» i^'i!' ■ ! 'I'l'.-.i I Class 1^1 Book Copyright Iv COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. The Game of Mind A Study in Psychological Disillusionment By Percy A. Campbell New York XTbe Umicfeerbocfeer press 1913 ^ tf S L* Copyright, 1913 BY PERCY A. CAMPBELL Published March 19 13 Zhc •fcnicfcerbocfeer fl5ress, *Hew lorfe 0CI.A343977 CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I Introduction ..... i CHAPTER II The Game of Seeing .... 7 CHAPTER III The Game of Thinking . . .16 CHAPTER IV The Game of Knowing . . .26 CHAPTER V The Game of Feeling ... 34 CHAPTER VI The Game of Remembering . . 44 CHAPTER VII The Game of Consciousness . . 55 chapter viii The Game of Mind .... 71 THE GAME OF MIND A Study in Psychological Disillusionment CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Psychology may be defined as the study of the Game of Mind, as such. That mental life is of the essence of a game, or is conducted in accordance with a set of rules which are more or less arbitrary, appears even upon a slight consideration. On waking from the dreaming state, we clearly admit to ourselves that our minds have been playing a fanciful, and very likely a most absurd, game of conscious activity. Just as in the game of chess the hopes and fears of the players hang upon particular arrangements and movements, upon a simple board, of simple pieces or "men," not be- cause of any intrinsic mechanical or other excellence or inferiority in one arrangement or movement over another, but because of 2 The Game of Mind the arbitrary but accepted chess-rules, so the dreamer finds himself trapped in a lion's den on the one hand, or dwelling in marble halls on the other, simply because of the game-quality which so largely constitutes his dreaming state. Lions' dens and marble halls, as such, of course never enter at all into human consciousness. At best, therefore, we are at any time dealing directly only with images or mental symbols of these possible realities; and, as it happens, the dreaming game is not sufficiently practical in its methods fairly to assure itself, before going ahead, of the existence and actual presence of suitable realities in relation to which its symbolic items may have a practical signifi- cance. The game-quality dominating dreams is indeed axiomatic. Besides in the dreaming state, the game- quality of mind displays itself with peculiar prominence and arbitrariness in connection with a great variety of forms of drug-intoxi- cation. Oliver Wendell Holmes relates that he once inhaled, by way of experiment, a large dose of ether. There ensued within him a philosophical game wherein the very scheme and mystery of the cosmos seemed fully resolved to his consciousness. He Introduction 3 hastened, upon recovering from the main effect of the drug, to record in writing his ap- parently invaluable philosophical discovery. The result was the scarcely weighty sentence, "A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout." He had been the victim of a more than usually arbitrary and impractical game of mind. In a similar manner the drugs alcohol, chloroform, nitrous oxide, opium, belladonna, hashish, mescal and many others all have the power of inducing in their human victims forms of conscious activity which the normal consciousness of mankind classifies unques- tioningly as morbid and impractical mental games. Passing over also with a bare mention the hypnotic and posthypnotic states, halluci- nations, trances, deliriums, monomanias and insanities of the different kinds, all of which stand in our present review in a common abnormal class with drug-intoxications, we will begin at once the consideration of the widespread, as well as useful, mental game- quality as it exists in the normal conscious life of man. Normal conscious activity, considered in so far only as it manifests itself in the playing 4 The Game of Mind of clearly recognizable games, factors never- theless very largely in the life of the average human being. During childhood, games of active make-believe are especially numerous and absorbing, while later on in life the read- ing of fiction, the enjoyment of pictures, the being entertained at plays and operas, the cultivation of cult- and hobby-propensities and devotion to sports, keeps alive and strong within us the partly recreational, partly luxurious, principle of "normal" self-aban- donment to the intoxication of the rules-of- the-game. But the main province of psychology must always be not only the normal but the wholly practical side of mind. For this reason all those phases of mental life, possessing the game-quality, which we have so far con- sidered, must be thought of as together con- stituting but a psychological side issue. It is to the sober groundwork itself of mental life that we wish, in the end, seriously to apply the phrase "game of mind." More or less seriously, men have often suggested that waking life is really a sort of dream only. Nevertheless it is not by means of such an- alysis that we wish to bring sober thinking under the category of games. Granting the Introduction 5 practically substantial quality of our waking consciousness, we do not need on that account to deny the existence therewith of rules curi- ously governing it. We need only demand that its rules be somehow productive of practical results. The science of mathemat- ics carries out its operations by means of symbols, and therefore partakes of the game- quality. Its rules, however, are practical or good rules. Whence mathematics is a practical science. In the same way, mind carries out, as we believe, even its most serious operations by help only of symbolic bodily activities. But the characteristic game- scheme of the latter is the handiwork of practical organic evolution. Whence mental life partakes richly of the quality of practi- cality, and should by no means be character- ized as a dream. To give now a suggestion as to the contents of the succeeding chapters, we may say that for the main they will deal directly with the problem of the nature of mind, but that the evolutional problem of How the Body Has a Mind will also now and then claim a moment's attention. Our discussion of the problem of the nature of mind will take on a double 6 The Game of Mind aspect. The first necessity will be to make clear that mental life in detail does possess the game-quality; and the second will be to demonstrate that the existence of this quality has not been given its due weight and signifi- cance in theoretical psychology. Just as a boy, playing much with tin soldiers, and always making believe that they possess the various qualities of human soldiers, may in time become an incompetent judge of just what qualities his tin soldiers, as such, do possess, so our psychological thinkers have, as we believe, lost, or rather have never at- tained to, the art of analyzing correctly those attributes which belong to the human mind itself. Thoroughgoing psychological disillu- sionment, therefore, is our general aim, and such disillusionment lies, we believe, in the direction of physiological or mechanistic psychology. Accordingly the chapters to which we proceed are to be devoted directly to a practical development of the mechanistic doctrine. CHAPTER II THE GAME OF SEEING In our search after the game-quality which permeates all normal phases of consciousness, and which has been and is the occasion of unnecessary mysteries and false theories in psychology, we will take as starting-point ocular vision, in its physiological and intro- spective aspects. The adage that seeing is believing makes it plain that sight insinuates itself with pecu- liar effectiveness into our conscious lives. We plainly have the feeling that its dealings with us are all open and aboveboard. This feeling is to a degree well founded. Rela- tively to our other types of sense-perception, sight is an affair of rich and clean-cut detail. Such being the case, it will be psychologically a most salutary step to force ourselves to the direct recognition of how greatly vision is controlled and constituted by rules and mere make-believes of the visual game. 7 8 The Game of Mind When we look at a landscape a perfectly concrete sense of distance impresses itself upon our consciousness. Nevertheless the definite visual entity which we can actually call our own is no more a remote object to us than is the chemically active image on a camera-plate a remote object to it. What we see depends immediately not at all upon the existence of a real landscape, but entirely upon the physical condition of the retinas at the instant. Supposing then, as is the case, that we seem to see a world of things as remote or distant from us, it follows that this remarkable phenomenon of seeing results somehow from our trained sense in illusion and make-believe. William James, in the Preface to his Psychology, speaks of his chapter on Space- perception as a "terrible thing." What might suffice to make it a terrible thing is the fact that in reality we do not perceive space at all, but only make believe and tell our- selves that we do. If a boy were to attempt a serious treatise explanatory of how the cholera had decimated his army of tin soldiers, he would indeed make a terrible thing of the self-imposed and fanciful task. But, as it happens, the discussion of space-perception The Game of Seeing 9 remains a terrible thing even when considered from the correct standpoint of its being a game of mind; terrible, at any rate, in its antagonism to the common-sense dictates of direct introspection. Professor James's chap- ter is one of real enlightenment. Briefly stated, the visual sense of remoteness is based principally upon activities of the nerves and muscles of ocular accommodation; but besides this the brightness and general ap- pearance of objects, their apparent size, etc., also enter into the symbolic equation of remoteness on the mental side. With this surprising state of things staring us out of psychological countenance, it is necessary to admit that the art of introspec- tion is theoretically, though not to the same extent practically, much at fault. Practi- cally the results largely justify the rules of the game. Our shorthand psychology, as it may be styled, is not only fairly effective in its quick approximations to the facts, but, in at least some shorthand form, seems indispensable in everyday living. Seriously to study the nature of mind, however, re- quires that a mental tin soldier, so to speak, be recognized as such in whatever disguise it may be successfully parading. In this io The Game of Mind way, little by little, as we proceed in our study of the game of mind, our discovery of a whole regiment of these mental tin soldiers will allow us to overcome our allegiance to much absurd and false psychological theory. In the present connection we are now pre- pared, when unsophisticated reasoning would tell us that a camera, for example, cannot see, to make reply, "Neither can a man see in the impossible sense in which that mental game is surprisingly conceived by everyday, shorthand psychology." Another and well-known fact in connection with vision is the inverted, and of course doubled, condition of our retinal images of objects. This condition certainly is a most curious one, and naturally suggests the