
exclusively, form what I have called the mental cue, or will 
remote ones equally suffice ? 

There can he no doubt whatever that the mental cue may he 
either an image of the resident or of the remote kind. Although, 
at the outset of our learning a movement, it would seem 
that the resident feelings must come strongly before con- 
sciousness (cf. p. 487), later this need not be the case. 
The rule, in fact, would seem to be that they tend to lapse 

* Maine de Biran, Royer Collard, Sir John Hei-scbel, Dr. Carpenter. 
Dr. Martineau, all seem to posit a force-sense by which, in becoming 
aware of an outer resistance to our will, we are taught the existence of an 
outer world. 1 hold that every periplieral sensation gives us an outer 
world. An insect crawling on our skin gives us as ' outward ' an impres- 
sion as a hundred pounds weighing on our back. — I have read M, A. Ber- 
trand's criticism of my views (La Psycholoirie de I'Effort, 1889); but as he 
seems to think that I deny the feeling of elTort altogether, I can get no 
profit from it, despite his charming way of saying things. 



WILL. 519 

more and more from couscioasness, and that the more 
practised we become in a movement, the moi^e ^ remote ' do 
the ideas become which form its mental cue. What we are 
interested in is what sticks in oilr consciousness ; everything 
else we get rid of as quickly as we can. Our resident feel- 
ings of movement have no substantive interest for us at all, 
as a rule. What interest us are the ends which the move- 
ment is to attain. Such an end is generally an outer im- 
pression on the eye or ear, or sometimes on the skin, nose, 
or palate. Now let the idea of the end associate itself 
definitely with the right motor innervation, and the thought 
of the innervation's reaidevd effects will become as great an 
encumbrance as we formerly concluded that the feeling of 
the innervation itself would be. The mind does not need it ; 
the end alone is enough. 

The idea of the end, then, tends more and more to make 
itself all-suj£cieni Or, at any rate, if the kinsesthetic ideas 
are called up at all, they are so swamped in the vivid 
kinsesthetic feelings by \vhich they are immediately over- 
taken that we have no time to be aware of their separate 
existence. As I write, I have no anticipation, as a thing 
distinct from my sensation, of either the look or the digital 
feel of the letters which flow from my pen; The words 
chime on my mental ear^ as it were, before I write them, 
but not on my mental eye or hand. This comes from the 
rapidity with which often-repeated movements follow on 
their mental cue. An end consented to as soon as conceived 
innervates directly the centre of the first movement of the 
chain which leads to its accomplishment, and then the 
whole chain rattles off yi^cwi-reflexly, as was described on 
pp. 115-6 of Vol. I. 

The reader will certainly recognize this to be true in 
all fluent and unhesitating voluntary acts. The only special 
fiat there is at the outset of the performance. A man says 
to himself, " I must change my shirt," and involuntarily he 
has taken oft' his coat, and his fingers are at work in their 
accustomed manner on his waistcoat-buttons, etc. ; or 
we say, " I must go downstairs," and ere we know it we 
have risen, walked, and turned the handle of the door ; — all 
through the idea of an end coupled with a series of guiding 



620 P8T0H0L0GT. 

sensations wliich suooessively arise. It would seem indeed 
that we fail of accuracy and certainty in our attainment of 
the end whenever we are preoccupied with much ideal con- 
sciousness of the means. We walk a beam the better the 
less we think of the position of our feet upon it. We pitch 
or catch, we shoot or chop the better the less tactile and 
muscular (the less resident), and the more exclusively optical, 
(the more remote) our consciousness is. Keep your eye on 
the place aimed at, and your hand will fetch it ; think of 
your hand, and you will very likely miss your aim. Dr. 
Southard found that he could touch a spot with a pencil- 
point more accurately with a visual than with a tactile 
mental cue. In the former case he looked at a small 
object and closed his eyes before trying to touch it. In 
the latter case he placed it with closed eyes, and then after 
removing his hand tried to touch it again. The average 
error with touch (when the results were most favorable) 
was 17.13 mm. With sight it was only 12.37 mm.*— All 
these are plain results of introspection and observation. 
By what neural machinery they are made possible we need 
not, at this present stage, inquire. 

In Chapter XVIII we saw how enormously individuals 
differ in respect to their mental imagery. In the type of 
imagination called tactile by the French authors, it is prob- 
able that the kiusesthetic ideas are more prominent than in 
my account. We must not expect too great a uniformity 
in individual accounts, nor wrangle overmuch as to which 
one * truly ' represents the process.t 



* Bowditch and Southard in Journal of Physiology, vol. in. No. 8. It 
was found in these experiments that the maximum of accuracy was reached 
when two seconds of time elapsed between locating the object by eye or 
hand and starting to touch it. When the mark was located with one 
hand, and the other hand had to touch it, the error was considerably 
greater than when the same hand both located and touched it. 

t The same caution must be shown in discussing pathological cases. 
There are remarkable discrepancies in the effects of peripheral anaesthesia 
upon the voluntary power. Such cases as I quoted in the text (p. 490) are 
by no means the only type. In those cases the patients could move their 
limbs accurately when the eyes were open, and inaccurately when they 
were shut. In other cases, however, the anaesthetic patients cannot mam 
their limba at all when the eyes are shut. (For reports of two such cases see 
Bastian in 'Brain/ Binet in Rev. Philos.. xxv. 478.) M. Binet explains 



WILL, 621 

I trust that I have now made clear what that < idea of 
a moyement ' is which must precede it in order that it 1)e 
voluntary. It is not the thought of the innervation which 
the movement requires. It is the anticipation of the move- 
ment's sensible effects, resident or remote, and sometimes 
very remote indeed. Such anticipations, to say the least, 
determine ivhot our movements shall be. I have spoken all 
along as if they also might determine that they shall be. 
This, no doubt, has disconcerted many readers, for it cer- 
tainly seems as if a special fiat, or consent to the movement 
were required in addition to the mere conception of it, in 
many cases of volition ; and this fiat I have altogether left 
out of my account This leads us to the next point in the 

these (hysterical) cases as requiring the 'dynamogenic ' stimulus of light (see 
above, p. 877). They might, however, be ctises of such cougenitally defective 
optical imagiDatioQ that the ' mental cue' was normally ' tactile ;' and that 
when this tactile cue failed through functional inertness of the kinsesthetic 
centres, the only optical cue strong enough to determine the discharge had 
to be an actual sensation of the eye. — There is still a third class of cases in 
which the limbs have lost all sensibility, even for movements passively im- 
printed, but in which voluntary movements can be accurately executed 
•even when the eyes are closed. MM. Binet and Fere have reported some 
■of these interesting cases, which are found amongst the hysterical hemian- 
aesthetics. They can, for example, write accurately at will, although their 
eyes are closed and they have no feeling of the writing taking place, and 
many of them do not know when it begins or stops. Asked to write re- 
peatedly the letter a, and then say how many times they have written it, 
some are able to assign the number and some are not. Some of them admit 
that they are guided by visual imagination of what is being done. Cf. 
Archives de Physiologic, Oct. 1887, pp. 868-5. Now it would seem at 
first sight that feelings of outgoing innervation must exist in these cases 
and be kept account of. There are no other guiding impressions, either 
immediate or remote, of which the patient is conscious ; and unless feelings 
of innervation be there, the writing would seem miraculous. But if such 
feelings are present in these cases, and suffice to direct accurately the suc- 
<'('.ssi()n of movements why do they not suffice in those other anaesthetic 
<»se8 in which movement becomes disorderly when the eyes are closed. 
Innervation is there, or there would be no movement ; why is the feeling 
of the innervation gone ? The truth seems to be, as M. Binet supposes 
(Rev. Philos., xxm. p. 479), that these cases are not arguments for the feel- 
ing of innervation. They are pathological curiosities ; and the patients are 
not really anaesthetic, but are victims of that curious dissociation or splitting- 
off of one part of their consciousness from the rest which we are just begin 
to understnnd, thanks to Messrs. Janet, Binet, and Gumey, and in which 
the split-off part (in this case the kincesthetic sensations) may nevertheless 
Temain to Droduce its usual effects. Compare what was said above, p. 491. 



622 P8TCH0L0OY. 

psychology of the Will. It can be the more easily treated 
now that we have got rid of so much tedious preliminary 
matter. 

rOEO-MOTOB AonoN. 

The question is this : Is the hare idea of a movement^ a sen-- 
atHle effects its sufficient mental cue (p. 497), or must there he 
an additional mental antecedent, in the shape of a fiat, decistony 
consent, volitional mandate, or other synonymous phenomenon of 
consdovsness, hefore the movement can follow ? 

I answer : Sometimes the bare idea is sufficient, but 
sometimes an additional conscious element, in the shape of 
a fiat, mandate, or express consent, has to intervene and 
precede the movement. The cases without a fiat constitute 
the more fundamental, because the more simple, variety. 
The others involve a special complication, which must be 
fully discussed at the proper time. For the present let us 
turn to ideo-motor action, as it has been termed, or the se- 
quence of movement upon the mere thought of it, as the 
type of the process of volition. 

Wherever movement follows unhesitatingly and immedi- 
ately the notion of it in the mind, we have ideo-motor action. 
We are then aware of nothing between the conception and 
the execution. All sorts of neuro-muscular processes come 
between, of course, but we know absolutely nothing of 
them. We think the act, and it is done ; and that is all 
that introspection tells us of the matter. Dr. Carpenter, 
who first used, I believe, the name of ideo-motor action, 
placed it, if I mistake not, among the curiosities of our 
mental life. The truth is that it is no curiosity, but simply 
the normal process stripped of disguise. Whilst talking I 
become conscious of a pin on the floor, or of some dust on 
my sleeve. Without interrupting the conversation I brush 
away the dust or pick up the pin. I make no express re- 
solve, but the mere perception of the object and the fleeting 
notion of the act seem of themselves to bring the latter 
about. Similarly, I sit at table after dinner and find 
myself from time to time taking nuts or raisins out of the 
dish and eating them. My dinner properly is over, and in 
the heat of the conversation I am hardly aware of what 1 



WILL, 523 

do, but the perception of the fruit and the fleeting notion 
that I may eat it seem fatally to bring the act about. 
There is certainly no express fiat here ; any more than there 
is in all those habitual goings and comings and rearrange- 
ments of ourselves which fill every hour of the day, and 
which incoming sensations instigate so immediately that it 
is often diflScult to decide .whether not to call them reflex / 
rather than voluntary acts. We have seen in Chapter IV 
that the intermediary terms of an habitual series of acts 
leading to an end are apt to be of this ^t/^c^'-automatic sort. 
As Lotze says : 

*' We see in writing or piano- playing a great number of very com- 
plicated movements following quickly one upon the other, the instigative 
representations of which remained scarcely a second in consciousness, 
certainly not long enough to awaken any other volition than the gen- 
eral one of resigning one's self without reserve to the passing over of rep- 
resentation into action. All the acts of our daily life hapj)en in this 
wise : Our standing up, walking, talking, all this never demands a dis- 
tinct impulse of the will, but is adequately brought about by the pure 
flux of thought."* 

In all this the determining condition of the unhesitating . 
and resistless sequence of the act seems to be the absence of 
my conjlicting notion in the mind. Either there is nothing 
else at all in the mind, or what is there does not conflict. 
The hypnotic subject realizes the former condition. Ask 
him what he is thinking about, and ten to one he will reply 
* nothing.' The consequence is that he both believes every- 
thing he is told, and performs everj^ act that is suggested. 
The suggestion may be a vocal command, or it may be the 
performance before him of the movement required. Hyp- 
notic subjects in certain conditions repeat whatever they 



* Medicinisclie Psychologie, p. 293. In his admirably acute chapter 
on the Will this autbor has most explicitly maintained the position that 
what we call muscular exertion is an afferent and not an efferent feeling ; 
** We must atlirm universally ibat in the muscular feeling we are not sen- 
sible of the force on its way to produce an effect, but only of the sufferance 
already produced in our movable orpuis, the muscles, after the force has, 
in a manner unobscrvable by us, exerted upon them its causality " (p. 811). 
How often the battles of psychology have to be fought over again, encli 
time with heavier armies and bigger trains, though not always with such 
able generals t 



624 P8T0H0L0GT. 

hear you say, and imitate whatever they see you do. Dr. 
F^re says that certain waking persons of neurotic type, if 
one repeatedly close and open one's hand before their eyes, 
soon begin to have corresponding feelings in their own fin- 
gers, and presently begin irresistibly to execute the move- 
ments which they see. Under these conditions of * prepa- 
ration ' Dr. Fer^ found that his subjects could squeeze the 
Ijand-dynamometer much more strongly than when abruptly 
invited to do so. A few passive repetitions of a movement 
will euable many enfeebled patients to execute it actively 
with greater strength. These observations beautifully 
show how the mere quickening of kinsesthetic ideas is 
equivalent to a certain amount of tension towards discharge 
in the c^^^tres.* 

We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing 
morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital 
principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably 
most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at 
a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We 
think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will 
suffer ; we say, " I mnst get up, this is ignominious," etc. ; 
but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold out- 
side too crueL, and resolution faints away and postpones 
itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of 
bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive 
act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances ? 
If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often 
than not get up without any struggle or decjision at alh We 
suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of 
consciousness occurs ; we forget both the warmth and the 
cold ; we fall into some revery connected with the day's 
life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, 
" Hollo ! I must lie here no longer " — an idea which at that 
lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing sug- 
gestions, and consequently produces immediately its appro- 
priate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of 
both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle. 



■ Ch. Fere : Sensation el Mouvemeut (1887), chapter lu. 



WILL, 626 

which paralyzed our activity then and kept onr idea of ris- 
ing in the condition of toiah and not of will. The moment 
these inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its 
effects. 

This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the 
data for an entire psychology of volition. It was in fact 
through meditating on the phenomenon in my own person 
that I first became convinced of the truth of the doctrine 
which these pages present, and which I need here illustrate 
by no farther examples.* The reason why that doctrine* is 
not a self-evident truth is that we have so many ideas 
which do not result in action. But it will be seen that in 
every such case, without exception, that is because other 
ideas simultaneously present rob them of their impulsive 
power. But even here, and when a movement is inhibited 
from completdy taking place by contrary ideas, it will tn- 
cipiently take place. To quote Lotze once more : 

''The spectator accompanies the throwing of a billiard-ball, or the 
thrust of the swordsman, with slight movements of his arm; the un- 
taught narrator tells his story with many gesticulations; the reader 
while absorbed in the perusal of a battle-scene feels a slight tension run 
through his muscular system, keeping time as it were with the actions 
he is reading of. These results become the more marked the more we 
are absorbed in thinking of the movements which suggest them; they 
grow fainter exactly in proportion as a complex consciousness, under 
the dominion of a crowd of other representations, withstands the pass- 
ing over of mental contemplation into outward action." 

The * willing-game,' the exhibitions of so-called * mind- 
reading,' or more properly muscle-reading, which have late- 
ly grown so fashionable, are based on this incipient obe- ; 
dience of muscular contraction to idea, even when the 
deliberate intention is that no contraction shall occur.t 



* ProfesBor A. Bain (Senses and Intellect, pp. 88^-48) and Dr. W. B. 
Carpenter (Mental Physiology, cliap. vi) give examples in abundance. 

t For a full account, by an expert, of the 'willing.game/ see Mr. 
Stuart Cumberland's article: A Thought-reader's Experiences in the Nine- 
teenth century, xx. 867. M. Gley has given a good example of Ideo- 
motor action in the Bulletins de la Soclete de Psychologic Physlologique 
for 1889. Tell a person to think intently of a certain name, and saying 
that you will then force her to write it, let her hold a pencil, and do you 
yourself hold her hand. She will then probably trace the name involun- 
tarily, believing that you are forcing her to do It. 



626 P8YCH0L00T. 

We may then lay it down for certain that every repre- 
aentcUion of a movement awakens in some degree the actual 
movement which is its object; and awakens it in a mjaximum 
degree whenever it is not kept from so doing by an antagonis- 
tic representation present simvUaneovsly to the mind. 

The express fiat, or act of mental consent to the move- 
{ ment, comes in when the neutralization of the antagonistic 
' ' and inhibitory idea is required. But that there is no express 
fiat needed when the i^onditions are simple, the reader ought 
now to be convinced. Lest, however, he should still share the 
common prejudice that voluntary action without * exertion 
of will-power ' is Hamlet with the prince's part left out, I 
will make a few farther remarks. The first point to start 
from in understanding voluntary action, and the possible 
occurrence of it with no fiat or express resolve, is the fact 
that consciousness is in its very nature impvlsive,* We do 
not have a sensation or a thought and then have to add 
something dynamic to it to get a movement. Every pulse 
of feeling which we have is the correlate of some neural 
activity that is already on its way to instigate a movement 
Our sensations and thoughts are but cross-sections, as it 
were, of currents whose essential consequence is motion, 
and which no sooner run in at one nerve than they run out 
again at another. The popular notion that mere conscious- 
ness as such is not essentially a forerunner of activity, that 
the latter must result from some superadded * will-force,* 
is a very natural inference from those special cases in 
which we think of an act for an indefinite length of time 
without the action taking place. These cases, however, are 
not the norm ; they are cases of inhibition by antagonistic 



* 1 abstract here from the fact that a certain intensity of the conscious- 
ness is required for its impulsiveness to be effective in a complete degree. 
There is an inertia in the motor processes as in all other natural things. 
In certain individuals, and at certain limes (disease, fatigue), the inertia is 
unusually great, and we may then have ideas of action which produce no 
visible act, but discharge themselves into merely nascent dispositions to 
activity or into emotional expression. The inertia of the motor parts here 
plays the same rdle as is elsewhere played by antagonistic ideas. We shall 
consider this restrictive inertia later on, it obviously introduces no essen- 
tial alteration into the law 'which ihe text lays down 



WILL, 627 

thoughts. When the blocking is released we feel as if an 
inward spring were let loose, and this is the additional im- 
pulse or fiat upon which the act eflfectiTely succeeds. We 
shall study anon the blocking and its release. Our higher 
thought is full of ii But where there is no blocking, there 
is naturally no hiatus between the thought-process and the 
motor discharge. Movement is the natural immediate effedt 
offeding^ irrespective of what the quality of thefeding mxiy he. 
It is so in reflex action^ it is so in ematiorud eocpressum^ it is so 
in the voluntary life. Ideo-motor action is thus no paradox, 
to be softened or explained away. It obeys the type of all 
conscious action, and from it one must start to explain ac- 
tion in which a special fiat is involved. 

It may be remarked in passing, that the inhibition of a 
movement no more involves an express effort or command 
than its execution does. Either of them may require it 
But in all simple and ordinary cases, just as the bare pres- 
ence of one idea prompts a ijiovement, so the bare presence 
of another idea will prevent its taking place. Try to feel 
as if you were crooking your finger, whilst keeping it 
straight In a minute it will fairly tingle with the imagi- 
nary change of position ; yet it will not sensibly move, be- 
cause its not really moving is also a part of what you have in 
mind. Drop this idea, think of the movement purely and 
simply, with all breaks off; and, presto ! it takes place with 
no effort at all. 

A wakiug man's behavior is thus at all times the result- 
ant of two opposing neuYal forces. With unimaginable 
fineness some currents among the cells and fibres of his 
brain are playing on his motor nerves, whilst other cur- 
rents, as unimaginably fine, are playing on the first cur- 
rents, damming or helping them, altering their direction or 
.their speed. The upshot of it all is, that whilst the currents 
must always end by being drained off through some motor 
nerves, they are drained off sometimes through one set and 
sometimes through another; and sometimes they keep each 
other in equilibrium so long that a superficial observer may 
think they are not drained off at all. Such an observer 
must remember, however, that from the physiological point 
of view a gesture, an expression of the brow, or an expul- 



528 P870H0L0GT. 

sion of the breath are moTements as much as an act oi 
locomotion is. A king's breath slays as well as an assas* 
sin's blow ; and the outpouring of those currents which the 
magic imponderable streaming of our ideas accompanies 
need not always be of an explosiye or otherwise phjsicallj 
conspicuous kind. 

AGTION AFT£B DEUBEBATION. 

We are now in a position to describe what happens in 
deliberate actiouy or whan the mind is the seat of many ideas 
related to each other in antagonistic or in favorable ways.* 
One of the ideas is that of an act. By itself this idea would 
prompt a movement ; some of the additional considerations, 
however, which are present to consciousness block the 
motor discharge, whilst others, on the contrary, solicit it to 
take place. The result is that peculiar feeling of inward 
unrest known as indecision. Fortunately it is too familiar 
to need description, for to describe it would be impossible. 
As long as it lasts, with the various objects before the at- 
tention, we are said to deliberate ; and when finally the orig- 
inal suggestion either prevails and makes the movement 
take place, or gets definitively quenched by its antagonists, 
we are said to decide, or to utter our voluntary /at in favor of 
one or the other course. The reinforcing and inhibiting 
ideas meanwhile are termed the reasons or motives by which 
the decision is brought about 

The process of deliberation contains endless degrees of 
complication. At every moment of it our consciousness 
is of an extremely complex object, namely the exist- 
ence of the whole set of motives and their conflict, as ex- 
plained on p. 275 of Vol. I. Of this object, the totality of 
which is realized more or less dimly all the while, certain 
parts stand out more or less sharply at one moment in the 



* I use the common phraseology here for mere convenience' sake. The 
reader who has made himself acquainted with Chapter IX will always under- 
stand, when he hears of many ideas simultaneously present to the mind 
and acting upon each other, that what is really meant is a mind with one 
Idea before it, of many objects, purposes, reasons, motives, related to each 
other, some in a harmonious and some in an antagonistic way. With this 
caution I shall not hesitate from time to time to fall into the popular 
Lockian speech, erroneous though I believe it to be. 



WILL. 629 

foreground, and at another moment other parts, in conse- 
quence of the oscillations of our attention, and of the ' asso- 
ciative ' flow of our ideas. But no matter how sharp the 
foreground-reasons may be, or how imminently close to 
bursting through the dam and carrying the motor conse- 
quences their own way, the background, however dimly felt, 
is always there ; and its presence (so long as the indecision 
actually lasts) serves as an eflfective check upon the irrevo- 
cable discharge. The deliberation may last for weeks or 
months, occupying at intervals the mind. The motives 
which yesterday seemed full of urgency and blood and life 
to-day feel strangely weak and pale and dead. But as little 
to-day as to-morrow is the question finally resolved. Some- 
thing tells us that all this is provisional ; that the weakened 
reasons will wax strong again, and the stronger weaken ; 
that equilibrium is unreached ; that testing our reasons, not 
obeying them, is still the order of the day, and that we 
must wait awhile, patient or impatiently, until our mind 
is made up * for good and all.' This inclining, first to one 
then to another future, both of which we represent as pos- 
sible, resembles the oscillations to and fro of a material 
body within the limits of its elasticity. There is inward 
strain, but no outward rupture. And this condition, 
plainly enough, is susceptible of indefinite continuance, as 
well in the physical mass as in the mind. If the elasticity 
give way, however, if the dam ever do break, and the cur- 
rents burst the crust, vacillation is over and decision is 
irrevocably there. 

The decision may come in any one of many modes. I 
will try briefly to sketch the most characteristic types of it, 
merely warning the reader that this is only an introspective 
account of symptoms and phenomena, and that all ques- 
tions of causal agency; whether neural or spiritual, are rele- 
gated to a later page. 

The particular reasons for or against action are of course 
infinitely various in concrete cases. But certain motives 
are more or less constantly in play. One of these is im- 
patience of the deliberative state; or to express it otherwise, 
proneness to act or to decide merely because action and 



530 P87CH0L0QT. 

decision are, as such, agreeable, and relieye the tension of 
doubt and hesitancy. Thus it comes that we will often 
take any course whatever which happens to be most vividly 
before our minds, at the moment when this impulse to 
decisive action becomes extreme. 

Against this impulse we have the dread of the irrevocable^ 
which often .engenders a type of character incapable of 
prompt and vigorous resolve, except perhaps when sur- 
prised into sudden activity. These two opposing motives 
twine round whatever x)ther motives may be present at the 
moment when decision is imminent, and tend to precipitate 
or retard it. The conflict of these motives so far as they 
alone affect the matter of decision is a conflict as to when it 
shall occur. One says * now,' the other says * not yet' 

Another constant component of the web of motivation is 
the impulse to persist in a decision once made. There is 
no more remarkable difference in human character than 
that between resolute and irresolute natures. Neither the 
physiological nor the psychical grounds of this difference 
have yet been analyzed. Its symptom is that whereas in 
the irresolute all decisions are provisional and liable to be 
reversed, in the resolute they are settled once for all and 
not disturbed again. Now into every one's deliberations 
the representation of one alternative will often enter with 
such sudden force as to carry the imagination with itself 
exclusively, and to produce an apparently settled decision 
in its own favor. These premature and spurious decisions 
are of course known to everyone. They often seem ridicu- 
lous in the light of the considerations that succeed them. 
But it cannot be denied that in the resolute type of char- 
aeter the accident that one of them has once been made 
does afterwards enter as a motive additional to the more 
genuine reasons why it should not be revoked, or if pro- 
visionally revoked, why it should be made again. How*^ 
many c^f us j)ersist in a precipitate course which, but for a 
moment of heedlessness, we might never have entered upon, 
simply because we hate to * change our mind.' "^ 



WILL, 631 



jrxvju TYFS8 OF DECISION. 

Turning now to the form of the decision itself , we may 
distinguish four chief types. The first m&y be called^^ 
r easonoMe type. It is that of those cases in which the 
arguments for. and against a given course seem gradually 
and almost insensibly to settle themselves in the mind and 
to end by leaving a clear balance in favor of one alternative, 
which alternative we then adopt without effort or constraint 
Until this rational balancing of the books is consummated 
we have a calm feeling that the evidence is not yet all in, 
and this keeps action in suspense. But some day we wake 
with the sense that we see the thing rightly, that no new 
light will be thrown on the subject by farther delay, and 
that the matter had better be settled now. In this easy 
transition from doubt to assurance we seem to ourselves 
almost passive ; the * reasons which decide us appearing to 
flow in from the nature of things, and to owe nothing to 
our wilL We have, however, a perfect sense of being /ree, 
in that we are devoid of any feeling of coercion. The con- 
clusive reason for the decision in these cases usually is the 
discovery that we can refer the case to a doss upon which 
we are accustomed to act unhesitatingly in a certain stereo- 
typed way. It may be said in general that a great part of 
every deliberation consists in the turning over of all the 
possible modes of conceiving the doing or not doing of the 
act in point. The moment we hit upon a conception which 
lets us apply some principle of action which is a fixed and 
stable part of our Ego, our state of doubt is at an end. 
Persons of authority, who have to make many decisions in 
the day, carry with them a set of heads of classification, 
each bearing its motor consequence, and under these they 
seek as far as possible to range each new emergency as it 
occurs. It is where the emergency belongs to a species 
without precedent, to which consequently no cut-and-dried 
maxim will apply, that we feel most at a loss, and are 
distressed at the indeterminateness of our task. As soon, 
however, as we see our way to a familiar classification, we 
are at ease again. In action as in reasoning^ then, the greai 
thing is the qvest of the right conception. The concrete dUem- 



532 P87CH0L0QT. 

mas do not come to us with labels gummed upon their 
backs. We may name them by many names. The wise 
man is he who succeeds in finding the name which suits 
the needs of the particular occasion best. A ' reasonable ' 
character is one who has a store of stable and worthy ends, 
and who does not decide about an action till he has calmly 
ascertained whether it be ministerial or detrimental to any 
one of these. 

In the next two types of decision, the final fiat occurs 
before the evidence is all *in.' It often happens that no 
paramount and authoritative reason for either course will 
come. Either seems a case of a Good, and there is no 
umpire as to which good should yield its place to the other. 
We grow tired of long hesitation and inconclusiveness, and 
the hour may come when we feel that even a bad decision is 
better than no decision at all. Under these conditions it 
will often happen that some accidental circumstance, s uper- 
vening at a particular movement upon our mental weariness, 
will upset the balance in the direction of one of the alter- 
natives, to which then we feel ourselves committed, al- 
though an opposite accident at the same time might have 
produced the opposite result. 

In the second type of case our feeling is to a certain 
extent that of letting ourselves drift with a certain in- 
different acquiescence in a direction accidentally deter- 
mined from nnthout, with the conviction that, after all, we 
might as well stand by this course as by the other, and 
that things are in any event sure to turn out suflSciently 
right. 

In the third type the determiaation seems equally acci- 
dental, but it comes from within, and not from without 
It often happens, when the absence of imperative princi- 
ple is perplexing and suspense distracting, that we find our- 
selves acting, as it were, automatically, and as if by a spon- 
taneous discharge of our nerves, in the direction of one of 
the horns of the dilemma. But so excitiog is this sense of 
motion after our intolerable pent-up state, that we eagerly 
throw ourselves into it * Forward now ! ' we inwardly cry, 
'though the heavens fall.' This reckless and exultwt es- 



WILL. 533 

pousal of an energy so little premeditated by us that we 
feel rather like passive spectators cheering on the display 
of some extraneous force than like voluntary agents, is a 
type of decision too abrupt and tumultuous to occur often 
in humdrum and cool-blooded natures. But it is prob- 
ably frequent in persons of strong emotional endowment 
and unstable or vacillating character. And in men of the 
world-shaking type, the Napoleons, Luthers, etc., in whom 
tenacious passion combines with ebullient activity, when by 
any chance the passion's outlet has been dammed by scru- 
ples or apprehensions, the resolution is probably often of this 
catastrophic kind. The flood breaks quite unexpectedly 
through the dam. That it should so often do so is quite 
sufficient to account for the tendency of these characters to 
a fatalistic mood of mind. And the fatalistic mood itself 
is sure to reinforce the strength of the energy just started 
on its exciting path of discharge. 

There is a fourth form of decision, which often ends 
deliberation as suddenly as the third form does. It comes 
when, in consequence of some outer experience or some 
inexplicable inward charge, toe svdderdy pass from the easy 
and careless to the sober and strenuous mood, or possibly the 
other way. The whole scale of values of our motives and 
impulses then undergoes a change like that which a change 
of the observer's level produces on a view. The most 
sobering possible agents are objects of grief and fear. 
When one of these affects us, all ' light fantastic ' notions 
lose their motive power, all solemn ones find theirs multi- 
plied many-fold. The consequence is an instant abandon- 
ment of the more trivial projects with which we had been 
dallying, and an instant practical acceptance of the more 
grim and earnest alternative which till then could not 
extort our mind's consent All those 'changes of heart,' 
'awakenings of conscience,' etc., which make new men of 
so many of us, may be classed under this head. The char- 
acter abruptly rises to another 'level,' and deliberation 
comes to an immediate end.* 



* My attention was first empbatically called to this class of decisions hj 
my colleague, Professor C. C. Everett. 



634 P8TCH0L0QY. 

In the fifth and final type of decision, the feeling that 
the OAddence is all in, and that reason has balanced the 
books, may be either present or absent But in either case 
we feel, in deciding, as if we ourselves by our own wilful 
act inclined the beam ; in the former case by adding our 
living effort to the weight of the logical reason which, 
taken alone, seems powerless to make the act discharge ; 
in the latter by a kind of creative contribution of something 
instead of a reason which does a reason's work. The slow 
dead heave of the will that is felt in these instances makes 
of them a class altogether different subjectively from all 
the three preceding classes. What the heave of the will 
betokens metaphysically, what the effort might lead us to 
infer about a will-power distinct from motives, are not 
matters that concern us yet. Subjectively and phenome- 
nally, ih^feding of effort , absent from the former decisions, 
accompanies these. Whether it be the dreary resignation 
for the sake of austere and naked duty of all soHs of rich 
mundane deUghts, or whether it be the hea\'y resolve that 
of two mutually exclusive trains of future fact, both sweet 
and good, and with no strictly objective or imperative 
principle of choice between them, one shall forevermore 
become impossible, while the other shall become reality, 
it is a desolate and acrid sort of act, an excursion into a lone- 
some moral wilderness. If examined closely, its chief differ- 
ence from the three former cases appears to be that in those 
3ases the mind at the moment of deciding on the trium- 
phant alternative dropped the other one wholly or nearly 
out of sight, whereas here both alternatives are steadily 
held in \dew% and in the very act of murdering the van- 
quished possibility the chooser realizes how much in that 
instant he is making himself lose. It is deliberately 
driving a thorn into one's flesh ; and the sense of ?*?i- 
ward effort with which the act is accompanied is an ele- 
ment w4iich sets the fourth type of decision in strong contrast 
with the previous three varieties, and makes of it an alto- 
gether peculiar sort ot mental phenomenon. The immense 
majority of human decisions are decisions without effort. In 
comparatively few of them, in most people, does effort accom- 
pany the final act. We are, I think, misled into supposing that 



WILL. 536 

effort is more frequent than it is, by the fact that during 
ddibercUion we so often haye a feeling of how great an effort 
it would take to make a decision now. Later, after the de- 
cision has made itself with ease, we recollect this and 
erroneously suppose the effort also to have been made then. 
The existence of the effort as a phenomenal fact in our 
consciousness cannot of course be doubted or denied. Its 
significance, on the other hand, is a matter about which the 
gravest difference of opinion prevails. Questions as mo- 
mentous as that of the very existence of spiritual causality, 
as vast as that of universal predestination or free-will, de- 
pend on its interpretation. It therefore becomes essential 
that we study with some care the conditions under which 
the feeling of volitional effort is found. 

When, awhile back (p. 526), I said that consciousness (or 
the neural process which goes with it) is in its very nature 
impulsivey I added in a note the proviso that it must be 
sufficiently intense. Now there are remarkable differences 
in the power of different sorts of consciousness to excite 
movement. The intensity of some feelings is practically 
apt to be below the discharging point, whilst that of others 
is apt to be above it. By practically apt, I mean apt under 
ordinary circumstances. These circumstances may be 
habitual inhibitions, like that comfortable feeling of the 
dclcefar niente which gives to each and all of us a certain 
dose of laziness only to be overcome by the acuteness of 
the impulsive spur; or they may consist in the native 
inertia, or internal resistance, of the motor centres them- 
selves making explosion impossible until a certain inward 
tension has been reached and overpast. These conditions 
may vary from one person to another and in the same per- 
son from time to time. The neural inertia may wax or wane, 
and the habitual inhibitions dwindle or augment. The in- 
tensity of particular thought-processes and stimulations 
may also change independently, and particular paths of 
association grow more pervious or less so. There thus re- 
sult great possibilities of alteration in the actual impul- 



636 P8TCH0L0QT, 

sive efficacy of particular motives compared with others. 
It is where the normally less efficacious motive becomes 
more efficacious and the normally more efficacious one less 
so that actions ordinarily effortless, or abstinences ordi- 
narily easy, either become impossible or are effected, if at 
all, by the expenditure of effort. A little more description 
will make it plainer what these cases are. 

There is a certain normal ratio in the impulsive power (^ 
different sorts of motive^ which characterizes what mxiy he called 
ordinary healthiness of tviUy and which is departed from only 
at exceptional times or by exceptional individuals. The 
states of mind which normally possess the most impul- 
sive quality are either those which represent objects of 
passion, appetite, or emotion — objects of instinctive reac- 
tion, in short ; or they are feelings or ideas of pleasure or of 
pain ; or ideas which for any reason we have grown accus- 
tomed to obey so that the habit of reacting on them is in- 
grained ; or finally, in comparison with ideas of remoter 
objects, they are ideas of objects present or near in space 
and time. Compared with these various objects, all far-off 
considerations, all highly abstract conceptions, unaccus- 
tomed reasons, and motives foreign to the instinctive history 
of the race, have little or no impulsive power. They prevail, 
when they ever do prevail, tmth effort ; and the normal^ as 
distinguished from the pathological, sphere of effort is thus 
found ivherever non-instinctive motives to behavior are to rtde 
the day. 

Healthiness of will moreover requires a certain amount 
of complication in the process which precedes the fiat or 
the act. Each stimulus or idea, at the same time that it 
wakens its own impulse, must arouse other ideas (associated 
and consequential) with their impulses, and action must 
follow, neither too slowly nor too rapidly, as the resultant 
of all the forces thus engaged. Even when the decision is 
very prompt, there is thus a sort of preliminary survey of 
the field and a vision of which course is best before the 
fiat comes. And where the will is healthy, the vision must 
be right (i.e., the motives must be on the whole in a normal 



WILL. 637 

or not too unusual ratio to each other), and the action must 
obey the vision's lead. 

Unhealthiness of unU may thus come about in many vxiys. 
The action may follow the stimulus or idea too rapidly, 
leaving no time for the arousal of restraining associates — 
we then have a precipitate vnU. Or, although the associates 
may come, the ratio which the impulsive and inhibitive 
forces normally bear to each other may be distorted, and 
we then have a vnd which is perverse. The perversity, in 
turn, may be due to either of many causes — too much in- 
tensity, or too little, here ; too much or too little inertia 
there ; or elsewhere too much or too little inhibitory power. 
If we compare the outward symptoms of perversity together^ 
they fall into two groups^ in one of which normal actions are 
impossible, and in the other abnormal ones are irrepressi- 
ble. Briefly, loe may caU them respectively the obstructed and 
the explosive tvilL 

It must be kept in mind, however, that since the result- 
ant action is always due to the raiio between the obstructive 
and the explosive forces which are present, we never can 
tell by the mere outward symptoms to what elementary 
cause the perversion of a man's will may be due, whether 
to an increase of one component or a diminution of the 
other. One may grow explosive as readily by losing the 
usual brakes as by getting up more of the impulsive steam ; 
and one may find things impossible as well through the en- 
feeblement of the original desire as through the advent of 
new lions in the path. As Dr. Clouston says, " the driver 
may be so weak that he cannot control well-broken horses, 
or the horses may be so hard-mouthed that no driver can 
pull them up." In some concrete cases (whether of explo- 
sive or of obstructed will) it is difficidt to tell whether the 
trouble is due to inhibitory or to impulsive change. Gener- 
ally, however, we can make a plausible guess at the truth. 

' THE EXPLOSIVE "WTIiL. 

There is a normal type of character, for example, in 
which impulses seem to discharge so promptly into move- 
ments that inhibitions get no time to arise. These are the 



538 PSYCHOLOGY. 

* dare-devil ' and * mercurial ' temperaments, overflowing with 
animation, and fizzling with talk, which are so common in the 
Latin and Celtic races, and with which the cold-blooded and 
long-headed English character forms so marked a contrast 
Monkeys these people seem to us, whilst we seem to them 
reptilian. It is quite impossible to judge, as between an ob- 
structed and an explosive individual, which has the greatest 
sum of vital energy. An explosive Italian with good per- 
ception and intellect will cut a figure as a perfectly tre- 
mendous fellow, on an inward capital that could be tucked 
away inside of an obstructed Yankee and hardly let you 
know that it was there. He will be the king of his company, 
sing all the songs and make all the speeches, lead the parties, 
carry but the practical jokes, kiss all the girls, fight the 
men, and, if need be, lead the forlorn hopes and enterprises, 
so that an onlooker would think he has more life in his little 
finger than can exist in the whole body of a correct judicious 
fellow. But the judicious fellow all the while may have all 
these possibilities and more besides, ready to break out in 
the same or even a more violent way, if only the brakes 
were taken off. It is the absence of scruples, of conse- 
quences, of considerations, the extraordinary simplification 
of each moment's mental outlook, that gives to the explosive 
individual such motor energy and ease ; it need not be the 
greater intensity of any of his passions, motives, or thoughts. 
As mental evolution goes on, the complexity of human con- 
sciousness grows ever greater, and with it the multiplication 
of the inhibitions to which every impulse is exposed. But 
this predominance of inhibition has a bad as well as a good 
side ; and if a man's impulses are in the main orderly as 
well as prompt, if he has courage to accept their conse- 
quences, and intellect to lead them to a successful end, he 
is all the better for his hair-trigger organization, and for 
not being * sicklied o*er with the pale cast of thought* 
Many of the most successful military and revolutionary 
characters in history have belonged to this simple but quick- 
witted impulsive type. Problems come much harder to 
reflective and inliibitive minds. They can, it is true, solve 
much vaster problems ; and they can avoid many a mis- 
take to which the men of impulse are exposed. But when 



WILL. 639 

the latter do not make mistakes, or when they are always 
able to retrieve them, theirs is one of the most engaging and 
indispensable of human types.* 

In infancy, and in certain conditions of exhaustion as 
well as in peculiar pathological states, the inhibitory power 
may fail to arrest the explosions of the impulsive discharge. 
We have then an explosive temperament temporarily real- 
ized in an individual who at other times may be of a rela- 
tively obstructed type. I cannot do better here than copy 
a few pages from Dr. Clouston's excellent work : t 

'* Take a child of six months, and there is absolutely no such brain- 
power existent as mental inhibition ; no desire or tendency is stopped 
by a mental act. ... At a year old the rudiments of the great 
faculty of self-control are clearly apparent in most children. They 
will resist the desire to seize the gas-flame, they will not upset 
the milk- jug, they will obey orders to sit still when they want to run 
about, all through a higher mental inhibition. But the power of 
control is just as gradual a development as the motions of the hands. 
. . . Look at a more com{)licated act, that will be recognized by any 
competent physiologist to be automatic and beyond the control of any 
ordinary inhibitory power, e.g., irritate and tease a child of one or two 
years sufficiently, and it will suddenly strike out at you ; suddenly 
strike at a man, and he will either perform an act of defence or offence, 
or both, quite automatically, and without power of controlling himself. 
Place a bright tempting toy before a child of a year, and it will be in- 
stantly appropriated. Place cold water before a man dying of thirst, 
and he will take and drink it without power of doing otherwise. £x- 

*Iu an excellent article on The ' MentJil Qualities of an Athlete * in the 
Harvard Monthly, vol. vi. p. 43, 3Ir. A. T. Dudley assigns the first place 
to the rapidly impulsive temperament. " Ask him how, in some complex 
trick, he performed a certain act. why he pushed or pulled at a certain in- 
stant, and he will tell you he does not know , he did it by instinct ; or 
rather his nerves and muscles did it of themselves. . . . Here is the dis- 
tinguishing feature of the good player ; the good player, confident In his. 
training and his practice, in the critical game trusts entirely to his impulse,, 
and does not think out every move. The poor player, unable to trust his. 
impulsive actions, is compelled to think carefully all the time. He thus^ 
not only loses the opportunities through his slowness in comprehending the* 
whole situation, but, being compelled to think rapidly all the time, at crit- 
ical points becomes confused ; while the fi ret rate player, not trying to 
reason, but acting as impulse directs, is continually distinguishing himself 
and plays the better under the greater pressure." 

f T. S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases iLondon 1888^ 
pp. 310-318. 



640 P8YCH0L0OT, 

haustion of nervous energy always lessens the inhibitory power. Who 
is not conscious of this ? * Irritability ' is one manifest at ion of this. 
Many persons have so small a stock of reserve brain-power — that most 
valuable of all brain-qualities — that it is soon used up, and you see at 
once that they lose tiieir power of self-control very soon. They are an- 
gels or demons just as they are fresh or tired. That surplus store of 
energy or resistive force which provides, in persons normally constituted, 
that moderate excesses in all directions shall do no great harm so long 
as they are not too often repeated, not being present in these people, 
overwork, over-drinking, or small debauches leave them at the mercy 
of their morbid impulses without power of resistance. . . . Woe to the 
man who uses up his surplus stock of brain-inhibition too near the bitter 
end, or too often 1 . . . The physiological word inhibition can be used 
synonymously with the psychological and ethical expression self-control, 
or with the will when exercised in certain directions. It is the charac- 
teristic of most forms of mental disease for self-control to be lost, but 
this loss is usually part of a general mental affection with melancholic, 
maniacal, demented, or delusional symptoms as the chief manifestation 
of the disease. There are other cases, not so numerous, where the loss 
of the power of inhibition is the chief and by far the most marked 
8>Tnptom. ... I shall call this form * Inhibitory Insanity.' Some of 
these cases have uncontrollable impulses to violence and destruction, 
others to homicide, others to suicide prompted by no depressed feel- 
ings, others to acts of animal gratification (satyriasis, nympho- 
mania, erotomania, bestiality), others to drinking too much alcohol 
(dipsomania), others towards setting things on fire (pyromania), others 
to stealing (kleptomania), and others towards immoralities of all sorts. 
The impulsive tendencies and morbid desires are innumerable in kind. 
Many of these varieties of Insanity have been distinguished by distinct 
names. To dig up and eat dead bodies (necrophilism), to wander from 
home and throw off the restraints of society (planomania), to act like a 
wild beast (lycanthropia), etc. Action from impulse in all these direc- 
tions may take place from a loss of controlling power in the higher re- 
gions of the brain, or from an over-development of energy in certain 
portions of the brain, which the normal power of inhibition cannot 
control. The driver may be so weak that he cannot control well-broken 
horses, or the horses may be so hard-mouthed that no driver can pull 
them up. Both conditions may arise from purely cerebral disorder .... 
or may be reflex. . . . The ego, tlie man, the will, may be non-existent 
for the time. The most perfect examples of this are murders done 
during somnambulism or epileptic unconsciousness, or acts done in the 
hypnotic state. There is no conscious desire to attain the object at all 
in such cases. In other cases there is consciousness and memory 
present, but no power of restraining action. The simplest example of 
this IS where an imbecile or dement, seeing something glittering, appro- 
priates it to himself, or when he commits indecent sexual acts. Through 
disease a previously sane and vigorous-minded person may get into the 



WILL, 541 

same state. The motives that would lead other persons not to do such 
acts do not operate in such persons. I have known a man steal who 
said he had no intense longing for the article he appropriated at all, at 
least consciously, but his will was in abeyance, and he could not resist 
the ordinary desire of possession common to all human nature.** 

It is not only those technically classed imbeciles and 
dements who exhibit this promptitude of impulse and tardi- 
ness of inhibition. Ask half the common drunkards you 
know why it is that they fall so often a prey to temptation, 
and they will say that most of the time they cannot telL 
It is a sort of vertigo with them. Their nervous centres 
have become a sluice-way pathologically unlocked by every 
passing conception of a bottle and a glass. They do not thirst 
for the beverage ; the taste of it may even appear repug- 
nant; and they perfectly foresee the morrow's remorse. 
But when they think of the liquor or see it, they find them- 
selves preparing to drink, and do not stop themselves : and 
more than this they cannot say. Similarly a man may 
lead a life of incessant love-making or sexual indulgence, 
though what spurs him thereto seems rather to be sug- 
gestions and notions of possibility than any overweening 
strength in his aflfections or lusts. He may even be physi- 
cally impotent all the while. The paths of natural (or it 
may be unnatural) impulse are so pervious in these charac- 
ters that the slightest rise in the level of innervation pro- 
duces an overflow. It is the condition recognized in pathol- 
ogy as 'irritable weakness.' The phase known as nascency 
or latency is so short in the excitement of the neural tissues 
that there is no opportunity for strain or tension to accumu- 
late within them; and the consequence is that with all the 
agitation and activity, the amount of real feeling engaged 
may be very small. The hysterical temperament is the play- 
ground par ea:celle7vce of this unstable equilibrium. One of 
these subjects will be filled with what seems the most genu- 
ine and settled aversion to a certain line of conduct, and 
the very next instant follow the stirring of temptation and 
plunge in it up to the neck. Professor Ribot well gives the 
name of 'Le Regne des Caprices' to the chapter in which 
he describes the hysterical temperament in his interesting 
little monograph * The Diseases of the Will.' 



-542 P8TCH0L0OY, 

Disorderly and impulsive conduct may, on the other 
hand, come about where the neural tissues preserve their 
proper inward tone, and where the inhibitory power is nor- 
mal or even unusually great In such cases the strength of 
the impdaive idea is pretematurally exalted, and what would 
be for most people the passing suggestion of a possibility 
becomes a gnawing, craving urgency to act. Works on in- 
sanity are full of examples of these morbid insistent ideas, 
in obstinately struggling against which the unfortunate 
victim's soul often sweats with agony, ere at last it gets 
swept away. One instance will stand for many ; M. Bibot 
quotes it from Calmeil : * 

** Gl^nadal, having lost his father in infancy, was brought up by his 
mother, whom he adored. At sixteen, his character, till then good 
and docile, changed. He became gloomy and taciturn. Pressed with 
questions by his mother, he decided at last to make a confession. * To 
you,' said he, 'I owe everything ; I love you with all my soul ; yet for 
some time past an incessant idea drives me to kill you. Prevent so 
terrible a misfortune from happening, in case some day the temptation 
should overpower me : allow me to enlist.' Notwithstanding pressing 
solicitations, he was firm in his resolve, went off, and was a good soldier. 
Still a secret impulse stimulated him without cessation to desert in 
order to come homo and kill his mother. At the end of his term of 
service the idea was as strong as on the first day. He enlisted for 
another terra. The murderous instinct persisted, but substituted 
another victim. He no lonjjer thought of killinj^ his mother — the hor- 
rible impulse pointed day and night towards his sister-in-law. In order 
to resist the second impulse, he condemned himself to jx^rpetual exile. 
At this time one of his old neighbors arrived in the regiment. Glena- 
dal confesses all his trouble. ' Be at rest,' said the other. * Your crime 
is impossible; your sister-in-law has just died.' At these words Glena- 
dal rises like a delivered captive. Joy fills his heart. He travels to the 
home of his childhood, nnvisited for so many years. But as he arrives 
he sees his sister-in-law living He jjives a cry, and the terrible impulse 
seizes him again as a prey. That very evening he makes his brother 
tie him fast. ' Take a solid rope, bind me like a wolf in the barn, and 
go and tell Dr. Calmeil. . . .' From him he jjot admission to an insane 
asylum. The evening before his entrance he wrote to the director of 
the establishment: 'Sir, I am to become an inmate of your house. I 
shall behave there as if 1 were in the regiment. You will think me 
cured. At moments perhaps 1 shall pretend to be so. Never believe 
me. Never let me out on any pretext. If I beg to be released, double 

* In his Maladies de la Volonte, p. 77. 



