The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 quotes

Native retentiveness is unchangeable, 663. All improvement of memory consists in better thinking, 667. Other conditions of good memory, 669. Recognition, or the sense of familiarity, 673. Exact measurements of memory, 676. Forgetting, 679. Pathological cases, 681. Professor Ladd criticised, 687.

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

The phenomena are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like; and, superficially considered, their variety and complexity is such as to leave a chaotic impression on the observer.

It will ere long be seen, I trust, that we can; and that we gain much more by a broad than by a narrow conception of our subject.

At a certain stage in the development of every science a degree of vagueness is what best consists with fertility.

On the whole, few recent formulas have done more real service of a rough sort in psychology than the Spencerian one that the essence of mental life and of bodily life are one, namely, 'the adjustment of inner to outer relations.'

If now we pass from such actions as these to those of living things, we notice a striking difference. Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they.

But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card.

Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents.

Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly.

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

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

… full of water be inverted over him, he will not, like the bubbles, perpetually press his nose against its unyielding roof, but will restlessly explore the neighborhood until by re-descending again he has discovered a path round its brim to the goal of his desires.

Again the fixed end, the varying means!

Such contrasts between living and inanimate performances end by leading men to deny that in the physical world final purposes exist at all. Loves and desires are to-day no longer imputed to particles of iron or of air.

But with intelligent agents, altering the conditions changes the activity displayed, but not the end reached; for here the idea of the yet unrealized end co-operates with the conditions to determine what the activities shall be.

The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon.

We all use this test to discriminate between an intelligent and a mechanical performance.

then amputating the right foot would indeed frustrate the wiping, but would not make the left leg move. It would simply result in the right stump moving through the empty air (which is in fact the phenomenon sometimes observed).

The right trigger makes no effort to discharge the left barrel if the right one be unloaded; nor does an electrical machine ever get restless because it can only emit sparks, and not hem pillow-cases like a sewing-machine.

If, on the contrary, the right leg originally moved for the purpose of wiping the acid, then nothing is more natural than that, when the easiest means of effecting that purpose prove fruitless, other means should be tried.

But both kinds of result flow with equally fatal necessity from their conditions. We cannot suppose the clock-work whose structure fatally determines it to a certain rate of speed, noticing that this speed is too slow or too fast and vainly trying to correct it.

Its conscience, if it have any, should be as good as that of the best chronometer, for both alike obey equally well the same eternal mechanical laws—laws from behind.

But if the brain be out of order and the man says "Twice four are two," instead of "Twice four are eight," or else "I must go to the coal to buy the wharf," instead of "I must go to the wharf to buy the …

Similarly, if an intact frog wishes to jump over a stone which he sees, all he need do is to excite from the hemispheres the jumping-centre in the thalami or wherever it may be, and the latter will provide for the details of the execution.

It is like a general ordering a colonel to make a certain movement, but not telling him how it shall be done.

[5]

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

Prudence, in a word, is for such a creature an impossible virtue.

Accordingly we see that nature removes those functions in the exercise of which prudence is a virtue from the lower centres and hands them over to the cerebrum. Wherever a creature has to deal with complex features of the environment, prudence is a virtue.

Appetite and the acts it prompts have consequently become in all higher vertebrates functions of the cerebrum. They disappear when the physiologist's knife has left the subordinate centres alone in place.

The brainless pigeon will starve though left on a corn-heap.

Take again the sexual function. In birds this devolves exclusively upon the hemispheres. When these are shorn away the pigeon pays no attention to the billings and cooings of its mate.

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

Hardly any factor measures more than this the difference between civilisation and barbarism.

Physiologically interpreted, chastity means nothing more than the fact that present solicitations of sense are overpowered by suggestions of æsthetic and moral fitness which the circumstances awaken in the cerebrum; and that upon the inhibitory or permissive influence of these alone action directly depends.

Movement mn, which natively is sensation sn's partner, becomes through the hemispheres the partner of sensation s1, s2, or s3.

It is like the great commutating switch-board at a central telephone station.

No new elementary process is involved; no impression nor any motion peculiar to the hemispheres; but any number of combinations impossible to the lower machinery taken alone, and an endless consequent increase in the possibilities of behavior on the creature's part.

'Herr Pastor, sure there be a horse inside,' called out the peasants to X after their spiritual shepherd had spent hours in explaining to them the construction of the locomotive.