ex- periment of attempting to induce our minds to perceive things thus upside down and double. As it happens, however, this ex- periment seems altogether doomed to failure. By some deep-seated, corrective process, not open apparently to introspective control or even analysis, we persistently see things upright and single as they really are. Thus the domination in things visual of (good) rules of the game is again made mani- fest, while the introspective faculty is again The Game of Seeing n seen to be theoretically weak and faulty. This impotence of direct introspection in connection with visual perception has an analogue, which we may mention in passing, in the ignorance of the average user of the opera-glass as to its structure and theory of operation. In this latter instance the play is the thing, not the properties of flint glass or the theory of lensic images. Similarly in life the business of the game of mind is to know not itself but the practical matters of the moment. Hence it happens that a real analytic study of the game of seeing, or of the game of mind in any one of its phases* becomes, from its teleological foreignness to our everyday standard of thought, a "terrible thing." As before seen, those nervous and other processes in the eye and brain and body which are habitually excited into being in the organic complex of man by the fact of remoteness of objects are just those elements out of which the game of seeing constructs its visual equivalent of remoteness in the concrete. Likewise the symbolic equivalents for visual uprightness and visual singleness are the habitual bodily accompaniments of objective uprightness and singleness, irre- 12 The Game of Mind spective of whether these processes are themselves either upright or single when considered as objects or processes. Mind is not a workshop wherein the qualities of things are manufactured and marshaled each in its own substance, but it is a device for doing just that thing with the symbolic representations of those qualities. Now there are practical reasons why representa- tions — as is seen in the case of mathematical symbols — are not in the least duplicates or models of the things they symbolize. The topsy-turvy state of things which the inverted retinal images signalize has its analogue in the illusion to which we have all been victims, at some time, when seated in a stationary railroad-train alongside of which another train has slowly started into motion. For the moment the illusion has been perfect that our own train and ourselves were moving. The difference between this experience and those of the game of seeing is that the one quickly finds a corrective for itself, while the others never do. A second difference is that whereas it would be equally possible for our own train to be moving in place of stationary, it is absolutely impossible for the qualities of objects themselves, rather than symbolic The Game of Seeing 13 representations of them, to enter into our minds. We may add that besides possessing the advantage of cosmic possibility, these symbolic equivalents are such as to serve well the required purposes of mind. At the same time, however, we all stand in need, on the theoretical side, of a psychological awak- ening or disillusionment vastly more sur- prising and enlightening than that of the illusioned passenger who comes suddenly to the realization that his unquestioned infer- ence has been just wrong. The task at hand is that of relegating to the domain of illusion and make-believe the whole surprising ap- pearance of extramechanistic mental reality and function to which everyday psychology still surrenders itself so easily. Passing to other details of visual percep- tion, the game-quality still reveals itself. A case in point is the appearance of solidity which belongs so fundamentally to our visual pictures of three-dimensional objects. This particular item of the visual game-quality exhibits itself in its true character with fine effect in the insinuating solidity of stereo- scopic pictures. Another instance of the game-quality occurs in the important realm of pictures. The art of portraying the world 14 The Game of Mind of solid objects upon plane surfaces, and the complementary art or faculty of interpreting these portrayals according to the intent of their makers, are thoroughgoing examples of trained illusion and make-believe. Picture- making and picture-interpreting are games in make-believe which apparently are quite foreign to the animal mind, and whose culti- vation even by the races of men is not quite universal, since our pictures fail to convey their intended meanings to the lowest types of savages. Lastly we will mention the clear type of game-quality which belongs to the field of the optical illusions. Of optical illusions we may say that nothing is more perplexing to everyday, shorthand psychology, yet more enlightening to a scientific, thoroughgoing psychology. For shorthand psychology would have us believe that what we see neces- sarily exists as such outside ourselves. Sci- entific psychology, on the other hand, insists that visual perception is immediately in and of ourselves, the outside world being separate in its phenomena, and standing only sparingly related to the passing phases of our visual content. To sum up, the commonplace point of view The Game of Seeing 15 that seeing and seeming is a good and sound basis for psychological belief and psychologi- cal theory is rudely discredited by numerous surprising and disconcerting facts in the domain of visual perception. So far as concerns visual perception, at any rate, the ultramechanism of everyday psychology may be regarded as identical with the impos- sible suggestions of illusion and make-believe. CHAPTER III THE GAME OF THINKING The famous theorem of Descartes, "I think, therefore I am," may be accepted as sound mechanistic doctrine as far as it goes, though not propounded by him as such. To complete the theorem in mechanistic terms re- quires the following expansion: "I think, therefore, indeed, I exist as a representative of the very highest type of evolutional mechanism." It is to the support and discussion of this expression of the mechanistic doctrine that our study of the game of mind now leads us. In other words, our general standpoint is to be that mind circumvents the uniform physical laws of the cosmos to appearance only, or merely in so far as our everyday, shorthand psychological theory is a thing of demonstrable illusions. In speaking of the achievements of mind, we are apt to think of all mechanisms as 16 The Game of Thinking 17 suitably qualified only when spoken of as "mere" machines. As a matter of fact, however, the derogatory epithet "mere," as applied to an example of a high type of evolutional mechanism — i.e., organism — is not a little ambiguous. Machines, as manu- factured by man in his workshops, may indeed be spoken of as mere machines, though most of us who feel justified in thus speaking of them are not able ourselves to conceive and invent a first-class example of even that type of mechanism. But an evolutional mecha- nism, existing as a resultant of a world-old process of natural development, is not only not susceptible of invention by any one of us, but is also so far from being a thing capable of easy description that it may be regarded as a fairly inexhaustible field of discovery for the physiologists, anatomists and histolo- gists of the present and future times. Ac- cordingly, though we do suppose man to be a pure mechanism, he cannot be fairly spoken of as a mere machine. Now an unabridged dictionary has the distinction, as it seems to me, of being the greatest of all monuments to the genius of mind. As such, it necessarily reveals much of man's mental character and manner of 1 8 The Game of Mind being. Let us, therefore, designate man as a "living dictionary," and see what we are able to learn from this analogical conception. As a living dictionary, man never defines or discusses a word except in terms of other words. Or, if not in terms of other words, then in terms of pictures, etc. A partly personal incident may serve to bring this most fundamental truth of the game of thinking home to us. An old man, seated beside me in a car, peevishly complains that I am crowding him rudely and unjustifiably. A companion of mine suggests that I get him to "write it down on paper." A second would also have him "draw a picture of it." Now these side remarks, while subject to discount in their practical bearing, neverthe- less contain, if viewed from our present standpoint, a very world of suggestive psychological meaning. Briefly stated, the meaning is that the beginning and end of the game of thinking is a purely dictionary-wise defining or discussing of something in a variety of ways: namely, in the form of words — spoken, written, or suppressed under the breath ; of sketches — whether upon paper or in suppressed bodily tendencies; of ges- tures; of grimaces; and finally in the form of The Game of Thinking 19 other more or less obscure activities of the body. Now that this is a fair statement of the nature of the human game of thinking is, I believe, demonstrable. We think of a thing, not by means of the thing itself, but by the introduction of something else, which in turn has to be thought of in the same way. Even a philosopher never escapes this grim neces- sity of adding link after link to his conceptual chain with no possibility of finally settling the burden of meaning upon any one link whatsoever. Theoretically, at any rate, the game of thinking is a chain of links which simply will not come to an end, because each new link requires an additional link to which it can cling for support and from which it can borrow a meaning. In practice, how- ever, a chain of thought is generally aban- doned almost as soon as begun. For the game of thinking is only a means to an end; namely, the association of what is strange with what is familiar. Now the things which are "familiar" are legion. For example, to the student consulting the dictionary for the meaning of the word ' ' propolis, ' ' the definition ' ' bee-glue ' ' is such a mental link of familiarity. At this point his momentary chain of thought 20 The Game of Mind naturally breaks itself off short. Funda- mentally, however, he does this only on the practical basis of having been over some of the ground before. For what, according to the game of thinking, is bee-glue ? Evidently nothing at all so long as it remains unlinked in thought with other somethings. As it happens, however, the "familiar" term bee- glue is itself definable in terms of other things only to a very limited extent. The theo- retically infinite chain of thought quickly breaks down for want of suitable material. Beyond a certain point chemistry and the other sciences keep silence regarding the nature of bee-glue, — a silence which is observed in the case of all things else as well. Dictionary- wise, then, a man in his game of thinking continually keeps shifting the burden of meaning from one element on to the next, and never for a moment halts in this operation with the object of analyzing any single element as such. Consequently it is only chains of elements which make up the game of thinking, these chains losing all semblance of the mental quality