WILL. 643 

your watchfulness; the only use I shall make of my liberty will be to 
commit a crime which I abhor/ '' * 

The craving for drink in real dipsomaniacs, or for opium 
or chloral in those subjugated, is of a strength of which 
normal persons can form no conception. "Were a keg 
of rum in one corner of a room and were a cannon con- 
stantly discharging balls between me and it, I could not 
refrain from passing before that cannon in order to get the 
rum ;" " If a bottle of brandy stood at one hand and the 
pit of hell yawned at the other, and I were convinced that 
I should be pushed in as sure as I took one glass, I could 
not refrain :" such statements abound in dipsomaniacs' 
mouths. Dr. Mussey of Cincinnati relates this case : 

*' A few years ago a tippler was put into an almshouse in this State. 
"Within a few days he had devised various expedients to procure rum, 
but failed. At length, however, he hit upon one which was successful. 
He went into the wood-yard of the establishment, placed one hand upon 
the block, and with an axe in the other, struck it off at a single blow. 
With the stump raised aud streaming he ran into the house and cried, 
* Get some rum ! get some rum! my hand is off I ' In the confusion and' 
bustle of the occasion a bowl of rum was brought, into which he 
plunged the bleeding member of his body, then raising the bowl to his 
mouth, drank freely, and exultingly exclaimed, * Now I am satisfied.' 
Dr. J. E. Turner tells of a man who, while under treatment for inebriety, 
during four weeks secretly drank the alcohol from six jars containing 
morbid specimens. On asking him why he had committed this loath- 
some act, he re{)lied: * Sir. it is as impossible for me to control this dis- 
eased appetite as it is for me to control the pulsations of my heart.'" \ 

The passion of love may be called a monomania to 
which all of us are subject, however otherwise sane. It 
can coexist with contempt and even hatred for the * object ' 
which inspires it, and whilst it lasts the whole life of the 
man is altered by its presence. Alfieri thus describes the 
struggles of his unusually powerful inhibitive power with 
his a])normally excited impulses toward a certain lady : 

"Contemptible in my own eyes, I fell into such a state of melan- 
choly as would, if long continued, inevitjibly have led to insanity or 

* For other rases of ' impulsive insanity,' .see 11. Maudsley's Responsi- 
bility in Mental Disease, pp. 133-170, and Forbes Winslow's Obscure 
Diseases of the Mind and Brain, chapters vr, vii, viii. 

f Quoted by G. Burr, in an article on the Insanity of Inebriety in the 
N. Y. Psychological and Medico-Legal Journal, Dec. 1874. 



644 PSYCHOLOGY. 

death. I continued to wear my disgraceful fetters till towards the eud 
of January, 1775, when my rage, which had hitherto so often been re- 
strained within bounds, broke forth with the greatest violence. On 
returning one evening from the opera (the most insipid and tiresome 
amusement in Italy), where I had passed several hours in the box of 
the woman who was by turns the object of my antipathy and my love, 
I took the firm determination of emancipating myself forever from her 
yoke. Experience had taught me that flight, so far from enabling me 
to persevere in my resolutions, tended on the contrary to weaken and 
destroy them; I was inclined therefore to subject myself to a still more 
severe trial, imagining from the obstinacy and peculiarity of my char- 
acter that I should succeed most certainly by the adoption of such 
measures as would compel me to make the greatest efforts, I deter- 
mined never to leave the house, which, as I have already said, was 
exactly opposite that of the lady; to gaze at her windows, to see her go 
in and out every day, to listen to the sound of her voice, though firmly 
resolved that no advances on her part, either direct or indirect, no 
tender remembrances, nor in short any other means which might be 
employed, should ever again tempt me to a revival of our friendship. I 
was determined to die or liberate myself from my disgraceful thraldom. 
In order Xo give stability to my purpose, and to render it impossible for 
me to waver without the imputation of dishonor, I communicated my 
determination to one of my friends, who was greatly attached to me, 
and whom I highly esteemed. He had lamented the state of mind into 
which 1 had fallen, but not wishing to give countenance to my conduct, 
and seeing the impossibility of inducing me to abandon it. he had for 
some time ceased to visit at my house. In the few line.s which I ad- 
dressed to him, I briefly stated the resolution I had adopted, and as a 
pledge of my constancy I sent him a long tress of my ugly red hair. I 
had purposely caused it to be cut off in order to prevent my going out, 
as no one but clowns and sailors then appeared in public with short 
hair. I concluded my billet by conjuring him to strengthen and aid my 
fortitude by his presence and example. Isolated in this manner in my 
own house, 1 prohibited all species of intercourse, and passed the first 
fifteen days in uttering the most frightful lamentations and groans. 
Some of my friends came to visit me, and appeared to commiserate my 
situation, perhaps because I did not myself complain; but my figure 
and whole appearance bespoke my sufferings. Wishing to read some- 
thing I had recourse to the gazettes, whole pages of which I frequently 
ran over without understanding a single word. . . I passed more than 
two months till the end of March 1775, in a state bordering on frenzy; 
but alx)ut this time a new idea darted into my mind, which tended to 
assuage my melancholy." 

This was the idea of poetical composition, at which 
Alfieri describes his first attempts, made under these dis- 
eased circumstances, and goes on : 



WILL. 646 

*' The ODly good that occnrred to me from this whim was that of 
gradually detaching me from love, and of awakening my reason which 
had 80 long lain dormant. I no longer fonnd it necessary to cause my- 
self to be tied with cords to a chair, in order to prevent me from leaving 
my house and returning to that of my lady. This had been one of the 
expedients I devised to render myself wise by force. The cords were 
concealed under a large mantle in which I was enveloped, and only one 
hand remained at liberty. Of all those who came to see me, not one 
suspected I was bound down in this manner. I remained in this situa- 
tion for whole hours; Elias, who was my jailer, was alone intrusted with 
the secret. He always liberated me, as he had been enjoined, whenever 
the paroxysms of my rage subsided. Of all the whimsical methods 
which I employed, however, the most curious was that of appearing 
in masquerade at the theatre towards the end of the carnival'. Habited 
as Apollo, I ventured to present myself with a lyre, on which I played 
as well as I was able and sang some bad verses of my own composing. 
Such effrontery was diametrically opposite to my natural character. 
The only excuse I can offer for such scenes was my inability to resist an 
imperious passion. I felt that it was necessary to place an insuperable 
barrier between its object and me; and I saw that the strongest of all 
was the shame to which I should expose myself by renewing an attach- 
ment which I had so publicly turned into ridicule." * 

Often the insistent idea is of a trivial sort, but it may- 
wear the patient's life out. His hands feel dirty, they must 
be washed. He knoiva they are not dirty ; yet to get rid of 
the teasing idea he washes them. The idea, however, returns 
in a moment, and the unfortunate victim, who is not in the 
least deluded inteUecttuxUyy will end by spending the whole 
day at the wash-stand. Or his clothes are not * rightly * 
put on ; and to banish the thought he takes them off and 
puts them on again, till his toilet consumes two or three 
hours of time. Most people have the potentiality of this 
disease. To few has it not happened to conceive, after get- 
ting into bed, that they may have forgotten to lock the 
front door, or to turn out the entry gas. And few of us 
have not on some occasion got up to repeat the perform- 
ance, less because they believed in the reality of its omis- 
sion than because only so could they banish the worrying 
doubt and get to sleep. t 

* Autobiography, Howells' edition (1877), pp. 192-6. 

t See a paper on Insistent and Fixed Ideas by Dr. Cowles in American 
Journal of Psychology, i. 222 ; and another on the so-called Insanity of 
Doubt by Dr. Knapp, ibid, lu. 1. The latter con tains a partial bibliography 
of the subject. 



546 PaTCHOLOOT, 



TKD OBSTBXJOTED 'WHiIi. 

In striking contrast with the cases in which inhibition 
is insufficient or impulsion in excess are those in which 
impulsion is insufficient or inhibition of in excess. We all 
know the condition described on p. 404 of Vol. I, in which the 
mind for a few moments seems to lose its focussing power 
and to be unable to rally its attention to any determinate 
thing. At such times we sit blankly staring and do nothing. 
The objects of consciousness fail to touch the quick or break 
the skin. They are there, but do not reach the level of effect- 
iveness. This state of non-efficacious presence is the nor- 
mal condition of some objects, in all of us. Great fatigue 
or exhaustion may make it the condition of almost all ob- 
jects ; and an apathy resembling that then . brought about 
is recognized in asylums under the name of abulia as a 
symptom of mental disease. The healthy state of the will 
reqidres, as aforesaid, both that vision should be right, and 
that action should obey its lead. But in the morbid con- 
dition in question the vision may be wholly unaffected, 
and the intellect clear, and yet the act either fails to follow 
or follows iu some other way. " Video indiora probogue, 
deferiora sequor " is the classic expression of the latter con- 
dition of mind. The former it is to which the name abulia 
peculiarly applies. The patients, says Guislain, 

**are able to will inwardly, mentally, according to the dictates of reason. 
They experience the desire to act, but they are powerless to act as they 
should. . . . Their will cannot overpass certain limits: one would say 
that the force of action within them is blocked up : the I uill dm^s not 
transform itself into impulsive volition, into active determination. 
Some of these patients wonder themselves at the impotence with which 
their will is smitten. If you abandon them to themselves, they pass 
whole days in their bed or on a chair. If one speaks to them or excites 
them, they express themselves properly though briefly ; and judge of 
things pretty well."* 

In Chapter XXI, as will be remembered, it was said 
that the sentiment of reality wath which an object ap- 
pealed to the mind is proportionate (amongst other things) 
to its efficacy as a stimulus to the will. Here we get the 



Quoted by Ribot. op eit. p. 39. 



WILL, 547 

obverse side of the truth. Those ideas, objects, con- 
siderations, which (in thesfe lethargic states) fail to get to the 
will, fail to draw blood, seem, in so far forth, distant and un- 
real. The connection of the reality of things with their 
effectiveness as motives is a tale that has never yet been 
fully told. The moral tragedy of human life comes almost 
wholly from the fact that the link is ruptured which nor- 
mally should hold between vision of the truth and action, 
and that this pungent sense of effective reality will not at- 
tach to certain ideas. Men do not differ so much in their 
mere feelings and conceptions. Their notions of possibility 
and their ideals are not as far apart as might be argued 
from their differing fates. No class of them have better 
sentiments or feel more constantly the difference between 
the higher and the lower path in life than the hopeless 
failures, the sentimentalists, the drunkards, the schemers, 
the * dead-beats,' whose life is one long contradiction 
between knowledge and action, and who, with full com- 
mand of theory, never get to holding their limp characters 
erect. No one eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge 
as they do ; as far as moral insight goes, in comparison with 
them, the orderly and prosperous philistines whom they 
scandalize are sucking babes. And yet their moral 
knowledge, always there grumbling and rumbling in the 
background, — discerniug, commenting, protesting, longing, 
half resolving, — never wholly resolves, never gets its voice 
out of the minor into the major key, or its speech out of 
the subjunctive into the imperative mood, never breaks 
the spell, never takes the helm into its hands. In such 
characters as Rousseau and Restif it would seem as if the 
lower motives had all the impulsive efficacy in their 
hands. Like trains with the right of way, they retain ex- 
clusive possession of the track. The more ideal motives 
exist alongside of them in profusion, but they never get 
switched on, and the man's conduct is no more influenced 
by tliem than an express train is influenced by a wayfarer 
standing by the roadside and calling to be taken aboard. 
They are an inert accompaniment to the end of time ; and 
the consciousness of inward hollowness that accrues from 
habitually seeing the better only to do the worse, is one of 



648 PSYCHOLOGY, 

the saddest feelings one can bear with him through this 
Tale of tears. 

We now see at one view when it is that effort complicates 
volition. It does so whenever a rarer and more ideal im- 
pulse is called upon to neutralize others of a more instinc- 
tive and habitual kind ; it does so whenever strongly ex- 
plosive tendencies are checked, or strongly obstructive 
conditions overcome. The dme Men nee, the child of the 
sunshine, at whose birth the fairies made their gifts, does 
not need much of it in his life. The hero and the neurotic 
subject, on the other hand, do. Now our spontaneous way 
of conceiving the effort, under all these circumstances, is as 
an active force adding its strength to that of the motives 
which ultimately prevail. When outer forces impinge upon 
a body, we say that the resultant motion is in the line of 
least resistance, or of greatest traction. But it is a curious 
fact that our spontaneous language never speaks of volition 
with effort in this way. Of course if we proceed a priori 
and define the line of least resistance as the line that is 
followed, the physical law must also hold good in the mental 
sphere. But we/ee/, in all hard cases of volition, as if the 
line taken, when the rarer and more ideal motives prevail, 
were the line of greater resistance, and as if the line of 
coarser motivation were the more pervious aud easy one, 
even at the very moment when we refuse to follow it He 
who under the surgeon's knife represses cries of pain, or 
he who exposes himself to social obloquy for duty's sake, 
feels as if he were following the line of greatest temporary 
resistance. He speaks of conquering and overcoming his 
impulses and temptations. 

But the sluggard, the drunkard, the coward, never talk 
of their conduct in that way or say they resist their energy, 
overcome their sobriety, conquer their courage, and so 
forth. If in general we class all springs of action as pro- 
pensities on the one hand and ideals on the other, the sen- 
sualist never says of his behavior that it results from a 
victory over his ideals, but the moralist always speaks of 
his as a victory over his propensities. The sensualist uses 
terms of inactivity, says he forgets his ideals, is deaf to 



WILL, 549 

duty, and so forth ; which terms seem to imply that the 
ideal motives per se can be annulled without energy or 
effort, and that the strongest Inere traction lies in the line 
of the propensities. The ideal impulse appears, in compar- 
ison with thisy a still small voice which must be artificially 
reinforced to prevail. Effort is what reinforces it, making 
things seem as if, while the force of propensity were essen- 
tially a fixed quantity, the ideal force might be of various 
amount But what determines the amount of the effort 
when, by its aid, an ideal motive becomes victorious over a 
great sensual resistance ? The very greatness of the resist- 
ance itself. If the sensual propensity is small, the effort is 
small. The latter is made great by the presence of a great 
antagonist to overcome. And if a brief definition of ideal 
or moral action were required, none could be given which 
would better fit the appearances than this : It is action in 
the line of the greatest resistance. 

The facts may be most briefly symbolized thus, P stand- 
ing for the propensity, I for the ideal impulse, and E for 
the effort : 

I per se < P. 
I+E>P. 

In other words, if E adds itself to I, P immediately 
offers the least resistance, and motion occurs in spito of it 

But the E does not seem to form an integral part of the 
L It appears adventitious and indeterminate in advance. 
We can make more or less as we please, and if we make 
enough we can convert the greatest mental resistance into 
the least Such, at least, is the impression which the facts 
spontaneously produce upon us. But we will not discuss 
the truth of this impression at present ; let us rather con- 
tinue our descriptive detail 

PLEASUBE AND PAIN AS 8PBING8 07 ACTION. 

Objects and thoughts of objects start our action, but 
the pleasures and pains which action brings modify its 
course and regulate it ; and later the thoughts of the pleas- 
ures and the pains acquire themselves impulsiye and in* 



550 PSTCHOLOQT. 

hibitive power. Not that the thought of a pleasure need 
be itself a pleasure, usually it is the reverse — nessun mag- 
gior ddore — as Dante says — and not that the thought of pain 
need be a pain, for, as Homer says, " griefs are often after- 
wards an entertainment." But as present pleasures are 
tremendous reinforcers, and present pains tremendous in- 
hibitors of whatever action leads to them, so the thoughts 
of pleasures and pains take rank amongst the thoughts 
which have most impulsive and inhibitive power. The 
precise relation which these thoughts hold to other thoughts 
is thus a matter demanding some attention. 

If a movement feels agreeable, We repeat and repeat it 
as long as the pleasure lasts. If it hurts us, our muscular 
contractions at the instant stop. So complete is the inhibi- 
tion in this latter case that it is almost impossible for a 
man to cut or mutilate himself slowly and deliberately — his 
hand invincibly refusing to bring on the pain. And there 
are many pleasures which, when once we have begun to 
taste them, make it all but obligatory to keep up the activ- 
ity to which they are due. So widespread and searching 
is this influence of pleasures and pains upon our movements 
that a premature philosophy has decided that these are 
our only spurs to action, and that w-herever they seem to 
be absent, it is only because they are so far on among the 
* remoter ' images that prompt the action that they are over- 
looked. 

This is a great mistake, however. Important as is the 
influence of pleasures and pains upon our movements, they 
are far from being our only stimuli. With the manifesta- 
tions of instinct and emotional expression, for example, they 
have absolutely nothing to do. Who smiles for the pleasure 
of the smiling, or frowns for the pleasure of the frown ? 
Who blushes to escape the discomfort of not blushing ? 
Or who in anger, grief, or fear is actuated to the movements 
which he makes by the pleasures which they yield ? In all 
these cases the movements are discharged fatally by the 
vis a tergo which the stimulus exerts upon a nervous system 
framed to respond in just that way. The objects of our 
rage, love, or terror, the occasions of our tears and smiles. 



WILL. 661 

whether they be present to our senses, or whether they be 
merely represented in idea, have this peculiar sort of im- 
pulsive power. The imptdsive qucMty of mental states is an 
attribute behind which we cannot go. Some states of mind 
have more of it than others, some have it in this direction, 
and some in thai Feelings of pleasure and pain have it, 
and perceptions and imaginations of fact have it, but neither 
have it exclusively or peculiarly. It is of the essence of all 
consciousness (or of the neural process which underlies it) 
to instigate movement of some sort. That with one creature 
and object it should be of one sort, with others of another 
sort, is a problem for evolutionary history to explain. 
However the actual impulsions may have arisen, they must 
now be described as they exist ; and those persons obey a 
curiously narrow teleological superstition who think them- 
selves bound to interpret them in every instance as eflfects 
of the secret solicitancy of pleasure and repugnancy of 
pain.* 



* Tbe silliness of the old-fashioned pleasure-philosophy saute auzyeux. 
Take, for example, Prof. Bain's explanation of sociability and parental 
love by the pleasures of touch : "Touch is the fundamental and generic 
sense. . . . Even after the remaining senses are differentiated, the primary 
sense continues to be a leading susceptibility of the mind. The soft warm 
touch, if not a first-class influence, is at least an approach to that The 
combined power of soft contact and warmth amounts to a considerable 
pitch of massive pleasure ; while there may be subtle influences not redu- 
cible to these two heads, such as we term, from not knowing anything 
about them, magnetic or electric. The sort of thrill from taking a baby in 
arms is something beyond mere warm touch ; and it may rise to the ecstatic 
height, in which case, however, there may be concurrent sensations and 
ideas. ... In mere tender emotion not sexual, there is nothing but the 
sense of touch to gratify, unless we assume the occult magnetic inluences. 
. . . In a word, our love pleasures begin and end in sensual contact. Touch 
is both the alpha and omega of affection. As the terminal and satisfying 
sensation, the ne plus ultra, it must be a pleasure of the highest degree. . . . 
Why should a more lively feeling grow up towards a fellow-being than 
towards a perennial fountain ? [This * should ' is simply delicious from 
the more modern evolutionary point of view.] It muet be that there is a 
source of pleasure in the companionship of other sentient creatures, over 
and above the help afforded by them in obtaining the necessaries of life. 
To account for this, I can suggest nothing but the primary and independent 
pleasure of the animal embrace.'* [Mind, this is said not of the sexual 
interest, but of * Sociability at Large.'] *• For this pleasure every creature 
is disposed to pay something, even when it is only fraternal. A certain 



662 PBTCHOLOQT. 

It might be that to reflection such a narrow teleologj 
would justify itself, that pleasures and pains might seem 
the only comprehensible and reasoncMe motives for action, the 
only motives on which we ought to act That is an ethicai 
proposition, in favor of which a good deal may be said 
But it is not a psychological proposition ; and nothing fol- 
lows from it as to the motives upon which as a matter of 
fact we do act. These motives are supplied by innumerable 
objects, which innervate our voluntary muscles by a process 
as automatic as that by which they light a fever in our 
breasts. If the thought of pleasure can impel to action, 
surely other thoughts may. Experience only can decide 
which thoughts do. The chapters on Instinct and Emotion 
have shown us that their name is legion ; and with this 
verdict we ought to remain contented, and not seek an illu- 
sory simplification at the cost of half the facts. 

If in these our Jirst acts pleasures and pains bear no 
part, as little do they bear in our last acts, or those arti- 
ficially acquired performances which have become habitual 



amount of material benefit imparted is a condition of the full heartiness of a 
responding embrace, the complete fruition of this primitive Joy. In the 
absence of those conditions the pleasure of giving . . . can scarcely be 
accounted for ; we know full well that, without these helps, it would be a 
very meagre sentiment in beings like ourselves. ... It seems to me that 
there must be at the [parental instinct's] foundation that Intense pleasure in 
the embrace of the young which we find to characterize the parental feeling 
throughout. Such a pleasure once created would associate itself with the 
prevailing features and aspects of the young, and give to all of these their 
very great interest. For the sake of the pleasure, the parent discovers the 
necessity of nourishing the subject of it, and comes to regard the minister- 
ing function as a part or condition of the delight" (Emotions and Will, 
pp. 126, 127, 132, 133, 140). Prof. Bain does not explain why a satin 
cushion kept at about 98* F. would not on the whole give us the pleasure In 
question more cheaply than our friends and babies do. It is true that the 
cushion might lack the 'occult magnetic influences.* Most of us would 
say that neither a baby's nor a friend's skin would possess them, were not 
a tenderness already there. The youth who feels ecstasy shoot through 
him when by accident the silken palm or even the * vesture's hem ' of his 
idol touches him, would hardly feel it were he not hard hit by Cupid in 
advan(!e. The love creates the ecstasy, not the ecstasy the love. And for 
the rest of us can it possibly be that all our social virtue springs from an 
appetite for the sensual pleasure of having our hand shaken, or being 
slapped on the back ? 



WILL. 553 

All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undress- 
ing, the coming and going from our work or carrying 
through of its various operations, is utterly without mental 
reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized 
conditions. It is ideo-motor action. As I do not breathe 
for the pleasure of the breathing, but simply find that I am 
breathing, so I do not write for the pleasure of the writ- 
ing, but simply because I have once begun, and being in a 
state of intellectual excitement which keeps venting itself 
in that way, find that I am writing stilL Who will pretend 
chat when he idly fingers his knife-handle at the table, it is 
for the sake of any pleasure which it gives him, or pain 
which he thereby avoids. We do all these things because 
at the moment we cannot help it ; our nervous systems are 
so shaped that they oyerflow in just that way ; and for 
many of our idle or purely * nervous * and fidgety perform- 
uices we can assign absolutely no reason at all. 

Or what shall be said of a shy and unsociable man who 
receives point-blank an invitation to a small party ? The 
thing is to him an abomination ; but your presence exerts 
a compulsion on him, he can think of no excuse, and so 
says yes, cursing himself the while for what he does. He 
is unusually aui compos who does not every week of his 
life fall into some such blundering act as this. Such in- 
stances of voluntas invila show not only that our acts can- 
not all be conceived as effects of represented pleasure, 
but that they cannot even be classed as cases of repre- 
resented good. The class * goods ' contains many more gen- 
erally influential motives to action than the class ' pleas- 
ants.' Pleasures often attract us only because we deem 
them goods. Mr. Spencer, e.g., urges us to court pleasures 
for their influence upon health, which comes to us as a good. 
But almost as little as under the form of pleasures do our 
acts invariably appear to us under the form of goods. All 
diseased impulses and pathological fixed ideas are instances 
to the contrary. It is the very badness of the act that gives 
it then its vertiginous fascination. Bemove the prohibi- 
tion, and the attraction stops. In my university days a 
student threw himself from an upper entry window of one 
of the college buildings and was nearly killed. Another 



654 PSYCHOLOGY, 

student, a friend of my own, had to pass the window daily in 
coming and going from his room, and experienced a dread- 
ful temptation to imitate the deed. Being a Catholic, he told 
his director, who said, * All right ! if you must, you must,' 
and added, * Go ahead and do it,' thereby instantly quench- 
ing his desire. This director knew hgw to minister to a 
mind diseased. But we need not go to minds diseased for 
examples of the occasional tempting-power of simple bad- 
ness and unpleasantness as such. Every one who has a 
wound or hurt anywhere, a sore tooth, e.g., will ever and 
anon press it just to bring out the pain. If we are near a 
new sort of stink, we must sniff it again just to verify once 
more how bad it is. This very day I have been repeating 
over and over to myself a verbal jingle whose mawkish 
silliness was the secret of its haunting power. I loathed 
yet could not banish it. 

Believers iu the pleasure-and-pain theory must thus, 
if they are candid, make large exceptions in the application 
of their creed. Action from * fixed ideas ' is accordingly 
a terrible stumbling-block to the candid Professor Bain. 
Ideas have in his psychology no impulsive but only a * guid- 
ing ' function, whilst 

" The proper stimulus of the will, namely, some variety of pleasure 
and pain, is needed to give the impetus. . . . The intellectual link is 
not sufficient for causing the deed to rise at the beck of the idea 
(except in case of an *idee fixe') ;" but "should any pleasure spring 
up or be continued, by performing an action that we clearly conceive, 
the causation is then complete ; both the directing and the moving 
powers are present.'' ♦ 

Pleasures and pains are for Professor Bfiin the * gennine 
impulses of the will.' f 

** Without an antecedent of pleasurable or painful feeling — actual 
or ideal, primary or derivative — the will cannot be stimulated. Through 



* Emotion and Will, p. 352. But even Bain's own description belies 
his formula, for the idea appears as the ' moving ' and the pleasure as 
the ' directing ' force. 

f P. 898 



WILL. 565 

all the disguises that wrap up what we call motives, something of one 
or other of these two grand conditions can be detected." * 

Accordingly, where Professor Bain finds an exception to 
this rule, he refuses to call the phenomenon a * genuinely 
voluntary impulse.' The exceptions, he admits, * are those 
furnished by never-dying spontaneity, habits, and fixed 
ideas.* f Fixed ideas 'traverse the proper course of voli- 
tion.' X 

*' Disinterested impulses are wholly distinct from the attainment of 
pleasure and the avoidance of pain. . . . The theory of disinterested 
action, in the only form that I can conceive it, supposes that the action 
of the will and the attainment of happiness do not square throughout."§ 

Sympathy " has this in common with the Fixed Idea, 
that it clashes with the regular outgoings of the will in 
favor of our pleasures."] 

Prof. Bain thus admits all the essential facts. Pleasure 
and pain are motives of only part of our activity. But he 
prefers to give to that part of the activity exclusively which 
these feelings prompt the name of * regular outgoings ' and 
* genuine impulses ' of the will, 1 and to treat all the rest as 
mere paradoxes and anomalies, of which nothing rational 
can be said. This amounts to taking one species of a 
genus, calling it alone by the generic name, and ordering 
the other co-ordinate species to find what names they may. 
At bottom this is only verbal play. How much more con- 
ducive to clearness and insight it is to take the genvs 
' springs of action * and treat it as a whole ; and then to 
distinguish within it the species * pleasure and pain ' from 
whatever other species may be found ! 

There is, it is true, a complication in the relation of 
pleasure to action, which partly excuses those who make 
it the exclusive spur. This complication deserves some 
notice at our hands. 

An impulse which discharges itself immediately is gen- 
erally quite neutral as regards pleasure or pain — the breath- 

♦ P. 354. t P 855. X p. 890. 

§ Pp. 295-6. I P. 121. 

1 Cf. also Bain's note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, vol. ii. p. 805. 



556 P8YCH0L00T, 

ing impulse, for example. If such an impulse is arrested, 
however, by an extrinsic force, a great feeling of uneasiness 
is produced — for instance, the dyspnoea of asthma. And 
in proportion as the arresting force is then overcome, relief 
acrues — as when we draw breath again after the asthma sub- 
sides. The relief is a pleasure and the uneasiness a pain ; 
and thus it happens that round all our impulses, merely as 
such, there twine, as it were, secondary possibilities of 
pleasant and painful feeling, involved in the manner in 
which the act is allowed to occur. These pleasures and 
pains of achievement, discharge, or fruition exist, no matter 
what the original spring of action be. We are glad when 
we have successfully got ourselves out of a danger, though 
the thought of the gladness was surely not what suggested 
to us to escape. To have compassed the steps towards a 
proposed sensual indulgence also makes us glad, and this 
gladness is a pleasure additional to the pleasure originally 
proposed. On the other hand, we are chagrined and dis- 
pleased when any activity, however instigated, is hindered 
whilst iu process of actual discharge. We are* uneasy' 
till the discharge starts up again. And this is just as true 
when the action is neutral, or has nothing but pain in view 
as its result, as when it was undertaken for pleasure's ex- 
press sake. The moth is probably as annoyed if hindered 
from getting into the lamp-Hame as the roue is if inter- 
rupted in his debauch ; and we are chagrined if prevented 
from doing some quite unimportant act which would have 
given us no noticeable pleasure if done, merely because the 
prevention itself is disagreeable. 

Let us now call the pleasure for the sake of which the 
act may be done the pursued pleasure. It follows that, even 
when no pleasure is pursued by an act, the act itself may he 
the plensantest live of conduct when once the impulse has 
begun, on account of the incidental pleasure which then 
attends its successful achievement and the pain which would 
come of interruption. X pleasant act and an act pursuing a 
pleasure are in themselves, however, two perfectly distinct 
conceptions, though they coalesce in one concrete phenome- 
non whenever a pleasure is deliberately pursued. I cannot 
help thinkinj; tUv\t it is the confusion of pursued pleasure 



WILL. 557 

mth mere pleasure of achievement which makes the pleasure- 
theory of action so plausible to the ordinary mind. We 
feel an impulse, no matter whence derived; we proceed 
to act ; if hindered, we feel displeasure ; and if successful, 
relief. Action in the line of the present impulse is always for 
the time being the pleasant course ; and the ordinary he- 
donist expresses this fact by saying that we act for the 
sake of the pleasantness involved. But who does not see 
that for this sort of pleasure to be possible, the impulse 
must be there already as an independent fact ? The pleasure 
of successful performance is the result of the impulse, not 
its cause. You cannot have your pleasure of achievement 
unless you have managed to get your impulse under head- 
way beforehand by some previous means. 

It is true that on special occasions (so complex is the 
human mind) the pleasure of achievement may itself become a 
pursued pleasure; and these cases form another point on which 
the pleasure-theory is apt to rally. Take a foot-ball game 
or a fox-hunt. Who in cold blood wants the fox for its 
own sake, or cares whether the ball be at this goal or that ? 
We know, however, by experience, that if we can once rouse 
a certain impulsive excitement in ourselves, whether to over- 
take the fox, or to get the ball to one particular goal, the 
successful venting of it over the counteracting checks will 
fill us with exceeding joy. We therefore get ourselves de- 
liberately and artificially into the hot impulsive state. It 
takes the presence of various instinct-arousing conditions to 
excite it ; but little by little, once we are in the field, it 
reaches its paroxysm ; and we reap the reward of our ex- 
ertions in that pleasure of successful achievement which» 
far more than the dead fox or the goal-got ball, was the ob- 
ject we originally pursued. So it often is with duties* 
Lots of actions are done with heaviness all through, and 
not till they are completed does pleasure emerge, in the joy 
of being done with them. Like Hamlet we say of each such 
successive task, 

" O cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right t " 

and then we often add to the original impulse that seine 
on, this additional one, that ** we shall feel so glad when 



658 P8TCH0L00T. 

well through with it/' that thought also having its iinpulsire 
spur. But because a pleasure of achievement can thus be- 
come a pursued pleasure upon occasion, it does not follow 
that everywhere and always that pleasure must be what is 
pursued. This, however, is what the pleasure-philosophers 
seem to suppose. As well might they suppose, because no 
steamer can go to sea without incidentally consuming coal, 
and because some steamers may occasionally go to sea to 
try their coal, that therefore no steamer can go to sea for 
any other motive than that of coal-consumption.* 

As we need not act for the sake of gaining the pleasure of 
achievement, so neither need we act for the sake of escaping 
the uneasiness of arrest. This uneasiness is altogether due 
to the fact that the act is already tending to occur on other 
grounds. And these original grounds are what impel to its 
continuance, even though the uneasiness of the arrest may 
upon occasion add to their impulsive power. 

To conclude, I am far from denying the exceeding prom- 
inence and importance of the part which pleasures and 
pains, both felt and represented, play in the motivation of 
our conduct. But I must insist that it is no exclusive part, 
and that co-ordinately with these mental objects innumer- 
able others have an exactly similar impulsive and inhibitive 
power, f 

If one must have a single name for the condition upon 
which the impulsive and inhibitive quality of objects de- 
pends, one had better call it their interest. * The interest- 

* How much clearer Hume's head was than that of his disciples* I •'It 
has been proved beyond all controversy that even the passions commonly 
esteemed sellish carry the Mind beyond self directly to the object ; that 
though the satisfaction of these passions gives us enjoyment, yet the pros 
pect of this enjoyment is not the cause of the passions but, on the contrary, 
the passion is antecedent to the enjoyment, and without the former ihe latter 
could never possibly exist," etc. (Essay on the Different Species of Philosc 
•j)hy. ^ 1, note near the end.) 

f In favor of the view in the text, one may ronsult H. Sidgwick, Meth 
ods of Ethics, lxx)k i. chap, iv; T. H. Green, Piolegomeua to Ethics, bk 
III. chap. I. p. 179; Carpenter. Mental Physiol., chap M. ; J. Martiueau. 
Types of Ethical Theory, part ii. bk i, chap. ii. i, and bk ii, branch i. 
chap. I. i. ^ 3. Against it see Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, chap. ii. 
gii : H. Spencer. Data of Ethics, §§9-15; D. G. Thompson. System of 
Psychology, part ix, and Mind. vi. 62. Also Bain, Senses and Intellect, 
7'i8-44 i Emotions and W\U. A^^. 



WILL. 669 

ing ' is a title Tirliich coyers not only the pleasant and the 
painful, but also the morbidly fascinating, the tediously 
haunting, and even the simply habitual, inasmuch as the 
attention usually travels on habitual lines, and what-we-at- 
tend-to and what-interests-us are sjTionymous terms. It 
seems as if we ought to look for the secret of an idea's im- 
pulsiveness, not in any peculiar relations which it may have 
with paths of motor discharge, — for aU ideas have relations 
with some such paths, — but rather in a preliminary phe- 
nomenon, the urgency^ namdy^ tvith which it is aUe to compel 
attention and dominate in consciousness. Let it once so dom- 
inate, let no other ideas succeed in displacing it, and what- 
ever motor effects belong to it by nature will inevitably 
occur — its impulsion, in short, will be given to boot, and will 
manifest itself as a matter of course. This is what we have 
seen in instinct, in emotion, in common ideo-motor action, 
in hypnotic suggestion, in morbid impulsion, and in voluntas 
invito, — the impelling idea is simply the one which possesses 
the attention. It is the same where pleasure and pain are 
the motor spurs — they drive other thoughts from con- 
sciousness at the same time that they instigate their own 
characteristic 'volitional' effects. And this is also what 
happens at the moment of the Jiat, in all the five types of 
'decision' which we have described. In short, one does not 
see any case in which the steadfast occupancy' of conscious- 
ness does not appear to be the prime condition of impulsive 
power. It is still more obviously the prime condition of 
inhibitive power. What checks our impulses is the mere 
thinking of reasons to the contrary — it is their bare presence 
to the mind which gives the veto, and makes acts, otherwise 
seductive, impossible to perform. If we could only forget 
our scruples, our doubts, our fears, what exultant energy 
we should for a while display ! 

Wllili IS A BELATION BETWEEN THE MIND AND ITS 
• IDEAS.' 

In closing in, therefore, after all these preliminaries, 
upon the more intimate nature of the volitional process, we 
find ourselves driven more and more exclusively to con- 
aider the conditions which make ideas prevail in the mind. 



560 PSTCHOLOQT. 

With the prevalence, once there as a fact, of the motiye 
idea the psychology of volition properly stops. The move- 
ments which ensue are exclusively physiological phenomena, 
following according to physiological laws upon the neural 
events to which the idea corresponds. The vnlling termi- 
nates with the prevalence of the idea ; and whether the act 
then follows or not is a matter quite immaterial, so far as the 
willing itself goes. I will to write, and the act follows. I 
will to sneeze, and it does not I will that the distant table 
slide over the floor towards me ; it also does not. My willing 
representation can no more instigate my sneezing-centre 
than it can instigate the table to activity. But in both cases 
it is as true and good willing as it was when I willed to 
write.* In a word, volition is a psychic or moral fact pure 
and simple, and is absolutely completed when the stable 
state of the idea is there. The supervention of motion is a 
supernumerary phenomenon depending on executive gan- 
glia whose function lies outside the mind. 

In St. Vitus' dance, in locomotor ataxy, the representa- 
tion of a movement and the consent to it take place nor- 
mally. But the inferior executive centres are deranged, and 
although the ideas discharge them, they do not discharge 
them so as to reproduce the precise sensations anticipated. 
In aphasia the patient has an image of certain words which 
he wishes to utter, but when he opens his mouth he hears 
himself making quite unintended sounds. This may fill 
him with rage and despair — which passions only show how 



♦ This sentence is written from the autlior's own consciousness. But 
many persons say that where they disbelieve in the effects ensuing, as in 
the case of the table, they cannot will it. They '* cannot exert a volition 
that a table should move/* This personal difference may be parti}- verlml. 
Different people may attach different connotations to the word 'will.' 
But I incline to think that we differ psychologically as well. When one 
knows that he has no power, one's desire of a thing is called a ttish and 
not a will. The sense of impotence inhibits the volition. Only by abstract- 
ing from the thought of the impossibility am I able to imagine strongly 
the table sliding over the floor, to make the bo{iily ' effort ' which 1 do, and 
to wili :t to come towards me. It may be thiit some people ure unable 
to perform thi.^ abstraction, and that the image of the tabic staiionary 
on the floor inhibits the contradictory image of its moving, which is the 
object to be willed. 



WILL. 561 

intact his will remains. Paralysis only goes a step farther. 
The associated mechanism is not only deranged but al- 
together broken through. The volition occurs, but the 
hand remains as still as the table. The paralytic is made 
aware of this by the absence of the expected change in his 
afferent sensations. He tries harder, i.e., he mentally 
frames the sensation of muscular ' effort/ with consent that 
it shall occur. It does so : he frowns, he heaves his chest, 
he clinches his other fist, but the palsied arm lies passive 
as before.* 

We thus find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into 
volition when we ask by what process it is that the thought of 
any given object comes to prevail stably in the mind. Where 
thoughts prevail without effort, we have sufficiently studied 
in the several chapters on sensation, association, and at- 
tention, the laws of their advent before consciousness and of 
their stay. We will not go over that ground again, for we 
know that interest and association are the words, let their 
worth be what it may, on which our explanations must per- 
force rely. Where, on the other hand, the prevalence of 
the thought is accompanied by the phenomenon of effort, 
the case is much less clear. Already in the chapter on at- 
tention we postponed the final consideration of voluntary 
attention with effort to a later place. We have now 
brought things to a point at which we see that attention 
with effort is all that any case of volition implies. The 
essential achievement of the tviU, in short, when it is most * vol- 
untary ,' is to ATTEND to a difficult object and hold it fast before 
the mind. The so-doing is iheifiat ; and it is a mere physio- 
logical incident that when the object is thus attended to, 
immediate motor consequences should ensue. A resolve^ 
whose contemplated motor consequences are not to ensue 
until some possibly far distant future condition shall have 
been fulfilled, involves all the psychic elements of a motor 
fiat except the word * now ;^ and it is the same with many of 

* A Dormal palsy occurs during sleep. We Will all sorts of motions in 
our dreams, but seldom perform any of them. In nightmare we become 
conscious of the non-performance, and make a muscular 'effort.' This 
seems then to occur in a restricted way, limiting itself to the occlusion of 
ihe glottis and producing the respiratory anxiety which wakes us up. 



662 P8TCH0L0GT. 

our purely theoretic beliefs. We saw in effect in the ap- 
propriate chapter, how in the last resort belief means only 
a peculiar sort of occupancy of the mind, and relation to 
the self felt in the thing believed ; and we know in the case 
of many beliefs how constant an effort of the attention is 
required to keep them in this situation and protect them 
from displacement by contradictory ideas.* (Compare 
above, p. 321.) 

Effort of attention is thus the essenJtial phenomenon cf 
tmll.f Every reader must know by his own experience that 
this is so, for every reader must have felt some fiery pas- 
sion's grasp. What constitutes the diflSculty for a man 
laboring under an unwise passion of acting as if the passion 

* Both resolves and beliefs have of course immediate motor conse- 
quences of a quasi-emotioDal sort, changes of breathing, of attituu ''^ in- 
ternal speech movements, etc, ; but these movements are not the ohfeeU 
resolved on or believed. The movements in common volition are the ob- 
jects willed. 

f This wlUianal effort pure and simple must be carefully distinguished 
from the muscular effort with which it is usually confounded. The latter 
consists of all those peripheral feelings to which a muscular * exertion ' 
may give rise. These feelings, whenever they are massive and the body is 
not ' fresh, ' are rather disagreeable, especially when accompanied by stopped 
breath, congested head, bruised skin of fingers, toes, or shoulders, and 
strained joints. And it is only as thvs disagreeable that the mind must 
make its tolitioual effort in stably representing their reality and conse- 
quently bringing it about. That they happen to be made real by muscular 
activity is a purely accidental circumstance. A soldier standing still to be 
tired at expects disagreeable sensations from his muscular passivity. The 
action of his will, in sustaining the expectation, is identical with that 
required for a painful muscular effort. What is hard for both is facing an 
idea as real. 

Where much muscular effort is not needed or where the * freshness ' is 
very great, the volitional effort is not required to sustain the idea of move- 
ment, which comes then and stays in virtue of association's simpler laws. 
More commonly, however, muscular effort involves volitional effort as 
well. Exhausted with fatigue and wet and watching, the sailor on a 
wreck throws himself down to rest. But hardly are his limbs fairly 
relaxed, when the order • To the pumps ! ' again sounds in his ears. Shall 
he, can he, obey it ? Is it not better just to let his aching body lie, and let 
the ship go down if she will? So he lies on, till, with a desperate heave 
of the will, at last he staggers to his legs, and to his task again. Again, 
there are instances where the fiat demands great volitional effort though 
the muscular exertion be iusiirnillcant, e.g., the getting out of bed and 
bathing one's self on a cold morning. 



WILL, 563 

were unwise ? Certainly there is no physical diflSculty. It 
is as easy physically to avoid a fight as to begin one, to 
pocket one's money as to squander it on one's cupidities, to 
walk away from as towards a coquette's door. The difficulty 
is mental ; it is that of getting the idea of the wise action 
to stay before our mind at all. When any strong emotional 
state whatever is upon us the tendency is for no images but 
such as are congruous with it to come up. If others by 
chance offer themselves, they are instantly- smothered and 
crowded out. If we be joyous, we cannot keep thinking of 
those uncertainties and risks of failure which abound upon 
our path ; if lugubrious, we cannot think of new triumphs, 
travels, loves, and joys ; nor if vengeful, of our oppressor's 
community of nature with ourselves. The cooling advice 
which we get from others when the fever-fit is on us is the 
most jarring and exasperating thing in life. Reply we can- 
not, so we get angry ; for by a sort of self-preserving in- 
stinct which our passion has, it feels that these chill objects, 
if they once but gain a lodgment, will work and work 
until they have frozen the very vital spark from out of all 
our mood and brought our airy castles in ruin to the ground. 
Such is the inevitable effect of reasonable ideas over others 
— if they can once get a quiet hearing ; and passion's cue 
accordingly is always and everywhere to prevent their still 
small voice from being heard at all. " Let me not think of 
that ! Don't speak to me of that !" This is the sudden cry 
of all those who in a passion perceive some sobering con- 
siderations about to check them in mid-career. " Hcec tibi 
erit janua leti,'' we feel. There is something so icy in this 
cold-water bath, something which seems so hostile to the 
movement of our life, so purely negative, in Beason, when 
she lays her corpse-like finger on our heart and says, "Haiti 
give up ! leave off! go back ! sit down !" that it is no wonder 
that to most men the steadying influence seems, for the 
time being, a very minister of death. 

The strong-willed man, however, is the man who hears 
the still small voice unflinchingly, and who, when the 
death-bringing consideration comes, looks at its face, con- 
sents to its presence, clings to it, affirms it, and holds it 
fast, in spite of the host of exciting mental images which 



664 PSTCHOLOOT. 

rise in revolt against it and would expel it from the mind 
Sustained in this way by a resolute effort of attention, the 
difficult object erelong begins to call up its own congeners 
and associates and ends by changing the disposition of the 
man's consciousness altogether. And with his conscious* 
ness, his action changes, for the new object, once stably in 
possesion of the field of his thoughts, infallibly produces 
its own motor effects. The difficulty lies in the gaining 
possession of that field. Though the spontaneous drift of 
thought is all the other way, the attention must be kept 
strained on that one object until at last it groics, so as to 
maintain itself before the mind with ease. This strain of 
the attention is the fundamental act of will. And the will's 
work is in most cases practically ended when the bare pres- 
ence to our thought of the naturally unwelcome object has 
been secured. For the mysterious tie between the thought 
and the motor centres next comes into play, and, in a way 
which we cannot even guess at, the obedience of the bodily 
organs follows as a matter of course. 

In all this one sees how the immediate point of appli- 
cation of the volitional effort lies exclusively in the mental 
world. The whole drama is a mental drama. The whole^ 
difficulty is a mental difficulty, a difficulty with an object of 
our thought. If I may use the word idea without suggest- 
ing associationist or Herbartian fables, I will say that it is 
an idea to which our will applies itself, an idea which if we 
let it go would slip away, but which we will not let go. 
Consent to the idea's undivided presence, this is effort's 
sole achievement. Its only function is to get this feeling of 
consent into the mind. And for this there is but one way. 
The idea to be consented to must be kept from flickering 
and going out It must be held steadily before the mind 
until itjills the mind. Such filling of the mind by an idea, 
with its congruous associates, is consent to the idea and to 
the fact which the idea represents. If the idea be that, or 
include that, of a bodily movement of our own, then we call 
the consent thus laboriously gained a motor volition. For 
Nature here * backs ' us instantaneously and follows up our 
inward willingness by outward changes on her own part 
She does this in no other instance. Pity she should not 



WILL. 666 

have been more generous, nor made a world whose other 
parts were as immediately subject to our will ! 

On page 531, in describing the ' reasonable type ' of de- 
cision, it was said that it usually came when the right con- 
ception of the case was found. Where, however, the right 
conception is an anti-inpulsive one, the whole intellectual 
ingenuity of the man usually goes to work to crowd it out 
of sight, and to find names for the emergency, by the help 
of which the dispositions of the moment may sound sancti- 
fied, and sloth or passion may reign unchecked. How many 
excuses does the drunkard find when each new temptation 
comes ! It is a new brand of liquor which the interests of 
intellectual culture in such matters oblige him to test ; 
moreover it is poured out and it is sin to waste it ; or others 
are drinking and it would be churlishness to refuse ; or it is 
but to enable him to sleep, or just to get through this job of 
work ; or it isn't drinking, it is because he feels so cold ; 
or it is Christmas-day ; or it is a means of stimulating him 
to make a more powerful resolution in favor of abstinence 
than any he has hitherto made ; or it is just this once, and 
once doesn't count, etc., etc., ad libitum — it is, in fact, any- 
thing you like except being a drunkard. That is the concep- 
tion that will not stay before the poor soul's attention. But 
if he once gets able to pick out that way of conceiving, from 
all the other possible ways of conceiving the various op- 
portunities which occur, if through thick and thin he holds 
to it that this is being a drunkard and is nothing else, he 
is not likely to remain one long. The effort by which he 
succeeds in keeping the right Ttanfie unwaveringly present 
to his mind proves to be his saving moral act.* 

Everywhere then the function of the effort is the same: 
to keep affirming and adopting a thought which, if left to 
itself, would slip away. It may be cold and flat when the 
spontaneous mental drift is towards excitement, or great 
and arduous when the spontaneous drift is towards repose. 
In the one case the effort has to inhibit an explosive, in the 

♦ Cf. Aristotle'8 Nichomachtean Ethics, vn. 8 ; also a discuMion of the 
doctrine of ' The Pnictical Syllogism ' in Sir A. Grant's edition of this 
work, 2<1 e4. vol. i. p. 212 ff. 



666 PBTCHOLOOY. 

other to arouse an obstructed wilL The exhausted sailoi 
on a wreck has a will which is obstructed. One of his 
ideas is that of his sore hands, of the nameless exhaustion 
of his whole frame which the act of farther pumping in- 
volves, and of the deliciousness of sinking into sleep. The 
other is that of the hungry sea ingulfing him. " Kathei 
the aching toil !" he says ; and it becomes reality then, in 
spite of the inhibiting influence of the relatively luxurious 
sensations which he gets from lying still. But exactly 
similar in form would be his consent to lie and sleep. Often 
it is the thought of sleep and what leads to it which is the 
hard one to keep before the mind. If a patient afflicted 
with insomnia can only control the whirling chase of his 
thoughts so far as to think of nothing at aU (which can be 
done), or so far as to imagine one letter after another of a 
verse of scripture or poetry spelt slowly and monotonously 
out, it is almost certain that here, too, specific bodily effects 
will follow, and that sleep will come. The trouble is to keep 
the mind upon a train of objects naturally so insipid. To 
sustain a represenkUion, to thinks is, in short, the only moral 
act, for the impulsive and the obstructed, for sane and 
lunatics alike. Most maniacs know their thoughts to be 
crazy, but find them too pressing to be withstood. Com- 
pared with them the sane truths are so deadly sober, so 
cadaverous, that the lunatic cannot bear to look them in 
the face and say, "Let these alone be my reality!" But 
with sufficient effort, as Dr. Wigan says, 

** Such a mau can for a time wind himself up, as it were, and deter- 
mine that the notions of the disordered brain shall not be manifested. 
Many instances are on record similar to that told by Pinel, where an 
inmate of the Bic^tre, having stood a long cross-examination, and 
given every mark of restored reason, signed his name to the paper 
authorizing his discharge 'Jesus Christ/ and then went off into all the 
vagaries connected with that delusion. In the phraseology of the 
gentleman whose case is related in an early part of this [Wigan's] work 
he had ' held himself tight' during the examination in order to attain 
hisobJ^?ct; this once accomplished he ' let himself down ' again, and, 
if even conscious of his delusion, could not control it. I have observed 
with such persons that it requires a considerable time to wind them- 
selves up to the pitch of complete self-control, that the effort is a pain- 
ful tension of the mind. . . . When thrown off their guard by any 
accidental remark or worn out by the length of the examination, thej 



WILL. 667 

let tliemgelvee go, and cannot gather themselves up again without prep- 
aration. Lonl EiTskine relates the story of a man who brought an 
action against Dr. Munro for confining him without cause. He under- 
w^ent the most rigid examination by the counsel for the defendant with- 
out discovering any appearance of insanity, till a gentleman asked him 
about a princess with whom he corresponded in cherry-juice, and he 
became instantly insane."* 

To sum it all up in a word, the terminus of the psyeJidogi- 
cat process in volition^ the point to which the vkU is directly ap^ 
plied, is oltvays an idecu There are at all times some ideas 
^:om which we shy away like frightened horses the moment 
we get a glimpse of their forbidding profile upon the 
threshold of our thought. The only resistance which our 
will can possibly experience is the resistance which such an idea 
offers to being attended to at all. To attend to it is the voli- 
tional act, and the only inward volitional act which we ever 
perform. 