With a horse inside truly everything becomes clear, even though it be a queer enough sort of horse—the horse itself calls for no explanation!

Phrenology takes a start to get beyond the point of view of the ghost-like soul entity, but she ends by populating the whole skull with ghosts of the same order."[8]

Luciani tested his dogs when hungry (a condition which sharpens their attention) by strewing pieces of meat and pieces of cork before them. If they went straight at them, they saw; and if they chose the meat and left the cork, they saw discriminatingly.

The quarrel is very acrimonious; indeed the subject of localization of functions in the brain seems to have a peculiar effect on the temper of those who cultivate it experimentally.

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

Meanwhile few things show more beautifully than the history of our knowledge of aphasia how the sagacity and patience of many banded workers are in time certain to analyze the darkest confusion into an orderly display.[41]

There is no 'centre of Speech' in the brain any more than there is a faculty of Speech in the mind.

The entire brain, more or less, is at work in a man who uses language. The subjoined diagram, from Boss, shows the four parts most critically concerned, and, in the light of our text, needs no farther explanation (see Fig. 18).

He may try to climb over both. All authors agree that they never found any difference, whether it was an inanimate body, a cat, a dog, or a bird of prey which came in their pigeon's way.

The creature knows neither friends nor enemies, in the thickest company it lives like a hermit.

The languishing cooing of the male awakens no more impression than the rattling of the peas, or the call-whistle which in the days before the injury used to make the birds hasten to be fed.

The natural way to consider this is as a summation of tensions which at last overcome a resistance.

The first of them produce a 'latent excitement' or a 'heightened irritability'—the phrase is immaterial so far as practical consequences go; the last is the straw which breaks the camel's back.

Where the neural process is one that has consciousness for its accompaniment, the final explosion would in all cases seem to involve a vivid state of feeling of a more or less substantive kind.

Neither circumstance alone may awaken outward manifestations, but together, i.e. when the strange man is met in the dark, the dog will be excited to violent defiance.[105]

Street-hawkers well know the efficacy of summation, for they arrange themselves in a line upon the sidewalk, and the passer often buys from the last one of them, through the effect of the reiterated solicitation, what he refused to buy from the first in the row.

Aphasia shows many examples of summation. A patient who cannot name an object simply shown him, will name it if he touches as well as sees it, etc.

The brain, like every other organ of the body, contains phosphorus, and a score of other chemicals besides. Why the phosphorus should be picked out as its essence, no one knows.

It would be equally true to say 'Ohne Wasser kein Gedanke,' or 'Ohne Kochsalz kein Gedanke'; for thought would stop as quickly if the brain should dry up or lose its NaCl as if it lost its phosphorus.

In America the phosphorus-delusion has twined itself round a saying quoted (rightly or wrongly) from Professor L. Agassiz, to the effect that fishermen are more intelligent than farmers because they eat so much fish, which contains so much phosphorus. All the facts may be doubted.

[135] Without multiplying references, I will simply cite Mendel (Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vol. iii, 1871), Mairet (Archives de Neurologie, vol. ix, 1885), and Beaunis (Rech. Expérimentales sur l'Activité Cérébrale, 1887). Richet gives a partial bibliography in the Revue Scientifique, vol. 38, p. 788 (1886).

When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits.

In wild animals, the usual round of daily behavior seems a necessity implanted at birth; in animals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems, to a great extent, to be the result of education.

The moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led to the fundamental properties of matter.

The laws of Nature are nothing but the immutable habits which the different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions upon each other.

In the organic world, however, the habits are more variable than this. Even instincts vary from one individual to another of a kind; and are modified in the same individual, as we shall later see, to suit the exigencies of the case.

When the structure has yielded, the same inertia becomes a condition of its comparative permanence in the new form, and of the new habits the body then manifests.

Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.

Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits. Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort;

A lock works better after being used some time; at the outset more force was required to overcome certain roughnesses in the mechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is a phenomenon of habituation.

It costs less trouble to fold a paper when it has been folded already.

This saving of trouble is due to the essential nature of habit, which brings it about that, to reproduce the effect, a less amount of the outward cause is required.

The currents, once in, must find a way out. In getting out they leave their traces in the paths which they take.

The only thing they can do, in short, is to deepen old paths or to make new ones; and the whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up in two words when we call it an organ in which currents pouring in from the sense-organs make with extreme facility paths which do not easily disappear.