immediately they are too fully resolved elementally. Let us note this as fundamental fact number one of the game of thinking. Fundamental The Game of Thinking 21 fact number two is the well-known psycho- physiological truth that special bodily activi- ties exist which can at all times be put in one-to-one correspondence with the elements of the game of thinking, and which, therefore, can serve as symbolic equivalents of the things, qualities and relations with which that game supposedly concerns itself. Thirdly, we have the fact that symbols are in practice the only type of reality which lends itself naturally to useful, general schemes of grouping or association. And, fourthly, we have the indubitable fact that purely sym- bolic representations of things do find en- trance and useful office in the activities of the mind. Singly and in combination these four fundamental facts point directly and unavoidably to the conclusion that the game of mind finds in the wealth of bodily activity and deportment of man precisely those elements which are necessary and sufficient for the make-up of its own peculiar system of fragmentary but multitudinous chains of thought. On the basis of this general conclusion, the analogical conception of man as a living dictionary becomes a definitely analyzable one. On the one hand, we have things, 22 The Game of Mind qualities and relations symbolized in the game of mind by bodily processes, and on the other hand, the very same realities are sym- bolized in the dictionary by two-dimensional characters done in printer's ink upon white paper. In all seriousness, moreover, we are able to say that any book composed and printed in accordance with the workings of the human mind has stamped upon it a definite impress of that mind. Were such not the case, the inverse influence of the book upon the minds of its readers the world over would be inexplicable. A piece of steel does not impart magnetism to anything unless it has first received a magnetization of its own. Similarly a book is able to dictate the play of mind in its readers only by virtue of the fact that the material of the book has itself been previously " mentalized," so to speak, through the intellectual efforts of its author. We are now in a position to disillusion ourselves of much false psychological doc- trine. In the light of man as a " dictionary set in motion," our everyday, shorthand psychology becomes analyzable very largely into the sort of make-believe that governs a boy in his play with tin soldiers. That The Game of Thinking 23 peculiar illumination, in the light of which mind fancies that it takes direct cognizance of things, qualities and relations, is seen to be an illumination lent merely by the rules of the game. Does man define, describe, discuss — atoms, the solar system, X rays, history, philosophy, time, space, right, wrong, mind, consciousness? So does the dictionary and other books. Can a man in his game of thinking make use of symbols for his own body, mind, his game of thinking itself? So does the dictionary, in its game of defining, employ symbols for its own parts and entity, i.e., paper, printer's ink, letters, words, sentences, a dictionary. Does man create books? So do books impress them- selves indelibly upon the minds of reading millions. To suppose that books are the creation of man's intellect, but that man's intellect exists independently of the creative power of books, is equally absurd to suppos- ing that in the natural order of things the hen came first and the hen's egg only after- wards. In closing this chapter on the game of thinking, it is only fair to state wherein we consider ourselves to be laboring under a difficulty. As distinguished from perceiv- 24 The Game of Mind ing, feeling, knowing and willing, thinking constitutes but a single phase of the gen- eral game of mind. Properly treated, the game of mind should be discussed in every- one of its phases simultaneously. To treat of them successively is much like try- ing to obtain a stereoscopic perspective by looking first at the right-hand view of a stereoscopic picture, and then afterwards at the left-hand view. The effect is indeed obtainable through agility and practice by this method, but the novice and the impatient are sure to miss the effect altogether. Could the games of perceiving, feeling, thinking, knowing and willing all be viewed simulta- neously in the mechanistic stereoscope we should not only save ourselves much labor in the attempt to unite the separate phases by artifice, but the final effect would no doubt appear far clearer and stronger. As it is, however, the necessity for discussing one phase of the game of mind at a time seems to be fairly unavoidable. In view of this situation, it is only nat- ural that the reader should already have observed a certain lack of psychological solidity in our treatment, and be in a mood to ask embarrassing questions. For exam- The Game of Thinking 25 pie, "If man is a mechanism, then what are pleasure, pain, remembrance?" Or again, "Is it not absurd to suppose that a form of mechanism should ever be able to discover and 'know' that it is just that thing and nothing else?" Or, more generally, "How is it possible to imagine that a mechanism, with nothing but symbolic physiological activities by way of mind-stuff, is able to concern itself with knowledge at all?" In reply to such questions as these we can say at this point only that they require for their consideration a recourse to phases of the game of mind, evolutional as well as individual, which we can discuss only in their proper chapters. For the present, however, we can, in the next chapter, give our attention to the Game of Knowing. The discussion of that phase of the game of mind should serve to clear up the general situation considerably. CHAPTER IV THE GAME OF KNOWING On the basis of our everyday, shorthand psychology, knowing is a faculty of the mind which concerns itself with things, qualities and relations first-hand or without the use of symbolism or make-believe. Our analysis of the elements of the game of thinking, however, has shown the absurdity of this situation. Returning to our interpretation of thinking man as a living dictionary, it is seen at once that our game of knowing is simply a particular linking or associating by succession of the symbolic equivalent of one thing with the symbolic equivalents of one or more other things. Theoretically the game of knowing is a chain of links without number. Practically, however, we do not bother ourselves in general to extend any particular chain of knowing beyond some link which can be further added to only 26 The Game of Knowing 27 through repetitions of our own past chains of knowing. As an example of such a broken chain of knowing, let us ask the reader the question, 1 ' How many days make a week ? " " Seven" is his "correct" answer, but he will observe that he does not think of attempting to elucidate in turn for himself the meaning of this word " seven." This however is not because he could, if he chose, do so in a theoretically finished manner. It simply re- sults from the fact that his game of mind is at least prepared at the moment to associate this word seven with any one of a dozen or more different, additional links from his potential vocabulary or system of symbolic equivalents. But a savage, or any one unacquainted with the English language, would never think of stopping a chain of knowing with the word " seven," whether spoken or printed. To him the word has no clearly defined potential linkages. It is simply not "familiar" ground. Now an analogy is not only valuable from the standpoint of likeness, but from the opposite point of view also of unlikeness. We have likened man to a living dictionary. Man's mental prerogative, however, consists 28 The Game of Mind in being non-stereotyped. Let us therefore analyze the mental attribute of plasticity, as distinguished from the stereotyped system of symbolism of the dictionary. There is a saying that history repeats itself. This means that all history, past and to come, might be delineated upon a surface like a map, the march of events taking a zigzag and eventually reticulated route over the same. Now the widespread map of any man's mental life is, to a first approximation, any good unabridged diction- ary. Therein is exhibited, at one time and all the time, a vast stereotyped content. Mental life, for its part, is a narrow line, projecting itself forward over this motionless map in a strangely meandering fashion. Thus it happens, for example, that a ship is a permanently pictured feature of the one, and but a passing phantasmagoria of the other. Or again, that the word "seven" is indelibly printed a thousand times in the dictionary, but is erased from the life of the mind for days at a time. In short, any particular element of the mind is an adap- tation to a momentary occasion, whereas occasions do not exist for the dictionary at all, but its whole worded content The Game of Knowing 29 lies spread out baldly over two thousand pages. The non-stereotyped nature of the human game of mind, then, depends upon choice, in a field where choice is eminently possible. We must hasten to add, however, that this ''choice" is entirely mechanistic. From the day of his birth to the moment of death a man makes progress through life in a mecha- nistic fashion. The only alternative to the continuous mechanistic game of life is a mechanistic suicide or death. According to a man's mechanistic structure and con- dition, and his mechanistic reaction to environment, so is his mentality. By hered- ity, training and habit, certain men occupy themselves with the search after the essences of things. These are our philosophical thinkers. But even in their case there is no "choice" except in the sense of mechanistic resultant. Likewise in their mental work they can no more escape from the region of symbolism, as it finds its medium in bodily activity, than a bird can fly out of the earth's atmosphere into interplanetary space. We all see a ship, for example, as a mechanistic consummation only, and the same is true of each and every element of thought and 30 The Game of Mind consciousness. In passing, we will simply remark that the difficulty, or present impos- sibility, which there may be in our confirming this by direct introspection, merely indicates a limitation on the part of the human game of mind which the mechanistic doctrine should be at no great labor to explain. Besides being non-stereotyped and linear, mental life differs from the system of the dictionary in that its types of symbols are more varied. The dictionary contains but two major types of symbols, printed words and pictures. Symbols of punctuation, etc., are distinctly minor. But mental life is so well supplied with major types of symbols that it can spare several of them altogether without irreparably handicapping itself. Thus a blind, deaf and mute person may achieve to a richness of mental life which puts to shame the mentality of a large proportion of normally endowed humans. Lastly, mental symbols are more mecha- nistically consequential. The symbolism of the dictionary is passive and self -conserved, that of the game of mind active and self- destructive. This tendency toward self- destruction is, however, checkmated