I have put the thing in this ultra-simple way because I 
want more than anything else to emphasize the fact that 
volition is primarily a relation, not between our Self and 

* The Duality of the Mind, pp. 141-2. Another case from the same 
book (p 126): " A gentleman of respectable birth, excelleut education, 
and ample fortune, engaged in one of the highest departments of trade, 
. . . and being induced to embark in one of the plausible speculations of 
the day . . . was utterly ruined. Like other men he could bear a sudden 
overwhelming reverse better than a long succession of petty misfortunes, 
and the way in which he conducted himself on the occasion met with un- 
bounded admiration from his friends. He withdrew, however, into rigid 
seclusion, and being no longer able to exercise the generosity and indulge 
the benevolent feelings which had formed the happiness of his life, made 
himself a substitute for them by daydreams, gradually fell into a state of 
irritable despondency, from which he only gradually recovered with the 
loss of reason. He now fancied himself possessed of immense wealth, and 
gave without stint his imaginary riches. He has ever since been under 
gentle restraint, and leads a life not merely of happiness, but of bliss ; con- 
verses rationally, reads the newspapers, where every tale of distress attracts 
bis notice, and being furnished with an abundant supply of blank checks, 
he fills up one of them with a munificent sum, sends it off to the sufferer, 
and sits down to his dinner with a happy conviction that he has earned the 
right to a little indulgence in the pleasures of the table ; and yet, on a 
serious conversation with one of his old friends, he is quite conscious of 
his real position, but the conviction Is so exquisitely painful that hswQl 
not Ut hvmseffbeliew it." 



668 PSYCHOLOGY. 

extra-mental matter (as many philosophers still maintaiii), 
but between our Self and our own states of mind. But 
when, a short while ago, I spoke of the filling of the mind 
with an idea as being equivalent to consent to the idea's 
object, I said something which the reader doubtless ques- 
tioned at the time, and which certainly now demands some 
qualification ere we pass beyond. 

It is unqualifiedly true that if any thought do fill the 
mind exclusively, such filling is consent The thought, for 
that time at any rate, carries the man and his will with it 
But it is not true that the thought need fill the mind ex- 
clusively for consent to be there ; for we often consent to 
things whilst thinking of other things, even of hostile 
things ; and we saw in fact that precisely what distinguishes 
our * fifth type ' of decision from the other types (see p. 534) 
is just this coexistence with the triumphant thought of 
other thoughts which would inhibit it but for the effort 
which makes it prevail. The effort to attend is therefore 
only a part of what the word * will ' covers ; it covers also 
the effort to consent to something to which our attention is 
not quite complete. Often, when an object has gained our 
attention exclusively, and its motor results are just on the 
point of setting in, it seems as if the sense of their immi- 
nent irrevocability were enough of itself to start up the in- 
hibitory ideas and to make us pause. Then we need a new 
stroke of effort to break down the sudden hesitation which 
seizes iipoi us, and to persevere. So that although atten- 
tion is the first and fundamental thing in volition, express 
consent to the reality of tchat is attended to is often an ad- 
ditional and quite distinct phenomenon involved. 

The reader's own consciousness tells him of course just 
what these words of mine denote. And I freelj- confess 
that I am impotent to carry the analysis of the matter any 
farther, or to explain in other terms of what this consent 
consists. It seems a subjective experience s\n generis, which 
we can designate but not define. We stand here exactly 
where we did in the case of belief. When an idea stings us 
in a eei'tain way, makes as it were a certain electric connec- 
tion with our self, we believe that it is a reality. When it 
stings us in another way, makes another connection with 



WILL. 669 

our Self, we say, let it he sl reality. To the word * is ' and 
to the words * let it be ' there correspond peculiar attitudes 
of consciousness which it is vain to seek to explain. The 
indicative and the imperative moods are as much ultimate 
categories of thinking as they are of grammar. The ' qual- 
ity of reality ' which these moods attach to things is not 
like other qualities. It is a relation to our life. It means 
our adoption of the things, our caring for them, our stand- 
ing by them. This at least is what it practically means for 
us; what it may mean beyond that we do not knoM. 
And the transition from merely considering an object as 
possible, to deciding or willing it to be real ; the change 
from the fluctuating to the stable personal attitude concern- 
ing it ; from the ' don't care ' state of mind to that in which 
* we mean business,' is one of the most familiar things in 
life. We can partly enumerate its conditions ; and we can 
partly trace its consequences, especially the momentous 
one that when the mental object is a movement of our own 
body, it realizes itself outwardly when the mental change 
in question has occurred. But the change itself as a sub- 
jective phenomenon is something which we can translate 
into no simpler terms. 

THE QUESTION OP • PBEB-'WIIjIj.' 

Especially must we, when talking about it, rid our mind 
of the fabulous warfare of separate agents called ' ideas.' 
The brain-processes may be agents, and the thought as such 
may be an agent. But what the ordinary psychologies 
call * ideas ' are nothing but parts of the total object of 
representation. All that is before the mind at once, no 
matter how complex a system of things and relations it may 
be, is one object for the thought. Thus, * A-and-B-and-their- 
mutual - incompatibility - and - the - fact - that-only-one-can- 
be-true-or-can - become- real-notwithstandiug -the-probabil- 
ity-or-desirability-of-both ' may be such a complex object ; 
and where the thought is deliberative its object has always 
some such form as this. When, now, we pass from delib- 
eration to decision, that total object undergoes a change. 
We either dismiss A altogether and its relations to B, and 
think of B exclusively ; or after thinking of both as possi- 



570 PBTCHOLOOT. 

bilities, we next think that A is impossible, and that B is 
or forthwith shall be real. In either case a new object is 
before our thought ; and where effort exists, it is where 
the change from the first object to the second one is hard* 
Our thought seems to turn in this case like a heavy door 
on rusty hinges ; only, so far as the effort feels spontaneous, 
it turns, not as if by some one helping, but as if by an 
inward activity, bom for the occasion, of its own. 

The psychologists who discussed * the muscular sense * 
at the international congress at Paris in 1889 agreed at the 
end that they needed to come to a better understanding 
in regard to this appearance of internal activity at the 
moment when a decision is made. M. FouilMe, in an article 
which I find more interesting and suggestive than coherent 
or conclusive,* seems to resolve our sense of activity into 
that of our very existence as thinking entities. At least so 
I translate his words, t But we. saw in Chapter X how hard 
it is to lay a verifying finger plainly upon the thinking- 
process as such, and to distinguish it from certain objects 
of the stream. M. FouilMe admits this ; but I do not think 
he fully realizes how strong would be the position of a man 
who should suggest (see Vol. I. p. 301) that the feeling of 
moral activity itself which accompanies the advent of cer- 
tain * objects ' before the mind is nothing but certain other 
objects, — constrictions, namely, in the brows, eyes, throat, 
and breathing apparatus, present then, but absent from 
other pulses of subjective change. Were this the truths 
then a part, at any rate, of the activity of which we become 
aware in effort would seem merely to be that of our body ; 
and many thinkers would probably thereupon conclude 
that this * settles the claims ' of inner activity, and dismisses 
the whole notion of such a thing as a superfluity in psy- 
chological science. 

I cannot see my way to so extreme a view ; even al- 
though I must repeat the confession made on pp. 296-7 of 
Vol. I, that I do not fully understand how we come to our 
unshakable belief that thinking exists as a special kind of 

* ' Le Sentiment de TEffort, et la Conscience de TAction,' in Revue 
Philosopbique, xxvni. 561. f P. 577. 



WILL. 571 

immaiterial process alongside of the material processes of the 
world. It is certain, however, that only by postidating such 
thinking do we inake things currently intelligible ; and it is 
certain that no psychologist has as yet denied the fact of 
thinking, the utmost that has been denied being its dynamic 
power. But if we postulate the fact of the thinking at all, 
I believe that we must postulate its power as well ; nor do 
I see how we can rightly equalize its power with its mere 
existence, and say (as M. Fouillee seems to say) that for the 
thought-process to gro on a< oH is an activity, and an activity 
everywhere the same ; for certain steps forward in this 
process seem prima facie to be passive, and other steps 
(as where an object comes with effort) seem prima facie to 
be active in a supreme degree. If we admit, therefore, that 
our thoughts exist, we ought to admit that they exist after 
the fashion in which they appear, as things, namely, that 
supervene upon each other, sometimes with effort and some- 
times with ease ; the only questions being, is the effort 
where it exists a fixed function of the object, which the latter 
imposes on the thought? or is it such an independent 
* variable ' that with a constant object more or less of it 
may be made ? 

It certainly appears to us indeterminate, and* as if, even 
with an unchanging object, we might make more or less, as 
we choose. If it be really indeterminate, our future acts are 
ambiguous or unpredestinate : in common parlance, our 
taUls are free. If the amount of effort be not indeterminate, 
but be related in a fixed manner to the objects themselves, 
in such wise that whatever object at any time fills our 
consciousness was from eternity bound to fill it then and 
there, and compel from us the exact effort, neither more nor 
less, which we bestow upon it, — then our wills are not free, 
and all our acts are foreordained. The question of fact in 
the free-will controversy is thus extremely simple. It relates 
solely to the amount of effort of attention or consent which 
we can at any time put forth. Are the duration and intensity 
of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not ? 
Now, as I just said, it seems as if the effort were an inde- 
pendent variable, as if we might exert more or less of it in 
any given case. When a man has let Ids thoughts go for 



672 P8TCHOL007. 

days and weeks until at last they culminate in some par- 
ticularly dirty or cowardly or cruel act, it is hard to per- 
suade him, in the midst of his remorse, that he might not 
have reined them in ; hard to make him belieye that this 
whole goodly universe (which his act so jars upon) required 
and exacted it of him at that fatal moment, and from eternity 
made aught else impossible. But, on the other hand, there 
is the certainty that all his effortless volitions are resultants 
of interests and associations whose strength and sequence are 
mechanically determined by the structure of that physical 
mass, his brain ; and the general continuity of things and 
the monistic conception of the world may lead one irresist- 
ibly to postulate that a little fact like effort can form no 
real exception to the overwhelming reign of deterministic 
law. Even in effortless volition we have the consciousness 
of the alternative being also possible. This is surely a de- 
lusion here ; why is it not a delusion everywhere ? 

My own belief is that the question of free-will is in- 
soluble on strictly psychologic grounds. After a certain 
amount of effort of attention has been given to an idea, it 
is manifestly impossible to tell whether either more or less 
of it might have been given or not. To tell that, we should 
have to ascend to the antecedents of the effort, and defin- 
ing them with mathematical exactitude, prove, by laws of 
which we have not at present even an inkling, that the 
only amount of sequent effort which could possibly comport 
with them was the precise amount which actually came. 
Measurements, whether of psychic or of neural quantities, 
and deductive reasonings such as this method of proof im- 
l)lies, will surely be forever beyond human reach. No seri- 
ous psychologist or physiologist will venture even to sug- 
gest a notion of how they might be practically made. We 
are thrown back therefore upon the crude evidences of in- 
trospection on the one hand, with all its liabilities to de- 
ception, and, on the other hand, upon a priori postulates 
and probabilities. He who loves to balance nice doubts 
need be in no hurry to decide the point. Like Mephis- 
toplieles to Faust, he can say to himself, "ddzu hast du nock 
eine lange Frist,'' for from generation to generation the 
reasons adduced on both sides will grow more voluminous; 



WILL. 673 

and the discussion more refined. But if our speculative 
delight be less keen, if the love of a parti pris outweighs 
that of keeping questions open, or if, as a French philoso- 
pher of genius says, *^V amour de la vie qui sindignede tarU 
de discourSy*' awakens in us, craving the sense of either 
peace or power, — then, taking the risk of error on our head, 
we must project upon one of the alternative views the 
attribute of reality for us ; we must so fill our mind with 
the idea of it that it becomes our settled creed. The 
present writer does this for the alternative of freedom, but 
since the grounds of his opinion are ethical rather than 
psychological, he prefers to exclude them from the present 
book.* 

A few words, however, may be permitted about the 
logic of the question. The most that any argument can do 
for determinism is to make it a clear and seductive concep- 
tion, which a man is foolish not to espouse, so long as he 
stands by the great scientific postulate that the world must 
be one unbroken fact, and that prediction of all things 
without exception must be ideally, even if not actually, 
possible. It is a moral postulate about the Universe, the 
postulate that luhai ought to be can be, and that bad acts 
cannot be fated, bid that good ones must be possible in their 
place, which would lead one to espouse the contrary 
view. But when scientific and moral postulates war thus 
with each other and objective proof is not to be had, the 
only course is voluntary choice, for scepticism itself, if sys- 
tematic, is also voluntary choice. If, meanwhile, the will 
be undetermined, it would seem only fitting that the belief 
in its indetermination should be voluntarily chosen from 
amongst other possible beliefs. Freedom's first deed should 
be to affirm itself. We ought never to hope for any other 
method of getting at the truth if indeterminism be a fact. 
Doubt of this particular truth will therefore probably be 
open to us to the end of time, and the utmost that a 



♦They will be found indicated, in somewhat popular form, in a lecture 
on 'The Dilemma of Determinism.' published in the Unitarian Review 
(of Boston) for September 1884 (vol. xxu. p. 193). 



\ 



574 P8TCH0L0OT. 

believer in free-will can ever do will be to show that the 
deterministic arguments are not coercive. That they are 
seductive, I am the last to deny ; nor do I deny that effort 
may be needed to keep the faith in freedom, when they 
press upon it, upright in the mind. 

There is Sk/atalistic argument for determinism, however, 
which is radically vicious. When a man has let himself 
go time after time, he easily becomes impressed with the 
enormously preponderating influence of circumstances, 
hereditary habits, and temporary bodily dispo3itions over 
what might seem a spontaneity born for the occasion. 
"All is fate,*' he then says ; "dll is result^.nt of what pre- 
exists. Even if the moment seems original, it is but the 
instable molecules passively tumbling in their preappointed 
way. It is hopeless to resist the drift, vain to look for any 
new force coming in ; and less, perhaps, than anywhere else 
under the sun is there anything really mine in the decisions 
which I make." This is really no argument for simple 
determinism. There runs throughout it the sense of a force 
which might make things otherwise from one moment to 
another, if it were only strong enough to breast the tide. A 
person who feels the impotence of free effort in this way has 
the acutest notion of what is meant by it, and of its possible 
independent power. How else could he be so conscious of 
its absence and of that of its effects ? But genuine deter- 
minism occupies a totally different ground ; not the impo- 
tence but the unthznkability of free-will is what it affirms. 
It admits something phenomenal called free effort, which 
seems to breast the tide, but it claims this as a portion of the 
tide. The variations of the effort cannot be independent, it 
says ; they cannot originate ex luhilo, or come from a fourth 
dimension ; they are matliematicallv tixed functions of the 
ideas themselves, which are the tide. Fatalism, whith 
conceives of effort clearly enough as an independent varia- 
ble that might come from a fourth dimension if it rcould 
come, but that does mtt come, is a very dubious ally for 
determinism. It strongly imagines that very possibility 
which determinism denies. 

But what, quite as much as the inconceivability of 
absolutely independent variables, persuades modern men 



WILL. B75 

of science that their efforts must be predetermined^ is the 
continuity of the latter with other phenomena whose pre- 
determination no one doubts. Decisions with effort merge 
so gradually into those without it that it is not easy to say 
where the limit lies. Decisions without effort merge again 
into ideo-motor, and these into reflex acts ; so that the 
temptation is almost irresistible to throw the formula 
which covers so many cases over absolutely all. Where 
there is effort just as where there is none, the ideas them- 
selves which furnish the matter of deliberation are brought 
before the mind by the machinery of association. And 
this machinery is essentially a system of arcs and path&y 
A reflex system, whether effort be amongst its incidents or 
not The reflex way is, after all, the universal way of 
conceiving the business. The feeling of ease is a passive 
result of the way in which the thoughts unwind themselves. 
Why is not the feeling of effort the same? Professor 
Xiipps, in his admirably clear deterministic statement, so 
far from admitting that the feeling of effort testifies to an 
increment of force exerted, explains it as a sign that force 
is lost We speak of effort, according to him, whenever a 
force expends itself (wholly or partly) in neutralizing 
another force, and so fails of its own possible outward 
effect. The outward effect of the antagonistic force, how- 
-ever, also fails in corresponding measure, " so that there is 
no effort without counter-effort, . . . and effort and coun- 
ter-effort signify only that causes are mutually robbing 
each other of effectiveness." * Where the forces are ideas, 
both sets of them, strictly speaking, are the seat of effort — 
both those which tend to explode, and those which tend to 
<;heck them. We, however, call the more abundant mass 
of ideas ourselves; and, talking of its effort as our effort, and 
of that of the smaller mass of ideas as the resistanceff we 
say that our effort sometimes overcomes the resistances 
offered by the inertias of an obstructed, and sometimes 

* See Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, pp. 594-5 ; and compare tba 
conclusion of our own chapter on Attention, Vol. I. pp. 448-454. 

t Thus at least I interpret Prof. Lipps's words: ** Wirwissen uns natur- 
gemftss iu jedem Streben umsomehr aktiv, je mehr unser gantes Ich bel 
dem Streben betheiligt ist," u. s. w. (p. 601). 




676 PSYCHOLOGY. 

those presented by the impulsions of an explosive, will 
Beally both effort and resistance are ours, and the identifi- 
cation of our ^ej/* with one of these fat5tors is an illusion 
and a trick of speech. I do not see how anyone can fail 
(especially when the mythologic dynamism of separate 
* ideas,' which Professor Lipps cleaves to, is translated into 
that of brain-processes) to recognize the fascinating sim- 
plicity of some such view as his. Nor do I see why 
for scientijic purposes one need give it up even if indeter- 
minate amounts of effort really do occur. Before their inde- 
terminism, science simply stops. She can abstract from it 
altogether, then ; for in the impulses and inhibitions with 
which the effort has to cope there is already a larger field 
of uniformity than she can ever practically cultivate. Her 
prevision will never foretell, even if the effort be completely 
predestinate, the actual way in which each individual emer- 
gency is resolved. Psychology will be Psychology,* and 
Science Science, as much as ever (as much and no more) 
in this :ivorld, whether free-will be true in it or not Science, 
however, must be constantly reminded that her purposes 
are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform 
causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in 
postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which 
she has no claims at all. 

We can therefore leave the free-will question altogether 
out of our account As we said in Chapter VI (p. 453)> 
the operation of free effort, if it existed, could only be to 
hold some one ideal object, or part of an object, a little 
longer or a little more intensely before the mind. Amongst 
the alternatives which present themselves as genuine pi)ssi'' 



* Such ejaculations as Mr. Spencer's : " Psychical changes cither 
conform to law or they do not. If they do not, this work, in comnn»n with 
all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense: no science of PsycholoL'V is 
possible " (Principles of Ps3'chology, I. 503), — are benetith criticism. Mr. 
Spencer's work, like all the other 'works on the subject,' treats of those 
general conditions of jyomble conduct within which ail our real decisions 
must fall no matter whether their effort be small or great. However 
closely psychical changes may conform to law, it is safe to say that indi- 
vidual histories and biographies will never be written in advance no matter 
how * evolved ' psychology may become. 



WILL. 577 

Uea, it would thus make one effective.* And althougli such 
quickening of one idea might be inoraUy and historically 
momentous, yet, if considered dynamically, it would be an 
operation amongst those physiological infinitesimals which 
calculation must forever neglect. 

But whilist eliminating the question about the amount of 

* C^iricatures of the kind of supposition which free >vill demands abound 
hi deterministic literature. The following passage from John Fiske's Cos- 
mic Philosophy (pt. ii. chap, xvii) is an example: "If volitions arise 
without cause, it necessarily follows that we cannot infer from them the 
character of the antecedent states of feeling. If, therefore, a murder has 
been committed, we have a priori no belter reason for suspecting the worst 
enemy than the best friend of the murdered man. If we see a man jump 
from a fourth-story window, we must beware of too hastily inferring his 
insanity, since he may be merely exercising his free-will ; the intense love 
of life implanted in the human breast being, as it seems, unconnected 
with attempts at suicide or at self-preservation. We can thus frame no 
theory of human actions whatever. The countless empirical maxims of 
every-day life, the embodiment as they are of the iDberited and organized 
sagacity of many generations, become wholly incompetent to guide us ; 
and nothing which any one may do ought ever to occasion surprise. The 
mother may strangle her lirst-born child, the miser may cast his long- 
treasured gold into the sea, the sculptor may break in pieces bis lately- 
finished statue, in the presence of no other feelings than those which 
before led them to chersish, to hoard, and to create. 

" To state these conclusions is to refute their premise. Probably no 
defender of the doctrine of free-will could be induced to accept them, even 
to save the theorem with which they are inseparably wrapped up. Yet the 
dilemma cannot be avoided. Volitions are either caused or they are not. If 
they are not caused, an inexorable logic brings us to the absurdities just 
mentioned. If they are caused, the free-will doctrine is annihilated. . . . 
In truth, the immediate corollaries of the free-will doctrine are so shock- 
ing, not only to philosophy but to common-sense, that were not accurate 
thinking a somewhat rare phenomenon, it would be inexplicable how any 
credit should ever have been given to such a dogma. This is but one of 
the many instances in which by the force of words alone men have been 
held subject to chronic delusion. . . . Attempting, as the free-will phi- 
losophers do, to destroy the science of history, they are compelled by an 
inexorable logic to pull down with it the cardinal principles of ethics, 
politics, and jurisprudence. Political economy, if rigidly dealt with on 
their theory, would fare little better ; and psychology would become 
chaotic jargon. . . . The denial of causation is the affirmation of chance, 
and 'between the theory of Chance and the theory of Law there can be 
no compromise, no reciprocity, no borrowing and lending.' To write 
history on any method furnished by the free-will doctrine would be utterly 
impossible." — All this comes from Mr. Fiske's not distinguishing between 
the possibles which really tempt a man and those which tempt him not at 
all. Free-will, like psychology, deals with the former possibles exclusively. 



678 P8TCH0L0QT, 

our eflfort as one which psychology will never have a prac* 
Ideal call to decide, I must say one word about the extra- 
ordinarily intimate and important character which the 
phenomenon of eflfort assumes in our own eyes as individ- 
ual men. Of course we measure ourselves by many stand- 
ards. Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and 
even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and 
make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than 
all such things, and able to suflice unto itself without them, 
is the sense of the amount of eflfort which we can put forth. 
Those are, after all, but eflfects, products, and reflections 
of the outer world within. But the eflfort seems to belong 
to an altogether diflferent realm, as if it were the substantive 
thing which we are, and those were but externals which we 
carry. If the * searching of our heart and reins ' be the 
purpose of this human drama, then what is sought seems 
to be what eflfort we can make. He who can make none is 
but a shadow ; he who can make much is a hero. The huge 
world that girdles us about puts all sorts of questions to 
us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Some of the tests we 
meet by actions that are easy, and some of the questions 
we answer in articulately formulated words. But the 
deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but 
the dumb turning of the will and tightening oi our heart- 
strings as we say, " Yes^ I tviU even have it so I " When 
a dreadful object is presented, or when life as a whole 
turns up its dark abysses to our ^dew, then the worth- 
less ones among us lose their hold on the situation alto- 
gether, and either escape from its diflSculties by averting 
their attention, or if they cannot do that, collapse into 
yielding masses of plaintiveness and fear. The eflfort 
required for facing and consenting to such objects is be- 
yciid their power to make. But the heroic mind does 
differently. To it, too, the objects are sinister and dread- 
ful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things. But 
it can face them if necessary, without for that losing its 
hold upon the rest of life. The world thus finds in the 
heroic man its worthy match and mate ; and the eflfort 
which he is able to put forth to hold himself erect and 
keep his heart unshaken is the direct measure of his worth 



WILL. 679 

and function in the game of human life. He can stand this 
Universe. He can meet it and keep up his faith in it in 
presence of those same features which lay his weaker breth* 
ren low. He can still find a zest in it, not by ' ostrich-like 
forgetfulness,' but by pure inward willingness to face the 
world with those deterrent objects there. And hereby he 
becomes one of the masters and the lords of life. He must 
be counted with henceforth; he forms a part of human 
destiny. Neither in the theoretic nor in the practical 
sphere do we care for, or go for help to, those who have 
no head for risks, or sense for living on the perilous edge. 
Our religious life lies more, our practical life lie's less, than 
it used to, on the perilous edge. But just as our courage 
is so often a reflex of another's courage, so our faith is apt 
to be, as Max Miiller somewhere says, a faith in some one 
else's faith. We draw new life from the heroic example. 
The prophet has drunk more deeply than anyone of the cup 
of bitterness, but his countenance is so unshaken and he 
speaks such mighty words of cheer that his will becomes 
our will, and our life is kindled at his own. 

Thus not only our morality but our religion, so far as 
the latter is deliberate, depend on the effort which we can 
make. " WiU you or tvorCt you have it so ? " is the most prob- 
ing question we are ever asked ; we are asked it every hour 
of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, 
the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things. 
"We answer by consents or novrconsents and not by words. 
What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our 
deepest organs of communication with the nature of things I 
What wonder if the effort demanded by them be the meas- 
ure of our worth as men I What wonder if the amount 
which we accord of it to the one strictly underived and 
original contribution which we make to the world ! 

THE EDUCATION OF THE "WILL. 

The education of the will may be taken in a broader or a 
narrower sense. In the broader sense, it means the whole 
of one's training to moral and prudential conduct, and of 
one's learning to adapt means to ends, involving the * asso- 
ciation of ideas,' in all its varieties and complications, to- 



680 PSYCHOLOQT. 

gether with the power of inhibiting impulses irrelevant to 
the ends desired, and of initiating movements contributory 
thereto. It is the acquisition of these latter powers which 
I mean by the education of the will in the narrower sense. 
And it is in this sense alone that it is worth while to -treat 
the matter here.* 

Since a willed movement is a movement preceded by an 
idea of itself, the problem of the will's education is the prob- 
lem of how the idea of a movement can arouse the move- 
ment itself. This, as we have seen, is a secondary kind of 
process ; for framed as we are, we can have no a priori idea 
of a movement, no idea of a movement which we have not 
iLlready performed. Before the idea can be generated, the 
movement must have occurred in a blind, unexpected way, 
And left its idea behind. R^lex^ instinctive^ or random exe- 
cution of a movement must, in other words, precede its vol- 
untary execution. Eeflex and instinctive movements have 
jjready been considered sufficiently for the purposes of this 
book. * Kandom ' movements are mentioned so as to in- 
clude gi^asi- accidental reflexes from inner causes, or 
movements possibly arising from such overflow of nutri- 
tion in special centres as Prof. Bain postulates in his ex- 
planation of those * spontaneous discharges * by which he 
sets such great store in his derivation of the voluntary 
life.t 

Now hoio can the sensory process which a movement has 
previously prodvjced, discharge, when excited again, into the 
centre/or the movement itself? On the movement's original 
occurrence the motor discharge came first and the sensory 
process second ; now in the voluntary repetition the sen- 
sory process (excited in weak or * ideational * form) comes 
first, and the motor discharge comes second. To tell how 
this comes to pass would be to answer the problem of the 
education of the will in physiological terms. Evidently the 
problem is that of the formation of neiv paths; and the 



*0n the education of the Will from h pedagogic point of view, see an 
article by G. Stanley Hall in the Princeton Review for November 1S82. 
and some bibliographic references there contained. 

f See his Emotions and Will, * The Will," chap, f 1 take the name of 
random movements from Sully, Outlines of Psychology, p. 593. 



WILL, 581 

only thing to do is to make hypotheses, till we find some 
which seem to cover all the facts. 

How is a fresh path ever formed ? All paths are paths 
of discharge, and the discharge always takes place in the 
direction of least resistance, whether the cell which dis- 
charges be * motor ' or * sensory.' The connate paths of least 
resistance are the paths of instinctive reaction ; and I sub- 
mit as my first hypothesis that these paths aU run one way^ 
that is from * sensory ' cells into * motor * cells and from motor 
cells into musdes^ vnthout ever taking the reverse direction. A 
motor cell, for example, never awakens a sensory cell di- 
rectly, but only through the incoming current caused by 
the bodily movements to which its discharge gives rise. 
And a sensory cell altvays discharges or normally tends to 
discharge towards the motor region. Let this direction be 
called the * forward ' direction. I call the law an hypothe- 
sis, but really it is an indubitable truth. No impression 
or idea of eye, ear, or skin comes to us without occasioning 
a movement, even though the movement be no more than 
the accommodation of the sense-organ ; and all our trains 
of sensation and sensational imagery have their terms 
alternated and interpenetrated with motor processes, of most 
of which we practically are unconscious. Another way of 
stating the rule is to say that, primarily or connately, all 
currents through the brain run towards the Eolandic re- 
gion, and that there they run out, and never return upon 
themselves. From this point of view the distinction of 
sensory and motor cells has no fundamental significance. 
All cells are motor ; we simply call those of the Eolandic 
region, those nearest the mouth of the funnel, the motor 
cells jKir excellence. 

A corollary of this law is that * sensory ' cells do not 
awaken each other connately ; that is, that no one sensi- 
ble property of things has any tendency, in advance of 
experience, to awaken in us the idea of any other sen- 
sible properties which in the nature of things may go 
with it. TTiere is no a priori calling up of one * idea ' by an- 
other ; the only a priori couplings are of ideas with move- 
ments. All suggestions of one sensible fact by another 



682 



PSTCHOLOOr. 



take place by secondary paths which experience has 
formed. 

The diagram (Fig. 87) shows what happens in a nervoiis 
system ideally reduced to the fewest possible terms. A 
stimulus reaching the sense-organ awakens the sensory cell, 
S ; this by the connate or instinctive path discharges the 
motor cell, M, which makes the muscle contract; and 
the contraction arouses the second sensory cell, K, which 



Motor CeU 



Muscle ^ 




Sensory Cell 
KinaBsthetloOea 



Sense-organ 



Fio. 87.* 



may be the organ either of a * resident * or * kinsBsthetic/ 
or of a * remote,' sensation. (See above, p. 488.) This 
cell K again discharges into M. If this were the entire 
nervous mechanism, the movement, once begun, would 
be self-maintaining, and would stop only when the parts were 
exhausted. And this, according to M. Pierre Janet, is what 
actually happens in catalepsy. A cataleptic patient is an- 
aesthetic; speechless, motionless. Consciousness, so far as 
we can judge, is abolished. Nevertheless the limbs will 
retain whatever position is impressed upon them from 
without, and retain it so long that if it be a strained and 
unnatural position, the phenomenon is regarded by Char- 
cot as one of the few conclusive tests against hypnotic 
subjects shamming, since hypnotics can be made catalep- 

* This figure and the following ones are purely schematic, and must 
not be supposed to involve any theory about protoplasmatic and axis-cylin- 
der processes. The latter, according to Golgi and others, emerge from the 
base of the cell, and each cell has but one. They alone form a nervous 
network. The reader will of course also understand that none of the 
hypothetical constructions which I make from now to the end of the chap- 
ter are proposed as definite accounts of what happens. All I aim at is to 
make it clear in some more or less symlx)lic fashion that the formation of 
new paths, the learning of habits, etc., is in some mechanical way con 
ceivable. Compare what was said in Vol. I. p. 81. note. 



WILL. 688 

tic, and then keep their limbs outstretched for a length of 
time quite unattainable by the waking will. M. Janet 
thinks that in all these cases the outlying ideational 
processes in the brain are temporarily thrown out of 
gear. The kinsesthetic sensation of the raised arm, for 
example, is produced in the patient when the operator 
raises the arm, this sensation discharges into the motor cell, 
which through the muscle reproduces the sensation, etc., 
the currents running in this closed circle until they grow 
so weak, by exhaustion of the parts, that the member slow- 
ly drops. We may call this circle from the muscle to K, 
from K to M, and from M to the muscle again, the * motor 
circle.' We ahovld aU be caialeptica and never stop a mua- 
cdar contraction once begun, toere it not that other processes 
simtdtaneotisly going on inhibit the contraction. Inhibition is 
there/ore not an occasional accident; it is an essential and unre- 
mitting dement of our cerebral life. It is interesting to note 
that Dr. Mercier, by a different path of reasoning, is also 
led to conclude that we owe to outside inhibitions exclu- 
sively our power to arrest a movement once begun.* 

One great inhibiter of the discharge of K into M seems 
to be the painful or otherwise displeasing quality of the 
sensation itself of K ; and conversely, when this sensation 
is distinctly pleasant, that fact tends to further K's dis- 
charge into M, and to keep the primordial motor circle 
agoing. Tremendous as the part is which ])leasure and 
pain play in our psychic life, we must confess that absolute- 
ly nothing is known of their cerebral conditions. It is hard 
to imagine them as having special centres ; it is harder still 
to invent peculiar forms of process in each and every centre, 
to which these feelings may be due. And let one try as 
one will to represent the cerebral activity in exclusively 
mechanical terms, I, for one, find it quite impossible to 
enumerate what seem to be the facts and yet to make no 
mention of the psychic side which they possess. However 
it be with other drainage currents and discharges, the drain- 
age currents and discharges of the brain are not purely 
physical facts. They are psycho-physical facts, and the 

♦ The Nervous System and the Mind (1888). pp. 76-«. 



684 ParCHOLOQT. 

spiritual quality of them seems a codeterminant of their 
mechanical effectiveness. If the mechanical activities in a 
cell, as they increase, give pleasure, they seem to increase 
all the more rapidly for that fact ; if they give displeasure, 
the displeasure seems to damp the activities. The psychic 
side of the phenomenon thus seems, somewhat like the ap- 
plause or hissing at a spectacle, to be an encouraging or ad- 
verse comment on what the machinery brings forth. The soul 
presents nothing herself ; creates nothing ; is at the mercy 
of the material forces for all possibilities; but amongst 
these possibilities she selects; and by reinforcing one and 
checking others, she figures not as an ' epiphenomenon,* 
but as something from which the play gets moral support. 
I shall therefore never hesitate to invoke the efficacy of the 
conscious comment, where no strictly mechanical reason 
appears why a current escaping from a cell should take 
one path rather than another.^ But the existence of the 
current, and its tendency towards either path, I feel bound 
to account for by mechanical laws. 

Having now considered a nervous system reduced to its 
lowest possible terms, in which all the paths are connate, 
and the possibilities of inhibition not extrinsic, but due 
solely to the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the feeling 
aroused, let us turn to the conditions under which new paths 
may be formed. Potentialities of new paths are furnished 
by the fibres which connect the sensory cells amongst 
themselves ; but these fibres are not originally per\aous, 
and have to be made so by a process which I proceed hy- 
pothetically to state as follows : Each discharge from a sen- 
sory cell in the forward direction, \ tends to drain the cells lying 
behind the discharging one of whatever tension they may possess. 
The drainage from the reartvard cells is ivhatfor the first time 
makes the fibres pervious. The result is a new-formed *path,* 
running from the cells which toere * rearward ' to the cell which 
was \forivard ' on that occasion ; which path, if on future occa- 
sions the rearvmrd cells are independently excited, vnU tend to 
carry off their activity in the same direction so as to excite the 



* Compare Vol. 1. pp. 187, 142. 

f That is, the direction towards the motor cells. 



WILL. • 585 

forward c^^ and tviU deepen itself more and more every time it 
is used. 

Now the * rearward cells,' so far, stand for all the sen- 
sory cells of the brain other than the one which is discharg- 
ing ; but such an indefinitely broad path would practically 
be no better than no path, so here I make a third hypoth- 
esis, which, taken together with the others, seems to me 
to cover all the facts. It is that the deepest paths are formed 
from the most drainaNe to the most draining cells; that the 
most drainoMe cells are those which have just been discharging, 
and that the most draining cells are those which are now dis- 
charging or in which the tension is rising totoards the point of 
discharge* Another diagram, Fig. 88, will make the matter 
-clear. Take the operation represented 
by the previous diagram at the 
moment when, the muscular contrac- 
tion having occurred, the cell K is 
discharging forward into M. Through 
the dotted line p it will, according to 
our third hypothesis, drain S (which, 
in the supposed case, has just dis- "^ "**^fio. 88 
-charged into M by the connate path P, and caused the mus- 
cular contraction), and the result is that p will now remain 
as a new path open from S to K. When next S is excited 
from without it will tend not only to discharge into M, 
but into K as well. K thus gets excited directly by S h^ore 
it gets excited by the incoming current from the muscle ; 
or, translated into psychic terms : when a sensation has 
once produced a movement in uSy the next time wc have the sen- 
sation, it tends to suggest the idea of the movement^ even before 
the movement occurs, f 

* This brain-scheme seems oddly enough to give a certain basis of reality 
to those hideously fabulous performances of the Herbartian Vorstellun^ien, 
Herbart says that when one idea is inhibited by another it fuses with that 
other and thereafter lielps it to ascend into consciousness. Inhibition is 
thus the basis of association in both schemes, for the 'draining * of which 
the text speaks is tantamount to an inhibition of the activity of the cells 
which are drained, which inhibition makes the inhibited revive the in- 
hibiter on later occasions. 

f See the luminous passage in MUnsterberg : Die Willenshandlung, pp. 
144-5. 




686 ParCHOLOOT, 

The same principles also apply to the relations of K 
and M. M, lying in the forward direction, drains K, and the 
path KM, even though it be no primary or connate path» 
becomes a secondary or habitual one. Hereafter K may be 
aroused in any way whatsoever (not as before from S or 
from without) and still it will tend to discharge into M ; or, 
to express it again in psychic terms, the idea of the move- 
ment M'a sensory effects tmll have become an immediatdy ante- 
cedent condition to the prodvction of the movement itself. 

Here, then, we have the answer to our original question 
of how a sensory process which, the first time it occurred, 
was the effect of a movement, can later figure as the move- 
ment's cause. 

It is obvious on this scheme that the cell which we have 
marked K may stand for the seat of either a resident or 
a remote sensation occasioned by the motor discharge. 
It may indifferently be a tactile, a visual, or an auditory celL 
The idea of how the arm feels when raised may cause it to 
rise ; but no less may the idea of some sound which it makes 
in rising, or of some optical impression wliicli it produces. 
Thus we see that the 'mental cue' may belong to either of 
various senses ; and that what our diagrams lead us to 
infer is what really happens ; namely, that in our move- 
ments, such as that of speech, for example, in some of us 
it is the tactile, in others the acoustic, Effectsbild, or memory- 
image, which seems most concerned in starting the articula- 
tion (Vol. I. pp. 54-5). The primitive * starters,' however, of 
all our moveu.ents are not Eff'ectsbilder at all, but sensations 
and objects, und subsequently ideas derived therefrom. 

Let us now turn to the more complex and serially con- 
catenated movements which oftenest meet us in real life. 
The object of our will is seldom a single muscular contrac- 
tion ; it is almost always an orderly sequence of contractions^ 
ending with a sensation which tells us that the goal is 
reached. But the several contractions of the sequence are 
not each distinctly willed ; each earlier one seems rather, 
by the sensation it produces, to call its follower up, after 
the fashion described in Chapter VI, where we spoke of 



WILL. 587 

habitual concatenated movements being due to a series of 
secondarily organized reflex arcs (Vol. I. p. 116). The first 
contraction is the one distinctly willed, and after willing it 
we let the rest of the chain rattle off of its own accord. 
How now is such an orderly concatenation of movements 
originally learned? or in other words, how are paths 
formed for the first time between one motor centre and an- 
other, so that the discharge of the first centre makes the 
others discharge in due order all along the line ? 

The phenomenon involves a rapid alternation of motor 
discharges and resultant afferent impressions, for as long a 
time as it lasts. They must be associated in one definite 
order ; and the order must once have been learned^ i.e., it 
must have been picked out and held to more and more 
exclusively out of the many other random orders which 
first presented themselves. The random afferent impres- 
sions fell out, those that felt right were selected and grew 
together in the chain. A chain which we actively teach 
ourselves by stringing a lot of right-feeling impressions 
together differs in no essential respect from a chain which 
we passively learn from someone else who gives us im- 
pressions in a certain order. So to make our ideas more 
precise, let us take a particular concatenated movement for 
an example, and let it be the recitation of the alphabet, 
which someone in our childhood taught us to say by heart. 

What we have seen so far is how the idea of the sound 
or articulatory feeling of A may make us say * A,' that of B, 

* B,' and so on. But what we now want to see is why the 
sensation that A is uttered should make us say * 5,' why the sen- 
sation that B is uttered should make us say * C,' arid so on. 

To understand this we must recall what happened when 
we first learned the letters in their order. Someone re- 
peated A, B, C, D to us over and over again, and we imi- 
tated the sounds. Sensory cells corresponding to each 
letter were awakened in succession in such wise that each 
one of them (by virtue of our second law) must have 

* drained * the cell just previously excited and left a path by 
which that cell tended ever afterwards to discharge into the 
cell that drained it. Let S", S*', S*" in figure 89 stand for 
three of these cells. Each later one of them, as it discharges 



688 



P8TCH0L007, 



motorwards, draws a current from the previous one, S^ from 
S«, and S^ from S*. Cell S** having thus drained S», if S« 
ever gets excited again, it tends to discharge into S^; whilst 







Fio. 89. 




8® having drained S**, S** later discharges into S*, etc., etc. 
— all through the dotted lines. Let now the idea of the 
letter A arise in the mind, or, in other words, let S* be 
aroused : what happens ? A current runs from S" not only 
into the motor cell M* for pronouncing that letter, but also 
into the cell S^ When, a moment later, the effect of M**'s 
discharge comes back by the afferent nerve and re-excites 
8**, this latter cell is inhibited from discharging again into 
M" and reproducing the * primordial motor circle' (which 




Fig. 90. 

in this case would be the continued utterance of the letter 
A), by the fact that tlie process in S^ already under head- 
way and tending to discharge into its own motor associate 
M**, is, nnder the existing conditions, the stronger drainage- 
channel for S'^'s excitement. The result is that M* dis- 
charges and the letter B is pronounced ; whilst at the same 
time S*' receives some of S'^'s overflow ; and, a moment later 



WILL. 589 

when the sound of B enters the ear, discharges into the 
motor cell for pronouncing C, by a repetition of the same 
mechanism as before; and so on ad libitum. Figure 90 
represents the entire set of processes involved. 

The only thing that one does not immediately see is the 
reason why * under the existing conditions ' the path from 
S" to S*^ should be the stronger drainage-channel for S**'8 
excitement. If the cells and fibres in the figure constituted 
the entire brain we might suppose either a mechanical or a 
psychical reason. The mechanical reason might lie in a 
general law that cells like S^ and M^ whose excitement is in 
a rising phase, are stronger drainers than cells like M", 
which have just discharged; or it might lie in the fact 
that an irradiation of the current beyond S** into S* and 
M'' has already begun also; and in a still farther law 
that drainage tends in the direction of the widest irra- 
diations. Either of these suppositions would be a suffi- 
cient mechanical reason why, having once said A, we 
should not say it again. But we must not forget that 
the process has a psychical side, nor close our eyes to the 
possibility that the sort of feelirvg aroused by incipient 
currents may be the reason why certain of them are in- 
stantly inhibited and others helped to flow. There is no 
doubt that before we have uttered a single letter, the gen- 
eral intention to recite the alphabet is already there ; nor is 
there any doubt that to that intention corresponds a wide- 
spread premonitorj" rising of tensions along the entire 
system of cells and fibres which are later to be aroused. So 
long as this rise of tensions/eefe goody so long every current 
which increases it is furthered, and every current which 
diminishes it is checked ; and this may be the chief one of 
the 'existing conditions' which make the drainage-channel 
from S" to &* temporarily so strong.* 

The new paths between the sensory cells of which we 
have studied the formation are paths of * association,' and 
we now see why associations run always in the forward 



* L. Lange's and Mttnsterberg's experiments with 'shortened ' or * mus- 
cular ' reaction-time (see Vol. I. p. 4d2) show how potent a fact djmami- 
cally this anticipatory preparation of a whole set of possible drainage- 
channels is. 



690 



PSTCHOLOOT, 



direction ; why, for example, we cannot say the alphabet 
backward, and why, although S** discharges into S*, there 
is no tendency for S* to discharge into S^ or at least no 
more than for it to discharge into S**.* The first-formed 
paths had, according to the principles which we invoked, 
to run from cells that had just discharged to those that 
were discharging ; and now, to get currents to run the other 
way, we must go through a new learning of our letters with 
their order reversed. There will then be two sets of asso- 
ciation-pathways, either of them possible, between the sen- 
sible cells. I represent them in Fig. 91, leaving out the 
motor features for simplicity's sake. The dotted lines are 
the paths in the backward direction, newly organized from 




''&^' 



Fio. 91. 



the reception by the ear of the letters in the order C B A. 
The same principles will explain the formation of new 
paths successively concatenated to no matter how great an 
extent, but it would obviously be folly to pretend to illus- 
trate by more intricate examples. I will therefore only 
bring back the case of the child and flame (Vol. I. p. 25), to 
show how easily it admits of explanation as a * purely cortical 
transaction ' (ibid, p. 80). The sight of the flame stimu- 
lates the cortical centre S' which discharges by an instinc- 
tive reflex path into the centre M* for the grasping-mo ve- 



* Even as the proofs of these pages are passing through my hands, I 
receive Heft 2 of the Zeitschrift ftlr Psychologie u. Physiologie der Sin- 
nesorgane, in which the irrepressible young Mtlnsterberg publishes experi- 
ments to show that there is no association between successive ideas, 
apart from Intervening movenieuts. As my explanations have assumed that 
an earlier excited senwry cell drains a later one. his experiments and infer- 
ences would, if sound, upset all my hypotheses. I therefore cau (at this 
late moment) only refer the reader to Herr M.'s article, hoping to review 
the subject again myself in another place. 



WILL. 691 



meut. This moyement produces the feeling of burn, as its 
effects come back to the centre S' ; and this centre by a 




Fig. OS. 

second connate path discharges into M*, the centre for 
withdrawing the hand. The moyement of withdrawal 
stimulates the centre S', and this, as far as we are concerned, 
is the last thing that happens. Now the next time the child 
sees the candle, the cortex is in possession of the secondary 
paths which the first experience left behind. S', having been 
stimulated immediately after S*, drained the latter, and now 
8' discharges into S' before the discharge of M* has had time 
to occur ; in other words, the sight of the flame suggests the 
idea of the bum before it produces its own natural reflex ef- 
fects. The result is an inhibition of M', or an overtaking 
of it before it is completed, by M*. — The characteristic phy- 
siological feature in all these acquired systems of paths lies 
in the fact that the new-formed sensory irradiations 
keep draining things fortvard, and so breaking up the ' motor 
circles ' which would otherwise accrue. But, even apart from 
catalepsy, we see the * motor circle ' every now and then 
come back. An infant learning to execute a simple move- 
ment at will, without regard to other movements beyond it, 
keeps repeating it till tired. How reiteratively they 
babble each new-learned word ! And we adults often catch 
ourselves reiterating some meaningless word over and over 
again, if by chance we once begin to utter it * absent-mind- 
edly,' that is, without thinking of any ulterior train of words 
to which it may belong. 

One more observation before closing these already too 
protracted physiological speculations. Already (Vol. I. p. 71) 
I have tried to shadow forth a reason why collateral inner- 



692 



P8TCH0L00T. 



vation should establish itself after loss of brain-tissue, 
and why incoming stimuli should find their way out again^ 
after an interval, by their former paths. I can now explain 
this a little better. Let S* be the dog's hearing-centre when 
he receives the command ' Give your paw.' This used to 
discharge into the motor centre M*, of whose discharge S* 
represents the kinesthetic effect ; but now M' has been de- 
stroyed by an operation, so that S* discharges as it can, into 
other movements of the body, whimpering, raising the 
wrong paw, etc. The kinesthetic centre S' meanwhile has 



Jiri^ 




Fio. 98. 



been awakened by the order S*, and the poor animal's mind 
tingles with expectation and desire of certain incoming sen- 
sations which are entirely at variance with those which the 
really executed movements give. None of the latter sensa- 
tions arouse a * motor circle,' for they are displeasing and 
inhibitory. But when, by random accident, 8* and S' do 
discharge into a path leading through M", by which the paw is 
again given, and 8* is excited at last from without as well as 
from within, there are no inhibitions and the * motor circle ' 
is formed : 8* discharges into M* over and over again, and 
the path from the one spot to the other is so much deepened 
that at last it becomes organized as the regular channel of 
efflux when 8* is aroused. No other path has a chance of 
being organized in like degree. 



CHAPTER XXVn. 

HYPNOTISM. 
MODES OF OPBBATING, AND SIJSOEPTIBIIjITY'. 