For, of course, a simple habit, like every other nervous event—the habit of snuffling, for example, or of putting one's hands into one's pockets, or of biting one's nails—is, mechanically, nothing but a reflex discharge;

But no sooner does he get excited than his whole body becomes 'animated,' and he moves his head and trunk, in particular, as if these also were organs with which he meant to belabor the keys."[144]

Man is born with a tendency to do more things than he has ready-made arrangements for in his nerve-centres.

Most of the performances of other animals are automatic. But in him the number of them is so enormous, that most of them must be the fruit of painful study.

When we are proficients, on the contrary, the results not only follow with the very minimum of muscular action requisite to bring them forth, they also follow from a single instantaneous 'cue.'

The marksman sees the bird, and, before he knows it, he has aimed and shot.

A gleam in his adversary's eye, a momentary pressure from his rapier, and the fencer finds that he has instantly made the right parry and return. A glance at the musical hieroglyphics, and the pianist's fingers have rippled through a cataract of notes.

The marksman sees the bird, and, before he knows it, he has aimed and shot. A gleam in his adversary's eye, a momentary pressure from his rapier, and the fencer finds that he has instantly made the right parry and return.

A glance at the musical hieroglyphics, and the pianist's fingers have rippled through a cataract of notes.

And not only is it the right thing at the right time that we thus involuntarily do, but the wrong thing also, if it be an habitual thing.

… to a travelling menagerie in the United States some time in 1881, a tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much bewildered by his new responsibilities, so that he was without difficulty secured.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.

It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

On the whole, it is best he should not escape.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits, the period below twenty is more important still for the fixing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.

It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.

It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter;

An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last; and how his better-bred acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be for him a mystery till his dying day.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.

For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.

The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.

Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.

Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. As Professor Bain says:

but, provided one can stand it, a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in simply changing one's hours of rising or of work.

It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be never fed.

"One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow path, before one can begin 'to make one's self over again.'

Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.

There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.

Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean.

But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glowing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically ignores some actual case, among the squalid 'other particulars' of which that same Good lurks disguised, treads straight on Rousseau's path.

All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form!

The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line.

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.

With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved.

And this is an obvious consequence of the principles we have laid down. A 'character,' as J. S. Mill says, 'is a completely fashioned will';

… heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.

Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods.

The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin.

But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things.

He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics.

Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one.

As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work.

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.

Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time!' Well!

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.

Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.

The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time!' Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less.

The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time!' Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less.

Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.

Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one.

but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.

Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one.

The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.

… with a strong sense of the 'chasm' between the two worlds, and with a lively faith in reflex machinery, the sense of this difficulty can hardly fail to make one turn consciousness out of the door as a superfluity so far as one's explanations go.

One may bow her out politely, allow her to remain as an 'epiphenomenon' (invaluable word!), but one insists that matter shall hold all the power.

"Having thoroughly recognized the fathomless abyss that separates mind from matter, and having so blended the very notion into his very nature that there is no chance of his ever forgetting it or failing to saturate with it all his meditations, the student of psychology …

Having firmly and tenaciously grasped these two notions, of the absolute separateness of mind and matter, and of the invariable concomitance of a mental change with a bodily change, the student will enter on the study of psychology with half his difficulties surmounted."[158]

Half his difficulties ignored, I should prefer to say.

For this 'concomitance' in the midst of 'absolute separateness' is an utterly irrational notion. It is to my mind quite inconceivable that consciousness should have nothing to do with a business which it so faithfully attends. And the question, 'What has it to do?'

However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it.

As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure.

But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only, as the automatists do, and to say that that causation is unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze …

… right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only, as the automatists do, and to say that that causation is unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.

One cannot thus blow hot and cold.

One must be impartially naif or impartially critical. If the latter, the reconstruction must be thorough-going or 'metaphysical,' and will probably preserve the common-sense view that ideas are forces, in some translated form.

But its hair-trigger organization makes of it a happy-go-lucky, hit-or-miss affair. It is as likely to do the crazy as the sane thing at any given moment. A low brain does few things, and in doing them perfectly forfeits all other use.

The performances of a high brain are like dice thrown forever on a table.

Unless they be loaded, what chance is there that the highest number will turn up oftener than the lowest?

But the machine itself knows nothing of wrong or right: matter has no ideals to pursue.