by the The Game of Knowing 31 reparative power of three meals and seven hours' sleep a day. Now while the existence of the above differences should be freely admitted, it is necessary that these characteristic qualities of activity, mobility and multiplicity should not deceive us regarding the essential nature of mental life. Mentality is a phantasma- goria which tricks the unsuspecting obser- ver into an exhausting and inconsequential chase forever after its changing phases. A dictionary, for its part, can be analyzed into printer's ink and paper by taking it as a whole into one's hands, and then subjecting it to analysis at any particular page, line or letter. But immediately, during introspec- tive analysis, we make the discovery that this or that simple element of mind is plainly a bodily process rather than something un- known and unknowable, the headlong flight onward of our mental life disconcerts us with its passage into bits of feeling, imagining, willing, remembering, knowing or philoso- phizing, and we loosen our grasp upon the mechanistic discovery , and perhaps even deny to ourselves altogether its claim to recogni- tion. Thus, instead of being at liberty to deal first with the simple elements of the 32 The Game of Mind game of mind and only afterwards with the complex, the simple becomes overwhelmed by the complex with the proverbial rapidity of thought. This leads us to refer to the fact that in our introspective analysis we altogether fail to appreciate the truth that each mental element or shortest arc of the game of mind is tied down to, or as we should say, is con- stituted by, a bodily activity of some sort. In general we have in mind the fact that certain of the mental processes are at least accompanied by bodily processes, but we tacitly imagine that the mind proceeds on its own momentum, so to speak, between the intervals of bodily activity. In view of this situation, a useful and necessary psychologi- cal habit to acquire is that of asking our- selves, in season and out of season, the pointed question, "What at this instant is the form of bodily activity accompanying, i.e., con- stituting, the mental life of the moment ?" If consistently carried out, this program should gradually aid us to discover, behind the symbolism and make-believe of the gen- eral game of mind, that system of bodily activity which alone constitutes the reality of the game of knowing. The Game of Knowing 33 While still on the subject of knowing we wish to direct attention to the fact that our present study of the game of mind is indeed a perfectly legitimate inquiry, considered from the purely mechanistic standpoint. No doubt there is a tendency for the critical mind to cavil at a philosophical doctrine which reduces all knowing to the basis of a system of symbolism, and at the same time undertakes itself to know that such in fact is the case. The paradox, however, turns out to be a paralogism of the critic himself. For certainly there is from this mechanistic standpoint nothing essentially paradoxical in knowing symbolically the truth of any matter. Dictionary -wise, to keep returning to an analogy which we believe the reader will find helpful if he will but bear with it, — dictionary -wise a man may discuss anything under the sun — as well as other or impossible things — provided only he has the use of the necessary symbolic equivalents. A dictionary does not cease being a plain affair of printer's ink and paper, even in those parts wherein it discusses the natures of printer's ink and paper, and that particular combination of the two which constitutes the dictionary itself. No less privileged certainly ismechanisticman. CHAPTER V THE GAME OF FEELING To classify feeling as a thing of game-rules and make-believe is sufficiently startling. Yet our present discussion unavoidably leads us to do so. Perhaps the least opportune time for a man to attempt to philosophize and intro- spectively to analyze the significance of his feelings is during the progress of a racking toothache. At any rate, he would in all probability at that time have little sympathy with a theory which reduced his trouble to the basis of a game. The one thing that really concerns him then is his own sense of injured feelings. That thought indeed he propounds to himself, in actual words, or else their equivalent, from instant to instant. Therein he proves himself a monomaniac. Evidently, therefore, the victim of a tooth- ache is in no condition of mind to make an 34 The Game of Feeling 35 unbiased inquiry into his own particular system of consciousness. The reader, however, is not similarly incapacitated, and may be asked the question, 11 To what extent does the mere reiteration, by the possessor of the toothache, of the complaint that he is indeed feeling pain, influence or constitute that pain?" In other words, "If the victim were so organized that he need not perforce tell himself each instant that he is being hurt, would the hurt exist as such at all?" We are convinced that it would not. A toothache, mentally considered, is not a feeling which exists, arrayed in all its ugliness, whether this ugliness be pictured and complained of by its victim or not. This truth indeed seems almost self-evident immediately it is brought to our attention. For the alternative situa- tion is the absurd one in which a double existence is given to the same ugliness, a lack in economy which organic nature, whose working rule is the survival of the fittest — hence the most efficient — naturally cannot tolerate. Moreover the presence of such a dual existence is absolutely uncorroborated by the findings of introspection. It is true that 36 The Game of Mind our everyday, shorthand psychology con- ceives the ugliness of complaint as projected backwards into an ugliness complained of; but there is no more reason for supposing that this represents the true relation of things, than, in the analogous, visual case already referred to, that our personal vision is a bona fide activity at or to a distance. Accordingly the game-quality of the feel- ings stands revealed. A feeling is just what we tell ourselves it is. Apart from the assemblage of symbolic attributes by means of which we conceive it, no feeling has any mental existence whatsoever. Just as the ugliness of a toothache is wholly an ugliness of complaint, so the beauty of a landscape is, mentally, wholly the pleasure of our own rejoicing in it. The pain and pleasure we take in things is an activity, not a condition. We do not first feel the pain and the pleasure and then sorrow and rejoice. Instead we only sorrow and rejoice in a " correct 1 ' bodily way, pain and pleasure finding their whole content therein as discussional or symbolic constructs. The bearing of this theory of feeling upon the necessary nature of mind is apparent. On the basis of our shorthand psychology, The Game of Feeling 37 mind is something which can be pained, whatever that may be supposed to imply. Upon our present theory mind is rather that which can refer to itself as being pained. It is a question on the one hand of actually possessing a quality or manner of being, and on the other hand of simply making a sym- bolic statement to the effect that such a manner of being is possessed; and this irre- spective of whether, as is the case with pain, the suggested manner of being, like a geo- metrical "round square," is a thoroughgoing impossibility of nature. The distinction is seen to be sufficiently real when it is con- sidered that even a dictionary is capable, in its own stereotyped, mechanistically incon- sequential way, of doing precisely what our own theory requires of the mind of man. It all resolves down, on the " mental" side, to the use of symbolic activities, in part ar- ticulate, and in part not articulate. On the bodily side these activities help to consti- tute a mechanistic life such as the human organism, in its actual environing world, is fitted to live. In the light of this simplifying theory, let us analyze in a general way what happens mentally and bodily during the progress of a 38 The Game of Mind toothache. The sense-organ involved is the tooth, as in vision it is the eye. Mentally, then, a toothache is the mind's discussion of what is occurring in the tooth, just as vision is the unwitting discussion of what is occurring in the eyes. Now the mind discusses things, qualities and relations by means of symbolic bodily activities. Of these symbolic activi- ties, those constituting articulate speech occupy a large and important place. The activities of articulate speech, however, do no more than take their place along with the activities of many other bodily parts, and by no means monopolize mental life to them- selves. Now the body's symbolic discussion of a bad tooth is primarily not an articulate one at all, either outspoken or suppressed. The words frequently come too, but only by way of additional links to the chain of feeling which the bad tooth establishes over and over again in the victim's being. In other words, the bodily activity which symbolizes the ugliness of the bad tooth is a "familiar" one to the victim, and like the student's word "bee-glue," requires in practice no further elucidation. As it happens, however, this primary (but still more or less general) bodily activity, reestablished in a man's organism The Game of Feeling 39 from moment to moment like water-waves at a point of continued disturbance, is of so violent a nature that such primary stage itself is commonly overreached, and the complaint becomes an articulate one as well. What then is the form of bodily activity which constitutes the victim's primary com- plaint? To discover the answer to this question by the direct method requires an effective introspective analysis at such time as we are experiencing the "pain" itself. Unfortunately for the success of this sug- gested analysis, our shorthand psychology then steps in, as we have seen, and forcibly asserts its own pragmatic, evolutional prin- ciples. For in real life it is beside the point for a man to know the manner of his complaint in toothache, just as it is useless for him to know of the retinal activity of his eyes as such in his everyday game of seeing. The ugliness of the diseased tooth in the one case, and the world of things in the other, are the practically important factors. Hence it happens that the games of seeing and of feeling are full of make-believe, and our shorthand psychology thereof full of theo- retical absurdities. To avoid all this absurd- ity and make-believe it is doubtless necessary 40 The Game of Mind to investigate the feelings largely in a non- introspective manner, i.e., physiologically. At present, however, we are not in a position to make even this indirect analysis with mechanistic effectiveness or genuineness. To the physiology of the future we must look for aid in the detailed analysis of the charac- teristic activity-content of our feelings. In the meantime, we are at liberty to attain to a full recognition of the truth that the feelings are indeed not what they com- monly pass themselves off as being. Cer- tainly a man, according to his best direct judgment, is warranted in conceiving that the pain of a crushed finger lies in the finger itself. Nevertheless, the finger, the hand, and the whole arm may