The ' hypnotic/ ' mesmeric,' or * magnetic ' trance can 
be induced in various toays, each operator having his pet 
method. The simplest one is to leave the subject seated 
by himself, telling him that if he close his eyes and relax 
his muscles and, as far as possible, think of vacancy, in a 
few minutes he will ' go off.' On returning in ten minutes 
you may find him effectually hypnotized. Braid used to 
make his subjects look at a bright button held near their 
forehead until their eyes spontaneously closed. The older 
mesmerists made * passes ' in a downward direction over 
the face and body, but without contact. Stroking the skin 
of the head, face, arms and hands, especially that of the 
region round the brows and eyes, will have the same effect. 
Staring into the eyes of the subject until the latter droop , 
making him listen to a watch's ticking ; or simply making 
him close his eyes for a minute whilst you describe to him 
the feeling of falling into sleep, ' talk sleep' to him, are 
equally efficacious methods in the hands of some operators ; 
whilst with trained subjects any method whatever from 
which they have been led by previous suggestion to expect 
results will be successful.* The touching of an object 

* It sbould be said that tbe methods of leaving the patient to himself, and 
that of tbe simple verbal sugs^estion of sleep (tbe so-called Nancy method 
introduced by Li^beault of that place), seem, wherever applicable, to be 
the best, as they entail none of the after-inconveniences which occasionally 
follow upon strainir^ his eyes. A new patient should not be put through 
a great variety of different suggestions in immediate succession. He should 
be waked up from time to time, and then rebypnotized to avoid mental 
confusion and excitement. Before finally waking a subject you should 
undo wnatcver delusive suggestions you may have implanted in blm,by tell- 
ing him that they are all gone, etc., and that you are now going to restore 
him to bis natural state. Headache, languor, etc., which sometimes fol- 



694 PSTOHOLOOr. 

which they are told has been ' magnetized/ the drinking of 
* magnetized ' water, the reception of a letter ordering them 
to sleep, etc., are means which have been frequently em- 
ployed. Eecently M. Li^geois has hypnotized some of his 
subjects at a distance of 1^ kilometres by giving them an 
intimation to that effect through a telephone. With some 
subjects, if you tell them in advance that at a certain hour 
of a certain day they will become entranced, the prophecy 
is fulfilled. Certain hysterical patients are immediately 
thrown into hypnotic catalepsy by any violent sensation, 
such as a blow on a gong or the flashing of an intense 
light in their eyes. Pressure on certain parts of the body 
(called zones hypnogenea by M. Pitres) rapidly produces 
hypnotic sleep in some hysterics. These regions, which 
differ in different subjects, are oftenest found on the fore- 
head and about the root of the thumbs. Finally, persons 
in ordinary sleep may be transferred into the hypnotic con- 
dition by verbal intimation or contact, performed so gently 
as not to wake them up. 

Some operators appear to be more successful than others 
in getting control of their subjects. I am informed that Mr. 
Gurney (who made valuable contributions to the theory of 
hypnotism) was never able himself to hypnotize, and had to 
use for his observations the subjects of others. On the other 
hand, Dr. Liebeault claims that he hypnotizes 92$^ of all 
comers, and Wetterstrand in Stockholm says that amongst 
718 persons there proved to be only 18 whom he failed to 
influence. Some of this disparity is unquestionably due to 
difl'erences in the personal * authority ' of the operator, for 
the prime condition of success is that the subject should 
confidently expect to be entranced. Much also depends on 
the operator's tact in interpreting the physiognomy of his 
subjects, 80 as to give the right commands, and 'crowd it 
on ' to the subject, at just the propitious moments. These 
conditions account for the fact that operators grow more 



low the first trance or two, must be banished at the outset, by the operator 
strongly assuring the subject that such things never come from hypnotism* 
that the subject must not have them, etc. 



HYPNOTISM. 695 

snccessful the more they operate. Bemheim says that 
whoever does not hypnotize 80 per cent of the persons 
whom he tries has not yet learned to operate as he should. 
Whether certain operators have over and above this a 
peculiar ' magnetic power * is a question which I leave 
at present undecided.* Children under three or four, and 
insane persons, especially idiots, are unusually hard to 
hypnotize. This seems due to the impossibility of getting 
them to fix their attention continuously on the idea of the 
coming trance. All ages above infancy are probably 
equally hypnotizable, as are all races and both sexes. A 
certain amount of mental training, sufficient to aid concen- 
tration of the attention, seems a favorable condition, and so 
does a certain momentary indifference or passivity as to the 
result Native strength or weakness of * will ' have abso- 
lutely nothing to do with the matter. Frequent trances 
enormously increase the susceptibility of a subject, and 
many who resist at first succumb after several trials. Dr. 
Moll says he has more than once succeeded after forty 
fruitless attempts. Some experts are of the opinion that 
every one is hypnotizable essentially, the only difficulty 
being the more habitual presence in some individuals of 
hindering mental preoccupations, which, however, may sud- 
denly at some moment be removed. 

The trance may be dispelled instantaneously by saying 
in a rousing voice, * All right, wake up ! ' or words of similar 
purport At the Salp^triere they awaken subjects by blow- 
ing on their eyelids. Upward passes have an awakening 
effect ; sprinkling cold water ditto. Anything will awaken 
a patient who expects to be awakened by that thing. Tell 
him that he will wake after counting five, and he will do 
so. Tell him to waken in five minutes, and he is very likely 
to do so puuctually, even though he interrupt thereby some 
exciting histrionic performance which you may have sug- 
gested. — As Dr. Moll says, any theory which pretends to 



* Certain facts would seem to point that way. Cf., e.g., the case of the 
man described by P. Despine, £tude Scientifique sur le Somnambuiisme, 
p. 286 ff. 




596 P8TCH0L0QT. 

explain the physiology of the hypnotic state must keep 
account of the fact that so simple a thing as hearing the 
word * wake ! ' will end it. 

THEOBUS8 ABOUT UHE HYPNOTIC STATE. 

TTke intimate nature of the hypnotic condition^ when once 
induced, can hardly be said to be understood. Without 
entering into details of controversy, one may say that three 
main opinions have been held concerning it, which we may 
call respectively the theories of 

1. Animal magnetism ; 

2. of Neurosis ; and finally of 

3. Suggestion. 

According to the animal'magnetism theory there is a 
direct passage of force from the operator to the subject, 
whereby the latter becomes the former's puppet This 
theory is nowadays given up as regards all the ordinary 
hypnotic phenomena, and is only held to by some persons 
as an explanation of a few effects exceptionally met with. 

According to the neurosis-theory, the hypnotic state is 
a peculiar pathological condition into which certain pre- 
disposed patients fall, and in which special physical agents 
have the power of provoking special symptoms, quite apart 
from the subjects mentally expecting the effect Professor 
Charcot and his colleagues at the Salpetriere hospital admit 
that this condition is rarely found in typical form. They call 
it then le grand hypnotisme, and say that it accompanies the 
disease hystero-epilepsy. If a patient subject to this sort 
of hypnotism hear a sudden loud noise, or look at a bright 
light unexpectedly, she falls into the cataleptic trance. Her 
limbs and body offer no resistance to movements communi- 
cated to them, but retain permanently the attitudes im- 
pressed. The eyes are staring, there is insensibility to 
pain, etc., etc. If the eyelids be forcibly closed, the cata- 
leptic gives place to the lethargic condition, characterized 
by apparent abolition of consciousness, and absolute mus- 
cular relaxation except where the muscles are kneaded or 
the tendons struck by the operator's hand, or certain nerve- 



HYPNOTISM, 597 

trunks are pressed upon. Then the muscles in question, 
or those supplied by the same nerve-trunk enter into a more 
or less steadfast tonic contraction. Charcot calls this symp- 
tom by the name of neuro-muscular hyperexcitability. The 
lethargic state may be primarily brought on by fixedly 
looking at anything, or by pressure on the closed eyeballs. 
Friction on the top of the head will make the patient pass 
from either of the two preceding conditions into the som- 
namlvlic state, in which she is alert, talkative, and suscep- 
tible to all the suggestions of the operator. The somnambu- 
lic state may also be induced primarily, by fixedly looking 
at a small object. In this state the accurately limited 
muscular contractions characteristic of lethargy do not 
follow upon the above-described manipulations, but instead 
of them there is a tendency to rigidity of entire regions of 
the body, which may upon occasion develop into general 
tetanus, and which is brought about by gently touching the 
skin or blowing upon it M. Charcot calls this by the 
name of cutaneo-muscular hyperexcitability. 

Many other symptoms, supposed by their observers to 
be independent of mental expectation, are described, of 
which I only will mention the more interesting. Opening the 
eyes of a patient in lethargy causes her to pass into catalepsy. 
If one eye only be opened, the corresponding half of the body 
becomes cataleptic, whilst the other half remains in leth- 
argy. Similarly, rubbing one side of the head may result 
in a patient becoming hemilethargic or hemicataleptic and 
hemisomnambulic. The approach of a magnet (or certain 
metals) to the skin causes these half-states (and many others) 
to be transferred to the opposite sides. Automatic repetition 
of every sound heard {* echolalia^) is said to be produced by 
pressure on the lower cervical vertebrae or on the epigas- 
trium. Aphasia is brought about by rubbing the head over 
the region of the speech-centre. Pressure behind the occiput 
determines movements of imitation. Heidenhaiu describes a 
number of curious automatic tendencies to movement, which 
are brought about by stroking various portions of the ver- 
tebral column. Certain other symptoms have been fre- 
quently noticed, such as a flushed face and cold hands, 
brilliant and congested eyes, dilated pupils. Dilated reti- 



598 PSYCHOLOGY, 

nal vessels and spasm of the. accommodation are also re- 
ported. 

The theory of Suggestion denies that there is any special 
hypnotic ataie worthy of the name of trance or neurosis. 
All the symptoms above described, as well as those to be 
described hereafter, are results of that mental suscepti- 
bility which we all to some degree possess, of yielding 
assent to outward suggestion, of affirming what we strongly 
conceive, and of acting in accordance with what we are 
made to expect The bodily symptoms of the Salpetriere 
patients are all of them results of expectation and training. 
The first patients accidentally did certain things which 
their doctors thought typical and caused to be repeated. 
The subsequent subjects 'caught on' and followed the 
established tradition. In proof of this the fact is urged 
that the classical three stages and their grouped symptoms 
have ordy been reported as spontaneously occurring, so far, 
at the Salpetriere, though they may be superinduced by 
deliberate suggestion, in patients anywhere found. The 
ocular symptoms, the flushed face, accelerated breathing, 
etc., are said not to be symptoms of the passage into the 
hypnotic state as such, but merely consequences of the 
strain on the eyes when the method of looking at a bright 
object is used. They are absent in the subjects at Nancy, 
where 8im])Ie verbal suggestion is employed. The various 
reflex eflects (aphasia, echolalia, imitation, etc.) are but 
habits induced by the influence of the operator, who uncon- 
sciously urges the subject into the direction in which he 
would prefer to have him go. The influence of the magnet, 
the opposite effects of upward and downward })asses, etc., 
are similarly ex])lained. Even that sleepy and inert condi- 
tion, the advent of which seems to be the prime condition of 
farther symi)toms being developed, is said to be merely due 
to the fact that the mind expects it to come ; whilst its influ- 
ence on the other symptoms is not physiological, so to speak, 
but psychical, its own easy realization by suggestion simply 
encouraging^ the subject to expect that ulterior suggestions 
will be realized with equal ease. The radical defenders of 
the suggestion-theory are thus led to deny the very exist- 



HTPN0TI8M. 599 

ence of the hypnotic state, in the sense of a peculiar trance- 
like condition which deprives the patient of spontaneity 
and makes him passive to suggestion from without. The 
trance itself is only one of the suggestions, and many sub- 
jects in fact can be made to exhibit the other hypnotic 
phenomena without the preliminary induction of this one. 

The theory of suggestion may be said to be quite tri- 
umphant at the present day over the neurosis- theory as held 
at the Salpetriere, with its three states, and its definite 
symptoms supposed to be produced by physical agents 
apart from co-operation of the subject's mind. But it 
is one thing to say this, and it is quite another thing to 
say that there is no peculiar physiological condition what- 
ever worthy of the name of hypnotic trance, no peculiar 
state of nervous equilibrium, ' hypotaxy,' ' dissociation,' or 
whatever you please to call it, during which the subject's 
susceptibility to outward suggestion is greater than at ordi- 
nary times. All the facts seem to prove that, until this 
trance-like state is assumed by the patient, suggestion pro- 
duces very insignificant results, but that, when it is once 
assumed, there are no limits to suggestion's power. The 
state in question has many affinities with ordinary sleep. 
It is probable, in fact, that we all pass through it tran- 
siently wheniever we fall asleep ; and one might most natu- 
rally describe the usual relation of operator and subject by 
saying that the former keeps the latter suspended between 
waking and sleeping by talking to him enough to keep his 
slumber from growing profound, and yet not in such a way 
as to wake him up. A hynotized patient, left to himself , will 
either fall sound asleep or wake up entirely. The diffi- 
culty in hypnotizing refractory persons is that of catching 
them at the right moment of transition and making it per- 
manent. Fixing the eyes and relaxing the muscles of the 
body produce the hypnotic state just as they facilitate the 
advent of sleep. The first stages of ordinary sleep are char- 
acterized by a peculiar dispersed attitude of the attention. 
Images come before consciousness which are entirely in- 
congruous with our ordinary beliefs and habits of thought. 
The latter either vanish altogether or withdraw, as it were, 



600 PSTCffOLOQT. 

inertly into the background of the mind, and let the incon- 
gruous images reign alone. These images acquire, more- 
over, an exceptional vivacity ; they become first ' hypnagogic 
hallucinations/ and then, as the sleep grows deeper, dreams. 
Now the * mono-ideism,' or else the impotency and failure 
to * rally ' on the part of the background-ideas, which thus 
characterize somnolescence, are unquestionably the result 
of a special physiological change occurring in the brain at 
that time. Just so that similar mono-ideism, or dissocia- 
tion of the reigning fancy from those other thoughts which 
might possibly act as its 'reductives,' which characterize 
the hypnotic consciousness, must equally be due to a 
special cerebral change. The term * hypnotic trance,' which 
I employ, tells us nothing of what the change is, but it 
marks the fact that it exists, and is consequently a useful 
expression. The great vivacity of the hypnotic images (as 
gauged by their motor effects), the oblivion of them when 
normal life is resumed, the abrupt awakening, the recollec- 
tion of them again in subsequent trances, the anaesthesia 
and hypersesthesia which are so frequent, all point away 
from our simple waking credulity and * suggestibility ' as 
the type by which the phenomena are to be interpreted, 
and make us look rather towards sleep and dreaming, or 
towards those deeper alterations of the personality known 
as automatism, double consciousness, or * second ' person- 
ality for the true analogues of the hypnotic trance.* Even 
the best hypnotic subjects pass through life without any 
one suspecting them to possess such a remarkable suscep- 
tibility, until by deliberate experiment it is made manifest 
The operator fixes their eyes or their attention a short time 
to develop the propitious phase, holds them in it by his 
talk, and the state hein^j there, makes them the puppets of all 
his suggestions. But no ordinary suggestions of waking life 
ever took such control of their mind. 



* The state is not ideniicul with sleep, however analogous in certain 
respects. The lighter stages of it, particularly, differ from sleep and 
dreaming, inasmuch as they are characterized almost exclusively by mus- 
cular inabilities and compulsions, which are not noted in ordinary somno- 
lescence, and the mind, which is confused in somnolescence, may be quite 
clearly conscious, in tlM> li«jrlit«r state of trance, of all that is going on. 



HTPNOTiaM, 601 

The anggestion-theory may therefore be approved as correct, 
provided we grant the trance-state cw its prerequisite. The 
three states of Charcot, the strange reflexes of Heiden- 
hain, and all the other bodily phenomena which have been 
called direct consequences of the trance-state itself, are not 
such. They are products of suggestion, the trance-state 
having no particular outward symptoms of its own ; but 
without the trance-state there, those particular suggestions 
could never have been successfully made.* 

THUS 87MFT01C8 OP THE TBAKOXL 

This accounts for the altogether indefinite array of symp- 
toms which have been gathered together as characteristic 
of the hypnotic state. The law of habit dominates hypnotic 
subjects even more than it dods waking ones. Any sort of 
personal peculiarity, any trick accidentally fallen into in 
the first instance by some one subject, may, by attracting 
attention, become stereotyped, serve as a pattern for imi- 
tation, and figure as the type of a school. The first sub- 
ject trains the operator, the operator trains the succeeding 
subjects, all of them in perfect good faith conspiring to- 
gether to evolve a perfectly arbitrary result. With the ex- 
traordinary perspicacity and subtlety of perception which 
subjects often display for all that concerns the operator 
with whom they are en rapport, it is hard to keep them 
ignorant of anything which he expects. Thus it happens 
that one easily verifies on new subjects what one has 
already seen on old ones, or any desired symptom of which 
one may have heard or read. 

The symptoms earliest observed by writers were all 
thought to be typical. But with the multiplication of ob- 



* The word ' suggestion ' has been bandied about too much as if it ex- 
plained all mysteries : When the subject obeys it is by reason of the ' ope- 
rator's suggestion ' ; when he proves refractory it is in consequence of an 
' auto-suggestion ' which he has made to himself, etc., etc. What explains 
everything explains nothing ; and it must be remembered that what needs 
explanation here is the fact that in a certain condition of the subject sug- 
gestions operate as they do at no other time; that through them functions 
are affected which ordinarily elude the action of the waking will ; and that 
usually all this happens in a condition of which no after-memory remains. 



602 PSTCHOLOQT, 

served phenomena, the importance of most particular symp- 
toms as marks of the state has diminished. This lightens 
very much our own immediate task. Proceeding to enu- 
merate the symptoms of the hypnotic trance, I may confine 
myself to those which are intrinsically interesting, or which 
differ considerably from the normal functions of man. 

First of all comes amnesia. In the earlier stages of hyp- 
notism the patient remembers what has happened, but with 
successive sittings he sinks into a deeper condition, which 
is commonly followed by complete loss of memory. He 
may have been led through the liveliest hallucinations and 
dramatic performances, and have exhibited the intensest ap- 
parent emotion, but on waking he can recall nothing at all. 
The same thing happens on yaking from sleep in the midst 
of a dream — it quickly eludes recall. But just as we may be 
reminded of it, or of parts of it, by meeting persons or ob- 
jects which figured therein, so on being adroitly prompted, 
the hypnotic patient will often remember what happened in 
his trance. One cause of the forgetfulness seems to be 
the disconnection of the trance performances with the sys- 
tem of waking ideas. Memory requires a continuous train 
of association. M. Delboeuf, reasoning in this way, woke 
his subjects in the midst of an action begun during trance 
(washing the hands, e.g.), and found that they then remem- 
bered the trance. The act in question bridged over the two 
states. But one can often make them remember by merely 
telling them during the trance that they shall remember. 
Acts of one trance, moreover, are usually recalled, either 
spontaneously or at command, during another trance, pro- 
vided that the contents of the two trances be not mutually 
incompatible. 

SwjgestihiUfy, The patient believes everything which 
his hypnotizer tells him, and does everything which the 
latter commands. Even results over which the will has 
normally no control, such as sneezing, secretion, reddening 
and growing pale, alterations of temperature and heart- 
beat, menstruation, action of the bowels, etc., may take 
place in consequence of the operator's firm assertions dur- 
ing the hypnotic trance, and the resulting conviction on the 



HYPNOTISM. . 603 

part of the subject, that the effects will occur. Since almost 
all the phenomena yet to be described are effects of this 
heightened suggestibility, I will say no more under the 
general head, but proceed to illustrate the peculiarity in 
detail. 

Effects on the voluntary musclea seem to be those most 
easily got ; and the ordinary routine of hypnotizing con- 
sists in provoking them first Tell the patient that he can- 
not open his eyes or his mouth, cannot unclasp his hands 
or lower his raised arm, cannot rise from his seat, or pick 
up a certain object from the floor, and he will be immedi- 
ately smitten with absolute impotence in these regards. 
The effect here is generally due to the involuntary contrac- 
tion of antagonizing muscles. But one can equally well 
suggest paralyaisy of an arm for example, in which case it 
will hang perfectly placid by the subject's side. Cataleptic 
and tetanic rigidity are easily produced by suggestion, 
aided by handling the parts. One of the favorite shows at 
public exhibitions is that of a subject stretched stiff as a 
board with his head on one chair and his heels on another. 
The cataleptic retention of impressed attitudes differs from 
voluntary assumption of the same attitude. An arm volun- 
tarily held out straight will drop from fatigue after a 
quarter of an hour at the utmost, and before it falls the 
agent's distress will be made manifest by oscillations in the 
arm, disturbances in the breathing, etc. But Charcot has 
shown that an arm held out in hypnotic catalepsy, though 
it may as soon descend, yet does so slowly and with no ac- 
companying vibration, whilst the breathing remains entirely 
calm. He rightly points out that this shows a profound 
physiological change, and is proof positive against simula- 
tion, as far as this symptom is concerned. A cataleptic 
attitude, moreover, may be held for many hours. — Some- 
times an expressive attitude, clinching of the fist, contrac* 
tion of the brows, will gradually set up a sympathetic 
action of the other muscles of the body, so that at last a 
tableau vivant of fear, anger, disdain, prayer, or other emo- 
tional condition, is produced with rare perfection. This 
effect would seem to be due to the suggestion of the men- 
tal state by the first contraction. Stammering, aphasia, or 



604 PSYCHOLOGY, 

inability to utter certain words, pronounce certain letters^ 
are readily producible by suggestion. 

HaUvcinations of all the senses and ddnsions of every 
conceivable kind can be easily suggested to good subjects. 
The emotional effects are then often so lively, and the pan- 
tomimic display so expressive, that it is hard not to believe 
in a certain * psychic hyper-excitability,' as one of the con- 
comitants of the hypnotic condition. You can make the 
subject think that he is freezing or burning, itching or 
covered with dirt, or wet ; you can make him eat a potato 
for a peach, or drink a cup of vinegar for a glass of cham- 
pagne ; * ammonia will smell to him like cologne water ; a 
chair will be a lion, a broom-stick a beautiful woman, a 
noise in the street will be an orchestral music, etc., etc, 
with no limit except your powers of invention and the 
patience of the lookers on.t Illusions and hallucinations 
form the pieces de resistance at public exhibitions. The 
comic effect is at its climax when it is successfully sug- 
gested to the subject that his personality is changed into 
that of a baby, of a street boy, of a young lady dressing 
lor a party, of a stump orator, or of Napoleon the Great 
He may even be transformed into a beast, or an inanimate 
thing like a chair or a carpet, and in every case will act 
out all the details of the part with a sincerity and inlen- 
sity seldom seen at the theatre. The excellence of the 
performance is in these cases the best reply to the suspicion 
that the subject may be shamming — so skilful a shammer 
must long since have found his true function in life upon 
the stage. Hallucinations and histrionic delusions gener- 
ally go with a certain depth of the trance, and are followed 



* A complete fit of drunkenness may be the consequence of the sug- 
gested champagne. It is even said that real drunkenness has been cured 
by suggestion. 

fTlie suggested hallucination may be followed by a negative after- 
image, just as if it were a real object. This can be very easily verified 
with the suggested hallucination of a colored cross on a sheet of while 
paper. The subject, on turning to another sheet of paper, will see a cross 
of the complementary color. Hallucinations have been shown by MM. 
Binet and Fere to be doubled by a prism or mirror, magnified by a lens, 
and in many other ways to behave optically like real objects. These 
points have been discussed already on p. 128 S. 



HTPNOTiaM, 606 

by complete forgetfulness. The subject awakens from 
them at the command of the operator with a sudden start 
of surprise, and may seem for a while a little dazed. 

Subjects in this condition will receive and execute sug- 
gestions of crime, and act out a theft, forgery, arson, or 
murder. A girl will believe that she is married to her 
hypnotizer, etc. It is unfair, however, to say that in these 
cases the subject is a pure puppet with no spontaneity. 
His spontaneity is certainly not in abeyance so far as 
things go which are harmoniously associated with the sug- 
gestion given him. He takes the text from his operator ; 
but he may amplify and develop it enormously as he acts 
it out. His spontaneity is lost only for those systems of 
ideas which conflict with the suggested delusion. The latter 
is thus ' systematized ' ; the rest of consciousness is shut 
off, excluded, dissociated from it In extreme cases the 
rest of the mind would seem to be actually abolished and 
the hypnotic subject to be literally a changed personality, 
a being in one of those * second ' states which we studied 
in Chapter X. But the reign of the delusion is often 
not as absolute as this. If the thing suggested be too in- 
timately repugnant, the subject may strenuously resist and 
get nervously excited in consequence, even to the point of 
having an hysterical attack. The conflicting ideas slumber 
in the background and merely permit those in the fore- 
ground to have their way until a real emergency arises ; 
then they assert their rights. As M. Delboeuf says, the 
subject surrenders himself good-naturedly to the perform- 
ance, stabs with the pasteboard dagger you give him be- 
cause he knows what it is, and fires off the pistol because he 
knows it has no ball ; but for a real murder he would not 
be your man. It is undoubtedly true that subjects are 
often well aware that they are acting a pari They know 
that what they do is absurd. Tliey know that the halluci- 
nation which they see, describe, and act upon, is not really 
there. They may laugh at themselves ; and they always 
recognize the abnormality of their state when asked about 
it, and call it * sleep.' One often notices a sort of mocking 
smile upon them, as if they were playing a comedy, and 
they may even say on * coming to ' that they were sham- 



606 P8TCH0L0OT. 

ming all the while. These facts have misled nltra-skepti- 
cal people so far as to make them doubt the genuineness 
of any hypnotic phenomena at alL But, save the con- 
sciousness of * sleep/ they do not occur in the deeper con- 
ditions ; and when they do occur they are only a natural 
consequence of the fact that the * monoideism ' is incom- 
plete. The background-thoughts still exist, and have the 
power of comment on the suggestions, but no power to in- 
hibit their motor and associative effects. A similar condi- 
tion is frequent enough in the waking state, when an 
impulse carries us away and our * will ' looks on wonder- 
ingly like an impotent spectator. These * shammers ' con- 
tinue to sham in just the same way, every new time you 
hypnotize them, until at last they are forced to admit that 
if shamming there be, it is something very different from 
the free voluntary shamming of waking hours. 

Meal senscUions may be abolished as well as false ones 
buggested. Legs and breasts may be amputated, children 
bom, teeth extracted, in short the most painful experi- 
ences undergone, with no other ansBsthetic than the hypno- 
tizer's assurance that no pain shall be felt. Similarly 
morbid ])ains may be annihilated, neuralgias, toothaches, 
rheumatisms cured. The sensation of hunger has thus 
been abolished, so that a patient took no nourishment for 
fourteen days. The most interesting of these suggested 
anaesthesias are those limited to certain objects of percep- 
tion. Thus a subject may be made blind to a certain per- 
son and to him alone, or deaf to certain words but to no 
others.* In this case the anjesthesia (or negative haUucina' 
Hon, as it has been called^ is apt to become systematized. 
Other things related to the person to whom one has 
been made blind may also be shut out of consciousness. 
What he says is not heard, his contact is not felt, objects 
which he takes from his pocket are not seen, etc. Objects 
which he screens are seen as if he were transparent. Facts 
about him are forgotten, his name is not recognized when 
pronounced. Of course there is great variety in the com- 

* M. Liegeois explains the common exhibition-trick of making the sub- 
ject unable to get bis arms into his coat-sleeves again after be has taken 
his coat off, by an anceslbesia to the necessary parts of the coat. 



HYPNOTISM. 607 

pleteness of this systematic extension of the suggested 
anaesthesia, but one may say that some tendency to it always 
exists. When one of the subjects' own limbs is made anaes- 
thetic, for example, memories as well as sensations of its 
movements often seem to depart. An interesting degree of 
the phenomenon is found in the case related by M. Binet 
of a subject to whom it was suggested that a certain M. G. 
was invisible. She still saw M. C, but saw him as a 
stranger, having lost the memory of his name and his exist- 
ence. — Nothing is easier than to make subjects forget their 
own name and condition in life. It is one of the sugges- 
tions which most promptly succeed, even with quite fresh 
ones. A systematized amnesia of certain periods of one's 
life may also be suggested, the subject placed, for instance, 
where he was a decade ago with the intervening years ob- 
literated from his mind. 

The mental condition which accompanies these system- 
atized anaesthesias and amnesias is a very curious one. 
The anaesthesia is not a genuine sensorial one, for if you 
make a real red cross (say) on a sheet of white paper in- 
visible to an hypnotic subject, and yet cause him to look 
fixedly at a dot on the paper on or near the cross, he will, 
on transferring his eye to a blank sheet, see a bluish-green 
after-image of the cross. This proves that it has impressed 
his sensibility. He has fdt it, but not perceived ii He 
had actively ignored it, refused to recognize it, as it were. 
Another experiment proves that he must distinguish it first 
in order thus to ignore it. Make a stroke on paper or 
blackboard, and tell the subject it is not there, and he will 
see nothing but the clean paper or board. Next, he not 
looking, surround the original stroke with other strokes 
exactly like it, and ask him what he sees. He will point 
out one by one all the new strokes and omit the original 
one every time, no matter how numerous the new strokes 
may be, or in what order they are arranged. Similarly, if 
the original single stroke to which he is blind be dovbled 
by a prism of sixteen degrees placed before one of his eyes 
(both being kept open), he will say that he now sees one 
stroke, and point in the direction in which the image seen 
through the prism lies. 




608 P8TCH0L0QY, 

Obviously, then, he is not blind to the hini of stroke in 
the least. He is blind only to one individual stroke of 
that kind in a particular position on the board or paper, — 
that is, to a particular complex object ; and, paradoxical as 
it may seem to say so, he must distinguish it with great 
accuracy from others like it, in order to remain blind 
to it when the others are brought near. He 'apperceives* 
it, as a preliminary to not seeing it at all ! How to con- 
ceive of this state of mind is not easy. It would be much 
simpler to understand the process, if adding new strokes 
made the first one visible. There would then be two dif- 
ferent objects apperceived as totals, — paper with one 
stroke, paper with two strokes ; and, blind to the former, 
he would see all that was in the latter, because he would 
have apperceived it as a different total in the first instance. 

A process of this sort occurs sometimes (not always) 
when the new strokes, instead of being mere repetitions of 
the original one, are lines which combine with it into a 
total object, say a human face. The subject of the trance 
then may regain his sight of the line to which he had pre- 
viously been blind, by seeing it as part of the face. 

When by a prism before oDe eye a previously invisible 
line has been made visible to that eye, and the other ej'e is 
closed or screened, its closure makes no difference ; the 
line still remains visible. But if then the prism is removed, 
the line will disappear even to the eye which a moment 
ago saw it, and both eyes will revert to their original blind 
state. 

We have, then, to deal in these cases neither with a 
sensorial anaesthesia, nor with a mere failure to notice, 
but with something much more complex ; namely, an 
active counting out and positive exclusion of certain ob- 
jects. It is as when one * cuts ' an acquaintance, * ignores * 
a claim, or * refuses to be influenced * by a consideration of 
whose existence one remains aware. Thus a lover of Na- 
ture in America finds himself able to overlook and ignore 
entirely the board- and rail-fences and general roadside 
raggedness, and revel in the beauty and picturesqueness of 
the other elements of the landscape, whilst to a newh-- 



HTPNOTISM. 609 

arriyed European the fences are so aggressiyely present as 
to spoil enjoyment 

Messrs. Gumey, Janet, and Binet have shown that the 
ignored elements are preserved in a split-off portion of the 
subjects* consciousness which can be tapped in certain ways, 
and made to give an account of itself (see YoL I. p. 209). 

Hypercesthesia of the senses is as common a symptom as 
ansBsthesia. On the skin two points can be discriminated 
at less than the normal distance. The sense of touch is so 
delicate that (as M. Delboeuf informs me) a subject after 
simply poising on her finger-tips a blank card drawn from 
a pack of similar ones can pick it out from the pack again 
by its * weight.* We approach here the line where, to many 
persons, it seems as if something more than the ordinary 
senses, however sharpened, were required in explanation. 
I have seen a coin from the operator's pocket repeatedly 
picked out by the subject from a heap of twenty others,* 
by its greater * weight' in the subject's language. — Audi- 
torj hypersBsthesia may enable a subject to hear a watch 
tick, or his operator speak, in a distant room. — One of the 
most extraordinary examples of visual hypersesthesia is 
that reported by Bergson, in which a subject who seemed 
to be reading through the back of a book held and looked 
at by the operator, was really proved to be reading the im- 
age of the page reflected on the latter's cornea. The same 
subject was able to discriminate with the naked eye details 
in a microscopic preparation. Such cases of ' h3rper8esthe- 
sia of vision ' as that reported by Taguet and Sauvaire, 
where subjects could see things mirrored by non-reflecting 
bodies, or through opaque pasteboard, would seem rather 
to belong to * psychical research ' than to the present cate- 
gory. — The ordinary test of visual hyperai^ateness in hyp- 
notism is the favorite trick of giving a subject the hallu- 
cination of a picture on a blank sheet of card- board, and 
then mixing the latter with a lot of other similar sheets. 
The subject will always find the picture on the original 
sheet again, and recognize infallibly if it has been turned 

* Precautions being taken against diflorences of temperature and other 
grounds of suggestion. 



610 P87CH0L0Q7. 

over, or upside down, although the bystanders have to re^ 
sort to artifice to identify it again. The Subject notes pe- 
culiarities on the card, too small for waking observation to 
detect* If it be said that the spectators guide him by 
their manner, their breathing, etc., that is only another 
proof of his hypersesthesia ; for he undoubtedly is con- 
scious of subtler personal indications (of his operator's 
mental states especially) than he could notice in his waking 
state. Examples of this are found in the so-called * mag- 
netic rapport' This is a name for the fact that in deep 
trance, or in lighter trance whenever the suggestion is 
made, the subject is deaf and blind to everyone but the 
operator or those spectators to whom the latter expressly 
awakens his senses. The most violent appeals from any- 
one else are for him as if non-existent, whilst he obeys the 
faintest signals on the part of his hypnotizer. If in cata- 
lepsy, his limbs will retain their attitude only when the 
operator moves them ; when others move them they fall 
down, etc. A more remarkable fact still is that the patient 
will often answer anyone whom his operator touches, or at 
whom he even points his fiDger, in however concealed a 
manner. All which is rationally explicable by expectation 
and suggestion, if only it be farther admitted that his 
senses are acutely sharpened for all the operator's move- 
ments, f He often shows great anxiety and restlessness if 
the latter is out of the room. A favorite experiment of 
Mr. E. Gurney's was to put the subject's hands through an 
opaque screen, and cause the operator to point at one 
finger. That finger presently grew insensible or rigid. A 
bystander pointing simultaneously at another finger, never 
made that insensible or rigid. Of course the elective rap. 
port with their operator had been developed in these 

* It should be said, however, that the bystander's ability to discrimi- 
nate unmarked cards and sheets of paper from each other is much greater 
than one would naturally suppose. 

f I must repeat, however, that we are here on the verge of possibly un- 
known forces and modes of commuuicalion. llypuotizjition at a distance, 
with no grounds for expectation on the subject's part that it was to be 
tried, setms pretty well established in certain very rare cases. See in 
general, for information on these matters, the Proceedings of tba 8oc. for 
Psych. Research, passim. 



HYPNOTISM. 611 

trained subjects during the hypnotic state, but the phe- 
nomenon then occurred in some of them during the waking 
state, even when their consciousness was absorbed in ani- 
mated conversation with" a fourth party.* I confess that 
when I saw these experiments I was impressed with the 
necessity for admitting between the emanations from differ- 
ent people differences for which we have no name, and a 
discriminative sensibility for them of the nature of which 
we can form no clear conception, but which seems to be 
developed in certain subjects by the hypnotic trance. — The 
enigmatic reports of the effect of magnets and metals, even 
if they be due, as many contend, to unintentional sugges- 
tion on the operator's part, certainly involve hyperaosthetic 
perception, for the operator seeks as well as possible to 
conceal the moment when the magnet is brought into play, 
and yet the subject not only finds it out that moment in a 
way difficult to understand, but may develop effects which 
(in the first instance certainly) the operator did not expect to 
find. Unilateral contractures, movements, paralyses, hallu- 
cinations, etc., are made to pass to the other side of the 
body, hallucinations to disappear, or to change to the com- 
plementary color, suggested emotions to pass into their 
opposites, etc. Many Italian observations agree with the 
French ones, and the iij^shot is that if unconscious sugges- 
tion lie at the bottom of this matter, the patients show an 
enormously exalted power of di\aning what it is they are 
expected to do. This hyperresthetic perception is what 
concerns us now.t Its modus cannot yet be said to be de- 
fined. 



* Here aj^ain the perception in question must take place below the 
threshold of ordiuary cousciousness, possibly in one of those split-off selyes 
or 'second ' states whose existence we have so often to recognize. 

f 1 myself verified many of the above effects of the magnet on a blind- 
folded subject on whom 1 was tr3'ing them for the first time, and whom I 
believe to have never heard of them before. The moment, however, an 
opaque screen was added to the blindfolding, the effects ceased to coincide 
with the approximation of the magnet, so that it looks as if visual percep- 
tion had been instrumental in produciug them. The subject passed from 
my observation, so that I never could clear up the mystery. Of course I 
gave him consciously no hint of what I was looking for. 



612 PSYCHOLOGY. 

Changes in the nutrition of the tiasvea may be produced by 
suggestion. These effects lead into therapeutics — a subject 
which I do not propose to treat of here. But I may say 
that there seems no reasonable ground for doubting that in 
certain chosen subjects the suggestion of a congestion, a 
bum, a blister, a raised papule, or a bleeding from the nose 
or skin, may produce the effect. Messrs. Beaunis, Berjon, 
Bernheim, Bourru, Burot, Charcot, DelbcBuf, Dumontpal- 
lier, Focachon, Forel, Jendrdssik, Krafft-Ebing, Liebauit, 
Liegeois, Lipp, Mabille, and others have recently vouched 
for one or other of these effects. Messrs. Delbceuf and 
Liegeois have annulled by suggestion, one the effects of a 
burn, the other of a blister. Delbceuf was led to his experi- 
ments after seeing a bum on the skin produced by suggestion, 
at the Salp^triere, by reasoning that if the idea of a pain 
could produce inflammation it must be because pain was 
itself an inflammatory irritant, and that the abolition of it 
from a real burn ought therefore to entail the absence of 
inflammation. He applied the actual cautery (as well as vesi- 
cants) to symmetrical places on the skin, affirming that no 
pain should be felt on one of the sides. The result was a 
dry scorch on that side, with (as he assures me) no after- 
mark, but on the other side a regular blister with sui)pura- 
tion and a subsequent scar. This explains the innoeuity of 
certain assaults made on subjects during trance. To test 
Bimulation, recourse is often had to sticking pins under their 
finger-nails or through their tongue, to inhalations of strong 
ammonia, and tlie like. These irritations, when not felt by 
the subject, seem to leave no after-consequences. One is 
reminded of the reported non-inflammatory character of the 
wounds made on themselves hy dervishes in their pious or- 
gies. On the other hand, the reddenings and bleedings of the 
skin along certain lines, suggested by tracing lines or press- 
ing objects thereupon, put the accounts handed down to us of 
the stigmata of the cross appearing on the hands, feet, sides, 
and forehead of certain Catholic mystics in a new light 
As so often happens, a fact is denied until a welcome inter- 
pretation conies with it. Then it is admitted readily enough; 
and evidence judged quite insufficient to back a claim, so 
long as the church had an interest in making it, proves to 



HYPNOTISM, 613 

be qniie sufficient for modem scientific enlightenment, the 
moment it appears that a reputed saint can thereby be 
classed as *a case of hystero-epilepsy.' 

There remain two other topics, viz., post-hypnotic effects 
of suggestion, and effects of suggestion in the waking 
state. 

FoJ9i'hypnotic, or deferred, suggestions are such as are 
giyen to the patients during trance, to take effect after wak- 
ing. They succeed with a certain number of patients even 
when the execution is named for a remote period — months 
or even a year, in one case reported by M. Li^geois. In 
this way one can make the patient feel a pain, or be para- 
lyzed, or be hungry or thirsty, or have an hallucination, 
positive or negative, or perform some fantastic action after 
emerging from his trance. The effect in question may be 
ordered to take place not immediately, but after an interval 
of time has elapsed, and the interval may be left to the 
subject to measure, or may be marked by a certain signal. 
The moment the signal occurs, or the time is run out, the 
subject, who until then seems in a perfectly normal waking 
condition, will experience the suggested effect. In many 
instances, whilst thus obedient to the suggestion, he 
seems to fall into the hypnotic condition again. This is 
proved by the fact that the moment the hallucination or sug- 
gested performance is over he forgets it, denies all knowl- 
edge of it, and so forth ; and by the further fact that he is 
'suggestible * during its performance, that is, will receive 
new hallucinations, etc., at command. A moment later and 
this suggestibility has disappeared. It cannot be said, how- 
ever, that relapse into the trance is an absolutely necessary 
condition for the post-hypnotic carrying out of commands, 
for the subject may be neither suggestible nor amnesic, and 
may struggle with all the strength of his will against the 
absurdity of this impulse which he feels rising in him, he 
knows not why. In these cases, as in most cases, he forgets 
the circumstance of the impulse having been suggested to 
hira in ^ previous trance ; regards it as arising within him- 
self ; and often improvises, as he yields to it, some more or 
less plausible or ingenious motive by which to justify it to 



614 P8rCH0L00r. 

the lookers-on. He acts, in short, with his usual sense of per 
sonal spontaneity and freedom ; and the disbelievers in the 
freedom of the will have naturally made much of these cases 
in their attempts to show it to be an illusion. 

The only really mysterious feature of these deferred sug- 
gestions is the patient's absolute ignorance during the inter- 
val preceding their execution that they have been deposited 
in his mind. They will often surge up at the preappointed 
time, even though you have vainly tried a while before to 
make him recall the circumstances of their production. The 
most important class of post-hypnotic suggestions are, of 
course, those relative to the patient's health — bowels, sleej), 
and other bodily functions. Among the most interesting 
(apart from the hallucinations) are those relative to future 
trances. One can determine the hour and minute, or the 
signal, at which the patient will of his own accord lapse into 
trance again. One can make him susceptible in future to 
another operator who may have been unsuccessful with him 
in the past Or more important still in certain cases, one 
can, by suggesting that certain persons shall never be able 
hereafter to put him to sleep, remove him for all future time 
from hypnotic influences which might be dangerous. This, 
indeed, is the simple and natural safeguard against those 
* dangers of hypnotism ' of which uuinstrueted persons talk 
so vaguely. A subject who knows himself to be ultra-sus- 
ceptible should never allow himself to be entranced by an 
operator in whose moral delicacy he lacks complete confi- 
dence ; and he can use a trusted operator's suggestions to 
protect himself against liberties which others, knowing his 
weakness, might be tempted to take with him. 

The mechanism by which the command is retained until 
the moment for its execution arrives is a mystery which has 
given rise to much discussion. The experiments of Gurnev 
and the observations of M. Pierre Janet and others on cer- 
tain hysterical somnabulists seem to prove that it is stored 
up in consciousness ; not simply organically registered, but 
that the consciousness which thus retains it is split off, dissociated 
from the rest of the subject's miniL We have here, in short, an 
experimental production of one of those ^second' states of the 
personality of which we have spoken so often. Only here the 



HYPNOTISM. 615 

second state coexists as well as alternates with the first. 
Gumey had the brilliant idea of tapping this second con- 
sciousness by means of the planchette. He found that 
certain persons, who were both hypnotic subjects and auto- 
matic writers, would if their hands were placed on a plan- 
chette (after being wakened from a trance in which they had 
received the suggestion of something to be done at a later 
time) write out unconsciously the order, or something con- 
nected witli it. This shows that something inside of them, 
which could express itself through the hand alone, was 
continuing to think of the order, and possibly of it alone. 
These researches have opened a new vista of possible ex- 
perimental investigations into the so-called * second * states 
of the personality. 

Some subjects seem almost as obedient to suggestion in 
the waking state as in sleep, or even more so, according to 
certain observers. Not only muscular phenomena, but 
changes of personality and hallucinations are recorded as 
the result of simple affirmation on the operator's part, with- 
out the previous ceremony of * magnetizing * or putting into 
the * mesmeric sleep.' These are all trained subjects, how- 
ever, so far as I know, and the affirmation must apparently 
be accompanied by tlie patient concentrating his attention 
and gazing, however briefly, into the eyes of the operator. 
It is probable therefore that an extremely rapidly induced 
condition of trance is a prerequisite for success in these 
experiments. 

I have now made mention of all the more important 
phenomena of the hypnotic trance. Of their therapeutic 
or forensic bearings this is not the proper place to speak. 
The recent literature of the subject is quite voluminous, but 
much of it consists in repetition. The best compendious 
work on the subject is * Der Hypnotismus,' by Dr. A. Moll 
(Berlin, 1889 ; and just translated into English, N. Y., 1890), 
which is extraordinarily complete and judicious. The other 
writings most recommendable are subjoined in the note.* 

*Binetand Fere, 'Animal Matrnctism/ in the International Sci(?ntific 
Series ; A. Bernheim, ' Suggestive Therapeutics ' (N.Y., 1889); J. Lie'gcois, 



616 P87CH0L0OT, 

Most of them contain a historical sketch and much bib- 
liography. A complete bibliography has been published 
by M. Dessoir (Berlin, 1888). 

' De la Suggestion ' (1889) ; £. Ourney, two articles in Miod, vol. ix.—In 
the recent revival of interest in the history of this subject, it seems a pity 
that the admirably critical and scientific work of Dr. John Eearsley 
Mitchell of Philadelphia should remain relatively so unknown. It is quite 
worthy to rank with Braid's investigations. See "Five Essays" by the 
above author, edited by S. Weir Mitchell, Philadelphia, 1809, pp. 141~2T4 



CHAPTER XXVDX 

NECEbSARY TRUTHS AND THE EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE 

In this final chapter I shall treat of what has sometimes 
been called paychogeneais^ and try to ascertain just how far 
the connections of things in the outward environment can 
account for our tendency to think of, and to react upon, 
certain things in certain ways and in no others, even though 
personally we have had of the things in question no ex- 
perience, or almost no experience, at all. It is a familiar 
truth that some propositions are necessary. We mtist attach 
the predicate * equal ' to the subject * opposite sides of a 
parallelogram* if we think those terms together at all, 
whereas we need not in any such way attach the i)redicat6 
* rainy,* for example, to the subject * to-morrow.' The dubious 
sort of coupling of terms is universally admitted to be due 
to * experience '; the certain sort is ascribed to the * organic 
structure ' of the mind. This structure is in turn supposed 
by the so-called apriorisfs to be of transcendental origin, or 
at any rate not to be explicable by experience ; whilst by 
evolutionary empiricists it is supposed to be also due to ex- 
perience, only not to the experience of the individual, but 
to that of his ancestors as far back as one may please to 
go. Our emotional and instinctive tendencies, our irresist- 
ible impulses to couple certain movements with the percep- 
tion or thought of certain things, are also features of our 
connate mental structure, and like the necessary judgments, 
are interpreted by the apriorists and the empiricists in the 
same warring ways. 

I shall try in the course of the chapter to make plain 
three things : 

1) That, taking the word experience as it is universally 
understood, the experience of the race can no more account 

617 



618 ParCHOLOGY, 

for our necessary or a2>ru>rt judgments than the experience 
of the individual can ; 

2) That there is no good evidence for the belief that 
our instinctive reactions are fruits of our ancestors' edu- 
cation in the midst of the same environment, transmitted to 
us at birth. 

3) That the features of our organic mental structure 
cannot be explained at all by our conscious intercourse 
with the outer environment, but must rather be u:.derstoo<l 
as congenital variations, * accidental ' * in the first instance, 
but then transmitted as fixed features of the race. 

On the whole, then, the account which the apriorists 
give of ihe facts is that which I defend ; although I should 
contend (as will hereafter appear) for a naturalistic view 
of their cavse. 

The first thing I have to say is that all schools (however 
they otherwise differ) must allow that the elementary 
qtudities of ' cold, heat, pleasure, pain, red, blue, sound, 
silence, etc., are original, innate, or apHori properties of our 
subjective nature, even though they should require the touch 
of experience to waken them into actual consciousness, 
and should slumber, to all eternity, without ii 

This is so on either of the two hypotheses we may 
make concerning the relation of the feelings to the 
realities at whose touch they become alive. For in the 
first place, if a feeling do not mirror the reality which 
wakens it and to which we say it corresponds, if it mirror 
no reality whatever outside of the mind, it of course is a 
purely mental product. By its very definition it can be 
nothing else. But in the second place, even if it do mirroi 
the reality exactly, stilJ it is not that reality itself, it is a 
duplication of it, the result of a mental reaction. And that 
the mind should have the power of reacting in just thai 
duplicate way can only be stated as a harmony between its 
nature and the nature of the truth outside of it, a harmony 
whereby it follows that the qualities of both parties match. 



* ' Accidental ' in the Darwinian sense, as belonging to a cycle of 
sation inaccetf^ible to the present order of research. 



NECESSARY TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 619 

The originality of these elements is not, then, a question 
for dispute. The mar/are of philosophers is exclusively rda* 
tive to their forms of combination. The empiricist main- 
tains that these forms can only follow the order of com- 
bination in which the elements were originally awakened 
by the impressions of the external world; the apriorists 
insist, on the contrary, that some modes of combination, at 
any rate, follow from the natures of the elements them- 
selves, and that no amount of experience can modify this 
result 

WHAT 18 MEANT BY EXPERIENCE ? 

The phrase * organic mental structure ' names the mat- 
ter in dispute. Has the mind such a structure or not? 
Are its contents arranged from the start, or is the arrange- 
ment they may possess simply due to the shuflling of them 
by experience in an absolutely plastic bed ? Now the first 
thing to make sure of is that when we talk of 'experience,' 
we attach a definite meaning to the word. Experience means 
experience of something foreign supposed to impress us, whether 
spontaneously or in consequence of our own exertions and 
acts. Impressions, as we well know, afi'ect certain orders of 
sequence and coexistence, and the mind's habits copy the 
habits of the impressions, so that our images of things 
assume a time- and space-arrangement which resembles 
the time- and space-arrangements outside. To uniform 
outer coexistences and sequences correspond constant con- 
junctions of ideas, to fortuitous coexistences and sequences 
casual conjunctions of ideas. We are sure that fire will 
burn and water wet us, less sure that thunder will come 
after lightning, not at all sure whether a strange dog will 
bark at us or let us go by. In these ways experience 
moulds us every hour, and makes of our minds a mirror of 
the time- and space-connections between the things in the 
world. The principle of habit within us so fixes the copy 
at last that we find it difficult even to imagine how the out- 
ward order could possibly be different from what it is, and 
we continually divine from the present what the future is 
to be. These habits of transition, from one thought to 
another, are features of mental structure which were lack- 



620 PSYCHOLOGY. 

ing in us at birth ; we can see their growth under experi- 
ence's moulding finger, and we can see how often experience 
undoes her own work, and for an earlier order substitutes 
a new one. ' The order of experiefncey in this matter of the 
time- and space-conjunctions of things, is thus an indis- 
putably vera causa of our forms of thought. It is our edu- 
cator, our sovereign helper and friend ; and its name, 
standing for something with so real and definite a use, 
ought to be kept sacred and encumbered with no vaguer 
meaning. 

If all the connections among ideas in the mind could 
be interpreted as so many combinations of sense-data 
wrought into fixity in this way from without, then experi- 
ence in the common and legitimate sense of the word would 
be the sole fashioner of the mind. 