A locomotive will carry its train through an open drawbridge as cheerfully as to any other destination.

A brain with part of it scooped out is virtually a new machine, and during the first days after the operation functions in a thoroughly abnormal manner.

The reader who found himself swamped with too much metaphysics in the last chapter will have a still worse time of it in this one, which is exclusively metaphysical.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.

Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings, the case is in no wise altered.

Take a hundred of them, shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can (whatever that may mean); still each remains the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean.

There would be a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or series of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belonging to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feeling would be a totally new fact;

The mind-stuff theory, in short, is unintelligible.

Atoms of feeling cannot compose higher feelings, any more than atoms of matter can compose physical things!

The 'things,' for a clear-headed atomistic evolutionist, are not. Nothing is but the everlasting atoms. When grouped in a certain way, we name them this 'thing' or that; but the thing we name has no existence out of our mind.

The other monists are of less deliquescent frame, and try to break down distinctness among mental states by making a distinction. This sounds paradoxical, but it is only ingenious. The distinction is that between the unconscious and the conscious being of the mental state.

It is the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and of turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies.

It has numerous champions, and elaborate reasons to give for itself. We must therefore accord it due consideration. In discussing the question:

It may be a constitutional infirmity, but I can take no comfort in such devices for making a luxury of intellectual defeat.

They are but spiritual chloroform.

Better live on the ragged edge, better gnaw the file forever!

It may be a constitutional infirmity, but I can take no comfort in such devices for making a luxury of intellectual defeat. They are but spiritual chloroform.

Better live on the ragged edge, better gnaw the file forever!

The most rational thing to do is to suspect that there may be a third possibility, an alternative supposition which we have not considered.

No one has emphasized more sharply than Brentano himself the difference between the immediate feltness of a feeling, and its perception by a subsequent reflective act. But which mode of consciousness of it is that which the psychologist must depend on?

If to have feelings or thoughts in their immediacy were enough, babies in the cradle would be psychologists, and infallible ones.

But the psychologist must not only have his mental states in their absolute veritableness, he must report them and write about them, name them, classify and compare them and trace their relations to other things. Whilst alive they are their own property;

But the psychologist must not only have his mental states in their absolute veritableness, he must report them and write about them, name them, classify and compare them and trace their relations to other things.

Whilst alive they are their own property; it is only post-mortem that they become his prey.

[193] And as in the naming, classing, and knowing of things in general we are notoriously fallible, why not also here? Comte is quite right in laying stress on the fact that a feeling, to be named, judged, or perceived, must be already past.

the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow.

There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry.

What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about.

We are then prone to suppose that no entity can be there; and so we come to overlook phenomena whose existence would be patent to us all, had we only grown up to hear it familiarly recognized in speech.[196]

It is hard to focus our attention on the nameless, and so there results a certain vacuousness in the descriptive parts of most psychologies.

But a worse defect than vacuousness comes from the dependence of psychology on common speech. Naming our thought by its own objects, we almost all of us assume that as the objects are, so the thought must be.

'The Psychologist's Fallacy.'

The great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report.

I shall hereafter call this the 'psychologist's fallacy' par excellence. For some of the mischief, here too, language is to blame. The psychologist, as we remarked above (p. 183), stands outside of the mental state he speaks of.

and, paradoxical as it may seem to say so, he must distinguish it with great accuracy from others like it, in order to remain blind to it when the others are brought near.

He discriminates it, as a preliminary to not seeing it at all.

Again, when by a prism before one eye a previously invisible line has been made visible to that eye, and the other eye is thereupon closed or screened, its closure makes no difference; the line still remains visible.

But the perceptive activity which works to this result is disconnected from the consciousness which is personal, so to speak, to the subject, and makes of the object concerning which the suggestion is made, its own private possession and prey.[207]

The mother who is asleep to every sound but the stirrings of her babe, evidently has the babe-portion of her auditory sensibility systematically awake.

Relatively to that, the rest of her mind is in a state of systematized anæsthesia. That department, split off and disconnected from the sleeping part, can none the less wake the latter up in case of need.

… things seem to act on it—they only act on the body, and through that on its brain.[211] All that it can do directly is to know other things, misknow or ignore them, and to find that they interest it, in this fashion or in that.

Now the relation of knowing is the most mysterious thing in the world.

If we ask how one thing can know another we are led into the heart of Erkenntnisstheorie and metaphysics. The psychologist, for his part, does not consider the matter so curiously as this.