be amputated with- out, possibly, destroying the pain-sensation, or shifting its apparent localization to some other bodily part. In the face of such a fact as this we are simply driven to the theory that a feeling consciously exists here or there in the body in a symbolic manner only. Now certainly there is no other attribute of feeling, as analyzed by our everyday, short- hand psychology, which can pretend to be so weighty, so real, or so fundamental as to overstep the powers of a like symbolism. The Game of Feeling 41 Whence we find ourselves bound to the con- clusion that we get out of our feelings pre- cisely what, in a symbolic way, we put into them, and nothing more. To state our conclusion in psychological terms, we may say that our fancied feeling- sensations have turned out instead to be feeling-perceptions. The organism of man is too thoroughly linked and highly energized to hold itself to surface-conditions or effects. The simplest elements of mental life are reactions to or discussions of surface- or other conditions. Take for example that optical illusion-picture which consists in a bare outline of a flight of steps. One instant we perceive it as a flight of steps seen from above, and the next instant as the same steps seen from underneath. The transition from the former interpretation to the latter occurs with the rapidity of thought and without effort on our part : and not only involuntarily, but even in spite of voluntary effort to the contrary. Therein we have a splendid ex- ample of involuntary, non-articulate inter- pretation, which our shorthand psychology often persists in refusing to recognize as such. This "common-sense" psychology holds te- naciously to the notion that things are what 42 The Game of Mind they seem, — that the seeming of things is a true and immediate imaging of the things themselves. So far as the example just cited goes, however, it is seen that this sort of psychological doctrine is palpably false. Without attempting to show at this point that it is also false in other applications, we wish simply to urge attention to the circum- stance that it is just such an involuntary, wordless form of interpretation or discussion as the above which constitutes the ugliness of pain and the comeliness of pleasure. By all means let the reader make an experimental study of the subject of optical illusions in general, and ask himself at frequent intervals whether his game of perception as regards them is not truly illuminating in connection with his whole game of mind. As just indi- cated, man is a well-energized mechanism which responds readily and curiously to the stimulation of an optical illusion-picture on the one hand, and a diseased tooth on the other. In both cases the response is, without theoretical warrant, projected by shorthand psychology out of the activity-class in which it actually belongs, into an entity-class. Thus the activity of seeing becomes an extra-bodily vision of an illusory flight of The Game of Feeling 43 steps; and the activity of feeling becomes, similarly absurdly, the pain of the tooth as such. But stripped of the perspective of make-believe, sight and feeling both become pure mechanistic activities. The map and mystery of the game of mind lie revealed to a surprising extent in the strange phantas- magoria of the optical illusion-picture of double interpretation. CHAPTER VI THE GAME OF REMEMBERING Without the faculty of remembering, mind as we know it would be impossible. In a general way we may say that mental life and the stream of things rememberable are identical. Every mental element leaves a trace of itself behind it, at least for a moment, by means of which it is, or may be, recalled. This being the case, it is especially necessary to understand precisely what this faculty of remembering signifies and involves. We have all heard it related how a drown- ing man sometimes will, during the short period of his great danger, pass large portions of his life in mental review, and live over in memory a surprising number of its principal events. Now, according to the mechanistic doctrine, this sort of thing represents a reactionary quickening of the activities of the body at a time when its surroundings have all at once become abnormal and threatening. 44 The Game of Remembering 45 Normal life may be likened to a ball toss- ing gracefully at the tip of a fountain-jet. Strike the ball lightly and it regains its equilibrium again at some slight cost of time and oscillatory movement. Strike it harder and its movement becomes heavy and con- vulsive, and possibly results in a total loss of the ball's poised position. In a similar manner the game of mind sometimes prefaces its own end by a supranormal manifestation of its characteristic activities. We have here referred to the game of mind as if it were, like a tossing ball, wholly a thing of the mechanistic present. What then has the game of remembering to do with the past? The answer is that symbolically it does bring the past events into being again. Let us analyze the meaning of this. "Common-sense" psychology tells us that past events pass in review in our conscious- ness upon a plane which is at least somewhat tilted from the plane of the mechanistic pres- ent. The facts of physiological psychology, however, sufficiently controvert this notion. The brain is now known to be the special organ of retention, and remembrance is pri- marily a matter of the reconstitution of past events in symbolic terms. Along with this 46 The Game of Mind process of reconstitution or reconstruction there is, in the game of conscious remember- ing, a more or less definite projection of the reconstructed matter back into the past. This again is effected in a purely symbolic way, in the same manner as our visual pictures are projected to a distance in front of us, or as our complaint of a toothache is projected into the diseased tooth. The symbolism for remoteness in time is in part articulate, and in part of other forms than words. As already pointed out, there is no clear line of mechanistic demarcation between the bodily activities constituting speech, outspoken and suppressed, and the great variety of other forms of bodily activity which are involved in mental life. So long as a mental element can readily be linked with other mental elements, that is to say, provided the mental element be " familiar" ground to the individ- ual, it matters not whether it be the activity of the vocal organs or of some other part of the total bodily mechanism. This quality which each familiar mental element possesses of being linked at each moment, latently if not actively, with other elements is known in psychology as the asso- ciation of ideas, or more comprehensively, The Game of Remembering 47 mental association. Now remembering is evidently a matter of such mental association. It is a repetition, more or less complete, of a certain previously existing system of asso- ciations, together with an explanatory mental attitude which declares, in a symbolic manner, that this system of associations is an entity from out the past. A discussion of the mechanism of mental association is therefore here needed. Mental association depends, without the least doubt, upon the structure of the body, and more especially upon the general sys- tem of nerve-fibers and nerve-centers. It is generally taken for granted in physiological psychology that the brain is the seat of physiological and therefore psychological association. Nevertheless, on the basis that mental association is purely a sequence of bodily activities, it is necessary to trace out the succession of, and causal connection between, such bodily processes as are known to be involved in the general game of mind. Now each portion of the cerebro-spinal nervous system, probably, together with each organ or bodily part controlled by it in a motor way, or contrariwise affecting it in a sensory way, is at one time or another 48 The Game of Mind the seat of activities which belong to the game of mind. Psychology sometimes tells us very wrongly, and inconsistently, that a man's mind is not in the least located in his hands, his arms, his legs or his feet. On the contrary, amputations of the bodily parts are in general equally amputations of the mental parts as well. For the entity or system mind is either nothing at all, or it is the sum total from moment to mo- ment of the elements of mental life, which are bodily activities. Now take away from a man a hand, a foot, his tongue, his eyes, his ear-drums, his semicircular canals, and little by little the various seats of his bodily activities are lost to him, and this being, who before was a complete man, is no longer such either in body or in mind. It is, to be sure, true that a certain pain-sensation of the hand, for example, may persist without apparent marked change even after the amputation of the hand itself. It must be remembered, however, that such sensation is only an incident in or connected with the psychologi- cal life of the normal hand. The perceptions of touch, muscular activity, temperature, pressure, etc., which normally belong to or concern the life of the hand, are unques- The Game of Remembering 49 tionably as a system destroyed forever upon its amputation. Thus, assuming that the body and mind — "body and mind" being a convenient expression by which to denote the body as active in its " psychologically" mechanistic way — assuming that body and mind both " survive" an amputation or organic loss of any kind, then at any rate the survival is not a complete or unqualified one. Fundamentally, therefore, a mental activ- ity belongs as much to a hand, an arm, the vocal cords, or some other part of the body as to the brain. Just as in a telephone- system the central exchange is a necessary but not a sole factor in the normal talking circuit, so in general it must be conceded that the brain is not an all-sufficient, though it is a necessary, bodily organ in the carrying- on of the game of mind. A brain, isolated from the rest of the body, and yet continuing the game of mind by itself, is a monstrous conception. It takes, on the contrary, a representative amount of the bodily structure and substance — bone, blood, muscle, flesh, viscera, sense-organs — to make the game of mind even a possibility. And besides all this required structure and substance a 50 The Game of Mind characteristic energistic tone, shared by the whole, is essential. A human body, newly dead, may lack but the breath of energy appropriate to its parts to make it a truly conscious being again. Thus the game of mind is a concrete system of activities which stands solely upon the mechanistically consequential nature of its own varied content. Were a singer's bodily activities no other than those recorded by a phonograph, he would be as little a conscious being as is the reproducing phono- graph itself. By the same certainty a pho- nograph lacks, in being a man, only in those bodily activities (and so bodily structure) which it, as a phonograph and not a human organism, fails to possess. But they are legion. This much having been discussed, we are now in a position to recognize the truth that mental association is a thing of the body as a whole, not of the brain individually. While it is true that the motor response to a sensory