The empirical school in psychology has in the main 
contended that they can be so interpreted. Before our 
generation, it was the experience of the individual only 
which was meant. But when one nowadays says that the 
human mind owes its present shape to experience, he means 
the experience of ancestors as well. Mr. Spencer's state- 
ment of this is the earliest emphatic one, and deserves 
quotation in full : * 

" The supposition that the inner cohesions are adjusted to the outer 
persistences by accumulated experience of those outer persistences is in 
harmony with all our actual knowledge of mental phenomena. Though 
in so far as reflex actions and instincts are concerned, the experience- 
hypothesis seems insuflicient: yet its seeming insufficiency occurs only 
where the evidence is beyond our reach. Nay, even here such few facts 
as we can get point to the conclusion that automatic psychical connec- 
tions result from the registration of experiences contiuued for number- 
less gene nit ions 

"In brief, the case stands thus : It is agreed that all psychic^il 
relations, save the absolutely indissoluble, are determined by experiences. 
Their various strengths are admitted, other things equal, to be pn)por- 
tionate to the multiplication of expe?'iences. It is an unavoidable 



* Thr passage is in § 207 of the Principles of Psychology, at the end of 
the ch}i|)ter entitled 'Reason.* I italicize certain words in order to show 
that the essence of this explanation is to demand numei-ically frequent ex- 
periences. The bearing of this remark will later appear. (Cf. pp 641-2, 
infra.) 



NECESSARY TRUTHS-EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE, 621 

corollary that an infinity of experiences yf'iW produce a psychical relation 
that is indissoluble. Though such infinity of experiences cannot be 
received by a single individual, yet it may be received by the succession 
of individuals forming a race. And if there is a transmission of induced 
tendencies in the nervous system, it is inferrible that all psychical rela- 
tions whateoer^ from the necessary to the fortuitous, result from the 
experiences of the corresponding external relations ; and are so brought 
into harmony with them. 

'*Thus, the experience-hypothesis furnishes an adequate solution. 
The genesis of instinct, the development of memory and reason out of 
it, and the consolidation of rational actions and inferences into in- 
stinctive ones, are alike explicable on the single principle that the 
cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the frequency with 
which the relation between the answering external phenomena has been 
repeated in experience, 

** The universal law that, other things equal, the cohesion of psy- 
chical states is proportionate to the frequency with which they have 
followed one another in experience, supplies an explanation of the so- 
called * forms of thought,' as soon as it is supplemented by the law that 
habitual psychical successions entail some hereditary tendency to such 
successions, which, under persistent conditions, will become cumulative 
in generation after generation. We saw that the establishment of those 
compound reflex actions called instincts is comprehensible on the prin- 
ciple that inner relations are, by perpetual repetition, organized into 
correspondence with outer relations. We have now to observe that the 
establishment of those consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive 
mental relations constituting our ideas of Space and Time is compre- 
hensible on the same principle. For if even to external relations 
that are often experienced during the life of a single organism, answer- 
ing internal relations are established that become next to automatic — 
if such a combination of psychical changes as that which guides a savage 
in hitting a bird with an arrow becomes, by constant repetition, so or- 
ganized as to be performed almost without thought of the processes of 
adjustment gone through — and if skill of this kind is so far transmissible 
that particular races of men become characterized by particular apti- 
tudes, which are nothing else than partially-organized psychical connec- 
tions ; then, if there exist certain external relations which are 
experienced by all organisms at all instants of their waking lives — 
relations which are absolutely constant, absolutely universal — there will 
be established answering internal relations that are absolutely constant,, 
absolutely universal. Such relations we have in those of Space and 
Time. The organization of subjective relations adjusted to these objec- 
tive relations has been cumulative, not in each race of creatures only, 
but throughout successive races of creatures ; and such subjective rela- 
tions have, therefore, become more consolidated than all others. Being 
experienced in every perception and every action of each creature, these 
connections among outer existences must, for this reason too, be 




622 P8YCU0L00T. 

responded to by connections among inner feelings, that are, above all 
others, indissoluble. As the substrata of all other relations in the von- 
ego, they must be responded to by conceptions that are the substrata of 
all other relations in the ego. Being the constant and infinitely- 
repeated elements of thought, they must become the automatic elementg 
of thought — the elements of thought which it is impossible to get rid of 
— the * forms of intuition/ 

** Such, it seems to me, is the only possible reconciliation between the 
experience-hypothesis and the hypothesis of the transcendentalists ; 
neither of which is tenable by itself. Insurmountable difficulties are 
presented by the Kantian doctrine (as we shall hereafter see) ; and the 
antagonist doctrine, taken alone, presents difficulties that are equally 
insurmountable. To rest with the unqualified assertion that, antece- 
dent to experience, the mind is a blank, is to ignore the questions— whence 
comes the power of organizing experiences ? whence arise the different 
degrees of that power possessed by different races of organisms, and 
different individuals of the same race? If, at birth, there exists noth- 
ing but a passive receptivity of impressions, why is not a horse as 
educable as a man ? Should it be said that language makes the differ- 
ence, then why do not the cat and the dog, reared in the same house- 
hold, arrive at equal degrees and kinds of intelligence ? Understood in 
its current form, the experience-hypothesis implies that the presence of 
a definitely-organized nervous system is a circumstance of no moment 
— a fact not needing to be taken into account ! Yet it is the all-imi>or- 
tant fact— the fact to which, in one sense, the criticisms of Leibnitz and 
others pointed — the fact without which an assimilation of experiences 
is inexplicable. Throughout the animal kingdom in general, the 

actions are dependent on the nervous structure. The physiologist shows 
ns that each reflex movement implies the ap:eney of certain nerves and 
ganglia ; that a development of complicated instincts is accompanie<l by 
complication of the nervous centres and their commissnral connections : 
that the same creature in different stages, as larva and ima;L»o for 
example, changes its instincts as its nervous structure changes ; and 
that as wo advance to creatures of high intelligence, a vast increase ii» 
the size and in the complexity of the nervous system takes place. Wh.i: 
is the obvious inferenct? ? It is that the ability to co-ordinate inipn>- 
sions and to perform the appropriate actions always implies the pn-- 
existence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way. What is the 
meaning of the human brain ? It is that the many established relaiinns 
among its parts stand for so many (stnhlLshed relations among the psy- 
chical chanj^es. Each of the constant connections among the fi)>res of 
the cerebral masses answers to some constant atninction of phenomena 
in the experiences of the race. Just as the organiztnl arrangement sub- 
sistin<r Ijetween the sen.sory nerves of the nostrils and the motor nerves 
of the respiratory muscles not only makes jmssible a sneeze, but also, 
in the newly-born infant, implies sneezings to be hereafter j>erfonned ; 
80, all tlie orj^anized arrangements sul)sisting among the nerves of the 



NECESSARY TRUTHS-- EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 623 

infant's bmin not only make possible certain combinations of impres- 
sions, but also imply that such combinations will hereafter be made — 
imply that there are answering combinations in the outer world— imply 
a preparedness to cognize these combinations — imply faculties of com- 
prehending them. It is true that the resulting compound psychical 
changes do not take place with the same readiness and automatic pre- 
cision as the simple reflex action instanced — it is true that some indi- 
vidual experiences seem required to establish them. But while this is 
partly due to the fact that these combinations are highly involved, 
extremely varied in their modes of occurrence, made up therefore of 
psychical relations less completely coherent, and hence need further 
repetitions to perfect them ; it is in a much greater degree due to the 
fact that at birth the organization of the brain is incomplete, and does 
not cease its spontaneous progress for twenty or thirty years afterwards. 
Those who contend that knowledge results wholly from the experiences 
of the individual, ignoring as they do the mental evolution which 
accompanies the autogenous development of the nervous system, fall into 
an error as great as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and struc- 
ture to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to assume the adult 
form. Were the infant born with a full-sized and completely-constructed 
brain, their position would be less untenable. But, as the case stands, 
the gradually-increasing intelligence displayed throughout childhood 
and youth is more attributable to the completion of the cerebral organ- 
ization than to the individual experiences— a truth proved by the fact 
that in adult life there is sometimes displayed a high endowment of 
some faculty which, during education, was never brought into play. 
Doubtless, experiences received by the individual furnish the concrete 
materials for all thought. Doubtless, the organized and semi-organized 
arrangements existing among the cerebral nerves can give no knowledge 
until th(;re has been a presentation of the external relations to wliich 
they correspond. And doubtless the child's daily observations and 
reasonings aid the formation of those involved nervous connections that 
are in process of spontaneous evolution ; just as its daily gambols aid 
the development of its limbs. But saying this is quit« a different thing 
from saying that its intelligence is wholly produced by its experiences. 
That is an utterly inadmissible doctrine -a doctrine which makes the 
presence of a brain meaningless — a doctrine which makes idiotcy unac- 
countable. 

** In the sense, then, that there exist in the nervous system certain 
pre-established relations answering to relations in the environment, 
there is truth in the doctrine of ' forms of intuition ' — not the truth 
which its defenders suppose, but a parallel trutli. Corresponding to 
absolute external relations, there are established in the structure of the 
nervous system absolute internal relations — relations that are potentially 
present before birth in the shape of definite nervous connections ; that 
are antecedent to, and independent of, individual experiences ; and 
that are automatically disclosed along with the first cognitions. And, 



624 PSTCHOLOOT. 

as here understood, it is not only these fundamental relations which 
are thus predetermined, hut also hosts of other relations of a more or 
less constant kind, which are congenitally represented by more or less 
complete nervous connections. But these predetermined internal 

relations, though independent of the experiences of the individual, are 
not independent of experiences in general : they have been determined 
by the experiences of preceding organisms. The corollary here drawn 
from the general argument is that the human brain is an organized 
register of ir^flnitely^numerous experiences received during the evolution 
of life, or rather during the evolution of that series of orgauisnis 
through which the human organism has been reached. The effects of 
the most uniform and frequent of these experiences have been succes- 
sively bequeathed, principal and interest ; and have slowly amounted 
to that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant— 
which the infant in after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or fur 
ther complicates — and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths tc 
future generations. And thus it happens that the European inberitb 
from twenty to thirty cubic inches more brain than the Papuan. Thuo 
it happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in some 
inferior human races, become congenital in superior ones. Thus it hap- 
pens that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their fin- 
gers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs, arise 
at length our Newtons and Sbakspeares.^' 

This is a brilliant and seductive statement, and it 
doubtless includes a good deal of truth. Unfortunately it 
fails to go into details ; and when the details are scrutinized, 
as they soon must be by us, many of them will be seen to 
be inexplicable in this simple way, and the choice will then 
remain to us either of denpng the experiential origin of 
certain of our judgments, or of enlarging the meaning of the 
word experience so as to include these cases among its 
effects. 



TWO MODES OP ORIGIN OP BBAIN STBUCTTJHE. 

If we adopt the former course we meet with a contro- 
versial difficulty. The * experience-philosophy ' has from 
time immemorial been the opponent of theological modes 
of tliought. The word experience has a halo of anti-super- 
naturalism about it ; so that if an^^one express dissatisfac- 
tion with any function claimed for it, he is liable to be 
treated as if he could only be animated by loyalty to the 



NECESSARY TBUTHS^EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE, 625 

catechism, or in some way have the interests of obscuran- 
tism at heart I am entirely certain that, on this ground 
alone, what I have erelong to say will make this a sealed 
chapter to many of my readers. ** He denies experience ! " 
they will exclaim, "denies science; believes the mind created 
by miracle; is a regular old partisan of innate ideas ! That is 
enough ! we'll listen to such antediluvian twaddle no more." 
Begrettable as is the loss of readers capable of such 
wholesale discipleship, I feel that a definite meaning for the 
word experience is even more important than their company. 
* Experience ' does not mean every natural, as opposed to 
every supernatural, cause. It means a particular sort of 
natural agency, alongside of which other more recondite 
natural agencies may perfectly well exist With the scien- 
tific animus of anti-supernaturalism we ought to agree, but 
we ought to free ourselves from its verbal idols and 
bugbears. 

Nature has many methods of producing the same effect. 
She may make a ' bom ' draughtsman or singer by tipping 
in a certain direction at an opportune moment the mole- 
cules of some human ovum ; or she may bring forth a 
child ungifted and make him spend laborious but successful 
years at school. She may make our ears ring by the sound 
of a bell, or by a dose of quinine ; make us see yellow by 
spreading a field of buttercups before our eyes, or by 
mixing a little santonine powder with our food ; fill us with 
terror of certain surroundings by making them really dan- 
gerous, or by a blow which produces a pathological altera- 
tion of our brain. It is obvious that we need two words 
to designate these two modes of operating. In the one case 
the natural agents produce perceptions which take cognizance of 
the agents themselves ; in the other case, they produce percep- 
tions tvhich take cognizance of something else. What is taught 
to the mind by the * experience,' in the first case, is the 
order of the experience itself — the * inner relation ' (in 
Spencer's phrase) * corresponds ' to the 'outer relation' 
which produced it, by remembering and knowing the latter. 
But in the case of the other sort of natural agency, what is 
taught to the mind has nothing to do with the agency 




626 PaTCHOLOOT. 

itself, but with some different outer relation altogether. A 
diagram will express the alternatives. B stands for our 
human brain in the midst of the world. All the little o's 



/^ 




Fio. M. 



with arrows proceeding from them are natural objects (like 
sunsets, etc.), which impress it through the sepses, and in 
the strict sense of the word give it experience^ teaching it by 
habit and association what is the order of their ways. AIJ 
the little x's inside the brain and all the little x's outside 
of it are other natural objects and processes (in the ovum, 
in the blood, etc.), which equally modify the brain, but 
mould it to no cognition of themselves. The tinnitus aurium 
discloses no properties of the quinine ; the musical endow- 
ment teaches no embryology ; the morbid dread (of solitude, 
perhaps) no brain-pathology ; but the way in which a dirty 
sunset and a rainy morrow hang together in the mind copies 
and teaches the sequences of sunsets and rainfall in the 
outer world. 

In zoological evolution we have two modes in which an 
animal race may grow to be a better match for its environ- 
ment. 

First, the so-called way of ' adaptation,' in which the 
environment may itself modify its inhabitant by exercis- 
ing, hardening, and habituating him to c^ertain sequences^ 
and these habits may, it is often maintained, become hered- 
itary. 

Second, the way of * accidental variation,' as Mr. Darwin 
termed it, in which certain young are born with peculiarities 
that help tliem and their progeuy to survive. That varia- 
tions of this sort tend to become ^hereditary, no one doubts. 



NECBBaART TRUTH8^EFFECTa OF EXPERIENCE 627 

The first mode is called by Mr. Spencer direct, the 
second indirect, equilibration. Both equilibrations must 
of course be natural and physical processes, but they 
belong to entirely different physical spheres. The direct 
influences are obvious and accessible things. The causes 
of variation in the young are, on the other hand, molecular 
and hidden. The direct influences are the animal's ' ex- 
periences,' in the widest sense of the term. Where what 
is influenced by them is the mental organism, they are con- 
scious experiences, and become the objects as well as the 
causes of their effects. That is, the effect consists in a ten- 
dency of the experience itself to be remembered, or to have 
its elements thereafter coupled in imagination just as they 
were coupled in the experience. In the diagram these ex- 
periences are represented by the 0*8 exclusively. The a;'s, 
on the other hand, stand for the indirect causes of mental 
modification — causes of which we are not immediately con- 
scious as such, and which are not the direct objects of the 
effects they produce. Some of them are molecular acci- 
dents before birth ; some of them are collateral and remote 
combinations, unintended combinations, one might say, of 
more direct effects wrought in the unstable and intricate 
brain-tissue. Such a result is unquestionably the suscepti- 
bility to music, which some individuals possess at the pres- 
ent day. It has no zoological utility ; it corresponds to no 
object in the natural environment ; it is a pure incident ol 
having a hearing organ, an incident depending on such in- 
stable and inessential conditions that one brother may have 
it and another brother not. Just so with the susceptibility 
to sea-sickness, which, so far from being engendered by 
long experience of its * object ' (if a heaving deck can be 
called itj4 object) is erelong annulled thereby. Our higher 
aesthetic, moral, and intellectual life seems made up of 
affections of this collateral and incidental sort, which have 
entered the mind by the back stairs, as it were, or rather 
have not entered the mind at all, hut got surreptitiously bom 
in the house. No one can successfully treat of psychogene- 
sis, or the factors of mental evolution, without distinguish- 
ing between these two ways in which the mind is assailed. 



628 P8TCH0L0OT. 

The way of ' experience ' proper is the front door, the door 
of the five senses. The agents which affect the brain in 
this way immediately become the mind's objects. The other 
agents do not. It would be simply silly to say of two men 
with perhaps equal effective skill in drawing, one an un- 
taught natural genius, the other a mere obstinate plodder 
in the studio, that both alike owe their skill to their ' ex- 
perience.' The reasons of their several skills lie in wholly 
disparate natural cycles of causation.* 

/ imll then, with the reader's permission, restrict the 
tvord * experience ' to processes which influence the mind by 
the front-door-ivay of simple habits and association. What 
the back-door-eftects may be will probably grow clearer 



* Principles of Biology, part iii. chaps, xi, xn.— Qoltz and Loeb have 
found that dogs become mild in character when their occipital, and fierce 
when their frontal, brain-lobes are cut off. "A dog which originally was 
cross in an extreme degree, never suffering himself to be touched, and 
even refusing, after two days' fasting, to take a piece of bread from my 
hand, became, after a bilateral operation on the occipital lobes, perfectly 
trustful and harmless. He underwent five operations on these parts. . . . 
Each one of them made him more good natured; so that at last (just as 
Goltz observed of his dogs) he would let other dogs take away the very 
bones which he was gnawing " (Loeb, Pflliger's xVrchiv, xxxix. 300). A 
course of kind treatment and training might have had a siuiilar effect. 
But how absurd to call two such different causes by the same name, and 
to say both times that the beast's ' experience of outer' relations ' is what 
educates him to good-nature. This, however, is virtually what all writers 
do who ignore the distmction between the ' front-door ' and the * back- 
door ' manners of producing mental change. 

One of the most striking of these back-door affections is snscfptibiUly 
to the charm of drunkenness. This (taking drunkenness in the broadest 
sense, as teetotalers use the word) is one of the deepest functions of human 
nature. Half of both the poetry and the tragedy of human lite wouk* 
▼anish if alcohol were taken away. As it is. the thirst for it is such that 
in the United States the cash-value of its sales amounts to thai of the sales 
of meat and of bread put together. And yet what ancestral 'outer rela- 
tion ' is responsible for this peculiar reaction of ours? The only • outer 
relation ' could be the alcohol itself, which, comparatively speakinsr. came 
into the environment but yesterday, and which, so far from creating is 
tending to eradicate, the love of itself from our mental structure, by letting 
only those families of men survive in whom it is not strong The love of 
drunkenness is a purely accidental susceptibility of a brain, evolved lor 
entirely different uses, and its causes are to be sought in the moleculai 
realm, rather than in any possible order of ' outer relations.' 



NECESSARY TRUTHS-EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE, 629 

as we proceed ; so I will pass right on to a scrutiny of the 
actual mental structure which we find. 

THE OISN1S8I8 OF THE ELEMENTABT MENTAIi OATE(K>BIE8. 

We find : 1. Elementary sorts of sensation, and feelings 
of personal activity ; 

2. Emotions; desires; instincts; ideas of worth; aes- 
thetic ideas ; 

3. Ideas of time and space and number ; 

4. Ideas of differenoe and resemblance, and of their de- 
grees. 

5. Ideas of causal dependence among events; of end 
and means ; of subject and attribute. 

6. Judgments affirming, denying, doubting, supposing 
any of the above ideas. 

7. Judgments that the former judgments logically in- 
volve, exclude, or are indifferent to, each other. 

Now we may postulate at the outset that all these 
forms of thought have a natural origin, if we could only get 
at it That assumption must be made at the outset of every 
scientific investigation, or there is no temptation to pro- 
ceed. But the first account of their origin which we are 
likely to hit upon is a snare. All these mental affections 
are ways of knowing objects. Most psychologists nowa- 
days believe that the objects first, in some natural way, en- 
gendered a brain from out of their midst, and then imprinted 
these various cognitive affections upon it. But how ? The 
ordinary evolutionist answer to this question is exceedingly 
simple-minded. The idea of most speculators seems to be 
that, since it sufiices now for us to become acquainted with 
a complex object, that it should be simply present to us 
often enough, so it must be fair to assume universally 
that, with time enough given, the mere presence of the 
various objects and relations to be known must end by 
bringing about the latter*s cognition, and that in this way 
all mental structure was from first to last evolved. Any 
ordinary Spencerite will tell you that just as the experience 
of blue objects wrought into our mind the color blue, and 
hard objects got it to feel hardness, so the presence of 
large and small objects in the world gave it the notion of 




630 P8YCU0L0OT. 

size, moving objects made it aware of motion, and objectiTe 
successions taught it time. Similarly in a world with dif- 
ferent impressing things, the mind had to acquire a sense 
of difference, whilst the like parts of the world as they fell 
upon it kindled in it the perception of similarity. Outward 
sequences which sometimes held good, and sometimes 
failed, naturally engendered in it doubtful and uncertain 
forms of expectation, and ultimately gave rise to the dis- 
junctive forms of judgment; whilst the hypothetic form, 
*if a, then b* was sure to ensue from sequences that were 
invariable in the outer world. On this view, if the outer 
order suddenly were to change its elements and modes, we 
should have no faculties to cognize the new order by. At 
most we should feel a sort of frustration and confusion. 
But little by little the new presence would work on us as 
the old one did; and in course of time another set of 
psychic categories would arise, fitted to take cognizance of 
the altered world. 

This notion of the outer world inevitably building up a 
sort of mental duplicate of itself if we only give it time, is 
so easy and natural in its vagueness that one hardly knows 
how to start to criticise it. One thing, however, is obvious, 
namely tliat the vianner in zvhich tve now become acquainted 
toith complex objects need not in the least resemble the man- 
ner in which the original dements of our consciousness grew up. 
Now, it is true, A new sort of animal need only be present 
to me, to impress its image permanently on my mind ; but 
this is because I am already in possession of categories for 
knowing each and all of its several attributes, and of a 
memory for retracing the order of their conjunction. I 
now have preformed categories for all possible objects. 
The ol)jects need only awaken these from their slumber. 
But it is a very different matter to account for the categories 
themselves. I think we must admit that the origin of the 
various elementary feelings is a recondite history, even 
after some sort of neural tissue is there for the outer world 
to begin its work on. The mere existence of things to be 
known is even now not, as a rule, sufficient to bring about 
a knowledge of them. Our abstract and general discover- 
ies usually come to us as lucky fancies ; and it is only aprea 



NECE83ART TRUTHS-EFFECTa OF EXPERIENCE, 631 

coup that we find that they correspond to some reality. 
What immediately produced them were previous thoughts, 
with which, and with the brain-processes of which, that 
reality had naught to do. 

Why may it not have been so of the original ele- 
ments of consciousness, sensation, time, space, resemblance, 
difference, and other relations ? Why may they not have 
come into being by the back-door method, by such 
physical processes as lie more in the sphere of morpho- 
logical accident, of inward summation of effects, than in 
that of the 'sensible presence' of objects? Why may they 
not, in short, be pure idiosyncrasies y spontaneous variations, 
fitted by good luck (those of them which have survived) 
to take cognizance of objects (that is, to steer us in our 
active dealings with them), without being in any intelligible 
sense immediate derivatives from them ? I think we shall 
find this view gain more and more plausibility as we pro- 
ceed.* 

All these elements are subjective duplicates of outer 
objects. They are not the outer objects. The secondary 
qualities among them are not sui)posed by any educated 
person even to resemble the objects. Their nature depends 
more on the reacting brain than on the stimuli which 
touch it off. This is even more palpably true of the natures 
of pleasure and pain, effort, desire and aversion, and of such 
feelings as those of cause and substance, of denial and of 



* Mr. OraDt AlleD, in a brilliant article entitled Idiosyncrasy (Mind, 
vm. 498), seeks to show that accidental morphological changes in the 
brain cannot possibly be imagined to result in any mental change of a sort 
which would fit the animal to its environment. If spontaneous variation 
ever works on the brain, il,s product, says Mr. Allen, ought to be an idiot 
or a raving madman, not a minister and interpreter of Nature, Only the 
environment can change us in the direction of accommodjition (o itself. 
But 1 think we ought to know a little better just what the molecular 
changes in the brain are on which thought depends, before we talk so con- 
fidently about what the effect can be of their possible variations. Mr. 
Allen, it should be said, has made a laudable eifort to conceive them dis- 
tinctly. To me his conception remains too purely anatomical. Meanwhile 
this essay and another by the same author in the Atlantic Monthly are 
probably as serious attempts as any that have been made towards applying 
the Spencerian theory in a radical way to the facts ol* human history. 



632 PSTCHOLOOT, 

doubt. Here then is a native wealth of inner forms whose 
origin is shrouded in mystery, and which at any rate were 
not simply ' impressed ' from without, in any intelligible 
sense of the verb ' to impress.' 

Their tirm- and apace-rdaiiona^ however, are impressed 
from without — for two outer things at least the evolution- 
ary psychologist must believe to resemble our thoughts of 
them, these are the time and space in which the objects lie. 
The time- and space-rdaiions bettoeen things do stamp copies 
of themselves within. Things juxtaposed in space impress us, 
continue to be thought of as thus juxtaposed. Things se- 
quent in time impress their sequence ou our memory-. And 
thus, through experience in the legitimate sense of the word, 
there can be truly explained an immense number of our 
mental habitudes, many of our abstract beliefs, and all our 
ideas of concrete things, and of their ways of behavior. 
Such truths as that fire burns and water wets, that glass 
refracts, heat melts snow, fishes live in water and die on 
land, and the like, form no small part of the most refined 
education, and are the all-in-all of education amongst the 
brutes and lowest men. Here the mind is passive and 
tributary, a servile copy, fatally and unresistingly fashioned 
from without. It is the merit of the associationist school 
to have seen the wide scope of these eflfects of neighbor- 
hood in time and space ; and their exaggerated applications 
of the principle of mere neighborhood ought not to blind 
us to the excellent service it has done to Psychology in 
their hands. As far as a large part of our thinking goes, 
then, it can intelligibly be formulated as a mere lot of habits 
impressed upon us from without. The degree of cohesion 
of our inner relations, is, in this part of our thinking, pro- 
portionate, in Mr. Spencer's phrase, to the degree of cohe- 
sion of the outer relations ; the causes and the objects of 
our thought are one ; and we are, in so far forth, what the 
materialistic evolutionists would have us altogether, mere 
ofi*shoots and creatures of our environment, and naught 
besides.* 

* In my own previous chapters on habit, memory, association, and 
perception, justice has been done to all these facts. 



NSCE88ART TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 633 

But now the plot thickens, for the images impressed 
upon our memory by the outer stimuli are not restricted to 
the mere time- and space-relations, in which they originally 
came, but revive in various manners (dependent on the in- 
tricacy of the brain-paths and the instability of the tissue 
thereof), and form secondary combinations such as the 
forma of jvdgment^ which, taken per «e, are not congruent 
either with the forms in which reality exists or in those in 
which experiences befall us, but which may nevertheless 
be explained by the way in which experiences befall in a 
mind gifted with memory, expectation, and the possibility 
of feeling doubt, curiosity, belief, and denial. The con- 
junctions of experience befall more or less invariably, vari- 
ably, or never. The idea of one term will then engender a 
fixed, a wavering, or a negative expectation of another, giv- 
ing affirmative, the hypothetical, disjunctive, interrogative, 
and negative judgments, and judgments of actuality and 
possibility about certain things. The separation of attribute 
from subject in all judgments (which violates the way in 
which nature exists) may be similarly explained by the 
piecemeal order in which our perceptions come to us, a 
vague nucleus growing gradually more detailed as we attend 
to it more and more. These particular secondary mental 
forms have had ample justice done them by associationists 
from Hume downwards. 

Associationists have also sought to account for discrim- 
ination, abstraction, and generalization by the rates of fre* 
quency in which attribiites come to us conjoined. With 
much less success, I think. In the chapter on Discrimina- 
tion, I have, under the "law of dissociation by varying con- 
comitants," sought to explain as much as possible by the 
passive order of experience. But the reader saw how much 
was left for active interest and unknown forces to do. In 
the chapter on Ima^nation I have similarly striven to do 
justice to the * blended image ' theory of generalization auil 
abstraction. So I need say no more of these matters here. 

THS aBNBBIB OF THE NATUBAIj SCTBNOSS. 

Our * scientific ' ways of thinking the outer reality are 
highly abstract ways. The essence of things for science is 



634 PSYC'HOLOOT. 

not to be what they seem, but to be atoms and molecoles 
moving to and from each other according tc strange laws. 
Nowhere does the account of inner relations produced by 
outer ones in proportion to the frequency with which the 
latter have been met, more egregiously break down than in 
Che case ox scientific conceptions. The order of scientific 
thought is quite incongruent either with the way in which 
reality exists or with the way in which it comes before us. 
Scientific thought goes by selection and emphasis exclu- 
sively. We break the solid plenitude of fact into separate 
essences, conceive generally what only exists particularly, 
and by our classifications leave nothing in its natural 
neighborhood, but separate the contiguous, and join what 
the poles divorce. The reality exists as a plenum. All its 
parts are oontemporaneous, each is as real as any other, and 
each as essential for making the whole just what it is and 
nothing else. But we can neither experience nor think 
ihi^ plenum. What we experience, wliut comes before us ^]a 
a chaos of fragmentary impressioDs interruptiug each 
other ; * what we think is an abstract system of hypothet 
ical data and laws.f 

* •* The order of nature, as perceived at a first glance, presents at every 
instant a chaos followed by another chaos. We must decompose each 
chaos into single facts. We must learn to see in the chaotic antecedent a 
multitude of distinct antecedents, in the chaotic consequent ^a multitude 
of distinct consequents. This, supposing it done, will not of itself tell us 
on which of the antecedents each consequent is invariably attendant. To 
determine that point, we musi endeavor to effect a separation of the facts 
from one another, not in our minds only, but in nature. The mental anal- 
ysis, however, must take place first. And every one knows that in the 
mode of performing it, one intellect differs immensely from another.* 
(J. S. Mill. Logic, bk. in. chap. vii. § 1.) 

f I quote from an address entitled 'Reflex Action and Theism,' pub- 
lished in the ' Unitarian Review ' for November 1881, and translated m 
the Critique Philoeophlque for January and February 1882. ** The con- 
ceiving or theorizing faculty works exclusively for U.e sake of ends that 
do not exist at all in the world of the impressions received by way of our 
senses, but are set by our emotional and practical subjectivity. It is a 
transformer of the woild of our impressions into a totally different worlds 
the world of our conception; and the transformation is effected in the 
'interests of our volitional nature, and for no other purpose whatsoever. 
Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective purposes, preferences, 
fondness for certain effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive 
would remain for the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all 
But. as we have the elal>orate volitional constitution we do have, the re- 



NECB88ART TBVTHS^EFFECTa OF EXPERIENCE. 035 

This sort of scientific algebra, little as it immediately 
resembles the reality given to us, turns out (strangely 

modelling must be effected, there is uo escape. The world's conteuts are 
given to each of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we 
can hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is 
like. We have to break that order altogether, and by picking out from it 
the items that concern us. and connecting them with others far away, 
which we say ' belong ' with them, we are able to make out definite threads 
of sequence and tendency, to foresee particular liabilities and get ready for 
them, to enjoy simplicity and harmony in the place of what was chaos. 
Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this moment and impar- 
tially added together an utter chaos ? The strains of my voice, the lights 
and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of the wind, the ticking 
of the clock, the various organic feelings you may happen individually to 
possess, do these make a whole at all? Is it not the only condition of your 
mental sanity in the midst of them that most of them should become non- 
existent for you. and that a few others— the sounds, I hope, which I am 
uttering— should evoke from places in your memory, that have nothing to 
do with this scene, associates fitted to combine with them in what we call 
a rational train of thought ? — rational because it leads to a conclusion we 
have some organ to appreciate. We have no organ or faculty to appreciate 
the simply given order. The real world as it is given at this moment is 
the sum total of all its beings and events now. But can we think of such 
a sum ? Can we realize for an instant what a cross- section of all existence 
at a definite point of time would be? While I talk and the flies buzz, a 
seagull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the 
Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, 
and twins are born in Prance. What does that mean ? Does the contem- 
poraneity of these events with each other and with a million more as dis- 
jointed as they form a rational bond between them, and unite them into 
anything that means for us a world ? Yet just such a collateral contem- 
poraneity, and nothing else, is the real order of the world. It is an order 
with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as pos- 
sible. As I said, we break it : we break it into histories, and we break it 
into arts, and we break it into sciences ; and then we begin to feel at home. 
We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it. On any one of these, 
we may react as if the rest did not exist. We discover among its parts re- 
lations that were never given to sense at all, — mathematical relations, tan- 
gents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions, — and out of an infinite 
number of these we call certain ones essential and lawgiving, and ignore 
the rest. Essential these relations are, but only/<9r our purpose, the other 
relations being just as real and present as they ; and our purpose is to con- 
ceive simply and lo foresee Are not simple conception and prevision subject- 
ive ends, pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science ; 
and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by 
any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling. It 
shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to many of our Aesthetic, to 
many of our practical purposes nnd ends." Cf. also Hodgson : Philos. of 
Refl., ch. V ; Lotze : Logik, §§ 842-851 ; Sigwart : Logik, §§ 60-68. 105. 



636 PSTCHOLOOT, 

enough) applicable to it. That is, it yields expressions 
which, at given places and times, can be translated into 
real values, or interpreted as definite portions of the chaos 
that falls upon our sense. It becomes thus a practical 
guide to our expectations as well as a theoretic delight 
But I do not see how any one with a sense for the facts can 
possibly call our systems immediate results of ' experience' 
in the ordinary sense. Every scientific conception is in the 
first instance a * spontaneous variation ' in some one's brain.* 
For one that proves useful and applicable there are a thou* 
sand that perish through their worthlessness. Their gene- 
sis is strictly akin to that of the flashes of poetry and sallies 
of wit to which the instable brain-paths equally give rise. 
But whereas the poetry and wit (like the science of the 
ancients) are their * own excuse for being,' and have to run 
the gauntlet of no farther test, the * scientific ' conceptions 
must prove their worth by being 'verified.' This test, how- 
ever, is the cause of their preservation^ not that of their pro- 
duction ; and one might as well account for the origin of 
Artemus Ward's jokes by the * cohesion ' of subjects with 
predicates in proportion to the * persistence of the outer 
relations ' to which they * correspond ' as to treat the genesis 
of scientific conceptions in the same ponderously unreal 
way. 

The most persistent outer relations which science be- 
lieves in are never matters of experience at all, but have to 
be disengaged from under experience by a process of elimi- 
nation, that is, by ignoring conditions which are always 
present. The elementary laws of mechanics, physics, and 
chemistry are all of this sort. The principle of uniformity 
in nature is of this sort ; it has to be sought under and in 
spite of the most rebellious appearances ; and our connc- 

* In an article entitled * Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environ- 
ment/ published in the Atlantic Monthly for October 1880. the reader 
will lind some ampler illustrations of these remarks. I have there tried to 
show that both mental and social evolution are to be conceived after the 
Darwinian fashion, and that the function of the environment properly so 
called is much more that of selecting forms, produced by invisible forces, 
than producing of such forms,— producing being the only fvmction thought 
of by the pre-Darwinian evolutionists, and the only one on which stress is 
laid by such contemporary ones as Mr. Spencer and Mr. Allen. 



NECE88ART TRVTHB-EFFBCTS OF EXPERIENCE. 637 

iion of its truth is far more like a religious faith than like 
assent to a demonstration. The only cohesions which ex- 
perience in the literal sense of the word produces in our 
mind are, as we contended some time back, the proximate 
laws of nature, and habitudes of concrete things, that heat 
melts ice, that salt preserves meat, that fish die out of 
water, and the like.* Such * empirical truths ' as these we 

* •* It is perfectly true that our world of experience begins with such 
associations as lead us to expect that what has happened to us will happen 
again. These associations lead the babe to look for milk from its nurse 
and not from its father, the child to believe that the apple he sees will 
taste good; and whilst they make him wish for it. they make him fear the 
bottle which contains his bitter medicine. But whereas a part of these 
associations grows confirmed by frequent repetition, another part is de- 
stroyed by contradictory experiences; and the world becomes divided for 
us into two provinces, one in which we are at home and anticipate with 
confidence always the same sequences; another filled with alternating, 
variable, accidental occurrences. 

'* . . . Accident is, in a wide sphere, such an every-day matter that we 
need not be surprised if it sometimes invades the territory where order is 
the rule. And one personification or another of the capricious power of 
chance easily helps us over the difllculties which further reflection might 
find in the exceptions. Yes, indeed, Exception has a peculiar fascination; 
it is a subject of astonishment, a dav^a, and the credulity with which in 
this first stage of pure association we adopt our supposed rules is matched 
by the equal credulity with which we adopt the miracles that interfere with 
them. 

" The whole history of popular beliefs about nature refutes the notion 
that the thought of an universal physical order can possibly have arisen 
through the purely passive reception and association of particular percep- 
tions. Indubitable as it is that all men infer from known cases to unknown, 
it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to the phenomenal 
materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would never have led to 
the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the belief that law and law- 
lessness rule the world in motley alternation. From the point of view of 
strict empiricism nothing exists but the sum of particular perceptions with 
their coincidences on the one hand, their contradictions on the other. 

** That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is not 
discovered till the order is looked for. The first impulse to look for it pro- 
ceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained, we must know 
Trustworthy means which infallibly possess a property or produce a result. 
But the practical need is only the first occasion for our reflection on the 
conditions of a true knowledge; even were there no such need, motives 
would still be present to carry us beyond the stage of mere association. 
For not with an equal interest, or nither with an equal lack of interest, 
does man contemplate those natural processes in which like is joined to 
like, and those in which like and unlike are joined; the former processes 



638 P8TCn0L0GT. 

admitted to form an enormous part of human wisdom. The 

* scientific ' truths have to harmonize with these truths, or 
be given up as useless ; but they arise in the mind in no 
such passive associative way as that in which the simpler 
truths arise. Even those experiences which are used to 
prove a scientific truth are for the most part artificial expe- 
riences of the laboratory gained after the truth itself has 
been conjectured. Instead of experiences engendering the 

* inner relations,' the inner relations are what engender the 
experiences here. 

What happens in the brain after experience has done its 
utmost is what happens in every material mass which has 
been fashioned by an outward force, — in every pudding or 
mortar, for example, which I may make with my hands. 
The fashioning from without brings the elements into coUo' 
cations which set new internal forces free to exert their 
e£fects in turn. And the random irradiations and resettle- 
ments of our ideas, which supervene upon experiencey and 
constitute our free mental play, are due entirely to these 
secondary internal processes, which vary enormously from 
brain to brain, even though the brains be exposed to 
exactly tlie same * outer relations.' The higher thought- 
])rocesses owe tlieip being to causes which correspond far 
more to the sourings and fermentations of dough, the setting 
of mortar, or the subsidence of sediments in mixtures, than 
to the manipulations by which these physical aggregates 
came to be compounded. Our study of similar association 
and reasoning taught us that the whole superiority of man 
depended on the facility with which in his brain the patfes 
worn by the most frequent outer cohesions could be rup- 
tured. The causes of the instability, the reasons why now 
this point and now that become in him the seat of rupture. 



harmonize with the conditions of his thinking, the hitter do not; in the 
former his concepts, judgments, inferences apply to realities, in the 
latter they have no such application. And thus the intellectual siitisfac 
tion which at first comes to him without rellection, at last excites in him 
the conscious wish to lind realized throughout the entire phenomenal world 
those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fun- 
damental element and guiding principle of his own thought." (C. Sigwart: 
Logik, II 880-2.) 



NECE88AR7 TRUTHS-EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 639 

we saw to be entirely obscure. (Vol. I. p. 560 ; Vol. IT. p. 
364) The only clear thing about the peculiarity seems to 
be its interstitial character, and the certainty that no mere 
appeal to man's * experience ' suffices to explain it 

When we pass from scientific to aesthetic and ethical 
systems, every one readily admits that, although the ele- 
ments are matters of experience, the peculiar forms of 
relation into which they are woven are incongruent with 
the order of passively received experience. The world of 
aesthetics and ethics is ^n ideal world, a Utopia, a world 
which the outer relations persist in CDutradicting, but which 
we as stubbornly persist in striving to make actual. Why 
do we thus invincibly crave to alter the given order of 
nature ? Simply because other relations among things are far 
more interesting to us and more charming than the mere 
rates of frequency of their time- and space-conjunctions. 
These other relations are all secondary and brain-born, 
* spontaneous variations ' most of them, of our sensibility, 
whereby certain elements of experience, and certain arrange- 
ments in time and space, have acquired an agreeableness 
which otherwise would not have been felt. It is true that 
habitual arrangements may also become agreeable. But this 
Agreeableness of the merely habitual is felt to be a mere 
ape and counterfeit of real iuward fitness ; and one sign of 
intelligence is never to mistake the one for the other. 

Hiere are then ideal and inivard relations amongst the o6- 
jects of our thought which can in no inteUigihle sense whatever 
be interpreted as reproductions of the order of outer experi- 
erce. In the aesthetic and ethical realms they conflict with 
its order — the early Christian with his kingdom of heaven, 
and the contemporary anarchist with his abstract dream of 
justice, will tell you that the existing order must perish, 
root and branch, ere the true order can come. Now the 
peculiarity of those relations among the objects of our 
khought which are dubbed 'scientific* is this, that although 
they nfj more are inward reproductions of the outer order 
tliJiu the ethical and a)sthetic relations are, yet they do not 
-conflict with that order, but, once haring sprung up by the 
play of the inward forces, are found — some of them at least, 
namely the only ones which have survived long enough to 



640 P8T0H0L0QT. 

be matters of record — to be congruent with the time- and 
space-relations which our impressions affect 

In other words, though nature's materials lend them- 
selves slowly and discouragingly to our translation of them 
into ethical forms, but more readily into sesthetic forms ; 
to translation into scientific forms they lend themselves with 
relative ease and completeness. The translation, it is true, 
will probably never be ended. The perceptive order does 
not give way, nor the right conceptive substitute for it arise, 
at our bare word of command.* It is often a deadly fight ; 
and many a man of science can say, like Johannes Miiller, 
after an investigation, * Es Idebt Blvt an der Arbeit' But 
victory after victory makes us sure that the essential doom 
of our enemy is defeat, t 



* Cf. Hodgson : Pbilosopby of Reflection, book ii, chap. v. 

f The aspiration to be 'scientific' is sucb an idol of tbe tribe to tbe 
present generation, is so sucked in with his mother's milk by every one of 
us, that we find it hard to conceive of a creature who should not feel it, 
and liarder still to treat it freely as the altogether peculiar and one-sided 
subjective interest which it is. But as a matter of fact, few even of ibe 
cultivated members of the race have shared it ; it was invented but a gen- 
eration or two ago. In the middle ages it meant only impious magic ; and 
the way in which it even now strikes orientals is charmingly shown in the 
letter of a Turki-sh CAdi to an English traveller asking him for statistical 
information, which Sir A. Layard prints at the end of his * Nineveh and 
Babylon.' The document is too full of edification not to be given in full. 
It runs thus : 

• Afy Illustrious Fyiend, and Joy of my Liver/ 

"The thing you ask of me is both difficult and useless. Although I 
nave passed all my daj's in tiiis place, I have neither counted the houses, 
nor inquired into the number of the inhabitnuls; and as towhut one person 
loads on his mules and the other stows away in the bottom of his ship, that 
is no business of mine. But, above all, as to the previous history of this 
city, (>od only knows the amount of dirt and confusion that the infidel* 
may have eaten before the coming of the sword of Islam. It were un- 
profitable for us to inquire into it. 

'"^'O my soul ! O my lamb ! seek not after the things which concern 
thee not. Thou camesl unto us and we welcomed thee : go in peace. 

"Of a truth thou hast spoken many words : and there is no harm done, 
#f)r the speaker is one and the listener is another. After the fashion of thy 
^ople thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy 
«nd content in none. \\v (praise hv to God) were born here, and never 
^esire to quit it. Is it possible, then, that the idea of a general intercourse 



JfBCWSABY TBUTHB-BFFB0T8 OF BXPERIENCB. 641 



THE QtWSTBBlB OF THE PUBIS 80IEN0B8. 

I have now stated in general terms the relation of the 
natural sciences to experience strictly so called, and shall 
complete what I have to say by reverting to the subject on 
a later page. At present I will pass to the so-called pure 
or a priori sdenoes of Classification, Logic, and Mathematics. 
My thesis concerning these is that they are even less than 
the natural sciences e£fects of the order of the world as it 
comes to our experience. The pure sciences express results 
OP cOBiPARisoN exdusivdy ; comparison is not a conceivable 
effect of the order in which outer impressions are experienced — 
it is one of the house-bom (p. 627) portions of our mental 
structure ; therefore the pure sciences form a body of proposi^ 
turns with whose genesis experience has nothing to do. 

First, consider the nature of comparison. The relations 
of resemblance and difference among things have nothing to 
do with the time- and space-order in which we may experience 
the latter. Suppose a hundred beings created by God 
and gifted with the faculties of memory and comparison. 
Suppose that upon each of them the same lot of sensa- 
tions are imprinted, but in different orders. Let some 

between mankiDd should make any impression on our understandings ? 
God forbid I 

"Listen, O my son t There is no wisdom equal unto the belief in Qod t 
He created the world, and shall we liken ourselves unto Him in seeking to 
penetrate into the mysteries of His creation ? Shall we say. Behold this 
star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and 
Cometh in so many years ! Let it go I He from whose hand it came will 
guide and direct it. 

"But thou wilt say unto me. Stand aside, O man, fori am more 
learned than thou art, and have seen more things. If thou thinkcst that 
thou art in this respect better than I am, thou art welcome. I pmisc God 
that I seek not that which I require not. Tliou art learned in the things I 
care not for ; and as for that which thou hast seen. I spit upon it. Will 
much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou seek Paradise 
with thine eyes ? 

'* O my friend I if thou wilt be happy, say, There is no God but 
God I Do no evil, and thus wilt thou fear neither man nor death ; foi 
surely thine hour will come I 

" The meek in spirit (£1 Fakir) 

''Imaum Ali Zadi." 



642 P8TCH0L0QT. 

of them have no single sensation more than once. Let 
some have this one and others that one repeated. Let 
every conceivable permutation prevail. And then let the 
magic-lantern show die out, and keep the creatures in a 
void eternity, with naught but their memories to muse upon. 
Inevitably in their long leisure they will begin to play with 
the items of their experience and rearrange them, make 
classificatory series of them, place gray between white and 
black, orange between red and yellow, and trace all other 
degrees of resemblance and difference. And this new con- 
struction will be absolutely identical in all the hundred 
creatures, the diversity of the sequence of the original ex- 
periences having no effect as regards this rearrangement. 
Any and every form of sequence will give the same result, 
because the result expresses the relation between the intcard 
natures of the sensations ; and to that the question of their 
outward succession is quite irrelevant Black will differ 
from white just as much in a world in which they always 
come close together as in one in which they always come 
far apart ; just as much in one in which they appear rarely 
as in one in which they appear all the time. 

But the advocate of * persistent outer relations ' may still 
return to the charge : These are wliat make us so sure that 
white and black differ, he may say ; for in a world where 
sometimes black resembled white and sometimes differed 
from it, we could never be so sure. It is because in this 
world black and white have alicays differed that the sense 
of their difference has become a necessary form of thought 
The pair of colors on the one hand and tlie sense of differ- 
ence on the other, inseparably experienced, not only by our- 
selves but by our ancestors, have become inseparably con- 
nected in the mind. Not through any essential structure 
of the mind, wliicli made difference the only possible feel- 
ing which they could arouse ; no, but because they simply 
did differ so often that at last they begat in us an impotency 
to imagine them doing anything else, and made us accept 
such a fabulous account as that just presented, of creatures 
to whom a single experience ^\ould suffice to make us 
feel the necessity of this Relation. 



NECESSARY TRUTHS- EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE, 643 

I know not whether Mr. Spencer would subscribe to 
this or not ; — nor do I care, for there are mysteries which 
press more for solution than the meaning of this vague 
writer's words. But to me such an explanation of our 
difference-judgment is absolutely unintelligible. We now 
find black and white different, the explanation says, he- 
oause ice have cdtvaya have so found them. But why should 
we always have so found them ? Why should difference 
have popped into our heads so invariably with the thought 
of them ? There must have been either a subjective or an 
objective reason. The subjective reason can only be that 
our minds were so constructed that a sense of difference 
was the only sort of conscious transition possible between 
black and white; the objective reason can only be that 
difference was always there, with these colors, outside the 
mind as an objective fact. The subjective reason explains 
outer frequency by inward structure, not inward structure 
by outer frequency ; and so surrenders the experience- 
theory. The objective reason simply says that if an outer 
difference is there the mind must needs know it — which is 
no explanation at all, but a mere appeal to the fact that 
somehow the mind does know what is there. 

The only clear thing to do is to give up the sham of a 
pretended explanation, and to fall back on the fact that 
the sense of difference has arisen, in some natural manner 
doubtless, but in a manner which we do not understand. 
It was by the back-stairs way, at all events ; and, from the 
very first, happened to be the only mode of reaction by 
which consciousness could feel the transition from one term 
to another of what (in consequence of this very reaction) we 
now call a contrasted pair. 

In noticing the differences and reseiublauces of things, 
and their degrees, the mind feels its own activity, and has 
given the name of comparison thereto. It need not compare 
its materials, but if once roused to do so, it can compare 
them with but one result, and this a fixed consequence of 
the nature of the materials themselves. Difference and re- 
semblance are thus relations between ideal objects, or con- 
ceptions as such. To learn whether black and white differ, 




644 PSTCHOLOGT, 

I need not consult the world of experience at all ; the mere 
ideas suffice. WluU I mean by black differs from whai 1 
mean by white, whether such colors exist extra mentem meam 
or not. If they ever do so exist, they will differ. White 
things may blacken, but the black of them will differ from 
the white of them, so long as I mean anything definite by 
these three words.* 

/ shaU now in what fcXiows call oR propositions which ex- 
press time- and space-relations empirical propositions ; and 1 
shall give the name of rational propositions to all propositions 
which express the results of a comparison. The latter denomi- 
nation is in a sense arbitrary, for resemblance and differ- 
ence are not usually held to be the only rational relations 
between things. I will next proceed to show, however, 
how many other rational relations commonly supposed dis- 
tinct can be resolved into these, so that my definition of 
rational propositions will end, I trust, by proving less arbi- 
trary than it now appears to be. 