impulse depends on the structure of the brain, it is also true that chains of bodily processes do not in general end immediately a sensory or centripetal activity has been thus handed on as an appropriate motor or centrifugal The Game of Remembering 51 activity. On the contrary, the centrifugal activity, in spending itself in one or another extracerebral part of the body, does not fail to affect in turn the sensory nerve-beginnings in that particular bodily part. Whereupon in general a new centripetal activity centers toward the brain, and is handed on in turn as a second centrifugal activity. Hence the tendency, which mental association exhibits, of maintaining itself indefinitely, a tendency which is held to only partially in practice on account of numberless sensory distractions, quick fatigue of bodily parts, etc. But after all the brain is involved especially intimately as a mechanistic factor in mental association. For the brain is par excellence that part of the body which is plastic to the molding influence of the game of mind. While the other parts of the bodily structure participate in the activities of the game only as tools or structures to be used as such, the mass of the brain is ever ready to put some part or component of itself at the service of the game of mind to be used merely as raw material. Now it is altogether prob- able that the structure taken on by this raw material, through the agency of mental life, is microscopic and suited to no other purpose 52 The Game of Mind than that of nervous intercommunication and activity. In other words, the raw material is molded into new or modified nerve-pathways through the brain. Taken as a whole, the brain may be considered as purely a switchboard by means of which afferent nerves stand or are put into commu- nication with efferent nerves. The system of the switchboard is vastly compound and intricate, and involves, besides a marvelous network of nerve-fibers, a system of energy- supply which is equally marvelous. But with all this wonderful complexity, it must be considered in its function as equivalent simply to the equality signs of algebraic equations. The first term of a mental equation is the united activity of one or another sense-organ, associated nerve-begin- nings and sensory nerve-fibers; the second term is the resulting activity of motor nerves and muscular and other parts. Between these two terms of the mental equation an associating activity, passing along some ramifying pathway of the brain, stands as the mental operation of equality. But as already seen, the equality signs in the brain are always to a certain extent under- going a new creation — a variation upon The Game of Remembering 53 themselves. This process, which belongs to the mechanism of the association of ideas, is, through the greater or less persistence of these new creations in the brain's pathways, a favoring condition towards the reconstitu- tion of past associations, i. e., of remembering. In this reconstitution the brain's office is to accomplish the work of cerebral association or linkage, the elements thus undergoing associa- tion being supplied by the remainder of the body. For, as already insisted upon, a mentally active human being is, in the game of remembering as well as in all the other games of mind, anything but a mere disem- bodied brain. Whence the game of remem- bering involves a more or less consistent duplication of former extracerebral activities of the body, together with revived intra- cerebral activities having the office of com- pleting their association or linkage into extended chains. This consummation of ac- tivities depends in turn equally upon the per- manence of general extracerebral structure, and a permanence of particular intracerebral structure as specially created in the past. To sum up, the brain is indispensably involved always in the game of remembering. By turns also the other consequential parts 54 The Game of Mind of the body enter therein as equally essen- tial seats of its activity. If anything, the latter parts stand even first in the mecha- nistic import of their processes. This high importance of extracerebral activities in mentality is a characteristic belonging equally to all phases of the general game of mind. CHAPTER VII THE GAME OF CONSCIOUSNESS Making adaptation of a well-known adage we obtain the improvised psychological prov- erb, "Conscious is that conscious does." Here, compressed into five words, we have the correct basis, as we believe, for the solu- tion of the psychological mystery of con- sciousness. Our discussion of the significance and substance of consciousness therefore takes the form of an elaboration of this very brief thesis. In our everyday, shorthand psychology, in which seeing and remembering are pro- jected out of their rightful category as pure bodily activities, and made to take on fancied attributes of remoteness in space and time respectively, the bodily activity of consciousness looms up as the vastest of all enigmas. Not content with the obvious interpretation of consciousness as a bodily behavior in which the human mechanism 55 56 The Game of Mind symbolically discusses or introspects itself — much as a dictionary, in its own modest way, does with regard to its own contents and substance — everyday psychology insists that man not only acts in an introspective or conscious manner, but is conscious. In thus making a distinction between consciousness as a type of behavior and consciousness as a manner of being, short- hand psychology has recourse to inaccuracy and haze of conception. For what it means to a being to be conscious, otherwise than in the fact of a succession of self -analytic mechanistic activities, shorthand psychology is wholly unprepared to tell. Fundamentally this distinction (without a difference) serves only as a peg upon which to hang an un- mechanistic psychology high and dry above the matter-of-fact world of scientific experi- ment and useful theory. Now in our study of the game of mind we all too naturally accord credit to man for circumstances which reflect back rather to the power and effectiveness of organic evolu- tion. Thus in place of the meaningless assertion that man acts consciously because he is a conscious being, the evolutional out- look forces us to the statement that man be- The Game of Consciousness 57 haves consciously because creative evolution has, through the millenniums, been molding organic nature into more and more curious and effective forms. Evolutionally we are all clay in the hands of the potter. Do we have bones and muscles? Then it is because organic evolution, not ourselves, has arranged it so. Do we see a world of images appar- ently outside ourselves and at a distance? Do we tell ourselves we are hurt when a tooth decays? Do we indulge in activities of the body which have organic imports, one activity being the complement, the discussion, the interpretation, the symbolism, of another? Then it is because of our evolutional struc- ture. If we have imagination, forethought, ambition, will, a certain freedom of mind, it is not true that we have endowed ourselves with these wonderful forms of activity. Life is a mechanistic trajectory, whose general course the evolutional past has already worked out to an exceeding nicety. In this trajec- tory the activity of consciousness, and the apparent freedom of activity which in our game of mind we know as the freedom of the will, take their places with as little ceremony or mystery as do the perturbations in the orbital course of a solar planet. Historically 58 The Game of Mind the whole grand trajectory of life exists down the ages as the resultant of a natural mecha- nistic selection of equally natural mechanis- tic variety. And this resultant stands to present-day man as a thing given. The factors of organic evolution thus relieving us of the necessity of explaining man's consciousness as a thing for which man himself is responsible, our psychological burden of analysis becomes vastly lightened. The simplification is analogous in degree to that we discovered in the psychology of the feelings when we acknowledged the fact that pain is a form of complaint only. To assure ourselves of the same, as well as to give the thesis, "Conscious is that conscious does,'* a satisfying measure of meaning, we will now proceed to consider what our opponents would be pleased to call mechanistic man sans consciousness. A mechanism worthy to be called mecha- nistic man must of necessity be a very extraordinary machine. Automatons made by human ingenuity are too little entitled to such appellative distinction to concern us in the least here. Even a normal man, in his sleeping hours, is for our present discus- sion not a good and sufficient starting-point. The Game of Consciousness 59 On the other hand, a somnambulist will serve the purpose very well. Suppose, ac- cordingly, a somnambulist-subject of ours to undertake a ramble through a daylighted woods. Then our first duty is to recognize the fact that this mechanistic subject has powers of associative and appropriate bodily activity which are very great indeed. Under the guidance of his several senses, he can walk and even run through the woods in a perfectly normal and even phenomenal man- ner. Upon his retinas fall in a normal manner the images of the objects about him. In his ears resound the noises of the woods and the noise of his own footfalls. Upon his spread-out skin play the effects of air currents cooling it, of branches and under- brush striking against it, of clothing restrain- ing and protecting it. In his body the particular energistic tone prevails which the larger activities of the body always induce. And all this activity in the sensorial parts is transformed and amplified through the agency of the central nervous system into appropriate and nicely measured and coordinated motor activities. Here certainly is an automaton which puts to shame any combination of the camera obscura, the recording and reproduc- 60 The Game of Mind ing phonograph, the dancing toy-figure, or what not, which man is ever likely to be able to invent. And yet even this somnambulist-subject does not, as we may suppose, even touch upon the domain of conscious activity. For conscious activity is, to be sure, neither plain walking, nor running, nor speaking, even as carried on under the exceptional guidance of the five senses. It is only vhen performed with accompanying self-analytic processes that these activities enter as elements into a more inclusive game of mind. As a matter of fact, then, our somnambulistic subject, though vastly clever in a limited mechanistic way, nevertheless falls short of the especial mechanistic world of consciousness. We are now, however, ready to permit his awaking to normal fullness of bodily activity, and to give ourselves over, the while and after- wards, to a realization of the truth that this growth in bodily life is really, for one thing, a development to a normal fullness of self-analytic bodily activity — which is consciousness. Now a man does not awake out of the somnambulant state — startled by a noisy partridge, as we will suppose — without the The Game of Consciousness 61 intrusion, and help, of much new mechanistic activity. For besides the operations of walking, seeing and hearing, there is a vast deal of other physiological activity possible to awakened man. This latter includes a surprising range of bodily self -analysis. Bodily self -analysis depends upon the ability which the general organism possesses of putting different parts of itself into the situation of mutually influencing each other. A raindrop, for its part, hitches slantingly down the window-pane of a rapidly moving railroad-coach, and possesses no mechanism in itself whereby it can at all discuss the matter. But self-analysis in man is a mechanistic consummation, and admits of endless variety as to the shifting combina- tion of the mutually influencing parts. In this part-with-part activity the eyes, or their retinal images, naturally play a leading r61e. As an example of this mechanistically or organically consequential type of activity we may set down the mutual influencing of hands and retinas which occurs in the per- formance of any careful manual task. This single example of bodily activity, however, is only a start toward self -analysis, whose particular formidableness, as a thing to be 62 The Game of Mind analyzed, lies in its phantasmagoric or stream- ing quality. For it is necessary to admit once again that a somnambulist is capable of performing one or another careful manual task under the direction of visual images. But never yet and never will a somnambulist, in that capacity, carry self -analysis, consid- ered from the bodily standpoint alone, to the mechanistic bounds which the feeblest minded, but actually conscious, man does habitually. Indeed the mere somnambulist, even in his carefully performed operations, fails to realize a whole peculiar world of bodily operations which belongs as a possi- bility to physiological man. Even a scant introspection of ourselves in the conscious performance of a task will reveal a range or type of bodily activity which is quite foreign to the manner of bodily being of the somnam- bulist. It is an activity of discussion, and its mechanistic characteristics are such that, of all the mechanisms we know of, of what- ever complexity, that of man is the only one which can support it to any considerable extent. So much by way of introducing ourselves to the bodily possibilities of our now aroused somnambulist-subject. The Game of Consciousness 63 Our mechanistic subject, then, does not long remain merely startled. In a few moments' time he has, as we say, collected himself. This means that for a short interval his bodily parts, relative to each other and to their immediate environment, are very busy. For adequate mechanistic recovery from the somnambulant state, and a shock, implies unavoidably a general mechanistic discussion of the whole situation. In the concrete world of the human body, some- thing does not proceed from nothing. At this point it is necessary to state at once that this mechanistic discussion of our awakening subject is not primarily an articu- late one. For language, as we have already seen, is after all only a longhand and sup- plementary form of symbolic bodily activity. It enlarges without creating the self-analytic powers. The actual scheme of the body's discussion of a situation or a thing (e.g., of our former optical illusion-picture) is one of suppressed or little apparent activities of the principal parts of the body, i.e., the arms, legs, eyes, viscera. This inceptive bodily activity has been revealed by the experimen- tal use of the planchette, and upon it is based the art of muscle-reading. Discussion in 64 The Game of Mind terms of articulate (whether outspoken or suppressed) words is accordingly not to be largely looked for in the startled awakening of our present subject. Mostly by means of wordless bodily dis- cussion, then, our mechanistic subject ana- lyzes, to his own satisfaction, the situation he is in. Being an experienced somnam- bulist, as we may suppose, his bodily organism has already acquired the power of quick self -analysis in cases of this kind. He there- fore tells himself successively that he is alarmed; alarmed by a noise; alarmed out of sleep; a walking sleep; in the woods; alarmed by a sudden din in front of him; a whirring which is still sounding ; faintly ; at a distance ; to his left — alarmed foolishly and walking to no purpose in his sleep. All this he actually tells himself by a well-directed application of his self -analytic and general observational powers. Each item is a mechanistic consum- mation. Omitted as such the item simply becomes non-existent. Were our subject not so organized and equipped as naturally to evolve each particular item in its turn, his self -recovery in this hypothetical case of ours would be so far incomplete. To appropriate the fact, for example, that the whirring sound The Game of Consciousness 65 still comes from the left and from a distance, these two items of information have actually to be given mechanistic pronouncement by the subject. In all this our mechanistic subject is, as it were, playing a game of solitaire, in which the natural inertia of things is overcome only by virtue of his own sus- tained activities. To awaken one's self, thus signifies the carrying out in the concrete of a particular mechanistic program. Depending upon his personal interests, the mechanistic life of our awakened subject now takes one or another dominant tone. Supposing, however, his interest to be largely philosophic, he will naturally, upon his homeward walk, be in a mood to discuss with himself the significance of his recent mecha- nistic awakening. Soon he also makes the observation that each item of his recovery was an activity on his own part, a solitaire- wise play which contained precisely what he himself put into it and nothing more. He realizes for the first time that the world of his self-analysis and general observation is, as such, wholly the world of his own making, the world of his own organic activities. He also recognizes that this truth is independent of the degree of the accord which prevails 66 The Game of Mind between his own world of artifact and the larger and environing world of things. And having once fairly mastered this truth, he becomes, from that moment on, precisely the thing which we suppose ourself to be — a pure mechanism, avowedly undertaking a mechanistic self-examination. Our subject, in his new rdle of mechanistic psychologist, now has complete use of the words, word-combinations and other bodily activities which are possible to philosophic man. For he is now a wide-awake physio- logical man and has the same use of his mechanistic eyes, ears, throat, etc., that anybody can have. Accordingly he creates unto himself a full and effective world of self -analysis and general observation. Where- upon our subject sees that he differs in no assignable detail from a fully conscious man. He therefore takes occasion to tell himself that he is one. To follow the ideas of our fully " conscious" subject still a little way, we may fancy him smiling at the naivete of a psychological doctrine which conceives the mind of man as sitting at its ease in its bodily temple and having at will mystic conception and knowl- edge of the things of the world in and The Game of Consciousness 67 of themselves. An extramechanistic mind (whatever that may mean) might verily find a mission and a usefulness upon that basis. But what can be its mission when a man has to create to himself — as his organic structure, energies and energistic connection with environment enable him to do — his whole world of things, qualities and relations ? What can be its usefulness when conception and knowing, equally with walking and talk- ing, are activity-constructs of the body itself? Plainly in this actual case, retinal images, movements of the eye-muscles, tym- panic vibrations, activities of the tongue, lips and vocal cords, and other bodily pro- cesses, often impossible to define, and too numerous and multiform even to catalogue, alone have their practical place and signifi- cance. They alone are the mind's realities. Following this line of argument a step higher, our subject tries to give substance to the shadowy, evasive conjecture which says that consciousness is supramechanistic. And this he finds in a persistent incapacity of introspective or self-analytic psychology to see the mechanistic reality which lies in each slightest move of the game of mind, — a bodily activity whose necessary existence is nowa- 68 The Game of Mind days freely admitted by competent physio- logical psychologists. As already described, shorthand psychology does read between the larger mechanistic lines of the game of mind, as indeed it should. But instead of reading still in mechanistic terms, it trenches upon the fanciful and meaningless. For the mechanistic conception alone is meaningful. And besides being of this world concrete, it is good and sufficient. It is a principle of universal applicability, not open to impeach- ment by any man possessing a brain and a body. Having now gradually gotten away from the original situation in which our mechanistic subject served a useful purpose, we will here- with continue our discussion without him. First, however, we wish to remark that he has given us the opportunity of seeing a genuine mechanistic man, not a mechanistic low- ideal. An organism which, in a walk through the woods, carries on a running discussion of things present, past and to come is not the sort of transparently simple machine which one evokes when advancing the proposition that a mechanism may not think. Neither, on the other hand, is that large world of illu- sion and make-believe, permeating in turn The Game of Consciousness 69 each phase of our own minds, taken suffi- ciently into account by our doctrine's oppo- nents. The mechanistic doctrine is equally concerned in discovering the deeper possibili- ties of activity in evolutional mechanisms, and in bringing about the disillusionment of our everyday psychology. Now as conscious activity depends above all things upon the truth of symbolism, and as we have constantly had reference to the symbolic quality as belonging to the system of bodily activities constituting the game of mind, we are clearly in need of an elucidation of the fact of symbolism. In any case the mechanistic fact of symbolism is a matter of relations. To a fire destroying a printing- house, there is no symbolism in a whole stack of unabridged dictionaries. But be- tween man and the dictionary, man and man, man and himself, or man and dog, the case is different. Here a bodily activity (or printed character) reaches beyond itself and finds its reawakening in another organism, or a different part of the same organism. This system of part-with-part and organism-with- organism reechoing stands as an achieve- ment of evolution, and as such serves its users as a means to survival. Now bodily 70 The Game of Mind activities of the type of retinal images, tympanic vibrations, vocal processes, etc., would have no survival- value for man did they not stand as a reliable intermediary between the realities of the environing world and the bare vegetal processes of man. Reli- ability in this case implies the existence of an established system of one-to-one corre- spondence between the things, qualities and relations of the outside world and these intermediating bodily