SERIES OP EVEN DIFFERENCE AND MEDIATE COMPARISON. 

In Chapter XII we saw that the mind can at successive 
moments inean the same, and that it gradually comes into 
possession of a stock of permanent and fixed meanings, 
ideal objects, or conceptions, some of which are universal 
qualities, like the black and white of oui example, and some, 
individual things. We now see that not only are the objects 
permanent mental possessions, but the results of their com- 
parison are permanent too. The objects and their differ- 
ences together form an immutable system. The same ob- 
ject Sy compared in the same ivay, ahvays give the same results ; 



* "Though u limn in a fever should from sugar have a bitter taste which 
at another time would pro<hice a sweet one, yet the idea of bitter in that 
man's mind would be tis clear and distinct from the idea of sweet as if he 
had tasted only gall. Nor does it make any more confusion between the 
two ideas of sweet and bitter that the same sort of body produces at one 
time one and at another time another idea by the taste, than it makes a 
confusion in two ideas of white and sweet, or white and round, that the 
same piece of sugar produces them both in the micd at the same time.' 
Locke's Essay, bk. ii. ch. xi. ^ 8. 



NE0E88ART TRUTHS^ EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 645 

if the result be not the same, then the objects are not those 
originally meant 

This last principle, which we may call the axiom cf con" 
atant restdtf holds good throughout all our mental opera- 
tions, not only when we compare, but when we add, dividei 
class, or infer a given matter in any conceivable way. 
Its most general expression would be " the Same operated 
on in the same way gives the Same.'' In mathematics it 
takes the form of " equals added to, or subtracted from, 
equals give equals," and the like. We shall meet with it 
again. 

The next thing which we observe is that the operation 
of comparing mxiy he repeated on its oumresvUa; in other 
words, that we can think of the various resemblances and 
differences which we find and compare them with each 
other, making differences and resemblances of a higher 
order. The mind thus becomes aware of sets of similar differ^ 
enceSj and forms series of terms with the same hind and amount 
of difference between them, terms which, as they succeed each 
other, maintain a constant direction of serial increase. This 
sense of constant direction in a series of operations we saw 
in Chapter XIII (p. 490) to be a cardinal mental fact 
"A differs from B differs from C differs from D, etc.,'* 
makes a series only when the differences are in the same 
direction. In any such difference-series all terms differ 
in just the same way from their predecessors. The num- 
bers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . . the notes of the chromatic scale in 
music, are familiar examples. As soon as the mind grasps 
such a series as a whole, it perceives that ttvo terms taken 
far apart differ more than ttvo terms taken near together, 
and that any one term differs more from a remote than 
from a near successor, and this no matter what the terms 
may be, or what the sort of difference may be, provided it 
is always the same sort. 

This PRINCIPLE OP MEDIATE COMPARISON might be briefly 
(though obscurely) expressed by the formula " more than 
the more is more than the less " — the words more and less 
standing simply for degrees of increase along a constant 
direction of differences. Such a formula would cover all 
possible cases, as, earlier than early is earlier than late, 






646 P8TCH0L0QT 

worse than bad is worse than good, east of east is east of 
west ; etc., etc., ad libitum* Symbolically, we might write 
itasa<6<c<d.... and say that any number of 
intermediaries may be expunged without obliging us to 
alter anything in what remains written. 

The principle of mediate comparison is only one form 
of a law which holds in many series of homogeneously 
related terms, the law that skipping intermediary terms 
leaves relations the same. This axiom of skipped intebmedi- 
ARIES or of transferred relations occurs, as we soon shall 
see, in logic as the fundamental principle of inference, in 
arithmetic as the fundamental property of the number- 
series, in geometry as that of the straight line, the plane 
and the parallel. It seems to be on the whole the broadest and 
deepest law of main's thought. 

In certain lists of terms the result of comparison may 
be to find no-diflference, or equality in place of difference. 
Here also intermediaries may be skipped, and mediate com- 
parison be carried on with the general result expressed by 
the axiom of mediate equality, " equals of equals are equal," 
which is the great principle of the mathematical sciences. 
This too as a result of the mind's mere acuteness, and in 
utter independence of the order in which experiences come 
associated together. Symbolically, again : a = b =c = d , . , 
with the same consequence as regards expunging terms 
which we saw before. 

OLASSIFICATOBY SEBIES. 

Thus we have a rather intricate system of necessary and 
immutable ideal truths of comparison, a system applicable to 
terms experienced in any order of sequence or frequency, or 
even to terms never experienced or to be experienced, such 
as the mind's imaginary constructions would be. These 
truths of comparison result in Classijications, It is, for some 
unknown reason, a great aesthetic delight for the mind to 
break the order of experience, and class its materials in serial 
orders, proceeding from step to step of difference, and to 
contemplate untiringly the crossings and inosculations of the 

•Of. Bradley, Logic, p. 226. 



NBCBSSART TRUTH&-EFFECT8 OF EXPERIENCE, 647 

series among themselves. The first steps in most of the 
sciences are purely classificatory. Where facts fall easily 
into rich and intricate series (as plants and animals and 
chemical compounds do), the mere sight of the series fills 
the mind with a satisfaction sui generis ; and a world whose 
real materials naturally lend themselves to serial classifi- 
cation is pro tanto a more rational world, a world with 
which the mind will feel more intimate, than with a world 
in which they do not By the pre-evolutionary naturalists, 
whose generation has hardly passed away, classifications 
were supposed to be ultimate insights into God's mind, 
filling us with adoration of his ways. The fact that 
Nature lets us make them was a proof of the presence of 
his Thought in her bosom. So far as the facts of expe- 
rience can not be serially classified, therefore, so far ex- 
perience fails to be rational in one of the ways, at least, 
which we crave. 

/ 

THE I1OGIO-8EBIE8. 

Closely akin to the function of comparison is that of 
judging, predicating, or subsuming. In fact, these elemen- 
tary intellectual functions run into each other so, that it 
is often only a question of practical convenience whether 
we shall call a given mental operation by the name of 
one or of the other. Comparisons result in groups 
of like things ; and presently (through discrimination and 
abstraction) in conceptions of the respects in which the 
likenesses obtain. The groups are genera or classes, the 
respects are characters or attributes. The attributes again 
may be compared, forming genera of higher orders, and 
their characters singled out ; so that we have a new sort 
of series, that of predication, or of kind including kind. Thus 
horses are quadrupeds, quadrupeds animals, animals 
machines, machines liable to wear out, etc. In such a 
series as this the several couplings of terms may have 
been made out originally at widely diflferent times and 
under diflferent circumstances. But memory may bring 
them together afterwards ; and whenever it does so, our 
faculty of apprehending serial increase makes us conscious 



648 PSYCHOLOOT. 

of them as a single system of successive terms united by 
the same relation.* 

Now whenever we become thus conscious, we may be- 
come aware of an additional relation which is of the highest 
intellectual importance, inasmuch as upon it the whole 
structure of logic is reared. The principle of mediate predi- 
cation or svbsumption is only the axiom of skipped inter- 
mediaries applied to a series of successive predications. It 
expresses the fact that any earlier term in the series stands 
to any later term in the same relation in which it stands 
to any intermediate term ; in other words, that whatever 
has an attribute has aU theattrihtttes of thai attribute ; or more 
briefly still, that tahatever is of a kind is of that kind's kind. 
A little explanation of this statement will bring out all 
that it involves. 

We learned in the chapter on Eeasoning what our 
great motive is for abstracting attributes and predicating 
them. It is that our varying practical purposes require 
us to lay hold of diflferent angles of the reality at different 
times. But for these we should be satisfied to * see it 
whole,' and always alike. The purpose, however, makes 
one aspect essential ; so, to avoid dispersion of the atten- 
tion, we treat the reality as if for the time being it were 
nothing but that aspect, and we let its supernumerary de- 
terminations go. In short, we substitute the aspect for 
the whole real thing. For our purpose the aspect can be 
substituted for the whole, and the two treated as the same ; 
and the word is (which couples the whole with its aspect 
or attribute in the categoric judgment) expresses (among 
other things) the identifying operation performed. The 
predication-series a is 6, 6 is c, c is d, ... . closely resembles 
for certain practical purposes the equation-series a = 6, 
fc ^ c, c = rf, etc. 

But what is our purpose in predicating ? Ultimately, 
it may be anything we please ; but proximately and im- 
mediately, it is always the gratification of a certain curi- 

* This appreliensioQ oflhem as formiDg a single system is what Mr. 
Braaley means by the act of construction which underlies all reasoning. 
The awareness, which then supervenes, of the addiliooal relation of which 
1 speak in the next paragraph of my text, is what this author calls tha 
act of i/ifpection. Cf. Principlvs of Logic, hk. ii. pt. i. chap. in. 



NECESSARY TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 649 

osity as to whether the object in hand is or is not of a kind 
connected with that ultimate purpose. Usually the con- 
nection is not obvious, and we only find that the object S 
is of a kind connected with P, after first finding that it is 
of a kind M, which itself is connected with P. Thus, to 
fix our ideas by an example, we have a curiosity (our ulti- 
mate purpose being conquest over nature) as to how Sirius 
may move. It is not obvious whether Sirius is a kind of 
thing which moves in the line of sight or not. When, 
however, we find it to be a kind of thing in whose spectrum 
the hydrogen-line is shifted, and when we reflect that that 
kind of thing is a kind of thing which moves in the line 
of sight ; we conclude that Sirius does so move. Whatever 
Sirius's attribute is, Sirius is ; its adjective's adjective can 
supersede its own adjective in our thinking, and this with 
no loss to our knowledge, so long as ive stick to the definite 
purpose in view. 

Now please note that this elimination of intermediary 
kinds and transfer of is's along the line, results from our 
insight into the very meaning of the word is, and into the 
constitution of any series of terms connected by that rela- 
tion. It has naught to do with what any particular thing is 
or is not ; but, whatever any given thing may be, we see 
that it also is whatever that is, indefinitely. To grasp in 
one view a succession of is's is to apprehend this relation 
between the terms which they connect ; just as to grasp a 
list of successive equals is to apprehend their mutual equal- 
ity throughoui The principle of mediate subsumption 
thus expresses relations of ideal objects as such. It can be 
■discovered by a mind left at leisure with any set of mean- 
ings (however originally obtained), of which some are pred- 
icable of others. The moment we string them in a serial 
line, that moment we see that we can drop intermediaries, 
treat remote terms just like near ones, and put a genus in 
the place of a species. This shows that the principle of 
mediate subsumption has nothing to do toith the particular 
order of our experiences, or unth tlie ouier coexistences and 
sequences of terms. Were it a mere outgrowth of habit 
and association, we should be forced to regard it as having 
no universal validity ; for every hour ot the day we meet 



650 P8TCH0L0QY. 

things which we consider to be of this kind or of that, but 
later learn that they have none of the kind's properties, that 
they do not belong to the kind's kind. Instead, however, of 
correcting the principle by these cases, we correct the cases 
by the principle. We say that if the thing we named an M 
has not M's properties, then we were either mistaken in call- 
ing it an M, or mistaken about M's properties ; or else that it 
is no longer M, but has changed. But we never say that it 
is an M without M's properties ; for bj' conceiving a thing as 
of the kind M I'mean that it shaU have M's properties, be of 
M's kind, even though I should never be able to find in the 
real world anything which is an M. The principle emanates 
from my perception of what a lot of successive is's mean. 
This perception can no more be confirmed by one set, or 
weakened by another set, of outer facts, than the perception 
that black is not white can be confirmed by the fact thai 
snow never blacke;ns, or weakened by the fact that photog- 
rapher's paper blackens as soon as you lay it in the sun. 

The abstract scheme of successive predications, extended 
indefinitely, with all the possibilities of substitution which 
it involves, is thus an immutable system of truth which 
flows from the very structure and form of our thinking. 
If any real terms ever do fit into such a scheme, they 
will obey its laws ; tvhether they do is a question as to 
nature's facts, the answer to which can only be empiri- 
cally ascertained. Formal logic is the name of the Science 
which traces in skeleton form all the remote relations 
of terms connected by successive t^'s with each other, 
and enumerates their ])ossibilities of mutual substitution. 
To our principle of mediate subsumptiou sli^ has given 
various formulations, of which the best is perhaps tliis 
broad expression, that the same can be suhstituted for the same 
in any mental operation,''^ 

The ordinary logical series contains but three terms 



* Realities fall uuder this only so far as they prove to fte- the sauic. So 
far as they cannot be substituted for each other, for the puri>ose hi hand, 
80 far they are not the sjinie ; though for other purjwses and in other 
respects they might be substituted, and then be treated as the same. Apart 
from purpose, of course, no realities ever are absolutely and exactly Ui« 
same. 



NECEaSART TRUTHS-EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 851 

— "Socrates, man, mortal." But we also have ' Sorites ' 
— Sociates, man, animal, machine, run down, mortal, etc. — 
and it violates psychology to represent these as syllogisms 
with terms suppressed. The ground of there being any 
logic at all is our power to grasp any series as a whole, 
and the more terms it holds the better. This synthetic 
consciousness of an uniform direction of advance through 
a multiplicity of terms is, apparently, what the brutes and 
lower men cannot accomplish, and what gives to us our 
extraordinary power of ratiocinative thought. The mind 
which can grasp a string of w's as a whole — the objects 
linked by them may be ideal or real, physical, mental, or 
symbolic, indifferently — can also apply to it the principle 
of skipped intermediaries. The logic-list is thus in its origin 
and essential nature just like those graded dassificatory lists 
which toe erewhile described. The * rational proposition' which 
lies at the basis of all reasoning, the dictum de omni et nullo 
in all the various forms in which it may be expressed, 
the fundamental law of thought, is thus only the result o/ 
the/unction of comparison in a mind which has come by 
some lucky variation to apprehend a series of more than 
two terms at once.* So far, then, both Systematic Classifi- 
cation and Logic are seen to be incidental results of the mere 
capacity for discerning difference and likeness, which capacity 
is a thing with which the order of experience, properly so 
styled, has absolutely nothing to do. 

But how comes it (it may next be asked) when sys- 
tematic classifications have so little ultimate theoretic im- 
portance — for the conceiving of things according to their 
mere degrees of resemblance always yields to other modes 
of conceiving when these can be obtained — that the logical 
relations among things should form such a mighty engine 
for dealing with the facts of life ? 

Chapter XXII already gave the reason (see p. 335, 
above). This world might be a world in which all things 
differed, and in which what properties there were were 



♦ A mind, in other words, which has got beyond the merely dtc?wtomie 
style of thought which Wundl alleges to be the essential form of human 
thinking (Pliysiol. Psych., ii. 312). 



652 PSrCHOLOOT. 

ultimate and had no farther predicates. In such a world 
there would be as many kinds as there were separate things. 
We could never subsume a new thing under an old kind ; 
or if we could, no consequences would follow. Or, again, 
this might be a world in which innumerable things were 
of a kind, but in which no concrete thing remained of the 
same kind long, but all objects were in a flux. Here again, 
though we could subsume and infer, our logic would be of 
no practical use to us, for the subjects of our propositions 
would have changed whilst we were talking. In such worlds, 
logical relations would obtain, and be known (doubtless) as 
they are now, but they would form a merely theoretic 
scheme and be of no use for the conduct of life. But our 
world is no such world. It is a very peculiar world, and 
plays right into logic's hands. Some of the things, at least, 
which it contains are of the same kind as other things ; some 
of them remain always of the kind of which they once were ; 
and some of the properties of them cohere indissolubly and 
are always found together. Wliicli things these latter things 
are we learn by experience in the strict sense of the word, 
and the results of the experience are embodied in 'empirical 
propositions.' Whenever such a thing is met with by us 
now, our sagacity notes it to be of a certain kind ; our 
learning immediately recalls that kind's kind, and then that 
kind's kind, and so on ; so that a moment's thinking may 
make us aware that the thing is of a kind so remote that 
we could never have directly perceived the connection. 
The flight to this last kind over the heads of the interjuedia- 
riesis the essential feature of the intellectual operation here. 
Evidently it is a pure outcome of our sense for apprehend- 
ing serial increase ; and, unlike the several propositions 
themselves which make up the series (and which may all 
be empirical), it has nothing to do with the time- and space- 
order in which the things have been experienced. 

MATHEMATICAL RELATIONS. 

80 much for the a priori necessities called systematic 
classification and logical inference. The other couplings 
of data which pass for a priori necessities of thought are 
the mathematical judgments, and certain metaphysical prop- 



NBCB88ARY TRUTH8^BFFBCT8 OF EXPERIENCE, 653 

ositions. These latter we shall consider farther on. As 
regards the mathematical judgments, they are all ' rational 
propositions ' in the sense defined on p. 644, for they express 
results of comparison and nothing more. The mathemati- 
cal sciences deal with similarities and equalities exclusively, 
and not with coexistences and sequences. Hence they have, 
in the first instance, no connection with the order of ex- 
perience. The comparisons of mathematics are between 
numbers and extensive magnitudes, giving rise to arith- 
metic and geometry respectively. 

Number seems to signify primarily the strokes of our 
attention in discriminating things. These strokes remain 
in the memory in groups, large or small, and the groups can 
be compared. The discrimination is, as we know, psycho- 
logically facilitated by the mobility of the thing as a total 
(p. 173). But within each thing we discriminate parts ; so 
that the number of things which any one given phenome- 
non may be depends in the last instance on our way of 
taking it. A globe is one, if undivided ; two, if composed 
of hemispheres. A sand-heap is one thing, or twenty 
thousand things, as we may choose to count it. We amuse 
ourselves by the counting of mere strokes, to form rhythms, 
and these we compare and name. Little by little in our 
minds the number-series is formed. This, like all lists of 
terms in which there is a direction of serial increase, car- 
ries with it the sense of those mediate relations between its 
terms which we expressed by the axiom " the more than the 
more is more than the less." That axiom seems, in fact, 
only a way of stating that the terms do form an increasing 
series. But, in addition to this, we are aware of certain 
other relations among our strokes of counting. We may 
interrupt them where we like, and go on again. All the 
while we feel that the interruption does not alter the strokes 
themselves. We may count 12 straight through ; or count 
7 and pause, and then count 5, but still the strokes will be 
the same. We thus distinguish between our acts of count- 
ing and those of interrupting or grouping, as between an 
unchanged matter and an operation of mere shuffling per- 
formed on it The matter is the original units or strokes; 



864 P8YCH0L00T. 

which all modes of grouping or combining simply give 
us back unchanged. In short, combinations of numbers 
are combinations of their, units, which is the fundamental 
axiom of arithmetic,* leading to such consequences as that 
7 + 5 = 8 + 4 because both = 12. The general axiom of 
mediate equality, that equals of equals are equal, comes in 
here.t The principle of constancy in our meanings, when 
applied to strokes of counting, also gives rise to the axiom 
that the same number, operated on (interrupted, grouped) 
in the same way will always give the same result or be the 
same. How shouldn't it ? Nothing is supposed changed. 
Arithmetic and its fundamental principles are thus tV 
dependent of our eocperiences or of the order of the world. 
The matter of arithmetic is mental matter; its principles flow 
from the fact that the matter forms a series, which can be cut 
into by us wherever we like without the matter changing. 
The empiricist school has strangely tried to interpret the 
truths of number as results of coexistences among out- 
ward things. John Mill calls number a ph^^sical property 
of things. * One,' according to Mill, means one sort of 
passive sensation which we receive, * two ' another, * three ' 
a third. The same things, however, can give us diflfereut 
number-sensations. Three things arranged thus, ^ ^ ^ , for 
example, impress us diflferently from three things arranged 
thus, °o°. But experience tells us that every real object-group 
which can be arranged in one of these ways can always be 
arranged in the other also, and that 2 + 1 and 3 are thus 
modes of numbering things which * coexist ' invariably vdi\\ 
each other. The indefeasibility of our belief in their * co- 
existence ' (which is Mill's word for their equivalence) is 
due solely to the enormous amouut of experience we have 
of it. For all things, whatever other sensations they may 
give us, give us at any rate number-sensations. Those 
number-sensations which the same thing may be suc- 
cessively made to arouse are the numbers which we deem 

* Said to be expressed by Grassman in the fuudamental Axiom of 
Arithmetic {a-\-h) -\-\ -^ a -\-{h^\). 

f Compare Helmholtz's more technically expressed Essay 'ZfthleD u. 
Messeu,' in the Philosophische Aufsiltze, Ed. Zeller gewidmet (Leipzig, 
1887). p. 17. 



NECBSSARY TRUTU8—BFFBCT8 OF EXPERIENCE. 665 

equal to each other ; those which the same thing refuses to 
arouse are those which we deem unequal. 

This is as clear a restatement as I can make of Mill's 
doctrine.* And its failure is written upon its front. Woe to 
arithmetic, were such the only grounds for its validity! 
The same real things are countable in numberless ways, 
and pass from one numerical form, not only to its equiva- 
lent (as Mill implies), but to its other, as the sport of 
physical accidents or of our mode of attending may de- 
cide. How could our notion that one and one are eternally 
and necessarily two ever maintain itself in a world where 
every time we add one drop of water to another we get not 
two but one again ? in a world where every time we add a 
drop to a crumb of quicklime we get a dozen or more ? — 
had it no better warrant than such experiences ? At most 
we could then say that one and one are vsvaUy two. 
Our arithmetical propositions would never have the con- 
fident tone which they now possess. That confident 
tone is due to the fact that they deal with abstract and ideal 
numbers exclusively. What tve mean by one plus one 
is two ; we make two out of it ; and it would mean two 
. still even in a world where physically (according to a 
conceit of Mill's) a third thing was engendered every time 
one thing came together with another. We are mas- 
ters of our meanings, and discriminate between the things 
we mean and our ways of taking them, between our strokes 
of numeration themselves, and our bundlings and separat- 
ings thereof. 

Mill ought not only to have said, " All things are num- 
bered." He ought, in order to prove his point, to have 
shown that they are unequivocally numbered, which they no- 
toriously are not Only the abstract numbers themselves are 
unequivocal, only those which we create mentally and hold 
fast to as ideal objects alwa^^s the same. A concrete natural 
thing can always be numbered in a great variety of ways. 
" We need only conceive a thing divided into four equal 
parts (and all thiugs may be conceived as so divided)," as 



* For the original statements, cf . J. S. Mill's Logic, bk. ii. chap, vl 
§§2, 3; and bk. iii. chap. xxiv. §5. 



656 P87GH0L0QY. 

Mill is himself compelled to say, to find the number four 
in it, and so on. 

The relation of numbers to experience is just like that 
of ' kinds' in logic. So long as an experience will keep its 
kind we can handle it bj logic. So long as it will keep ita 
number we can deal with it by arithmetic. SensiMy, how- 
ever, things are constantly changing their numbers, just as 
they are changing their kinds. They are forever breaking 
apart and fusing. Compounds and their elements are never 
numerically identical, for the elements are sensibly many 
and the compounds sensibly one. Unless our arithmetic 
is to remain without application to life, we must somehow 
make more numerical continuity than we spontaneously find. 
Accordingly Lavoisier discovers his weight-units which re- 
main the same in compounds and elements, though volume- 
units and quality-units all have changed. A great discovery ! 
And modern science outdoes it by denying that compounds 
exist at all. There is no such thing as * water ' for 
'science ;' that is only a handy name for H, and O when 
they have got into the position H-O-H, and then affect 
our senses in a novel way. The modern theories of atoms, 
of heat, and of gases are, in fact, only intensely artificial 
devices for gaining that constancy in the numbers of 
things which sensible experience will not show. " Sensible 
things are not the things for me," says Science, " because 
in their changes they will not keep their numbers the same. 
Sensible qualities are not the qualities for me, because they 
can with difficulty be numbered at all. These hypothetic 
atoms, however, are the things, these hypothetic masses 
and velocities are the qualities for me ; they will stay num- 
bered all the time.'' 

By such elaborate inventions, and at such a cost to the 
imagination, do men succeed in making for themselves a 
world in which real things shall be coerced per fas aut 
nefas under arithmetical law. 

The other branch of mathematics is geometry. Its ob- 
jects are also ideal creations. Whether nature contain 
circles or not, I can know what I mean by a circle and 
can stick to my meaning ; and when I mean two circles I 



NECEaSART TRUTHa^EFFBCTS OF EXPERIENCE. 657 

mean two things of an identical kind. The axiom of con- 
stant resolts (see above, p. 645) holds in geometry. The 
same forms, treated in the same way (added, subtracted, 
or compared), give the same results — how shouldn't they ? 
The axioms of mediate comparison (p. 645), of logic (p. 648), 
and of number (p. 664) all apply to the forms which we 
imagine in space, inasmuch as these resemble or differ 
from each other, form kinds, and are numerable things. 
But in addition to these general principles, which are true 
of space-forms only as they are of other mental conceptions, 
there are certain axioms relative to space-forms exclusively, 
which we must briefly consider. 

Three of them give marks of identity among straight 
lines, planes, and parallels. Straight lines which have two 
points, planes which have three points, parallels to a given 
line which have one point, in common, coalesce throughout 
Some say that the certainty of our belief in these axioms 
is due to repeated experiences of their truth ; others that 
it is due to an intuitive acquaintance with the properties 
of space. It is neither. We experience lines enough which 
pass through two points onl}' to separate again, only we 
won't call them straight. Similarly of planes and parallels. 
We have a definite idea of what we mean by each of these 
words ; and when something different is offered us, we see 
the difference. Straight lines, planes, and parallels, as they 
figure in geometry, are mere inventions of our faculty for 
apprehending serial increase. The farther continuations 
of these forms, we say, ahoR bear the same relation to their 
last visible parts which these did to still earlier parts. It 
thus follows (from that axiom of skipped intermediaries 
which obtains in all regular series) that parts of these 
figures separated by other parts must agree in direction, 
just as contiguous parts do. This uniformity of direction 
throughout is, in fact, all that makes us care for these 
forms, gives them their beauty, and stamps them into fixed 
conceptions in our mind. But obviously if two lines, or 
two planes, with a common segment, were to part company 
beyond the segment, it could only be because the direction 
of at least one of them had changed. Parting company in 
lines and planes means changing direction, means assuming 



658 P8YCH0L0QT, 

a new relation to the parts that pre-exist ; and assunung a 
new relation means ceasing to be straight or plane. If we 
mean by a parallel a line that will never meet a second 
line ; and if we have one such line drawn through a point, 
any new line drawn through that point which does not 
coalesce with the first must be inclined to it, and if inclined 
to it must approach the second, i.e., cease to be parallel 
with it. No properties of outlying space need come in 
here : only a definite conception of uniform direction, and 
constancy in sticking to one's point. 

The other two axioms peculiar to geometry are that 
figures can be moved in space without change, and that no 
variation in the way of subdividing a given amount of space 
alters its total quantity.* This last axiom is similar to 
what we found to obtain in numbers. * The whole is equal 
to its parts ' is an abridged way of expressing it. A man is 
not the same biological whole if we cut him in two at the 
neck as if we divide him at the ankles ; but geometrically 
he is the same whole, no matter in which place we cut him. 
The axiom about figures being movable in space is rather 
a postulate than an axiom. So far as they are so movable, 
then certain fixed equalities and diflerences obtain between 
forms, 710 matter ivhere placed. But if translation through 
space warped or magnified forms, then the relations of 
equality, etc., would always have to be expressed with a 
position-qualification added. A geometry as absolutely 
certain as ours could be invented on the supposition of 
such a space, if the laws of its warping and deformation 
were fixed. It would, however, be much more complicated 
thau our geometry, which makes the simplest possible sup- 
})()sition; and finds, luckily enough, that it is a supposition 
with which the space of our experience seems to agree. 

By means of these principles, all playing into each 
other's hands, the mutual equivalences of an immense num- 
ber of forms can be traced, even of such as at first sight 
bear hardly any resemblance to each other. We move and 



* The subdivision itself consumes uoue of the space. In all practical 
experience oui subdivisions do consume space. They consume it in our 
geometrical figures. But for simplicity's sake, in geometry we postulate 
subdivisions which violate experience and consume uoue of ii. 



NECBSaABY TRUTHS^ EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE, 859 

turn them mentally, and find that parts of them will super- 
pose. We add imaginary lines which subdivide or enlarge 
them, and find that the new figures resemble each other in 
ways which show us that the old ones are equivalent too. 
We thus end by expressing all sorts of forms in terms of 
other forms, enlarging our knowledge of the kinds of things 
which certain other kinds of things are, or to which they 
are equivalent. 

The result is a new system of mental objects which can 
be treated as identical for certain purposes, a new series of 
18*8 almost indefinitely prolonged, just like the series of 
equivalencies among numbers, part of which the multipli- 
cation-table expresses. And all this is in the first instance 
regardless of the coexistences and sequences of nature, 
and regardless of whether the figures we speak of have ever 
been outwardly experienced or not 

OONSOIOUSXESS OF SEBIBS IS THE BASIS OF RATION A TiITY. 

Classification, logic, and mathematics all result, then, 
from the mere play of the mind comparing its conceptions, 
no matter whence the latter may have come. The essential 
condition for the formation of all these sciences is that we 
should have grown capable of apprehending series as such, 
and of distinguishing them as homogeneous or hetero- 
geneous, and as possessing definite directions of what I have 
called 'increase.' This consciousness of series is a human 
perfection which has been gradually evolved, and which 
varies greatly from man to mau. There is no accounting 
for it as a result of habitual associations among outward 
impressions, so we must simply ascribe it to the factors, 
whatever they be, of inward cerebral growth. Once this 
consciousness attained to, however, mediate thought be- 
comes possible ; with our very awareness of a series may 
go an awareness that dropping terms out of it will leave 
identical relations between the terms that remain ; and 
thus arises a perception of relations between things so 
naturally separate that we should otherwise never have 
compared them together at all. 

The axiom of skipped intermediaries applies, however, 
only t<o certain particular series, and among them to those 



660 PSTCHOLOOT, 

which we have considered, in which the recurring relation 
is either of difference, of likeness, of kind, of numerical ad- 
dition, or of prolongation in the same linear or plane direc- 
tion. It is therefore not a purely formal law of thinking, 
but flows from the nature of the matters thought about. It 
will not do to say universally that in all series of homo- 
geneously related terms the remote members are related to 
each other as the near ones are ; for that will oft^n be 
untrue. The series A is not B is not C is not D . . . does 
not permit the relation to be traced between remote terms. 
From two negations no inference can be drawn. Nor, to 
become more concrete, does the lover of a woman generally 
love her beloved, or the contradictor of a contradictor con- 
tradict whomever he contradicts. The slayer of a slayer 
does not slay the latter's victim ; the acquaintances or ene- 
mies of a man need not be each other's acquaintances or 
enemies ; nor are two things which are on top of a third 
thing necessarily on top of each other. 

All skipping of intermediaries and transfer of relations 
occurs within homogeneous series. But not all homoge- 
neous series allow of intermediaries being skipped and re- 
lations transferred. It depends on which series they are, 
on what relations they contain.* Let it not be said that it 
is a mere matter of verbal association, due to the fact that 
language sometimes permits us to transfer the name of a 
relation over skipped intermediaries, and sometimes does 
not ; as where we call men * progenitors ' of their remote as 
well as of their immediate posterity, but refuse to call them 
* fathers ' thereof. There are relations which are intrinsi- 
colly transferable, whilst others are not. The relation of 
condition, e.g., is intrinsically transferable. What conditions 
a condition conditions what it conditions — " cause of cause 
is cause of effect." The relations of negation and frtistration, 
on the other hand, are not transferable : what frustrates a 
frustration does not frustrate what it frustrates. No 
changes of terminology would annul the intimate difference 
between these two cases. 



* Cf . A. de Morgan : Syllabus of a proposed System of Logic (1860), pp. 
46-56. 



NECSaSABT TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 861 

Nothing but the clear sight of the ideas themselves 
shows whether the axiom of skipped intermediaries applies 
to them or not Their connections, immediate and remote, 
flow from their inward natures. We try to consider them 
in certain ways, to bring them into certain relations, and 
we find that sometimes we can and sometimes we cannot 
The question whether there are or are not inxvard and essential 
connections betioeen conceived objects as such, really is the same 
thing as the question whether toe can get any new perception 
from mentally coupling them together ^ or pass from one to 
another by a mental operation which gives a result. In the 
case of some ideas and operations we get a result ; but no 
result in the case of others. Where a result comes, it is 
due exclusively to the nature of the ideas and of the opera- 
tion. Take blueness and yellowness, for example. We can 
operate on them in some ways, but not in other ways. We 
can compare them ; but we cannot add one to or subtract 
it from the other. We can refer them to a common kind, 
color ; but we cannot make one a kind of the other, or infer 
one from the other. This has nothing to do with experience* 
For we can add blue pigment to yellow pigment, and sub-^ 
tract it again, and get a result both times. Only we know 
perfectly that this is no addition or subtraction of the blue 
and yellow qualities or natures themselves.* 

There is thus no denying the fact that the mind isfUed 
with necessary and eternal relations which it finds between cer- 
tain of its ideal conceptions, and which form a determinate 
system, independent of the order of frequency in which experience 
may have associated the conception's originals in time and space. 

Shall we continue to call these sciences * intuitive,' * in- 
nate,' or * a priori ' bodies of truth, or not ?t Personally 



* Cf. Locke's Essay, bk. it. chap, xvii § 6. 

t Some readers may expect me to plunge into the old debate as to 
whether the a priori truths are * analytic ' or * synthetic' It seems to me 
that the distinction is one of Kant's most unhappy legacies, for the reason 
that it is impossible to make it sharp. No one will say that such analytic 
judgments as '* equidistant lines can nowhere meet " are pure tautologies. 
The predicate is a somewhat new way of conceiving as well as of naming 
the subject. There is something ' ampliative * in our greatest truisms, our 
state of mind is richer after than before we have uttered them. This 



662 P8TCH0L007. 

J should like to do so. But I hesitate to use the teripa^ 
on account of the odium which controversial history ha8 
made the whole of their connotation for many worthy per- 
sons. The most politic way not to alienate these readers 
is to flourish the name of the immortal Locke. For in truth 
I have done nothing more in the previous pages than to 
make a little more explicit the teachings of Locke's fourth 
book : 

''The immutability of the same relations between the same im 
mutable things is now the idea that shows him that if the three angles of 
a triangle were once equal to two right angles, they will always be 
equal to two right ones. And hence he comes to be certain that what 
was once true in the case is always true ; what ideas once agreed will 
always agree . . . Upon this ground it is that particular demonstrations 
in mathematics afford general knowledge. If, then, the perception 
that the same ideas will eternally have the same habitudes and relations 
be not a sufficient ground of knowledge, there could be no knowledge 
of general propositions in mathematics. . . . AH general knowledge 
lies only in our own thoughts, and consists barely in the contemplation of 
our abstract ideas. Wherever we perceive any agreement or disagree- 
ment amongst them, there we have general knowledge ; and by putting 
the names of those ideas together accordingly in propositions, can with 
certainty pronounce general truths. . . . What is once known of such 
ideas will be perpetually and forever true. So that, as to all general 
knowledge, we must search and find it only in our own minds and it is 
only the examining of our own ideas that fumisheth us with that. 
Truths belonging to essences of things (that is, to abstract ideas) art 

being the case, the question "at what point does the new state of mind 
cea&c io he implicit in the o\(}?'' is too vague to be answered. The only 
sharp way of detiniug synthetic propositions would be to say that they ex- 
press a relation between two data at least. But it is hard to tind any prop- 
osition which cannot be construed as doing this. Even verbal definitions 
do it. Such painstaking attempts as that latest one by Mr. I). G. Thomp- 
son to prove all necessary judgments to be analytic (System of Psvcliology. 
II. pp.232 IT.) seem accordingly but nugit difficiks , and little better than 
wastes of ink and paper. All philosophic interest vanishes from the 
question, the moment one ceases to ascribe to any a priori truths 
(whether analytic or synthetic) that *' legislative character for all possible 
experience " w liich Kant believed in. We ourselves have denied such 
hirislaiivc character, »u)d contended that it was for experience itself to 
prove wIkMIut its data can or cannot be assimilated to those ideal terms 
between which n //r^rw/ relations obtain. The analytic-synthetic debate is 
tins for us di'void of all sigiiiticance. On the whole, the best recent treat- 
ment of the (juestion known to nie is in one of A. Spir's works, his Denkeu 
und Wirklichkeil, I WuuW, Wl I ciiunoi now liudthe page. 



NB0B88AR7 TRUTHS- EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 663 

aiernal, and are to be found out only by the contemplation of those 
essences. . . . Knowledge is the consequence of the ideas (be they what 
they will) that are in our minds, producing there certain general proposi- 
tions. . . . Such propositions are therefore called * eternal truths,' . . . 
because, being once made about abstract ideas so as to be true, they 
will, whenever they can be supposed to be made again, at any time past 
or to come, by a mind having those ideas, always actually be true. For 
names being supposed to stand perpetually for the same ideas, and the 
same ideas having immutably the same habitudes one to another, prop- 
ositions concerning any abstract ideas that are once true must needs 
be eternal verities." 

But what are these eternal verities, these * agreements,' 
which the mind discovers by barely considering its own 
fixed meanings, except what I have said ? — relations of like- 
ness and difference, immediate or mediate, between the 
terms of certain series. Classification is serial comparison, 
logic mediate subsumption, arithmetic mediate equality of 
different bundles of attention- strokes, geometry mediate 
equality of different ways of carving space. None of these 
eternal verities has anything to say about facts, about what 
is or is not in the world. Logic does not saj^ whether Soc- 
rates, men, mortals or immortals exist; arithmetic does 
not tell us where her 7's, S's, and 12's are to be found; ge- 
ometry affirms not that circles and rectangles are real. All 
that these sciences make us sure of is, that if these things 
are anywhere to be found, the eternal verities will obtain 
of them. Locke accordingly never tires of telling us that the 

** universal propositions of whose truth or falsehood we can have cer- 
tain knowledge, concern not existence. . . . These universal and self- 
evident principles, being only our constant, clear, and distinct knowl- 
edge of our own ideas more g(»neral or comprehensive, can assure us of 
nothing that passes without the mind; their certainty is founded only 
upon the knowledge of each idea by itself, and of its distinction from 
others ; about which we cannot l)e mistaken whilst they are in our 
minds. . . . The maihematician considers the truth and properties 
belonging to a rectangle or circle only as they are in idea in his own 
mind'. For it is possible he never found either of them existing mathe- 
matically, i.e., precis(}ly true, in his life. But yet the knowledge he 
has of any truths or properties belonging to a circle, or any other math- 
ematical figure, are nevertheless true and certain even of real things 
existing; because real things are no farther concerned nor intended to 
be meant by any such propositions, than as things really agree to those 
archetypes in his mind. Is it true of the idea of a triangle, that its 



664 PSYCHOLOGY. 

three angles are equal to two right ones ? It is true also of a triangto 
wherever it really exists. Whatever other figure exists that is not ex- 
actly auswerable to that idea in his mind is not at all concerned in that 
proposition. And therefore he is certain all his knowledge concerning 
such ideas is real knowledge: because, intending things no farther than 
they agree with those his ideas, he is sure what he knows concerning 
those figures when they have barely an ideal existence in his mind will 
hold true of them also when they have a real existence in matter." But 
*'that any or what bodies do exist, that we are left to our senses to 
discover to us as far as they can." * 

Locke accordingly distinguishes between * mental truth ' 
and 'real truth.' t The former is intuitively certain ; the 
latter dependent on experience. Only hypotheticaUy can we 
affirm intuitive truths of real things — by supposing, namely, 
that real things exist which correspond exactly with the 
ideal subjects of the intuitive propositions. 

If our senses corroborate the supposition all goes well 
But note the strange descent in Locke's hands of the dig- 
nity of a priori propositions. By the ancients they were 
considered, without farther question, to reveal the constitu- 
tion of Reality. Archetypal things existed, it was assumed, 
in the relations in which we had to think them. The mind's 
necessities were a warrant for those of Being ; and it was not 
till Descartes' time that scepticism had so advanced (in * dog- 
matic ' circles) that the warrant must itself be warranted, 
and the veracity of the Deity invoked as a reason for hold- 
ing fast to our natural belieis. 

But the intuitive propositions of Locke leave us as re- 
gards outer reality none tlie better for their possession. 
We still have to "go to our senses" to find what the 
reality is. The vindication of the intuitionist position 
is thus a barren victory. The eternal verities which 
the very structure of our mind lays hold of do not neces- 
sarily themselves lay hold ou extra-mental being, nor have 
they, as Kant pretended later,:^ a legislating character even 

* Book IV. chaps, ix. § 1; vii. 14. 

t C'hap. v. ^§ 0, 8. 

i Kant, by ilie way, made a strange tactical blunder in his way of 
showing that the forms of our necessary thought are underived from ex- 
perience. He insisted ou tliou^rlit-forms with which experience largely 
agrees, forgetting that the only forms which could not by any possibility 



NECESSARY TRUTHS- EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 666 

for all possible experience. They are primarily interesting 
only as subjective facts. They stand waiting in the mind, 
forming a beautiful ideal network ; and the most we can 
say is that we hope to discover outer realities over which the 
network may be flung so that ideal and real may coincide. 

And this brings us back to * science * from which we di- 
verted our attention so long ago (see p. 640). Science thinkd 
that she has discovered the outer realities in question. 
Atoms and ether, with no properties but masses and veloc- 
ities expressible by numbers, and paths expressible by an- 
alytic formulas, these at last are things over which the 
mathematico-logical network may be flung, and by suppos- 
ing which instead of sensible phenomena science becomes 
yearly more able to manufacture for herself a world about 
which rational propositions may be framed. Sensible phe- 
nomena are pure delusions for the mechanical philosophy. 
The * things ' and qualities we instinctively believe in do 
not exist. The only realities are swarming solids in ever- 
lasting motion, undulatorj' or continued, whose expression- 
less and meaningless changes of position form the history 
of the world, and are deducible from initial collocations 
and habits of movement hypothetically assumed. Thous- 
ands of years ago men started to cast the chaos of nature's 
sequences and juxtapositions into a form that might seem 
intelligible. Many were their ideal prototypes of rational 
order : teleological and sesthetic ties between things, causal 
and substantial bonds, as well as logical and mathematical 
relations. The most promising of these ideal systems at first 
were of course the richer ones, the sentimental ones. The 
baldest and least promising were the mathematical ones; but 
the history of the latter's application is a history of steadily 
advancing successes, whilst that of the sentimentally richer 



be the results of experience would be such as experience violated. The 
first thing a Kantian ought to do is to discover forms of judgment to which 
no order in ' things ' runs pamllel. These would indeed be features native 
to the mind. 1 owe this remark to Hen* A. Spir, in whose 'Denken und 
Wirklichkeit ' it is somewhere contained. 1 have myself already to some 
extent proceeded, and in the pages which follow shall proceed still farther, 
to show the originality of the mind's structure in this way. 



66t5 P8TCH0L0OT. 

systems is one of relative sterility and failure.* Take those 
aspects of phenomena which interest you as a human being 
most, and class the phenomena as perfect and imperfect, as 
ends and means to ends, as high and low, beautiful and ugly, 
positive and negative, harmonious and discordant, fit and 
unfit, natural and unnatural, etc., and barren are all yoiu 
results. In the ideal world the kind * precious ' has char- 
acteristic properties. What is precious should be pre- 
served ; unworthy things should be sacrificed for its sake ; 
exceptions made on its account ; its preciousness is a rea- 
son for other things' actions, and the like. But none of 
these things need happen to your * precious ' object in the 
real world. Call the things of nature as much as you like 
by sentimental, moral, and (esthetic names, no natural 
consequences follow from the naming. They may be of 
the kinds you allege, but they are not oi* the kifid's kind'- 
and the last great system-maker of this sort, Hegel, was 
obliged explicitly to repudiate logic in order to make any 
inferences at all from the names he called things by. 

But when you give things mathematical and mechanical 
names and call them just so many solids in just such posi- 
tions, describing just such paths with just such velocities, 
all is changed. Your sagacity finds its reward in the veri- 
fication by nature of all the deductions which you may next 
proceed to make. Your * things ' realize all the consequences 
of the names by which you classed them. The modern 
mechanico-pliysical philosophy of which we are all so 
proud, because it includes the nebular cosmogony, the 
conservation of energy, the kinetic theory of heat and 

* Yet even so hite as Berkeley's lime one could write : *' As in reading 
other books a wise man will choose to lix his thoughts on the sense nnd 
apply it to use, rather than lay them out in grammatical remarks on the 
language : so in perusing the volume of nature methinks it is beneath the 
dignity of the mind to affect an exactness in reducing each particular phe- 
nomenon to general rules, or showing how it follows from them. We 
should propose to ourselves nobler views, namely, to recreate and exalt the 
mind with a pros]>cct of the beauty, order, extent, and variety of natural 
things: hence, by proper inferences, to enlarge our notions of the grau- 
deur, wisdom, and beneticence of the Creator," etc., etc.. etc. (Principles 
of Human Knowledge, g 109.) 



NECE88AR7 TRUTHS-EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE, 667 

gases, etc., etc., begins by saying that the ordy facts are 
collocations and motions of primordial solids, and the only 
laws the changes of motion which changes in collocation 
bring. The ideal which this philosophy strives after is a 
mathematical world-formula, by which, if all the colloca- 
tions and motions at a given moment were known, it would 
be possible to reckon those of any wished-for future mo- 
ment, by simply considering the necessary geometrical, 
arithmetical, ana logical implications. Once we have the 
world in this bare shape, we can fling our net of a priori 
relations over all its terms, and pass from one of its phases 
to another by inward thought-necessity. Of course it is a 
world with a very minimum of rational stuff. The senti- 
mental facts and relations are butchered at a blow. But 
the rationality yielded is so superbly complete inform that 
to many minds this atones for the loss, and reconciles the 
thinker to the notion of a purposeless universe, in which 
all the things and qualities men love, duloisaima mundi 
nomina^ are but illusioDS of our fancy attached to accidental 
clouds of dust which will be dissipated by the eternal 
cosmic weather as carelessly as they were formed. 

The popular notion that * Science ' is forced ou the mind 
ab extra, and that our interests have uotliiug to do with its 
constructions, is utterly absurd. The craving to believe 
that the things of the world belong to kinds which are rela- 
ted by inward rationality together, is the parent of Science 
as well as of sentimental philosophy ; and the original in- 
vestigator always preserves a healthy sense of how plastic 
the materials are in his hands. 

'*Once for all," says Helmholtz in beginning that little work of his 
which laid the foundations of the 'conservation of energy,' 'Mt is the 
task of the physical sciences to seek for laws by which particular pro- 
cesses in nature may bo referretl to general rules, and deduced front 
such again. Such rules (for example the laws of reflection or refrac- 
tion of light, or that of Mariotte and Gay-Lussac for gas-volumes) are* 
evidently nothing but generic-concepts for embracing whole classes of 
phenomena. The search for them is the business. of the experimental 
division of our Science. Its theoretic division, on the other hand, 
tries to discover the unknown causes of processes from their visible 
effects ; tries to understand them by the law of causality. . . . The 
ultimate goal of theoretic physics is to find the last unchanging causea 



668 PSTCHOLOOT. 

of the processes in Nature. Whether all processes be really ascribable 
to such causes, whether, in other words, nature he completely itUelligiblt, 
or whether there be chauges which would elude the law of a necessary 
causality, and fall into a realm of spontaneity or freedom, is not here 
the place to determine : but at any rate it is clear that the Science 
whose aim it is to make nature appear intelligible [die Natur zu 
begreifen] must start with the assumption of her intelligibility, and 
draw consequences in conformity with this assumption, until irrefu- 
table facts show the limitations of this method. . . . The postulate that 
natural phenomena must be reduced to changeless ultimate causes next 
shapes itself so that forces unchanged by time must be found to be 
these causes. Now in Science we have already found portions of mat- 
ter with changeless forces (indestructible qualities), and called them 
(chemical) elements. If, then, we imagine the world composed of ele- 
ments with inalterable qualities, the only changes that can rema! ' 
possible in such a world are spatial changes, i.e. movements, and the 
only outer relations which can modify the action of the forc^ are 
spatial too . or, in other words, the forces are motor forces dependent 
for their effect only on spatial relations. More exactly still : The phe- 
nomena of nature must be reduced to [zurilckgefiJihrty conceived as, 
classed as] motions of material points with inalterable motor forces 
acting according to space-relations alone. . . . But points have no 
mutual space-relations except their distance, . . . and a motor force 
which they exert upon each other can cause nothing but a change of 
distance— i.e. be an attractive or a repulsive force. . . . And its inten- 
sity can only depend on distance. So that at last the task of Physics 
resolves itself into this, to refer phenomena to inalterable attractive 
and repulsive forces whose intensity varies with distance. The solu- 
tion of this task would at the same time be the condition of Nature's 
complete intelligibility."* 

The subjective interest leading to the assumption could 
not be more candidly expressed. What makes the assump- 
tion * scientific ' and not merely poetic, what makes a Helm- 
lioltz and his kin discoverers^ is that the things of Nature 
turn out to act as if they tcere of the kind assumed. They 
behave as such mere drawing and driving atoms would be- 
have ; and so far as they have been distinctly enough trans- 
lated into molecular terms to lest the point, so far a certain 
fantastically ideal object, namely, the mathematical sum 
containing their mutual distances and velocities, is found to 
be constant throughout all their movements. This sum is 
called the total energy of the molecules considered. Its con- 



* D\e li:t\ia.\vvu\^ At\ ^x^W VN^'t\> ^^ 2-6. 



NECE88AB7 TBUTHaSFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 

stancj or ' conservation ' gives the name to the hypothesis 
of molecules and central forces from which it was logically 
deduced. 

Take any other mathematico-mechanical theory and it 
is the same. They are all translations of sensible experi- 
ences into other forms, substitutions of items between which 
ideal relations of kind, number, form, equality, etc., obtain, 
for items between which no such relations obtain ; coupled 
with declarations that the experienced form is false and the 
ideal form true, declarations which are justified by the ap- 
pearance of new sensible experiences at just those times 
and places at which we logically infer that their ideal cor- 
relates ought to be. Wave-hypotheses thus make us pre- 
dict rings of darkness and color, distortions, dispersions, 
changes of pitch in sonorous bodies moving from us, 
etc. ; molecule-hypotheses lead to predictions of vapor- 
density, freezing point, etc., — all which predictions fall true. 