activities. This cor- respondence, thus integrated into a system, may properly be termed the symbolism of the organic processes of man. Now, by extension of this principle of correspondence to the world of the self- analytic bodily processes, our account of the symbolism of the bodily processes becomes complete, and the symbolism characteristic to consciousness and self -consciousness be- comes recognizable as a mechanistic fact. As thus explained, symbolism depends upon the mechanistic structure of the non-vegetal regions and elements of the body, and is thus primarily a gift to us from the evolu- tional past. CHAPTER VIII THE GAME OF MIND In this concluding chapter we wish first to return for a moment to the ever-fascinating subject of the inverted retinal images. Afterwards we will give an answer to some adverse criticism. Lastly we will introduce a summarizing paragraph by way of stereo- scopic composite to our unavoidably serial discussion. In discrediting shorthand psychology in an early chapter, we referred to the inverted and doubled condition of our retinal images. We then saw that introspection is powerless to reconcile that fact with the singleness and uprightness of objects as we actually see them. Our mechanistic account of this surprising situation was also hinted at, but may now be concluded with better understanding. Considered mechanistically or physiologi- cally, the two eyes act through the brain upon the general body in a consistent and 71 72 The Game of Mind integral manner. The same might still be true had we, like some insects, ten thousand facets or virtually separate eyes. Now in this constructive unity of extraretinal bodily activity, as associated in visual perception, lies the necessary and sufficient condition for the symbolic pronouncement of visual singleness, which our shorthand psychology is ready to accept as the attribute of visual singleness itself. For, in conformity with our whole mechanistic scheme, we may say that our consciousness of the attribute of singleness of objects, regarding which our eyes inform us, is of the nature of an affirma- tion or pronouncement which we give our- selves the trouble of introducing in our general game of seeing. In other words, at such time as we are in the mechanistic act of ascribing singleness to objects, we become "conscious," as we say, that objects do ap- pear single to us, for this mechanistic act of ascription and the consciousness in question are one. Without just such bodily discus- sion of the matter as this, our visual percep- tions could be likened, without falsification, to the functioning of a mere stereoscopic camera. To account for our perception of objects The Game of Mind 73 as upright, it is seen at once that the same point of view is applicable. Again the mechanistic affirmation of the up-and-down relation of visually perceived objects is left to other portions of the body than the two retinas. Fundamentally, both these attri- butes of singleness and uprightness, as our visual perceptions contain them, are prag- matic activities of discussion consequent upon the particular structure of the body. Thanks to the achievements of organic evolution, the structure and energies of the human body are such as habitually to enable us to carry on the game of visual discussion in the notably successful manner we know so well. Now, not even a moderately rash opponent, we presume, is ready to deny flatly a thesis which we have been to the trouble of develop- ing throughout the previous pages; viz., that a system of illusion and make-believe permeates our everyday psychology and colors it through and through with the delu- sive mirage of the unreal. Moreover we believe such an opponent must find it impossible to satisfy himself as to the neces- sary limits — short of the limits set down by 74 The Game of Mind the mechanistic doctrine itself — of this phe- nomenon of psychological delusion. Con- sequently he is inclined naturally to the alternative of declaring that illusion and make-believe, as entertained by our minds, are themselves of necessity extrabodily phe- nomena. However, after our mechanistic discussion of such particular psychological concepts as thought, feeling and conscious- ness, it is not to be anticipated that illusion and make-believe can prove stubborn phe- nomena in the hands of mechanistic analysis. Illusion and unwitting make-believe, in- deed, are not essential factors at all of the game of conscious mind, but rather unfor- tunate elements which limit and corrupt it. In the evolutional world in which survival of the fit is no more than a selective survival of the actual, perfection in fitness is hardly to be looked for. Expressed on the mental side, this means that man's bodily activities, as they constitute the game of mind, sym- bolize with more or less imperfectness the things, qualities and relations of the body and its environing world. A perfect con- sciousness, on the contrary, would contain neither illusion nor unwitting make-believe. Its game of mind would be without need of The Game of Mind 75 disillusionment, not because of its being other than a game, but because of its containing within itself a complete world-analysis. Its own true nature, and the natures of other things, would lie open to its consistent symbolic system of knowing. Viewed in this light, illusion and make- believe take their places as qualities of semi- inconsistency and fraud now belonging to the symbolism of our psychological system of bodily activities. A more consistent use of symbolism must attend the mind's gradual disillusionment. There is (to pass to a second criticism) a commonly accredited hypothesis to the effect that the mechanistic doctrine implicates its advocate into the position of regarding the perceptions, thoughts and emotions of one's neighbor as open to successful mechanis- tic inspection. If not by the eye alone, then by the help of the microscope, especially as brought to bear upon our neighbor's brain-substance, do these activities of a foreign mind presumably stand open to our investigation. Taken in a limited sense, this thesis must be accepted and even defended in the interests of the mechanistic doctrine. At the same 76 The Game of Mind time, however, there is nothing in the theo- retical situation thus introduced which will supply the doctrine's opponents with substantial critical material. In the first place, it must be realized that the eye, and its aid the microscope, have their broad mechanistic limitations, as well as their narrow mechanistic uses. For, on the one hand, the relative amount of bodily activity resident in the eyes is small; and on the other hand, the eyes exercise but a very partial control over the bodily activities which lie beyond themselves. The crackling and warmth of a winter's fire, as appropriated by ourselves, and the aroma and flavor of roasted coffee, are, for example, wholly extravisual perceptions. But over and above this natural limitation on the part of the eyes as mechanistic gate- ways to the bodily activities, it must be admitted, of course, that our bodily activities are related to perceived, extrabodily things — e. g., a neighbor's body or brain — only as processes which have been urged or stimu- lated into being are related to the environ- mental reality or realities which, indirectly, furnish the energistic stimulus thereto. On this basis, the suggested experiment of The Game of Mind 77 seeing our neighbor's thoughts and feelings, as such, becomes a question of living in duplicate, in our own body, these very- thoughts and feelings. And this under the very meager stimulus of the rays of light coming from the illuminated body- or brain-substance under examination. Here certainly is a task regarding the general pos- sibility of which the mechanistic doctrine can offer no guarantee. Mind-reading as a perfected art is doubtless as impossible of mechanistic solution as " squaring the circle' ' is of geometrical solution. However we are able to point to partial successes in this direction. For example, our interpretation of certain facial expres- sions in terms of mental content is an item belonging to the art of mind-reading. The same is true of lip-reading as practiced by the deaf. In future, provided suitable means be discovered whereby the brain and body of a second person can be watched in their normal activity, evolution may still institute in man a vastly more comprehensive mecha- nistic art of mind-reading. As the third and last criticism to be dis- cussed we will take one which had the advocacy of Lord Kelvin. Otherwise it 78 The Game of Mind would seem hardly to require serious atten- tion here. The criticism is based upon a suggested possibility of reversal in the activities of cosmic mechanisms. Applying this idea to mechanistic man we obtain the anomaly of a completely reversed organic life, bodily death and senescence coming first in order of time, and childhood and birth coming last of all. For suppose, says the argument, that all the atoms of the uni- verse were to have, all of an instant, their directions of motion reversed, but their velocities conserved. Then is the paradox accomplished, provided only that man him- self is a mechanism. Now this supposed damaging corollary to the mechanistic doctrine is not only gratuitous, it is contrary to its very spirit. For the spirit of the mechanistic doctrine is analytic rather than synthetic. It is taking things as given, rather than imagining them other than they are. Let it indeed be ad- mitted that it is possible to conjecture matter as a congeries of simple atoms darting hither and thither in a commonplace and reversible sort of way. Then it follows that this sup- posititious system evolves backwards and forwards with equal theoretical facility. But The Game of Mind 79 to regard the eccentricities of this hopeless- ly crude scheme of simple atoms and rever- sibility as a suitable basis for criticizing the mechanistic doctrine is absurd. For the fact is that the real world of matter (whatever it is) is apparently not a reversible organic and inorganic affair at all. That world moves ever onward, and seeming local reversals depend entirely upon the contingency of a limited and superficial point of view. So long as water persists in running down hill, the mechanistic doctrine need have no fear of the specter of reversibility. In conclusion, we are well content to believe that our mechanistic conception of mind stands finer in its concreteness and consistency than it possibly could on any so-called higher but illusory basis. With a sort of satisfaction we should put ourselves in the introspective frame of mind of ad- mitting that our ever changing mentality has its full source and flow in the organic life of the bod}^. Of admitting that per- ceiving, conceiving, knowing, etc., are after all only finer sorts of bodily living. That remembering means reconstitution. That feeling is a discussion. That consciousness 80 The Game of Mind is self-analysis. That mental evolution, for its part, is a selective and mutatory hand- ing on from the past, as a mechanistic gift to the present and future, of the great bodily Game of Mind. ' i '::: ; -r»ii!:'^'# m n m HUWrn ; < I ■ ■ ■ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 013 312 523 1 H m-tm I I ■T ■ ■ I