Thus the world grows more orderly and rational to the 
mind, which passes from one feature of it to another by de- 
ductive necessity, as soon as it conceives it as made up of 
so few and so simple phenomena as bodies with no proper-' 
ties but number and movement to and fro. 

METAFHTSICAIi AXIOMS. 

But alongside of these ideal relations between terms 
which the world verifies, there are other ideal relations not 
as yet so verified. I refer to those propositions (no longer 
expressing mere results of comparison) which are formu- 
lated in such metaphysical and esthetic axioms as " The 
Principle of things is one ; " " The quantity of existence is 
unchanged f " Nature is simple and invariable ; '* " Nature 
acts by the shortest ways ; '* " Ex nihUo nihil Jit ; ** " Noth- 
ing can be evolved which was not involved ; " " Whatever 
is in the effect must be in the cause ; " "A thing can only 
work where it is ; *' "A thing can only affect another of its 
own kind ; " " Cessante caitsa, cessat et effedus ; " " Nature 
makes no leaps ; " " Things belong to discrete and perma- 
nent kinds ; " " Nothing is or happens without a reason ; ** 
"The world is throughout rationally intelligible;" etc., 



870 P8YCH0L00Y. 

etc., etc. Such principles as these, which might be multi- 
plied to satiety,* are properly to be called postvlates of 
rationality, not propositions of fact If nature did obey 
them, she tvovld be pro tanto more intelligible ; and we seek 
meanwhile so to conceive her phenomena as to show that 
she does obey them. To a certain extent We succeed. For 
example, instead of the * quantity of existence ' so vaguely 
postulated as unchanged, Nature allows us to suppose that 
curious sum of distances and velocities which for want of 
a better terra we call 'energy.' For the effect being 'con- 
tained in the cause,* nature lets us substitute * the effect is 
the cause,' so soon as she lets us conceive both effect and 
cause as the same molecules, in two successive positions. — 
But all around these incipient successes (as all around the 
molecular world, so soon as we add to it as its * effects ' those 
illusory * things ' of common-sense which we had to butcher 
for its sake), there still spreads a vast field of irrationalized 
fact whose items simply are together, and from one to 
another of which we can pass by no ideally * rational ' way. 
It is not that these more metaphysical postulates of 
rationality are absolutely barren — though barren enough 
they were when used, as the scholastics used them, as 
immediate i)ropositious of faet.f They have a fertility as 



* Perhaps the most intUienlial of all these postulates is that the nature 
of the world musl be such that sweeping statements may be ma<le about it. 

f Consider, e.g., the use of the axioms ' nemo j^olfst ,supin stipAfun,' nnd 
^ nemo dat quod nou hahet,' in this refutation of ' Dai w inism.' which I take 
from the much-used scholastic compendium of Logic and Metaphysics of 
LilxMatore, 3d ed. (Home, 18{:<0) : " Ha,*c hypothesis . . . aperte conlra- 
dicil i^incipiis ^letaphysicje, quoe docent es.*ienlias rerum esse imniuta- 
biles, et effeclum non ])osse superare cau.sam. Et sane, quando. juxta 
Darwin, species inferior se evolvit in superiorem, unde trahit maiorem illam 
Lobilitatem? Ex ejus careniia. At nihil dat quod nou habei ; et minus 
gignere nequit plus, aut negatio positionem. PraMerea in transtormaiione 
qme lingitur, natura prioris spcci<M, scrvaturaut dcstruitur? tSi primum. 
mutatio erit tantum accidentalis, quaicm reapsc videmus in diversis stirpi 
bus animantium. Sin alterum asseritur, ut reapse ferl hyix)tl»esis darwin- 
iana, res lenderet ad seipwim destruendam ; cum contra omnia naturalittr 
tendant ad sui conservaiionem et non nisi per actionem contrarii agent is 
corruant." It is merely a question of fact whellier these ideally proper 
relations do or do not obtain between animal and vegetable ancestors and 
descendants. If they do not, what happens? simply this, that we cannot 
continue to class animal and vegetal facts under the kinda between which 



NBOESSABT TRUTHS-EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 671 

ideals, and keep us uneasy and striving always to recast 
the world of sense until its lines become more congruent 
with theirs. Take for example the principle that * nothing 
can happen without a cause.* We have no definite idea of 
what we mean by cause, or of what causality consists in. But 
the principle expresses a demand for some deeper sort of 
inward connection between phenomena than their merely 
habitual time-sequence seems to us to be. The word * cause ' 
is, in short, an altar to an unknown god ; an empty pedes- 
tal still marking tJie place of a hoped-for statue. Any 
really inward belonging-together of the sequent terms, if 
discovered, would be accepted as what the word cause was 
meant to stand for. So we seek, and seek ; and in the 
molecular systems we find a sort of inward belonging in 
the notion of identity of matter with change of collocation. 
Perhaps by still seeking we may find other sorts of inward 
belonging, even between the molecules and those * secondary 
qualities,' etc., which they produce upon our minds. 

It cannot be too often repeated that the triumphant 
application of any one of our ideal systems of rational rela- 
tions to the real world justifies our hope that other sys- 
tems may be found also applicable. Metaphysics should 
take heart from the example of physics, simply confessing 
that hers is the longer task. Nature may be remodelled, 
nay, certainly will be remodelled, far beyond the point at 
present reached. Just how far ? — is a question which only 
the whole future history of Science and Philosophy can 
answer.* Our task being Ps^'chology, we cannot even 
cross the threshold of that larger problem. 

Besides the mental structure which results in such 



those ideal relations obtain. Thus, we can no longer call animal breeds by 
the name of 'species '; cannot call generating a kind of 'giving.' or treat a 
descendant as an ' effect ' of his ancestor. The ideal scheme of terms and 
relations can remain, if you like; but it must remain purely mental, and 
without application to life, which 'gangs its ain gait ' regardless of ideal 
schemes. Most of us, however, would prefer to doubt whether such abstract 
axioms as that * a thing cannot tend to its own destruction ' express ideal 
relations of an important sort at all. 

•Compare A. liiehl: Der Philosophische Kriticismus, Bd. ii. Thl. L 
Abschn. i. Cap. iii. § 6. 



672 P8YCH0L0QT. 

metaphysical principles as those just considered, there ia 
a mental structure which expresses itself in 

.aSSTHETIC AND MOBAL FBINOIPIiES. 

The aesthetic principles are at bottom such axioms as 
that a note sounds good with its third and fifth, or that 
potatoes need salt. We are once for all so made that when 
certain impressions come before our mind, one of them will 
seem to call for or repel the others as its companions. To 
a certain extent the principle of habit will explain these 
SBsthetic connections. When a conjunction is repeatedly 
experienced, the cohesion of its terms grows grateful, or at 
least their disruption grows unpleasant. But to explain ofl 
aesthetic judgments in this way would be absurd ; for it is 
notorious how seldom natural experiences come up to our 
aesthetic demands. Many of the so-called metaphysical 
principles are at bottom only expressions of aesthetic feel- 
ing. Nature is simple and invariable ; makes no leaps, or 
makes nothing but leaps ; is rationally intelligible ; neither 
increases nor diminishes in quantity ; flows from one prin- 
ciple, etc., etc., — what do all such principles express save 
our sense of how pleasantly our intellect would feel if it 
had a Nature of that sort to deal with ? The subjectivity 
of which feeling is of course quite compatible with Nature 
also turning out objectively to be of that sort, later on. 

The moral principles which our mental structure en- 
genders are quite as little explicable in tofo by habitual 
experiences having bred inner cohesions. Rightness is not 
mere usualness, wrongness not mere oddity, however numer- 
ous the facts which might be invoked to prove such identity. 
Nor are the moral judgments those most invariably and 
emphatically impressed on us by public opinion. The 
most characteristically and peculiarly moral judgments 
that a man is ever called on to make are iu un])rece- 
dented cases and lonely emergencies, where n(^ popular 
rhetorical maxims can avail, and the hidden oracle alone 
can speak ; and it speaks often in favor of conduci 
quite unusual, and suicidal as far as gaining popular 
approbation goes. The forces which conspire to this 
resultant are subtle harmonies and discords between the 



NBCEa8AR7 TRUTHS-EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. GTS 

elementary ideas which form the data of the case. Some of 
these harmonies, no doubt, have to do with habit; but 
in respect to most of them our sensibility must assuredly 
be a phenomenon of supernumerary order, correlated with 
a brain-function quite as secondary as that which takes 
cognizance of the diverse excellence of elaborate musical 
compositions. No more than the higher musical sensibili- 
ty can the higher moral sensibility be accounted for by the 
frequency with which outer relations have cohered.* Take 
judgments of justice or equity, for example. Instinctively, 
one judges everything differently, according as it pertains 
to one's self or to some one else. Empirically one notices 
that everybody else does the same. But little by little 
there dawns in one the judgment " nothing can be right for 
me which would not be right for another similarly placed ;" 
or " the fulfilment of my desires is intrinsically no more im- 
perative than that of anyone else's ; " or " what it is reason- 
able that another should do for me, it is also reasonable 
that I should do for him ; " t and forthwith the whole mass 
of the habitual gets overturned. It gets seriously over- 
turned only in a few fanatical heads. But its overturning 
is due to a back-door and not to a front-door process. 
Some minds are pretematurally sensitive to logical con- 
sistency and inconsistency. When they have ranked a 
thing under a kind, they miuit treat it as of that kind's 
kind, or feel all out of tune. In many respects we do class 
ourselves with other men, and call them and ourselves by 
a common name. They agree with us in having the same 
Heavenly Father, in not being consulted about their birth, 

* As one example out of a thousand of exceptionally delicate idiosyn- 
crasy in this regard, take this: "I must quit society. 1 would rather un- 
dergo twice the danger from beasts and ten times the danger from rocks. 
It is not pain, it is not death, that I dread,— it is the haired of a man; there 
is something in it so shocking that 1 would rather submit to any injury 
than incur or increase the hatred of a man by revenging it. . . . Another 
Buflacient reason for suicide is that I was this morning out of temper with 
Mrs. Douglas (for no fault of hers). 1 did not betray myself in the least, 
but I reflected that to be exposed to the possibility of such an event once a 
year, was evil enough to render life intolerable. The disgrace of using an 
impatient word is to me overpowering." (Elton Hammond, quoted in 
Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary, vol. i. p. 424.) 

t Compare H. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, bk. iii. chap. xiii. § 8. 



674 PSTCHOLOQT. 

in not being themselves to thank or blame for their natural 
gifts, in having the same desires and pains and pleasures, 
in short in a host of fundamental relations.* Hence, if these 
things be our essence, we should be substitutable for other 
men, and they for us, in any proposition in which either 
of us is involved. The more fundamental and common 
the essence chosen, and the more simple the reasoning,* 
the more Tvildly radical and unconditional will the justice 
be which is aspired to. Life is one long struggle between 
conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and 
opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive percep- 
tion of them as individual facts. The logical stickler 
for justice always seems pedantic and mechanical to 
the man who goes by tact and the particular instance, 
and who usually makes a poor show at argument Some- 
times the abstract couceiver*s way is better, sometimes that 
of the man of instinct But just as in our study of reason- 
ing we found it impossible to lay down any mark whereby 
to distinguish right conception of a concrete case from con- 
fusion (see pp. 336, 3.50), so here we can give no general 
rule for deciding when it is morally useful to treat a con- 
crete case as sui generis, and when to lump it with others 
in au abstract class. f 

* A gentleman told me that he had a conclusive argument for opening 
the Harvard ^Icdical School to women. It was this: "Are not women 
human ?"— which major premise of course had to be granted. '* Then are 
they not entitled to all the rights of humanity?" My friend said that he 
hud never met anyone who coull successfully meet this reasoning. 

f You retich the Mephistophelian point of view as well as the point of 
view of justice by treating cases as if they belonged rigorously to abstract 
classes. Pure rationalism, complete immunity from prejudice, consists in re- 
fusing to sec that the case before one is absolutely unique. It is always possi- 
ble to treat the country of one's nativity, the liouseof one's fathers, thel>cd 
in which one's mother died, nay, the mother herself if need be, on a naked 
equality with all other specimens of so many respective genera. It shows 
the world in a clenr frosty light from which all fuliginous mists of aflFec- 
tion, all swamp-lights of sentimentality, are absent. Straight and immedi- 
ate action becomes easy then — witness a Napoleon's or a Frederick's career. 
But the question always remains, " Are not the mists and vai)or8 ^torth re- 
taining?" The illogical refusal to treat certain concretes by the mere law 
of their genus has made the drama of human history. The obstinate insist- 
ing that tweedledum is rioi tweedledee is the bone and marrow of life 
Look at Mie Jews and the Scots, with their miserable factions and sec- 



NBCEaSART TRUTHB-EFFECTa OF EXPERIENCE. 676 

An adequate treatment of the way in which we come by 
our aesthetic and moral judgments would require a separate 
chapter, which I cannot conveniently include in this book. 
Suffice it that these judgments express inner harmonies 
and discords between objects of thought ; and that whilst 
outer cohesions frequently repeated will often seem har- 
monious, all harmonies are not thus engendered, but our 
feeling of many of them is a secondary and incidental func- 
tion of the mind. Where harmonies are asserted of the 
real world, they are obviously mere postulates of ration- 
ality, so far as they transcend experience. Such postulates 
are exemplified by the ethical propositions that the indi- 
vidual and universal good are one, and that happiness and 
goodness are bound to coalesce in the same subject. 

SITMMABY OF WHAT FBE0EDE8. 

I will now sum up our progress so far by a short sum- 
mary of the most important conclusions which we have 
reached. 



tarian disputes, their loyalties and patriotisms and exclusions. — their an- 
nals now become a classic heritage, because men of genius took part and 
sang in them. A thing is im|)ortant If any one thitik it important. The 
process of history consists in certain folks becoming possessed of the mania 
that certain special things are important infinitely, whilst other folks can- 
not agree in the belief. The Sliah of Persia refused to be taken to the 
Derby Day, saying ** It is already known to me that one horee can nm faster 
than another." He mnde the question "which horse?" immaterial. Any 
question can be made immaterinl by subsuming all its answers under a 
common head. Imagine what college ball-games and races would be if the 
teams were to forget the absolute distinctness of Harvard from Yale and 
think of both as One in the higher genus College. The sovereign road to 
indifference, whether to evils or to goods, lies in the thought of the higher 
genus. " When we have meat before us,*' says Marcus A urelius, seeking 
indifference to M/if kir^ of good, "we must receive the impression that 
tbis is the dead body ot a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird or of a 
pig; and again that this Falernian is only a little grape- juice, and this pur- 
pie robe some sheep's wool dyed with the blood of a shell-fish. Such, then, 
are these impressions, and they reach the things themselves and penetrate 
them, and we see what kind of things they are. Just in the same way 
ought we to act through life, and where there are things which appear 
most worthy of our approbation, we ought to la}' them bare and look at 
their worthlessness and strip them of all the words by which they are ex- 
alted. " (Long's Translation, vi. 18.) 



676 P8TCH0L00Y. 

The mind has a native structure in this sense, that cer- 
tain of its objects, if considered together in certain ways, 
give definite results ; and that no other ways of consider- 
ing, and no other results, are possible if the same objects 
be taken. 

The results are ' relations ' which are all expressed by 
judgments of subsumption and of comparison. 

The judgments of subsumption are themselves sub- 
sumed under the laws of logic 

Those of comparison are expressed in dassijlcations, and 
in the sciences of arithmetic and geometry. 

Mr. Spencer's opinion that our consciousness of classifi- 
catory, logical, and mathematical relations between ideas is 
due to the frequency with which the corresponding * outer 
relations ' have impressed our minds, is unintelligible. 

Our consciousness of these relations, no doubt, has a 
natural genesis. But it is to be sought rather in the inner 
forces which have made the brain grow, than in any mere 
paths of 'frequent' association which outer stimuli may 
have ploughed in that organ. 

But let our sense for these relations have arisen as it 
may, the relations themselves form a fixed system of lines 
of cleavage, so to speak, in the mind, by which we naturally 
pass from one object to another ; and the objects connected 
by these Hues of cleavage are often not connected by any 
regular time- aud space-associations. We distinguish, 
therefore, between the empirical order of things, and this 
their rational order of comparison ; and, so far as possible, 
we seek to translate the former into the latter, as being the 
more congenial of the two to our intellect. 

An}' classification of things into kinds (especially if the 
kinds form series, or if they successively involve each 
other) is a more rational way of conceinng the things than 
is that mere juxtaposition or separation of them as indi- 
viduals in time and space which is the order of their crude 
perception. Any assimilation of things to terms between 
which such classificatory relations, with their remote and 
mediate transactions, obtain, is a way of bringing the things 
into a more rational scheme. 

Solids in motion are such terms ; and the mechanical 



NECES8ART TRUTHB-EFFBCTS OF EXPBRIBNCB, 677 

philosophy is only a way of conceiving nature so as to 
arrange its items along some of the more natural lines of 
cleavage of our mental structure. 

Other natural lines are the moral and aesthetic relations. 
Philosophy is still seeking to conceive things so that these 
relations also may seem to obtain between them. 

As long as things have not successfully been so con- 
ceived, the moral and Aesthetic relations obtain only between 
entia rationis, terms in the mind ; and the moral and aesthetic 
principles remain but postulates, not propositions, with 
regard to the real world outside. 

There is thus a large body of a priori or intuitively 
necessary truths. As a rule, these are truths of comparison 
only, and in the first instance they express relations be- 
tween merely mental terms. Nature, however, acts as if 
some of her realities were identical with these mental 
terms. So far as she does this, we can make a priori propo- 
sitions concerning natural fact. The aim of both science 
and philosophy is to make the identifiable terms more 
numerous. So far it has proved easier to identify nature s 
things with mental terms of the mechanical than with men- 
tal terms of the sentimental order. 

TJie widest postulate of rationality is that the world is 
rationally intelligible throughout, after the pattern of some 
ideal system. The whole war of the philosophies is over 
that point of faith. Some say they can see their way 
already to the rationality; others that it is hopeless in any 
other but the mechanical way. To some the very fact that 
there is a world at all seems irrational. Nonentity would be 
a more natural thing than existence, for these minds. One 
philosopher at least says that the relatedness of things to 
each other is irrational anyhow, and that a world of rela- 
tions can never be made intelligible.* 

With this I may be assumed to have completed the 
programme which I announced at the beginning of the chap- 
ter, so far as the theoretic part of our organic mental struc- 

* " An fiich, in seinem eignen Wesen/Ut jedea reale Object mii sieh aeUai 
identisch vnd unbedingt **— that is, the *' allgemeinste Eimicht oprtJ^n'/'and 
the '* allgemeumie aus Erfahrung *' is *' AlUs erkennba/re iat hedirhgU* 
(A. Spir : Deuken und Wirklichkeit. Compare also Herbart and Hegel.) 



678 P87CH0L00T. 

ture goes. It can be due neither to our own nor to our an- 
cestors' experience. I now pass to those practical parts of 
our organic mental structure. Things are a little different 
here ; and our conclusion, though it lies in the same direc- 
tion, can be by no means as confidently expressed. , 

To be as short and simple as possible, I will take the 
case of instincts, and, supposing the reader to be familiar 
with Chapter XXIV, I will plunge in medias res. 

THE ORIGIN OF INSTINCTS. 

Instincts must have been either 

1) Each specially created in complete form, or 

2) Gradually evolved. 

As the first alternative is nowadays obsolete, I proceed 
directly to the second. The two most prominent sugges- 
tions as to the way in which instincts may have been evolved 
are associated with the names of Lamarck and Darwin. 

Lamarck's statement is that animals have tvants, and 
contract, to satisfy them, habits which transform themselves 
gradually into so many propensities which they can neither 
resist nor change. These propensities, once acquired, prop- 
agate themselves by way of transmission to the young, so 
that they come to exist in new individuals, anteriorly to all 
exercise. Thus are the same emotions, the same habits, 
the same instincts, perpetuated without variation from one 
generation to another, so long as the outward comlitious 
of existence remain the same.^ Mr. Lewes calls this the 
theory of * lapsed intelligence.' Mr. Spencer's words are 
clearer than Lamarck's, so that I will quote from liim : t 

* Philosophic ZoOlogiqne. Bme partie, chap, v , 'de I'Instinot.' 
f It should be said thai Mr. Spencer's most formal utterance about io- 
stinct is in his Principles of Psychology, in the chapter under that name. 
Dr. Romanes has reformulated and criticised the doctrine of this chapter 
in his Mental Evolution in Animals, chapter xvii. I must confess my in- 
ability to state its vagueness in intelligible terms. It treats instincts as a 
further development of retlex actions, and as forerunners of intelligence, — 
which is probabl}' true of many. Rut when it ascribes their formation to 
the mere 'multiplication of experiences,' which, at tirst simple, mould 
the nervous sy.stem to *corres|)ond to outer relations' by simple reflex 
actions, and, afterwards complex, make it 'correspond' by compound 
retlex actions.' it becomes too mysterious to follow without more of a key 
than is given. Tlie whole thing becomes perfectly simple if we suppose 
the reflex actions to be accidental inborn idiosyncrasies preserved. 



NECE88AR7 TRUTHS-EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 679 

** Setting out with the unquestionable assumption, that every new 
form of emotion making its appearance in the individual or the race is 
a modification of some pre-existing emotion, or a compounding of 
several pre-existing emotions, we should be greatly aided by knowing 
what always are the pre-existing emotions. When, for example, we 
find that very few, if any, of the lower animals show any love of accu- 
mulation, and that this feeling is absent in infancy ; when we see that 
an infant in arms exhibits anger, fear, wonder, while yet it manifests 
no desire of permanent possession ; and that a brute which has no ac- 
quisitive emotion can nevertheless feel attachment, jealousy, love of ap- 
probation, — we may suspect that the feeling which property satisfies is 
compounded out of simpler and deeper feelings. We may conclude 
that as when a dog hides a bone there must exist in him a prospective 
gratification of hunger, so there must similarly, at first, in all cases 
where anything is secured or taken possession of, exist an ideal excite- 
ment of the feeling which that thing will gratify. We may further con- 
clude that when the intelligence is such that a variety of objects come to 
be utilized for different purposes ; when, as among savages, divers wants 
are satisfied through the articles appropriated for weapons, shelter, 
clothing, ornament, — the act of appropriating comes to be one con- 
stantly involving agreeable associations, and one which is therefore 
pleasurable, irrespective of the end suljserved. And when, as in civ- 
ilized life, the property acquired is of a kind not conducing to one order 
of gratifications, but is capable of ministering to all gratifications, the 
pleasure of acquiring property grows more distinct from each of the 
various pleasures subserved — is more completely differentiated into a 
separate emotion.* It is well known that on newly-discovered islands 
not inhabited by man, birds are so devoid of fear as to allow them- 
selves to be knocked over with sticks, but that in the course of genera- 

* This account of acquisitiveness differs from our own. Without de- 
nying the associationlst account to be a true description of a great deal of 
our proprietary feeling, we admitted in addition an entirely primitive form 
of desire. (See above, p. 420 ff .) The reader must decide as to the plausibili- 
ties of the case. Certainly appearances are In favor of there being in us same 
cupidities quite disconnected with the ulterior uses of the things appro- 
priated. The source of their fascination lies In their appeal to our a?stheiic 
sense, and we wish thereupon simply to avm them. Olitteriug, hard, 
metallic, odd. pretty things ; curious things especially ; natural objects that 
look as If they were artificial, or that mimic other objects,— these form a 
class of things which human beings snatch at as magpies snatch rags. They 
simply fascinate us. What house does not contain some drawer or cup- 
board full of senseless odds and ends of this sort, with which nobody knows 
what to do. but which a blind Instinct saves from the ash-barrel ? Witness 
people returning from a walk on the sea-shore or in the woods, each 
carrying 3ome Uisus naturm In the shape of stone or shell, or strip of bark 
or odd-shaped fungus, which litter the house and grow daily more unsightly, 
until at last reason triumphs over blind propensity and sweeps them awaj. 



680 ParCHOLOGT. 

tions they acquire such a dread of man as to fly on his approach, and 
that this dread is manifested by yonng as well as old. Now unless this 
change be ascribed to the killing off of the least fearful, and the preser- 
Tation and multiplication of the more fearful, which, considering the 
small number killed by man, is an inadequate cause, it must be ascribed 
to accumulated experiences, and each expeiience must be held to have 
a share in producing it. We must conclude that in each bird that es 
capes with injuries inflicted by man, or is alarmed by the outcries of 
other members of the flock, . . . there is established an association of 
ideas between the human aspect and the pains, direct and indirect, suf- 
fered from human agency. And we must further conclude that the 
state of consciousness which impels the bird to take flight is at first 
nothiug more than an ideal reproduction of those painful impressions 
which before followed man's approach ; that such ideal reproduction 
becomes more vivid and more massive as the painful experiences, direct 
or sympathetic, increase ; and that thus the emotion, in its incipient 
state, is nothing else than an aggregation of the revived pains before 
experienced. As, in the course of generations, the young birds of this 
race begin to display a fear of man before they have been injured by 
him, it is an unavoidable inference that the nervous system of the rate 
has been organically modified by these experiences ; we have no choice 
but to conclude that when a young bird is thus led to fly, it is because 
the impression produced on its senses by the approaching man entails, 
through an incipieutly reflex action, a partial excitement of all those 
nerves which, in its ancestors, had been excited under the like con- 
ditions ; that this partial excitement has its accompanying painful con- 
sciousness ; and that the vague painful consciousness thus arising con- 
stitutes emotion proper — emotion undecomposable into specific experi- 
ences, and therefore seemingly homogeneous. If such be tfie expla- 
nation of the fact in this case, then it is in all cases. If the emotion 
is so generated here, then it is so generated throughout. If so, we must 
perforce conclude that the emotional modifications displayed by dif- 
ferent nations, and those higher emotions by which civilized are dis- 
tinguished from savage, are to be accounted for on the same principle. 
And, concluding this, we are led strongly to suspect that the emotions 
in general have severally thus originated." * 

Obviously the word * emotion ' here means instinct as 
well, — the actions we call instinctive are expressions or 
manifestations of the emotions whose genesis Mr. Spencer 
describes. Now if habit could thus bear fruit outside the 
individual life, and if the modifications so painfully ac- 
quired by the parents* nervous systems could be found 
ready-made at birth in those of the young, it would be hard 

* lieview of Baiu iu H. Spencer: Illuslratious of Universal Progress 
(New York. i864), pp. 811, 315. 



mSCESSART TRUTH8-EFFE0T8 OF EXPBRIBNCE. 681 

to overestimate the importance, both practical and theo- 
retical, of such an extension of its sway. In principle, in- 
stincts would then be assimilated to * secondarily-automatic ' 
habits, and the origin of many of them out of tentative ex- 
periments made during ancestral lives, perfected by repe- 
tition, addition, and association through successive genera- 
tions, would be a comparatively simple thing to understand. 

Contemporary students of instinct have accordingly 
been alert to discover all the facts which would seem to 
establish the possibility of such an explanation. The list 
is not very long, considering what a burden of conclusions 
it has to bear. Let acquisitiveness and fear of man, as just 
argued for by Spencer, lead it off. Other cases of the latter 
sort are the increased shyness of the woodcock noticed to 
have occurred within sixty years* observation by Mr. T. A. 
Knight, and the greater shyness everywhere shown by large 
than by small birds, to which Darwin has called attention. 
Then we may add — 

The propensities of 'pointing,' 'retrieving,' etc., in 
sporting dogs, which seem partly, at any rate, to be due to 
training, but which in well-bred stock are all but innate. 
It is in these breeds considered bad for a litter of young if 
its sire or dam have not been trained in the field. 

Docility of domestic breeds of horses and cattle. 

Tameness of young of tame rabbit — ^young wild rabbits 
being invincibly timid. 

Young foxes are most wary in those places where they 
are most severely hunted. 

Wild ducks, hatched out by tame ones, fly off. But if 
kept close for some generations, the young are said to be- 
come tame.* 

Young savages at a certain age will revert to the woods. 

English greyhounds taken to the high plateau of Mexico 
could not at first run well, on account of rarefied air. Their 
whelps entirely got over the diflSculty. 

Mr. Lewes somewhere t tells of a terrier pup whose 
parents had been taught to * beg,' and who constantly 

* Ribol : De l'H6r6dit§, 2me 6d. p. 26. 

t Quoted (without reference) in Spencer's Biology, vol. i. p. 247. 



682 P8TCH0L0O7. 

threw himself spontaneously into the begging attitude. 
Darwin tells of a French orphan-child, brought up out of 
France, yet shrugging like his ancestors.* 

Musical ability often increases from generation to gen- 
eration in the families of musicians. 

The hereditarily epileptic guinea-pigs of Brown-S^- 
quard, whose parents had become epileptic through surgical 
operations on the spinal cord or sciatic nerve. The adults 
often lose some of their hind toes, and the young, in addi- 
tion to being epileptic, are frequently born with the corre- 
sponding toes lacking. The offspring of guinea-pigs whose 
cervical sympathetic nerve has been cut on one side will 
have the ear larger, the eyeball smaller, etc., just like their 
parents after the operation. Puncture of the *restiform 
body ' of the medulla will, in the same animal, congest and 
enlarge one eye, and cause gangrene of one ear. In the 
young of such parents the same symptoms occur. 

Physical refinement, delicate hands and feet, etc, ap- 
pear in families well-bred and rich for several generations. 

The * nervous ' temperament also develops in the de- 
scendants of sedentary brain- working people. 

Inebriates produce ofi'spring in various ways degener- 
ate. 

Nearsightedness is produced by indoor ocoupation for 
generations. It has been found in Europe much more fre- 
quent among schoolchildren in towns than among children 
of the same age in the country. 

These latter cases are of the inheritance of structural 
rather than of functional peculiarities. But as structure 
gives rise to function it may be said that the principle is 
the same. Amongst other inheritances of adaptive! struc- 
tural change may be mentioned : 

The * Yankee ' type. 

Scrofula, rickets, and other diseases of bad conditions 
of life. 



♦ Expression of Emotions (N. Y.). p. 287. 

f ' Adaptive ' changes are those produced by the direct effect of out- 
ward conditions on an organ or organism. Sunburned complexion, horny 
hands, muscular toughness, are illustrations. 



NECES8ART TRUTHS- EFFECTS OF EXPEmENGB. 683 

The udders and permaueut milk of the domestic breeds 
of cow. 

The * fancy' rabbit's ears, drooping through lack of 
need to erect them. Dog's, ass's, etc., in some breeds 
ditto. 

The obsolete eyes of mole and various cave-dwelling 
animals. 

The diminished size of the wing-bones of domesticated 
ducks, du€ tc ancestral disuse of flight.* 

These are about all the facts which, by one author or 
another, have been invoked as evidence in favor of the 
* lapsed intelligence ' theory of the origin of instincts. 

Mr. Darwin's theory is that of the natural selection of 
accidentally produced tendencies to action. 

** It would," says he, ** be the most serious error to suppose that the 
greater number of instinct* have been acquired by habit in one genera- 
tion, and then transmitted by inheritance in succeeding generations. 
It can clearly be shown that the most wonderful instincts with which 
we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, 
could not possibly have been thus acquired f It will be universally ad- 
mitted that instincts are as important as corporeal structure for the wel- 
fare of each species, under its present conditions of life. Under changed 
conditions oi life, it is at least possible that slight modifications of in- 
stinct might be profitable to a species ; and if it can be shown that in- 
stincts do vary ever so little, then I can see no difficulty in natural 
selection preserving and continually accumulating variations of instinct 
to any extent that may bo profitable. It is thus, as I believe, that all 
the most complex and wonderful instincts have arisen. ... I believe 
that the effects of habit are of quite subordinate importance to the effects 
of the natural selection of what may bo called accidental variations of 
instincts ; — that is, of variations produced by the same unknown causes 
which produce slight deviations of bodily structure." % 



♦ For these and other facts cf. Th liibot : De l'Heredit6 ; W. B. Car- 
penter : Coulcmporary Review, vol. 21, p. 296, 779, 867; H. Spencer: 
Princ. of Biol. pt. ir. ch. v, viii, ix, x ; pt. ni. ch. xi, xii ; C. Darwin; 
Animals and Plants under Domestication, ch. xii, xiii, xiv ; Sam'l But- 
ler : Life and Habit ; T. A. Knight : Philos. Trans. 1887 ; E. Dupuy ; 
Popular Science Monthly, vol. xi. p. 832 ; F. Papillon ; Nature and Life, 
p. 330 ; Crothers, in Pop. Sci. M., Jan. (or Feb.) 1889. 

f [Because, being exhibited by neuter insects, the effects of mere prac« 
lice cannot accumulate from one generation to another. — W. J.] 

X Origin of Species, chap. vii. 



684 PSrCHOLOOr. 

The evidence for Mr. Darwin's view is too complex to 
be given in this place. To my own mind it is quite convinc- 
ing. If, with the Darwinian theory in mind, one re-reads 
the list of examples given in favor of the Lamarckian theory, 
one finds that many of the cases are irrelevant, and that 
some make for one side as well as for the other. This is 
so obvious in many of the cases that it is needless to point 
it out in detail. The shrugging child and the begging pup, 
e.g., prove somewhat too much. They are examples so 
imique as to suggest spontaneous variation rather than in- 
herited habit. In other cases the observations much need 
corroboration, e.g., the effects of not training for a generation 
in sporting dogs and race-horses, the difference between 
young wild rabbits born in captivity and young tame ones, 
the cumulative effect of many generations of captivity on 
wild ducks, etc. 

Similarly, the increased wariness of the large birds, of 
those on islands frequented by men, of the woodcock, of 
the foxes, may be due to the fact that the bolder families 
have been killed off, and left none but the naturally timid 
behind, or simply to the individual experience of older 
birds being imparted by example to the young so that a 
new ejj ucational tradition has occurred. — The eases of phv- 
«ical refinement, nervous temperament, Yankee type, etc., 
also need much more discriminating treatment than they 
have yet received from the Lamarckians. There is no real 
evidence that physical refinement and nervosity tend to ac- 
cumulate from generation to generation in aristocratic or 
intellectual families ; nor is there any that the change in 
that direction which Europeans transplanted to America 
undergo is not all completed in the first generation of 
children bred on our soil. To my mind, the facts all point 
that way. Similarly the better breathing of the grey- 
hounds born in Mexico was surely due to a post-natal 
adaptation of the pups* thorax to the rarer aii. 

Distinct neurotic degeneration may undoubtedly accumu- 
late from parent to child, and as the parent usually in this 
case grows worse by his own irregular habits of life, the 
temptation lies near to ascribe the child's deterioration to 
this cause. This, again, is a hasty conclusion. For neurotic 



NECESSARY TRUTHS-EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE, 685 

degeneration is unquestionably a disease whose original 
causes are unknown ; and like other * accidental variations * 
it is hereditary. But it ultimately ends in sterility ; and it 
seems to me quite unfair to draw any conclusions from its 
natural history in favor of the transmission of acquired 
peculiarities. Nor does the degeneration of the children of 
alcoholics prove anything in favor of their having inherited 
the shattered nervous system which the alcohol has induced 
in their parents : because the poison usually has a chance 
to directly affect their own bodies before birth, by acting 
on the germinal matter from which they are formed whilst 
it is still nourished by the alcoholized blood of the parent 
In many cases, moreover, the parental alcoholics are them- 
selves degenerates neurotically, and the drink-habit is only 
a symptom of their disease, which in some form or other 
they also propagate to their children. 

There remain the inherited mutilations of the guinea- 
pig. But these are such startling exceptions to the ordinary 
rule with animals that they should hardly be used as ex- 
amples of a typical process. The docility of domestic 
cattle is certainly in part due to man's selection, etc., etc. 
In a word, the proofs form rather a beggarly array. 

Add to this that the writers who have tried to carry out 
the theory of transmitted habit with any detail are always 
obliged somewhere to admit inexplicable variation. Thus 
Spencer allows that 

" Sociality can begin only where, through some slight variation, there 
is less tendency than usual for the individuals to disperse. . . . That 
slight variations of mental nature, sufficient to initiate this process, may 
be fairly assumed, all our domestic animals show us: differences in their 
characters and likings are conspicuous. Sociality having thus commenced,, 
and survival of the fittest tending ever to maintain and increase it, it 
will be further strengthened by the inherited effects of habit. ' ♦ Again, 
in writing of the pleasure of pity, Mr. Spencer says : ** This feeling is. 
not one that has arisen through the inherited effects of experiences, but 
belongs to a quite different group, traceable to the survival of the fittest 
simply — to the natural selection of incidental variations. In this group 
are included all the bodily appetites, together with those simpler in- 
stincts, sexual and parental, by which every race is maintained ; and 
which must exist before the higher processes of mental evolution can 
commence." t 

♦Princ. of Psychol., ii. 661. t Ihid p. 623. 



686 PSYCHOLOGY. 

The inheritance of tricks of manner and trifling peculi- 
arities, such as handwriting, certain odd gestures when 
pleased, peculiar movements during sleep, etc., have also 
been quoted in favor of the theory of transmission of ac- 
quired habits. Strangely enough ; for of all things in the 
world these tricks seem most like idiosyncratic variations. 
They are usually defects or oddities which the education 
of the individual, the pressure of what is really acquired 
by him, would counteract, but which are too native to be 
repressed, and breaks through all artificial barriers, in his 
children as well as in himself. 

I leave my text practically just as it was written in 1885. 
I proceeded at that time to draw a tentative conclusion to 
the effect that the origin of mjosi of our instincts must cer* 
tainly be deemed fruits of the back-door method of genesis, 
and not of ancestral experience in the proper meaning of 
the term. Whether acquired ancestral habits played any 
part at all in their production was still an open question in 
which it would be as rash to affirm as to deny. Already 
before that time, however, Professor Weismann of Freiburg 
had begun a very serious attack upon the Lamarckian 
theory,^ and his polemic has at last excited such a widespread 
interest among naturalists that the whilom almost unhes- 
itatingly accepted theory seems almost on the point of 
being abandoned. 

I will therefore add some of Weismann's criticisms of the 
supposed e\ddence to my own. In the first place, he has a 
<5aptivating theory of descent of his own,t which makes him 
think it a priori impossible that any peculiarity acquired 
during lifetime by the parent should be transmitted to the 
germ. Into the nature of that theory this is not the place 
to go. Suftice to say that it has made him a keener critic 
of Lamarck's and Spencer's theory than he otherwise might 
have been. The only way in which the germinal products 
can be influenced whilst in thebody of the parentis, accord- 



* Ueber die Vererbung (Jena, 1883). Prof. Weismann 's Essays on 
Heredity have recently (1889) been published in English in a collected 
form. 

f Best expressed in the Essiiy on the ContinuitaX de» Keimj)Ui»mn8{\^T») 



NECE88ART IBUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 687 

ing to Weismann, by good or bad nutrition. Through this 
they may degenerate in various ways or lose vitality alto- 
gether. They may also be infected through the blood by 
small-pox, syphilis, or other virulent diseases, and other- 
wise be poisoned. But peculiarities of neural structure and 
habit in the parents which the parents themselves were not 
horn tvith, they can never acquire unless perhaps accident- 
ally through some coincidental variation of their own. 
Accidental variations develop of course into idiosyncrasies 
which tend to pass to later generations in virtue of the 
well-known law which no one doubts. 

Beferriug to the often-heard assertion that the increase 
of talent found in certain families from one generation to 
another is due to the transmitted effects of eocercise of the 
faculty concerned (the Bachs, the BemouUis, Mozart, etc.), 
he sensibly remarks, that the talent being kept in exercise, 
it ought to have gone on growing for an indefinite number 
of generations. As a matter of fact, it quickly reaches a 
maximum, and then we hear no more of it, which is what 
happens always when an idiosyncrasy is exposed to the ef- 
fects of miscellaneous intermarriage. 

The hereditary epilepsy and other degenerations of the 
operated guinea-pigs are explained by Professor Weis- 
mann as results of infection of the young by the parent's 
blood. The latter he supposes to undergo a pathologic 
change in consequence of the original traumatic injury. The 
obsolescence of disused organs he explains very satisfactor- 
ily, without invoking any transmission of the direct effects of 
disuse, by his theory of panmixy^ for which I must refer to 
his own writings. Finally, he criticises searchingly the 
stories we occasionally hear of inherited mutilations in 
animals (dogs' ears and tails, etc.), and cites a prolonged 
series of experiments of his own on mice, which he bred for 
many generations, cutting off both parental tails each time, 
without interfering in the least with the length of tail with 
which the young continued to be born. 

The strongest argument, after all, in favor of the La- 
marckian theory remains the a priori one urged by Spencer 
in his little work (much the solidest thing, by the way, which 
he has ever written) * The Factors of Organic Evolution.' 



688 P87CH0L0Q7. 

Since, says Mr. Spencer, the accidental variations of all 
parts of the body are independent of each other, if the 
entire organization of animals were due to such accidental 
variations alone, the amount of mutual adaptation and har- 
mony that we now find there could hardly possibly- have 
come about in any finite time. We must rather suppose that 
the divers varying parts brought the other parts into har- 
mony with themselves by exercising them ad hoc, and that 
the effects of the exercise remained and were passed on to 
the young. This forms, of course, a gresit presumption against 
the all-sufficiency of the view of selection of accidental 
variations exclusively. But it must be admitted that in 
favor of the contrary view, that adaptive changes are in- 
herited, we have as yet perhaps not one single unequivocal 
item of positive proof. 

I must therefore end this chapter on the genesis of our 
mental structure by reaffirming my conviction that the so- 
called Experience-philosophy has failed to prove its point 
No more if we take ancestral experiences into account than 
if we limit ourselves to those of the individual after birth, 
can we believe that the couplings of terms within the mind 
are simple copies of corresponding couplings impressed 
upon it by the environment. This indeed is true of a small 
part of our cognitions. But so far as logical and mathe- 
matical, ethical, a^sthetical, and metaphysical jn-opositions 
go, such an assertion is not only untrue but altogether 
unintelligible; for these propositions say nothing about 
the time- and space-order of things, and it is hard to un- 
derstand how such shallow and vague accounts of them as 
Mill's and Spencer's could ever have been given by think- 
ing men. 

The causes of our mental structure are doubtless natural, 
and connected, like all our other peculiarities, with those of 
our nervous structure. Our interests, our tendencies of at- 
tention, our motor impulses, the aesthetic, moral, and 
theoretic combinations we delight in, the extent of our 
power of apprehending schemes of i elation, just like the 
elementary relations themselves, time, space, difference and 
similarity, and the elementary kinds of feeling, have all 



NECB88ART TRUTHS-EFFJSCTS OF EXPERIENCE, (589 

grown up in ways of which at present we can give no ac- 
count Even in the clearest parts of Psychology our insight 
is insignificant enough. And the more sincerely one seeks 
to trace the actual course of psychogenesis, the steps by 
which as a race we may have come by the peculiar mental 
attributes which we possess, the more clearly one per- 
ceives " the slowly gathering twilight close in utter night" 



THE END. 



*•■! 



INDEX. 



Authors the titles only Of whose works are cited are not, as a nile, referred to la 
this index. 



Abbott, T. K., II. 221 

Abstract ideas, I 468, 508; II. 48 

Abstract qualities, II. 829-37, 840 

Abstraction, I. 505; II. 846 ft. See 
distraction 

Accommodation, feeling of, II. 08, 
285 

Acquaintance, I. 220 

Acquired characters, see iriheritance 

Acquisitiveness, II. 422, 679 

Actors, their emotions whilst play- 
ing. II. 464 

Adaptation of mind to envlronmtiiii. 
results in our knowing the im- 
pressing circumstances, 625 fl. 

Esthetic principles, II. 689, 672 

Atter-images, I. 645-7; II. 67, 200. 
604 

Agoraphobia, II. 421 

Agraphia, I. 40, 62 

Alfieri, II 548 

Allen, G., I. 144; II. 681 

Altenitiou of one impression by 
another one simultaneously tak- 
ing place. II. 2«ff., 201 

Alternating personality, I. 879 ff. 

Ambiguity' of optical sensations, II. 
231-7 

Amidon, I. 100 

Amnesia in hysterical disease, I. 884 
ff ; accompanies ansesthesia, ^, 
682; in hypnotic trance. II. 602. 
See forgetting 

Ampiaated limbs, feeling of, II. 
38-9. 10.5 

An.Tsihesia. in hysterics, I. 208 ff.; 
involves correlated amnesia, 886; 
movements executed during, II. 
105. 489-92, 520-1 : and emotion, 
455-6; in hypnotism, 606-9 

Analoc:ies. the perception of, I. 580 

Analysis, I 502; II. 844 

Anger, II. 409. 460, 478 



Aphasia, motor, I. 87, 62; sensory, 
I. 58-4-5; optical. I. 60; amnesia 
in. 640, 684; II. 68 

Apperception, II. 107 ff. 

Apperception, transcendental Unity 
of, I. 362 

Appropriateness, characterizes men- 
tal acto, I. 18 

Apraana, I. 52 

A priori connections exist only be- 
tween objects of perception and 
> "Movements, not between sensory 
laeas, II. 581. A priori ideas and 
experience. Chapter XXVIII. A 
prtori propositions, II. 661-5 

Archer. W., II. 464 

Arithmetic, IL 654. 

Articular sensibility, II. 189 ff. 
" ^Association. Chapter XIV: is not 
of ideas, but of things thought of, 

I. 554; examples of, 555 ff.; its 
rapidity, 557 ff.; by contiguity, 
561; elementary law of, 566; 'mixed' 
association, 571; conditions of, 
575 ff.; by similarity, 578; three 
kinds of association compared* 
680; in voluntary thought, 583; by 
contrast, 593; history of the doc- 
trine of, 594; association the means 
of localization, II. 158 ff.; connec- 
tion of association by similarity 
with reasoning, 345 ff. 

Associationism, I. 161 
Associationist theory of the self, I. 
342, 850 ff.; of space-perception, 

II. 271ff. *«•*'*' 
Asymbolia, I. 52 

Attention, Chapter XI— to how 
many things possible, I. 405 ff.; 
to simultaneous sight and sound, 
411 ff.; its varieties, 416; pas- 
sive, 417: voluntary. 42 ff.; its 
effects, 424 ff. ; its iuliuence on i» 
691 



INDEX. 



action-time, 427-84; accompa- 
nied by feelings of tension due to 
adaptation of sense-organs, 434-8; 
involves imagination or preper- 
ception of object, 438-44; con- 
ceivable as a mere effect, 4^ ff. 

AUBERT. H., II. 285 

• AuitfaUserscheinungen,* I. 75 

Auditory centre in brain, I. 52-6 

Auditory type of imagination, II. 
60 

Automatic writiug. I. 393 ff. 

Austen, Jane, I. 571 

Automaton -Theory, Chapter V: 
postulated rather than proved, I. 
134-8; reasons against it, 188-144; 
applied to attention, 448 

disregarded in this book, II. 

583 

AZAM. Dr., I. 380. 

Babe and caudle, scheme of, I. 25 
Baby's first perception, II. 8, 34; his 

early instmctive movements, 404 

ff. 
Baer. von, I. 639 
Bagkhot, W., I. 582; II, 283. 308 
Bain, on series conscious of itself, 

I. 162; on self-esteem, 313; on 
self-love, 328, 354; on attention, 
444; on association, 485. 530, 561. 
589. 601. 658; II. 6. 12, 69, 186, 
271, 282, 296. 319, 322, 872-3. 463. 
466. 551, 554-5 

Ballard. I. 266 

Balzac, I. 374 

Bartels. I. 432 

Bastian. H. C, II. 488 

Baumann, II. 409 

Baxt. I. 648 

Beaunis, E.. II. 492 

Bechterew, 1. 407 

Belief. Chapter XXI: in sensations, 

II. 299 ff.; in objects of emotion. 
306 ff.; in theories, 311 ff.; and 
will. 319. 8cemiZ% 

Bell. C. II. 483. 492 

Bergson. J., II. 609 

Berkeley. I 2')4, 469, 476; II. 48, 

49, 77, 212. 240,666 
Bernhardt, II. 502 
Rernheim, I. 206 
Bertrand, a.. II. 518 
Bessel, I. 418 
BiNET, A., I. 203 ff.; II. 71. 74, 128 

ff.. 130, 167. 491, 520 
Black, K. W.. II. 839 
Bleek, II. 358 
Blind, the, their space- perception, 

II. 202 ff.; after restoration to 



si^ht, 211-2; hallucination of a 
blind man, 828; dreams of the, 
44 

Blindness, mental, I. 41, 50, 66. See 
isight, Hemiopia, etc. 

Blix, II. 170 

Bloch, II. 515 

Blood, its exciting effect on the 
nerves. II. 41^-3 

Blood, B. P., II. 284 

Blood-supply to brain, I. 97 

Bourne. A., I. 391 

BouRRU, Dr.. I. 888 

BowDiTCH. H. P., his reaction- 
timer, I. 87; on contrast ip aeeo 
motion, II. 247; on knee-jerk, 
380; comparison of touch and 
sight, 520 

Bowen, p.. 214 

BowNE, B. P., on knowledge, 1. 219 

Bradley. P. H., I. 452. 474, 604; 
II. 7, 9, 284, 648 

Brain, its functions. Chapter II: of 
frog. I. 14; of dog. 38; of monkey, 
84; of man, 86; lower centres 
compared with hemispheres, 9-10, 
75; circulation in, 97; instability, 
139; its connection with Mind, 
176; 'entire' brain not a real 
physical fact. 176; its changes as 
subtle as those of thought. 234; 
its dying vibrations operative in 
producing consciousness, 242 

Influence of environment upon 

it, 626 ff. 

Brain-process, see neural process 

Brain-structure, the two modes of 
its genesis. II. 6*24 

Brentano, I. 187, 547 

Bridoeman, Laura, II. 62, 358, 
420 

Broca's convolution, I. 39. 54 

Brodhun. I. 542 

Brown. Thos., I. 248, 277. 371; II. 
271 

Brown-Sequard, I. 48, 67, 69; IT 
695 

Brutes, the intellect of, II 848 ff 

BucKE. R. M., II. 460 

BUBNOFF. I. 82 

BuRKE. II. 464. 
BURNHAM. W. H., I. 689 
BuROT, Dr., I. 388 

Caird. E.. I. 366. 469, 471 DL. ff. 
Calmeil, a., II. 524 
Campanella. II. 464 
Campbell. G.. I. 261 
Cardaillac. I. 247 
Carlyle, T., I. 311 



INDEX, 



693 



Carpektbr, W. B., on formation 
of habits, 1. 110: ethical remarks 
on habit, 120 : mistakes in speech, 
257 ; lapses of memory, 374; on 
not feeling pain, 419; on ideo- 
motor action, II. 522 

Carville, I. 69 

Catalepsy, I. 229; II. 588 

Cattkll, on reaction -time. I. 93, 
482; 524; on recognition. 407, 
648; on attention, ^ ; on asso- 
ciation-time, 558 ff. 

Cause, consciousness a, I. 187 ; II. 
588. 592 

Centres, cortical, I. 80 ff.; motor, 
81 ; visual, 41 ; auditory, 62; olfac- 
tory, 57; gustatory. 58; tactile, 58 

Cerebral process, see neural pro- 
cess 

Cerebrum, see Brain, Hemispheres 

CUADBOURKB, P A., II. 888 

Characters, general, II. 829 ff. 

Charcot. I. 54-5; II. 58, 596 

Chloroform, I. 581 

Choice, see selection , interest 

Circulation in brain, I. 97; effects 
of sensory stimuli upon. XL 874 
ff. ; in grief, 443-4 

Cla8.<<ic and romantic. II. 469 

ClaJvsiflctttions, II. 646 

Clay. E. C. R, I. 609 

Cleanliness. II. 484 

Clearness. I. 426 

Clifford. I. 180-2 

Cloiston, II. 114. 284-6. 687, 689 

CoHBE. F. P.. I. 874 

Cochlea, theory of its action, II. 
169 

Cognition, see knowing 

Cohen. IL, I. 865 

CoLEiiiDOE. S. T., I. 572, 681 

Collateral in nervation, see vicarious 
fu nction 

Comparison, Chapter XIII: rela- 
tions discovered by comimrison 
have nothing to do with the time 
and space order of their terms, 
II. 641; mediate. 489, 644; see 
difference, likeness 

Com|X)sition, of Mind out of its 
elements, see Mind-Stuff theory ; 
differences due to, I. 491 

CoMTE, A., I. 187 

Conceivubility, I. 468 

Conceptions, Chapter XII: defined. 
I. 461;— their permanence, 464 
ff. ; do not develop of them- 
selves, 4B6tt'.; abstract, 468; uni- 
versal, 473; essentially teleologi- 
cal, II. 382 



Conceptual order different from 
perceptual. I. 482 

Concomitants, law of varying, I. 606 

Confusion. II. 852 

Consciousness, its seat, I. 65; its 
distribution. 142-8; ite function of 
selection. 139-41; is personal in 
form, 225; is continuous. 237, 
488; of lack. 251; of self not 
essential, 273; of c^ect comes 
first, 274: always partial and se- 
lective, 284 ff., see Selection; of 
the process of thinking, 800 ff.; 
the span of. 405 

Consent, in willing, II. 568 

Considerations, I. 20 

Constructiveness, II. 426 

Contiguity, association by, I. 661 

Continuity of object of conscious- 
ness. I. 488 

Contrast, of colors, II. 18-27; of 
temperatures, 14; two theories of, 
17 ff., 245; of movemento, 246 ff., 
250 

Convolutions, motor, I. 41 

Cortex, of brain, experiments on, 
I. 31 ff. 

Cranmiing, I. 668 

Credulity, our primitive, II. 819 

CUDWORTH, R., II. 9 

* Cue.' the mental. II. 497, 618 

Cumberland, 8., II. 625 

Curiosity. II. 429 

CZERMAK. II. 170, 175 

Darwin. C. U. 482, 446, 479, 484, 

678, 681-2-4 
Darwinism, scholastic refutation 

of, II. 670 
Data, the, of psychology, I. 184 
Davidson, T., 1, 474 
Deaf-mute *8 thought in infancy, I. 

266 
Deafness, mental, I. 50. 55-6. See 

hearing 
Dean. S., I. 394 
Decision, five types of, II. 531 
Degenerations, descending in nerve- 
centres, I. 37. 62 
Deiabarre, E.. II. 13-27, 71 
Delb<euf, J., 1. 455, 531, 541, 

542, 548-r: II. 100, 189. 249, 

264. 605. 609. 612 
Deliberation. II. 528 ff. 
Delusions, insane, I. 375; II. 114 ff. 
Depth, see third dimension 
Descartes. I. 130, 200. 214, 844 
Destutt de Tracy, I 247 
Determinism must be postulated by 

psychology, 11. 576 



694 



INDEX. 



Dewbt, J., I. 473 

Dichotomy in thinking, II. 654 

Dickens, C, I. 374 

DiETZE, I. 407. 617 

Difference, not resolvable into com- 
position, I. 490 ; noticed most 
between species of a genus, 529 ; 
the magnitude of, 581; least dis- 
cernible, !;37 ff.; methods for 
ascertaining, 540 ff. 

local, XL 167 ff.; genesis of 

our perception of, 642 

Diffusion of movements, the law of. 
II. 372 

Dimension, third, II, 134 ff., 212 
ff., 220 

Dipsomania. II. 543 

Disbelief, II. 284 

Discrimination, Chapter XIII; 
conditions which favor it, I. 494; 
improves by practice. 508; spatial, 
II. 107 ff See difference 

Dissociation, I. 486-7; law of, by 
varying concomitants, 506 

, ditto, II. 845. 359 

of one part of the mind from 

another, see Janet, Pierre 

Dist^iuce, between terms of a series, 
I. 530 

in space, see third dimension 

Distnwti'm, I. 404. See indttention 

Dizziness, see vertigo 

Dog's cortical centres, after Ferrier, 
I. 33; after Munk, I. 44-5; after 
Luciani, I. 46, 53, 58, 60; for special 
muscles, 64; hemispheres ablated, 
70 

Donaldson, II. 170 

DONDEKS, II. 235 

Double images, II. 225-30; 252 

Doubt, II. 284, 318 ff; the mania of. 
545 

Dou(;.\L. J I).. 11.222 

Drainjige of one brain-cell by an- 
other, II. 583 tf. 
-••ccDreams, II. 294 

DiioBiscir, I 632. 660 

Drunkard, II. 565 

Drunkernc^, I. 144; II. 543, 565, 
6'28 

Dualism of object and knower, I. 
218, 220 

Duality, of Brain, I. 300, 399 

Dudli:y, a. T., on mental qualities 
or u.i athlete, II. 539 

DUFOUR. II. 211 

Dun.xn, Ch., II. 176, 206, 208-9 

Duration, the primitive object in 
time perception, I. 609; our esti- 
mate of short, Gil ff. 



• Dynamogeny,* II. 879 ff.. 491 

Ebbinghaus, H., I. 548, 676 

Eccentric projection of sensations, 
n. 81ff., 195 ff. 

Education of hemispheres. I. 76 
See pedagogic remarks 

Effort, II. 584-7. Muscular effort, 
562. Moral effort, 549. 561. 578-8 

EOGER. v.. I. 280-1-2; II. 256 

Ego, Empirical, I. 291 ff. ; pure. 843 
ff.; 'transcendental,' 362; criti- 
cised. 864 

Elementary factors of mind, see 
Units of cc nsciousness 

Elsas, I. 548 

Emerson. R. W., I. 582, II. 307 

Emotion, Chapter XXV: continuoui 
with instinct, II. 442; description 
of typical emotions, 448-9; results 
from reflex effects of stimulus 
upon organism. 449 ff.; thelrclass- 
itication, 454; in anaesthetic sub- 
jects, 455; in the alwence of nor- 
mal stimulus, 45>*-60; effects of 
expressing, 463 ff. : of repressing, 
466; the subtler, 469 ff.; the neu- 
ral process in, 472; differences 
in individuals. 474; evolution of 
special emotions. 477 ff. 

Empirical ego, I. 290 

Empirical pr{)jx)sitions, II. 644 

Emulation. II. 409 

Enn\ii, I. 626 

Entoptic sensations, I. 515 ff. 

Etpuuion, personal, I. 413 

* E(iuilibration.' direct and indirect, 

627 

Essences, their meaninjr, II. 329 ff.; 
sentimental and mechanical, 665 

Essential qualities, see essences 

ESTEL, I. (513. 618 

Evolutionism demands a 'mind- 
dust,' 146 

ExNKU, on human cortical centres 
I. 36; on ' circumvallation ' of 
centres, 65; his psychodometer, 
87; on reaction-time, 91: on ikt- 
ception of rapid succession. 409; 
on attention, 439; on time-percep- 
tion. 615. 638.646; on feeling of 
motion. II. 172 

Experience, I. 402, 487. Relation 
of experience to necessary judg- 
ments. Chapter XXVIII. Expen- 
enee defined, II. 619 ff., 628 

Experimentation in psychology, I. 
192 

Extradition of sensations, II. 81 ff.. 
195 ff 



INDEX. 



090 



Fallacy, the Psychologist's, I. 196, 

278, 158; H. 281 
Familiarity, sense of, see reeogniUon 
Fatalism, II. 574 
i Fatigue, diminishes span of con- 
sciousness, I. 640 
Fear, instinct of, II. 896, 416; the 

symptoms of, 446; morbid, 460; 

origin of. 478 
*^^HNBR, I. 435-6. 688, 589 ft.. 649, 
/ 616, 645; II. 50, 70, 187 ff., 178, 
' 464 
Feeling, synonym for consciousness 

in general in this book, I. 186; 

feelings of relation, 248 
MlidaX.,I. 88(M 
Fer6, Ch., II. 68. 878 fL 
Febriek, D.. I. 81, 46-7-8, 68, 67- 

8-9, 445; II. 508 
Ferribr, Jas., I. 274, 475 
Fiat, of the will, U. 501, 536, 561, 

564; 568. Seo dftJiMtm 
FiCHTE, I. 865 
FiCK, I. 150 
FiSKE. J., n. 577 
Fixed ideas. See inMsnt idea$ 
Flechsig's Pyramidenbahn, L 87 
Flint, R, 11.425 
Flourens, p.. I. 80 
Force, supposed sense of, 11. 518 
Forgetting, I. 679 ff. ; U. 870-1. See 

amnesia 
FouiLLEE, A., II. 500, 570 

FRANgoiS-FRANCK. I. 70 

Franklin, Mrs. C. L., II. 94 

Franz. Dr., II. 62 

Freedom, of the will. II. 569 ff. 

'Fringe' of object, I. 258, 281-2, 
471-3. 478 

Frog's nerve-centres, I. 14 

Fusion of feelings unintelligible, 
I. 157-62; II. 2. See Mind-stuff 
theory 

Fusion of impressions Into one ob- 
ject, I. 484, 502; II. 108. 188 

Galton, F., I. 254. 265. 685; on 
mental imagery. II. 51-7; on gre- 
gariousness, 480 

General propositions, what they in- 
volve. II. 887 ff. See universtU 
conceptions 

Genesis of brain-structure, its two 
modes, II. 624 

Genius. I. 428, 530; U. 110, 852, 
860 

Gentleman, the mind of the, 11. 870 

Geometry. 11. 658 
/^Hddiness, see vertigo 

Gilman. B. I.. I. 96 



GLBY.E.,n. 514-5, 625 
GU>LDSCHBIDEK, II. 170, 192 ff., 209 
GoLTZ, I. 9, 81, 88, 84, 45, 46, 58, 

62. 67. 69, 70, 74, 77 
Gorilla, II. 416 
Gbaefb, a., U. 507, 510 
Grashet, I. 640 
Grabsman, R., U. 654 
Gregariousness, IL 480 
Green. T. H.. 1. 247, 274, 866-8; XL 

4, 10, 11 
Grief, II. 448, 480 
Griesinoer, W.. II. 298 
Grubelsucht, II. 284 
Guinea-pigs, epileptic, etc.. II. 68^-7 
GuisjjLiN. II. 546 
Gurnet, E., 1. 209; II. 117, 180, 469, 

610 
GuYAU, U. 414, 469 

Habit, Chapter IV: due to plasticity 
of brain-matter. 1. 105; depends on 
paths in nerve-centres, 107; origi- 
nation of, 109-13; mechanism of 
concatenated habits, 114-8; thev 
demand some sensation, 118; ethi- 
cal and pedagogic maxims, 121-7; 
is the ground of association, 566; 
of memory, 655 ( 

Habits may inhibit instincts. II. 894. 
Habit accounts for one large part 
of our knowledge, 632 

Hall, G. S.. I. 96-7. 558. 614, 616; 
II. 155, 247, 281, 428 

Hallucination, sensation a veridical, 
II. 33; of lost limbs. 38, 105; of 
emotional feeling. 459 

Hallucinations, II. 114 ff.; hypna- 
gogic, 124; the brain-process in, 
122 ff. ; hypnotic. 604 

Hamilton, W., I 214. 215, 274,406, 
419, 569, 578, 6^2; II. 113 

Hammond, E , II. 673 

Haploscopic method. II. 226 

Harlbss. II. 497 

Hartley, I. 553. 561, 564, 600 

Hartmann, R, 11.416 

Hasheesh-delirium, II. 121 

Hearing, its cortical centre, I. 52 

Heat, of mental work, I. 100 

Hecker. II. 480 

Hroel, I. 163, 265, 366, 369, 666 

Heideniiain, I. 82 

Helmholtz, H., I. 285; on atten- 
tion, 422, 437. 441; on discrimi- 
nation, 504, 516-21; time as a 
category, 627-8: after- images, 645, 
648; on color-contrast, II. 17 ff.; on 
sensation, 33; on cochlea, 170; oo 
convergence of eyes, 200; viaioo 



INDEX. 



with inverted liead, 213; on what 
marks a sensation, 218 if., 24S)-4; 
on entoptic objects, 241-2; on 
contrast in seen moyement, 247; 
on relief, 257; on measurement of 
the field of view, 266 ff.; on theo- 
ry of space-perception, 279; on 
feeling of innervation, 498, 507, 
510; on conservation of energy, 667 
Hemiamblyopia, 1. 44 
Hemianopsia, I. 41, 44; II. 78 
Hemispheres, their distinction from 
lower centres, I. 20; their educa-* 
tion. 24, 67; localization of func- 
tion in, 80; the exclusive seat of 
coDsciousuess, 65; effects of de- 
privation of, on fro^s, 17, 72-8; 
on fishes, 73; on birds, 74, 77; on 
rodents. 74; on dogs. 70. 74; on 
primates. 75; not devoid of con- 
nate paths, 76; their evolution 
from lower centres, 79 
Henlb. J., 11.445,461.481 
Herbabt, I. 853, 418, 603. 608, 626 
Hereditary transmissidn of acquired 

characters, see inheritance 
Herino. E., on attention, I. 488, 
449; on comparing weights, 544; 
on pure sensation, if. 4; on 
color-contrast, 20 ff. ; on roomy 
character of sensations. 136 ff. ; on 
after-images and convergence, 200; 
on distance of double images, 230; 
on steieoseopy. 252; on reproduc- 
tion in vision. 260 ff. ; on move- 
ments of closed eye, 510 
Herzex, I. 58: on reaction-time 
from a corn, 96; on cerebral ther- 
mometry. 100: on swooning, 273 
Hitzio. 1.^31 

HoBBES. T., I. 573, 587, 594 ff. 
Hodgson, H., I. 374, 398 
HoiKisox, S. II., on inertness of 
consciousness, I. 129-30, 133; on 
self, 341, 347; on conceptual order, 
483; on association, 572 ff., 603; on 
vol un tar}' redintegration, 588-9; 
on the ' present ' in time, 607 
HoFFDiNG, H., I. 674; II. 455 
HoLBRooK, M. H., I. 665 
Holmes, O. W., I. 88, 405, 682 

HOLTKI, VON, I. 624 

Horopter, II. 226 

HousLEY, v.. I. 35, 59, 63 

HoKwicz, I. 314, 325-7 

Howe, 8. G., II. 358 

Human intellect, compared with 
that of brute, II. 348 ff.; depends 
on association by similarity, 
853 ff ; various orders of. 360; 



what brain-peculiarity it depends 
on, 866. 688 

Hume, I. 254; on personal identity, 
851-^ 360; assochition, 597; due 
to brain-laws. 564; on mental im- 
ages, n. 45-6; on belief, 29&-6, 
802; on pleasure and will, 658 

Hunting instinct. II. 411 

Huxley. I. 180-1, 254; H. 46 

Hyatt, A., II. 102 

Hylozoism, see Mind-stuff theory 

Hypersesthesia.in hypnotism, II. 609 
educa-'^^ypnotism, I. 407; II. 128, 851; gen- 
eral account of. Chapter XXVII: 
methods, II. 598; theories of, 596; 
symptoms of trance, 602 ff . ; post- 
hypnotic suggestion, 618 

Hysterics, their so-called anaesthe- 
sias, and unconsciousness, 1.202 ff. 

Ideal objects, eternal and necessair 
relations between, U. 689, 661. 
See conception 

'Ideas,' the theory of, I. 230; con- 
foimded with objects, 281, 276, 
278, 899, 521; they do not exist as 
parts of our thought, 279, 405, 553; 
Platonic, 462; abstract, 468 ff.; 
universal, 478 ff.; never come 
twice the same. 480-1 

Ideation, no distinct centres for, I. 
764; II. 73 

Identity, sense of, I. 459; three prin- 
ciples of, 460: not the foundation 
of likeness, 492 

Identity, personal, I. 238, 380 ff.; 
based on ordinary judgment of 
sameness, 334; due to resemblance 
and continuity of our feelings, 
336; Lotzeou, 350; only relativelv 
tnie, 372 

Ideo-niotor action the type of all 
volition. II. 522 

Idiosyncrasy, II. 631 

'Idomenians,' II. 214 

Illusions, II. S5ff., 129, 232 ff., 243- 
66. See hallucination 

Images, double, in vision, II 225-80 

Images, mental, not lost in mental 
blindness, etc., I. 50, 66: II. 73 

. are usiially vague, II. 45; vis- 
ual. 51 ff.; auditory. 160; motor, 
61; tactile, 165; between sleep and 
waking, 124-6 

Imagination, Chapter XVIH: it 
differs in individuals. II. 51 ff.; 
sometimes leaves an after-imaee, 
67; the cerebral process of, 68 n.; 
not locally distinct from that of 
sensation, 73; \& figured, 82 



INDEX. 



697 



Imitation, II. 406 

Immortality, I. 84^ft 

Impulses, morbid, II. 542 ff. See 
insiincis 

Impulsiveness of all consciousness, 
II. 526 ff. 

Inattention, I. 404, 455 ff. 

Increase, serial, I. 490 

Indeterminism, II. 569 ff. 

Inqersoll, R., n. 469 

Inheritance of acquired characters, 
II. 367, 678 ff. 

Inhibition, I. 43. 67. 404; II. 136, 
873; of instincts, 391, 394; of One 
cortical process by another, 588 

Innervation, feeling of, II. 286. 498; 
it is unnecessary, 494 ff.; no evi- 
dence for it. 499, 518 

, collateral, see vicarious func- 
tion 

Insane delusions, I. 875; II. 113 

Insistent ideas, II. 545 

Instinct, Chapter XXIV.: defined, 
II. 384; is a reflex impulse, 885 
ff.; is neither blind nor invari- 
able. 889; contrary instincts in 
same animal, 892; man has more 
than other mammals. 898, 441; 
their transitoriness, 898; special 
instincts, 404-441; the origin of 
instincts, 678 

* Integration ' of feelings, Spencer's 
theory of, 1. 151 ff. 

Intelligence, the test of its presence, 

I. 8; of lower brain-centres, 78 ff. 
Intention to speak, I. 258 
Interest, I. 140, 284 ff., 402-8, 482, 

615 ff., 572, 594; II. 812 ff., 344-5, 
634 
Intermediaries, the axiom of skipped, 

II. 646 
Introspection, 1. 185 

Inverted head, vision with, II. 218 

Jackson, Hughlings. I. 29, 64, 400; 

II. 125-6 
Janet, J.. I. 885 
Janet. Paul, I. 625; II. 40-1 
Janet. PiERRE.I.203ff., 227, 884ff., 

682; II. 456, 614 
Jastrow. I. 88, 548, 545; II. 44, 

135, 180 
Jevons. W. S., I. 406 
Joints, their sensibility, II. 189 ff. 
Judgments, existential, II. 290 
Justice, II. 673 

KANDiNsrr, v., II. 70, 116 
Kant, I. 274, 331. 844, 347; his 
' transcendental ' deduction of the 



categories. 360; his paralogisms, 
862; criticised, 363-6; on time, 
642; on symmetrical figures, II. 
150; on space. 273 ff.; on the real, 
296; on synthetic judgments a 
priori, 661. and their relation to 
experience, 664 

KinsBsthetic feelings, II. 488 ff., ^8 

* Kleptomania,' II. 425 

Knee-ierk, II. 880 

Knowing, I. 216 ff . ; psychology as- 
sumes it. 218; not reducible to 
any other relation, 219, 471, 688 

Knowledge, two kinds of, I. 221; of 
Self not essential to, 274; the rela- 
tivity of, II. 9 ff.; the genesis of, 
630 ff. 

Knowledge-odou^, I. 221 

KOnio, I. 542 

KRIE8, von, I. 96, 547; U. 258 

Kribhaber, I. 877 

Kttssmaul, a., I. 684 

Ladd. G. T.. I., 687; H. 8, 811 

Lamarck, II. 678 

Landrt, II. 490. 492 

Lanoe, a., I. 29, 284 

Lanqe, C, II. 443, 449, 455,. 457. 
460.462 

Lange, K., U. Ill 

Lanoe, L.. on reaction-time, mus- 
cular and sensorial, I. 92 

Lange, N., on muscular element in 
imagination, 1 . 444 

Language, as a human function, II. 
856-8 

LaromiguI:irb, I. 247 

Laughter. II. 480 

Lazarus, I. 624, 626; II. 84, 97, 
369, 429 

Le Contb. Joseph, II. 228, 252. 
265 

L^onie, M. Janet's trance-subject, 
I. 201. 387 ff 

Levy. W. H., II. 204 

Lewes, on frog's sp. cord, I. 9, 78, 
134; on thought as a sort of alge- 
bra. 270; on * preperception,' 489, 
442; on muscular feeling, II. 199; 
on begging in pup, 400; on lapsed 
intelligence. 678 

Lewinski, II. 192 

Liber ATORE. II. 670 

LiEBMAN, O. , on brain as a machine, 
I. 10; II. 34 

LiliGEOis, J., II. 594. 606 

Light, effects of, on movement, IL 
379 

Likeness, I. 528 

Lindsay. T. L . II. 421 



INDEX. 



LiFFfl^ on * unconscious ' sensmtions, 

I. 175; on theory of ideas. 608; 
time-perception, 682 ; on muscular 
feeling. II. 200; on distance, 221; 
on visual illusions. 251, 264; on 
space-perception, 280; on reality, 
297; on effort, 575 

LlSSAUBB, I. 50 

Local signs, II. 155 ff.. 167 

Localization, in hemispheres, 1.80 ff. 

Localization, II. 158 ff . ; of one sen- 
sible object in another; II. 81 ff., 
188 ff., I95ff. 

Locke. J.. I. 200, 280, 247, 849, 
890, 462, 488, 553, 568, 679; H. 
210. 806, 644, 662-4 

•Locksle;r Hall,' L 567 

Locomotion, instinct of, U. 405 

LoEB. I. 88, 44; II. 255, 516. 628 

Logic, II. 647 

Lombard, J. S., I. 99 

Lombard, W., II. 880 

LoTZE, I. 214; on immortality, 849; 
on personal identity, 850; on at- 
tention, 442-8; on fusion and dis- 
crimination of sensations, 522; 
on local signs, II. 157, 495; on 
volition, 528-4 

Louis v., I. 388 

Love, sexual, II 437, 548; parental, 
439; Bain's explanation of, 651 

Lowell, J. R., I. 582 

LuciANi, I. 44-5-6-7, 53, 60. 

McCosn, I. 501 

Mach, E., on attention, I. 486; on 
space-feeling, 449; on time feel- 
ing. 616, 635; on motion-contrast, 

II. 247; on optical inversion. 255; 
ou probability. 258; on feeling of 
innervation, 509, 511 

Magnitude of differences, I. 530 ff. 

Malebranchk, II. 9 

Manouvrier, II. 496 

Mania, transitory. II. 460 

Man's intellectual distinction from 

brutes. II. 348 ff. 
Manskl, H. L . I. 274 
Mantegazza. p., II. 447, 479, 481 
Marcus Aurelius, I. 318. 817; II. 

67.-) 
Makilliek. L.. I. 445; n. 514 
Marique, 1. 05 
Martin, H. N.. 99; II. 3 
Martineau, J.. I. 484 ff.. 506; II. 9 
Maudsley, H., 1. 113, 656 
Maury, A., II. 83, 124, 127 
Mechanical philosophy, the. 11 

66611. , 

Mechanism vs. intelligence, I. 8-14 



Mediate comparison, I. 489 

Mediumship, I. 228. 398 ff. 

Mehner, I. 618 

Memory. Chapter XVI : it depends 
on material conditions, I. 2; the 
essential function of the hemi- 
spheres, 20; lapses of, 878 ff., in 
hysterics, 884 ff.; favored by at- 
tention, 427; primary. 638, 643; 
analysis of the phenomenon of 
Memorjr, 648: the return of a 
mental image is not memory. 649; 
memory's causes. 653 ff. ; tne re- 
sult of association, 654; conditions 
of ^ood memory, 659; brute re- 
tentiveness, 660; multiple associa- 
tions, 662; improvement of mem- 
ory, 667 ff . ; its usefulness depends 
on forgetting much, 680; its decay, 
688; metaphysical explanations of 
it, 687 ff . 

Mentality, the mark of its presence, 
18 

Mental operations, simultaneous, L 
408 

Mercieb, C, on inertness of con- 
sciousness, 185; on inhibitioo, IL 
588 

Merkel. I. 542-8-4 

Metaphysical principles, II. 669 ff. 

Metaphysics. I. 187, 401 

Meyer's experiment on color-con- 
trast, II. 21 

Meyer, G. H., 11.66, 97-8 

Meynert, T., his brain-scheme, I. 
25 64 72 

Mill, James. I. 277, 355, 470, 476, 
485, 499,597,651,653 

II. 77 

Mill, J. S.. I. 189; on unity of 
self, 356-9: on abstract ideas, 470; 
methods of inquiry. 590: on in- 
finitude and association, 600; on 
space, II. 271: on belief, 285. 322; 
on reasoning, 331; on the order 
of Nature, 634; on arithmetical 
propositions. 654 

Mills, C. K., 1. 60 

Mimicry, its effects on emotion. II. 
463-6 

Mind, depends on brain -conditions, 
I. 4, 553 ; the mark of its pres- 
ence. 8; difficulty of stating its 
connection with brain, 176; 
what psychology means by it, 
183 **16 

Mind-Stuff theory. Chapter VI: a 
postulate of evolution, 1. 146, 176: 
some proofs of it. 148; author's 
interpretation of them. 154; feel- 



INJJEX. 



ings cannot mix, 157 ff., II. 2, 

103 
Miser, aasociatiooist explanation of 

the, II. 428 fl. 
Mitchell, J. K., U. 616 
Mitchell, S. W., I. 381; II. 88-9, 

880 
Modesty, II. 485 
Moll, A., II. 616 
M' LYNEUX, II. 210 
Monadism, I. 179 
Monism. I. 866-7 
Monkey's cortical centres, I. 84-5, 

46, 59 

MONTOOMERT, E., I. 158 

M«ral principles, II. 689, 673 

Morris, O. 8., I. 865 

MoBso, on blood-supply to brain, I. 
97-9 

'-^, plethysmographic researches, 
II. 878; OD fear, 419, 488 

Motor centres, I. 81 ff. 

'Motor circle,' II. 588 

Motor Istrands, I. 88; foi special 
muscles, I. 64 

Motor type of imagination, II. 61 

Movement, perception of, by sen- 
sory surfaces. II. 171 ff.; part 
played by.in vision, 197,208,284-7; 
the, Production of. Chap. XXII 
requires guiding sensations, 490; 
illusory perception of. during au- 
(Bstbesia, 489; results from every 
kind of consciousness, 526 

MozAKT, I. 255 

MuLLER, G. E., I. 445, 456-8; II. 
198, 280, 491. 502 508. 517 

MuLLER, J.,I. 68; II. 640 

MULLER. J. J., II. 218 

MuLLEU, Max, I. 269 

MuNK, 11.. I. 41-3-4-5-6, 57-^9. 68 

MuNSTERBERG. ou Mcyuert's 
scheme, I. 77; on reaction times 
with intellectual operation, 482: 
on association, 562: on time-per- 
ception, 6'iO, 687; on imagination, 
n. 74: on muscular sensibility, 
189; on volition, 505; on feel- 
ing of innervation, 514: on asso- 
ciation. 590 

Muscles, how represented in nerve- 
centres, I. 19 

Muscle reading, II. 525 

Muscular sense, its cortical centre, 
I. 61; its existence. II. 189 ff., 197 
ff.; its insignificance in space-per- 
ception. 197-203, 234-7 

Music, its accidental genesis, U. 
627 ; 687 

MuBSBT. U. 548 



Mutilations, inherited, II. 627 
Myers. F. W. H.. I. 400; 11. 188 
Mysophobia, 11. 485, 545 

Nature, the order of, its incogm 
ence with that of our thought, II. 
634 ff. 

Naunyn, I. 55. 

Necessary truths are all truths of 
comparison, II. 641 ff.. 651, 662. 
^eQ experience, a priori connection $, 
etc. 

Nbiglick, I. 548 

Neural process, in perception . I. 78 
ff. ; in habit, 105 ff. ; in association, 
566; in memory, 655; in imagin- 
ation, II. 68 ff.: in perception, 82 
ff , 108 ff.; in hallucination, 122 
ff.; in space-perception. 148: in 
emotion, 474; in volition. 580 ff.; 
in association, 587 ff. 

Nitrous oxide intoxication, II. 284 

Nonsense, how it escapes detection, 
1.261 

Normal position in vision, II. 288 

NOTHNAGEL. I. 51, 60-1 

Number, II. 658 

Obersteiner, I. 87. 445 

Object, use of the word, I. 275. 471; 

confusion of, with thought that 

knows it, 278 
Objective world, known before self, 

L 278: its primitive unity, 487-8; 

ditto. II. 8 
Objects versus ideas. I. 280, 278 
Old-fogyism, II. 110 
Orchanskt, I. 95 
• Overtone ' (psychic), I. 258, 281-2 

Pain, I. 148. its relations to the 
will. II. 549 ff., 583-4 

Paneth, I. 64, 65 

Parallelism, theory of, between 
mental and cerebral phenomena, 
see Automaton-theory 

Paresis of external rectus muscle, 
II. 236, 507 

Parinaud, II. 71 

Partiality of mind, see interest, tele- 
ology, intelligence, selection, es- 
sences 

Past time, known in a present feel- 
ing, I. 627; the immediate past 
is a portion of the present dura- 
tion-block, 608 ff. 

Patellar reflex, II. 380 

Paths through cortex, I. 71; their 
formation, 107-12; II. 584 ff.; 
association depends on them, 567 



700 



IMDEX. 



if.: memory depends on them, 
656ff.,661. 686 

Paulhan, F., I. 250: 408: 670: 11. 
64; 476 

Pedagogic remarks: I. 131-7; II. 
110, 401-2, 409, 463, 466 
■ Perception. Chapter XIX : com- 
pared with sensation, II. 1, 76: 
Involves reproductive processes, 
78: is of probable objects, 82 If. ; 
not an unconscious inference, 111 
if. : rapidity of, 131 

Perception-time, II 131 

Pbrez. B, I. 446; II. 416 

Personal equation, I. 413 

Personality, alterations of. I. 878 ff. 

Pplugbr, on frogs spinal cord, I. 
9. 134 

Philosophies, their test, II. 312 

Phosphorus and thought, 1. 101 

Phrenology, I. 27 

Pick, E.. I. 669 

PlTRES. I. 206 

Plancbette-writing, I. 208-9; 393 
ff. 

Plasticity, as basis of habit, defined, 

I. 105 
Platner, II. 208 
Plato. I. 462 
Play, II. 437 

Pleasure, as related to will, I. 143; 

II. 549: 583-4 

Poiuts, identical, theory of, II. 222 

tf. 
Possession, Spirit-. I. 393 ff. 
Post -hypnotic suggc'stiou, II. 613 
Pmclical iutcMesis, their effects on 

discrimiuutiou, I. 515 ff. 
Prayer, 1. 316 
' Preperception,' I. 439 
Present, the present moment, I. 606 

ff. 
Preyer, II. 403 
Probability determines what object 

shall be perceived, II. 82, 104, 

258. 2(30-3 
Problematic conceptions. I. 463 
Problems, the process of solution 

of, I. .•)84 
Projectijn of sensjitions, eccentric, 

II. ai If. 
Projection, theory of, II. 228 
Psycholoirist's fallacy, the, see FcU- 

iitci/ 
Psvciio physic law, I. 5IJ9 
Pugnacity. II 409 
Pure Ego. I. 342 
Putnam. J. J.. I. Gl 

Questioning mania, II. 284 



Rabier, I. 470. 604 

Rational propositions. II. 644 

Rationality is based on apprehension 
of scries, II. 659 

Rationality, postulates of, 670. 677 

Rationality, sense of, I. 260-4; II. 
647 

Reaction-time. I. 87; simple, 88; 
what it measures is not conscious 
thought, 90; Lange's distinct ic.u 
between muscular and sensorial, 
92; its variations, 94-7; influenced 
by expectant attention, 427 IT.; 
after intellectual process. 432; after 
discrimination, 523; after associa- 
tion, 557; after perception, II. 131 

Real size and shape of visual ob- 
jects, II. 179, 287 ff. 

Reality, the Perception of. Chapter 
XXI; not a distinct content of 
consciousness, 286; various orders 
of, 287 ff. ; every object has tame 
kind of reality, 291 ff. ; the choice 
of, 290; practical, 293 ft.; means 
relation to the self, 295-8; relation 
of sensations to, 299; of emotions, 
306 

Reason, I. 551. See Logic 

Retisoniug, Chapter XXII; its defi- 
nition, II. 325; involves the pick 
ing out of essences, or sagacity, 
329. and abstniclion, 332; ft* 
utility depends on the peculiar 
constitution of this world, 337 ff.,. 
651; depends on association by 
similarity, 345 

Recall, I. 578, 654 
Recepts.'II. 827, 349, 351 

Recognition, C73 

Recollection, voluntary .')85 (T. 

Redintegration, I, 569 

•Reductivcs,'II 125, 291 

Reflex acts, I. 12- reaction-time 
measures one. DO: concatenated 
habits arc consiiiuted by a chain 
of, 116 

Reid, TnoMAS, I. 609, 78; II. 214 
216, 218, 240, 309 

Relating principle, I. 687-8 

Relation, feelings of. I. 243 ft 
.space relations. II. 148 ff. 

Relations inward, between ideas. II. 
0:^9. 642. 661, 671; the principle of 
transferred, 646 

Relief, II. 254-7. See ^urd dtmen^ 
sion . 

Renouvier, Ch.. I. 551; II. 309 

Reproduction in memory, I. 674 fL. 
654; voluntary. 585 ff. 

Resemblance. I. 528 



INDEX. 



701 



Respiration, effects of sensoiy stim- 
uli upon, II. 876 

KestitutioD of function, I. 67 ff. 

Restoration of function, I. 67 ft. 

Retention in memory, 653 ff. 

Retentiveuess, organic, I. 659 ft. ; it 
is uncliaugeable, 668 ff. 
^jRetinal ima^e, II. 92 
^Retinal sensibility, see msian, ipcfee, 
identical points, third dimensitm, 
prafeetion, etc. 

Revival in memory, I. 574 ff., 654 

Reynolds. Mary, I. 881. 

RiBOT, Th., I. 875; on attention, 
444, 446, 680. 682 

Rkhet, Ch.. I. 688, 644-6-7 

RiEHL. A., II. 82 

Robertson, G. C. I. 461; BL 86 

Romanes, G. J. II. 95, 182, 827-9, 
349, 351, 855, 897 

Romantic and classic, II. 409 

Rosenthal, 79 

Ross, J., I. 56-7 

RoYCE. J., I. 874; n. 816-7 

ROYER-COLLARD, I. 609 

Rutherford, II. 170 

Sagacity, II. 881, 848 

Sameness. I. 272, 459. 480, II. 650 

SCHAEFER, W., I. 85. 58. 59, 68 

ScHTFF. M., I. 58, 78, 100 

SCHMID. I. 688 

Schmidt, H. D.. II. 899-400 

Schneider. G. H., on Habits, I. 
112, 118-20; on perception of 
motion, II. 173; on evolution of 
movements, 880; on instincts, 
387-8, 411, 418, 489 

Schopenhauer, II. 88, 278 

SCHKADER, I. 72 ft. 

Science, the genesis of, II. 665-9 

Sea-sickness, susceptibility to, an 
accident, II. 627 

Seat of consciousness, I. 65; of Soul, 
214; of sensations, no original, 
II. 84 

Sciences, the natural, the factors of 
their production, II. 683 ft.; a 
Turkish cadi upon, 640 ; pos* 
tulate things with unchangeable 
properties, 656 

Sciences, the pure, they express re- 
sults of comparison "exclusively, 
II. 641; classitications. 646; logic, 
647; mathematics, 658 

Secret! veness, II. 432 

Beguin, I. 48. 75 

Selection, a cardinal function of 
consciousness, 284 ft., 402. 594; 
II. 584; of visual reality, II. 177 



ft., 237; of reality in general. 290^ 
294; of essential quality, 838. 87a 
634 

Self, consciousness of. Chap. X; 
not primary, I. 278; the empirical 
self, I. 291; its constituents, 292; 
the material self, 292; the social 
self, 29.3; the spiritual self, 296; 
resolvable into feelings localized 
in head, 800 ft. ; consciousness of 
personal identity, 330 ft.; its al- 
terations, 378 ir. 

Self-feelini. I. 805 ft. 

Self-love, I. 317; the name for ac 
tive impulses and emotions to- 
wards certain ohfeets ; we do not 
love our bare principle of indi 
viduality, 323 

Self-seeking. I. 307 ft. 

Selves, their rivalry, I. 809 ft. 

Semi-retlex acts, I. 18 

Sensation, does attention increase 
its strength? I. 425; terminus of 
thought, 471 

Chapter XVII; dlstin^ished 

from perception, II. 1, 76; its cog- 
nitive function, 8; pure sensation 
an abstraction, 8; the terminus of 
thought, 7 

Sensations, are not compounds, L 
158 If.; II. 2; their supposed com* 
bination by a higher principle. 

I. 687: IL 27-80; their influ- 
ence on each other, II. 28-80; 
their eccentric projection. 81 ft., 
195 ft.; their localization inside of 
one another. 183 ff. ; their relation 
to reality, 299 ff.; to emotions, 
458; their fusion, see Mind-Btufi 
theory 

Sensationalism, I. 248; criticised 

by spiritualism. 687 
ditto. II. fi: in the field of 

space-jKTception, criticised, 216 

ft. ; its difficulties,281-7; defended. 

237 ff.. 517 
Seroi, II. 34 

Serial increase, I. 490; II. 644 
Series, II. 644-51, 659 ff. 
Seth, a., II 4 
Sexual function, I. 22 
Shadows, colored. II. 25 
Shame. II. 435 
Shoemaker, Dr., I. 278 
Shynean. II. 430 
Sight, its cortical centre, I. 41 ff., 

Sign-making, a differentia of man, 

II. 356 

Signs, local. II. 155 ff. 



702 



INDEX. 



BiQWART, C, II. «S4-6 
BiKOBSKT, II. 465 

Bimilarity, I. 628 

Similarity, association by, I. 578; 
II. 845, 858 

Bkin, discrimination of points on, 
1.512 

dkep, partial consciousness during, 
I. 218 

Sociability, 11. 480 

Bomnanibulism, see hypnotism, 
hj/hUrics 
\J&o\i\, theory of the, I. 180; inac- 
V cessihility of, 187; its essence is 
to think (according to Descartes), 
200; seat of, 214; arguments for 
its existence. 848 ff.; an unneces- 
sary hypothesis for psychology, 
850; compared with transcenden- 
tal Ego, 865; a relating principle, 
499 

Space, the perception of. Chapter 
XX; primitive extensitv in three 
dimensions, 11. 184-9; spatial 
order, 145; space-relations, 148; 
localization in, 158 ff.; how real 
Apace is mentally constructed, 166 
ff. ; pan played by movement in, 
i71-6; measurement of exten- 
sions, 177 if.; synthesis of origi- 
nally chaotic sensations of exten- 
uion, 181 ff ; part played by 
articular surfaces in, 189 ff. : by 
muscles, 197 ff.; how the blind 
VMjrceive space, 208 ff'.; visual 
ipace, 211-268: theory of identical 
Loints. 222; of projection, 228; 
difficulties of sensation-theory 
ex]>ounded and replied to, 231- 
268; historical sketch of opinion, 
270 ff. 

Spalding, D. A., II. 896. 898, 400, 
406 

Span of consciousness, I. 405, 640 

Speech, the ' centre * of, 1. 55; its 
misleading intluence in psychol- 
ogy, I. 194; thought possible 
williout it, 269. See Aphasia, 
Phrenology 

Bpenceu. his formula of 'adjust- 
meul,' I 6; on formation of paths 
in nerve-centres, 109; on chasm 
between mind and matter, 147: on 
origin of consciousness, 148; on 
•integration' of nervous shocks, 
151-3: on feelings of relation, 247; 
on unity of self, 354: on con- 
ceivability, 464: on abstraction, 
506: on association, 600; on time 
perception, 622, 639; on memory, 



649; on recognition, 678; on feel- 
ing and perception, II. 113. 180; 
on space-perception, 272. 282; oa 
genesis of emotions, 478 ff.; on 
free-will, 576: on inheritance of 
acquired peculiarities, 620 ff., 679; 
on * equilibration,' 627; on genesis 
of cognition, 648; on that of so- 
ciality and pity, 685 

Spinoza, II. 288 

Spir. a., II. 665, 677 

'Spirit-control,' I. 228 

Spiritualist theory of the self, I. 
842; II. 5 

Spiritualists, I. 161 

Stanley, Henry M., II. 310 

Starr, A., I, 54. 56 

btatistical method in psycholoiry, 
I. 194 

Steiner, I. 72-8 

Steinthal, I. 604: II. 107-9 

Stepanoff, II. 170 

Stereoscope, II. 87 

Stereoscopy, II. 228, 253. See Ihird 
dimension 

Sternberg, II. 105, 515 

Stevens, 1. 617 

Stevens, E. W., I. 397 

Stoky, Jean, I. 263 

Stream of Thought, Chapter IX: 
schematic representations of, I. 
279-82 

Stkicker, S, II. 62 ff. 
I Stkumpell. a., I. 376, 445. 489, 
I 491 
! Strumpell. Prof , II. J^53 

Stdakt, D., I. 406, 4*,'7 

Stumpf. C, on attention, I. 426. 
on difference, 493; on fusion of 
impressions, 522, 530-8; on strong 
and weak sensations, 547; on re- 
lativity of knowledge, II. 11; on 
sensations of extent, 219, 221 

Subjective sensations, I. 516 ff. 

Substance, spiritual, I. 345 

Substantive states of mind, I. 243 

Substitution of parts for wholes in 
reasoning, II. 330; of the same 
for the same, 650 

Subsumplion, the principle of medi 
ate. II. 648 

Succession, not known by succes- 
sive feelings. I. 628; vs. duration, 
609 

Suggestion, in hypnotism, II. 59ft- 
601; post-hvpnotic, 618 
' Suicide. I. 317 

Sully, J.. 1. 191; II. 79, 28t, 273, 
281. 322, 425 

Summation of stimuli, I. 83; of el-^ 



nmEX. 



703 



ments of feeling. 151; the lattei 

is inadmissible, 158 
Superposition, in space- measure. 

ments, II. 177, 266 ff. 
Symbols as substitutes for reality, 

11.805 
Sympathy, II. 410 
Synthetic judgments a prion, II. 

661-2 
Systems, philosophic, sentimental, 

and mechanical, II. 665-7 

Tactile centre, I. 58 

Tactile images, II. 65 

Tactile sensibility, its cortical cen- 
tre, I. 34, 61, 6i 

Taink, H., on unity of self, I. 855; 
on alterations of ditto, 876; on 
recollecting, 668, 670. On projec- 
tion of sensations, II 88; on 
images, 48, and their 'reduction/ 
125-6; on reality, 291 

TlKACs. II. 490 

Takok. G , I. 268 

Tayi.oic. C F., II. 99 

Tedium. I. 626 

Teleology, created by consciousness, 

I. 140-1; essence of intelligence, 
482 

involved in the fact of essences, 

II. 885; its barrenness in the 
natunil sciences, 665 

1 cndencry, feelings of, I. 250-4 

Thackekay, W. M.. II. 484 

Thermometry, cerebral, I. 99 

' Thin(^'.' II. 184, 259 

Thinking, the consciousness of, I. 
300 ff. 

Thinking principle, I. 842 
. Third dimension of space, II. 184 ff., 
" 212 ff., 220 

Thompson, D. G., I. 854; II. 662 

Thomson. Allen, I. 84 

Thought, synonym for conscious- 
ness at large, I. 186; the stream of. 
Chapter lA: it tends to personal 
form. 225; same thought never 
comes twice, 281 ff.; sense in 
which it is continuous. 287; can I 
be carried on in any terms, 260-8; : 
what constitutes its rational char- ' 
acter, 269; is cognitive, 271; not 
made up of parts, 276 ff., II. 79 
ff. : always partial to some of its ob- 
jects, I. 284 ff.; the consciousness 
of it as a process, 800 ff.: the pres- 
ent thought is the thinker, 869, 
401; depends on material condi- 
tions. 558 

'Thought reading,' II. 525 i 



Time, occupied by neural and mental 
processes, see recuitian'time 

unconscious registration of, 201 

Time, the perception of. Chapter 
XV; begins with duration, I. 609; 
compared with perception of 
space, 610 ff.; empty time not 
perceived, 619; its discrete flow, 
621, 687; long intervals conceived 
symbolically. 622 ff.; variations 
in our estimate of its length, 628 
ff.; cerebral process underlying, 
627 ff . 

TiscuER, I. 524, 527 

Touch, cortical centre for, I. 58 

Trance, see hypnotism 

Transcendentalist theory of the Self, 
I. 842, 860 ff.: cnticised, 868 ff. 

Transitive states of mind, I. 248 ff. 

Tbchisch, von, I. 414, 560 

TUKE, D. H.. II. 180, 418 

Taylor, E. B.. II. 804 

Tympanic membrane, its tactile sen- 
sibility, II. 140 

Tyndall, I. 147-8 

Ueberweo. I. 187 

Unconscious states of Mind, proofs 
of their existence, I. 164 ff. Ob- 
jections. 164 ff. 

Unconsciousness, I. 199 ff.; in hys- 
terics, 202 ff.; of useless sensa- 
tions, 517 ff. 

Understanding of a sentence, I. 281 

Units, psychic, I. 151 

Unity of original object, 1. 487-8; II. 
8; 188 ff. 

Universal conceptions. I. 478. See 
general proponiions 

Unreality, the feeling of, II. 298 

Valentin, I. 557 

Varying concomitants, law of disso- 
ciation bv, I. 506 

Vennum, Lurancy, I. 897 

Ventriloquism, II. 184 

Verdon, R, I. 685 

Vertigo, II. 89. Mental vertigo, 
809: optical, 506 

Vicarious function of brain-parts, I. 
69. 142; II. 592 

ViERORDT, I. 616 ff.; II. 154, 173 

ViNTSCHGAU, I. 95-6 

Vision with head upside down, IL 

218 
Visual centre in brain, I. 41 ff. 
Visual space, II. 211 ff. 
Visualizing power, II. 51-60 
Vocalization, II. 407 
Volition, see Will 



704 



INDBX, 



YoLKMANK. A. W., n. 198, 362 fr. 

YOLKMANN, W. YON YOLKMAB, I. 

627,829,681. 11.276 
Voluminousness.priiDitiye, of seiua- 

tioDS, II. 184 
Yoluntary thinking, I. 088 
Vulgarity of mind, II. 870 
VULPIAN, I. 78 

Wahle. I. 498 

Waitz, Th., I. 405, 682; H. 486 

Walking, in child, n. 406 

Walter. J. £., I. 214 

Ward. J., I. 162. 454. 548, 562, 

629. 688; II. 282 
Warren, J. W.. I. 97 
Watlakd. I. 847 
Weber. £. H., his * law,' I. 587 fT. 

On space -perception on skin, II. 

141-2: on muscular feeling, 198 
Weed. T.. I. 665 
Weibmann, a., n. 684 If. 
Wernicke's convolution, I. 89. 54-5 
' Wheatbtoiie*b experiment,' n. 

226-7 
WiGAN. Dr.. I. 890, 676; II. 566-7 

WiLBRAND. I. 50-1 

Will, Chapter XXVI; involves 
memory of past acts, and nothing 
else but consent that they shall 
occur again, II. 487-518; the 
memory may involve images of 
either resident or remote effects of 
the movement, 518-22; ideo-mo- 
tor action. 522-8; action after de- 
liberation, 528; decision. 581; 
«ffort. 585; the explosive will, 587; 



the obstructed will, 546; relaiion 
of will to pleasure and ^n, 549 ff. : 
to attention, 561; terminates in an 
*idea', 567; the question of iu 
indeterminism, 569; psvcholQgy 
must assume determmum. 616; 
neural processes concerned in 
education of the will, 579 ff. 

WiU, relations of, to Belief, II. 890 

Wills, Jab.. I. 241 

Witchcraft. 11. 809 

Wolfe, H. E., I. 674, 679 

Wolff, Chr., I. 409, 651 

World, the peculiar constitution of 
the. II. 887. 647. 651-2 

Writing, automatic, I 898 ff. 

WunDT, on frontal lobes, I. 64; on 
reaction-time, 89-94, 96, 427 ff.. 
525; on introspective method, 189; 
on self-consciousness, 808; on per- 
ception of strokes of sound. 407; 
on perception of simultaneous 
events, 411 ff.; on Weber's law, 
584 ff. ; association-time, 557, 660; 
on time-perception, 606, 612 ff., 
620. 634. On local signs, II. 155- 
7; on eyeball-muscles, 200; on 
sensations, 219; on paresis of ext. 
rectus, 286: on contrast, 250; on 
certain illusions, 264; on feeling 
of innervation. 266,498; on space 
as synthesis, 276; on emotions, 
481; on dichotomic form of 
thought, 654 

ZOllner*s pattern, II. 282