The words feeling and thought give voice to the antithesis. Through feelings we become acquainted with things, but only by our thoughts do we know about them.

Feelings are the germ and starting point of cognition, thoughts the developed tree.

The minimum of grammatical subject, of objective presence, of reality known about, the mere beginning of knowledge, must be named by the word that says the least. Such a word is the interjection, as lo! there! ecco! voilà!

Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself.

Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.

It is astonishing what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless contain a flaw. The bad consequences develop themselves later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the whole texture of the work.

The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on. I use the word thinking, in accordance with what was said on p. 186, for every form of consciousness indiscriminately.

If we could say in English 'it thinks,' as we say 'it rains 'or 'it blows,' we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of assumption.

As we cannot, we must simply say that thought goes on.

Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own.

Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law.

It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned.

Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal minds.

The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature.

Everyone will recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of something corresponding to the term 'personal mind' is all that is insisted on, without any particular view of its nature being implied.

But what here strikes us so forcibly on the flagrant scale exists on every scale, down to the imperceptible transition from one hour's outlook to that of the next.

Experience is remoulding us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date.

The analogies of brain-physiology must again be appealed to to corroborate our view.

Every brain-state is partly determined by the nature of this entire past succession. Alter the latter in any part, and the brain-state must be somewhat different.

Each present brain-state is a record in which the eye of Omniscience might read all the foregone history of its owner.

It is out of the question, then, that any total brain-state should identically recur. Something like it may recur;

But in the one case as in the other we must never forget that we are talking symbolically, and that there is nothing in nature to answer to our words.

A permanently existing 'idea' or 'Vorstellung' which makes its appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals, is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.

What makes it convenient to use the mythological formulas is the whole organization of speech, which, as was remarked a while ago, was not made by psychologists, but by men who were as a rule only interested in the facts their mental states revealed.

He remembers his own states, whilst he only conceives Paul's.

Remembrance is like direct feeling; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains.

This quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what Peter's present thought also possesses for itself.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance.

It is nothing jointed; it flows.

A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

But that very confusion is a mental state, and a state that passes us straight over from the silence to the sound.

The transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood.

It is a part of the consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the bamboo.

The superficial introspective view is the overlooking, even when the things are contrasted with each other most violently, of the large amount of affinity that may still remain between the thoughts by whose means they are cognized.

Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.

[226] Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence;

As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts.

Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.

The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period.

… but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated.

The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.

And the challenge to produce these psychoses, which is sure to be thrown by doubting psychologists at anyone who contends for their existence, is as unfair as Zeno's treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them to point out in what place an arrow …

if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to all their shades.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.

Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.

There are innumerable consciousnesses of emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each other. The ordinary way is to assume that they are all emptinesses of consciousness, and so the same state.

But the feeling of an absence is toto cœlo other than the absence of a feeling.

It is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without growing more distinct.

But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough. What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live.

The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water.

Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook.

Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow.

It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook.

Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it.

Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook.

Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it.

With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead.

… without, but that they are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted of feelings of tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them at all.

It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention.

Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have, as we shall see in Chapter XVIII, made one step in advance in exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things.

To the reader, the book quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning to end. It is impossible to divine, in such a case, just what sort of feeling of rational relation between the words may have appeared to the author's mind.

The border line between objective sense and nonsense is hard to draw; that between subjective sense and nonsense, impossible.

Subjectively, any collocation of words may make sense—even the wildest words in a dream—if one only does not doubt their belonging together. Take the obscurer passages in Hegel:

They hold that a thought, in order to know a thing at all, must expressly distinguish between the thing and its own self.[246] This is a perfectly wanton assumption, and not the faintest shadow of reason exists for supposing it true.

As well might I contend that I cannot dream without dreaming that I dream, swear without swearing that I swear, deny without denying that I deny, as maintain that I cannot know without knowing that I know.

I may have either acquaintance-with, or knowledge-about, an object O without think about myself at all. It suffices for this that I think O, and that it exist.

Its best plan is to repeat the verbal sentence, if there was one, in which the object was expressed. But for inarticulate thoughts there is not even this resource, and introspection must confess that the task exceeds her powers.

The mass of our thinking vanishes for ever, beyond hope of recovery, and psychology only gathers up a few of the crumbs that fall from the feast.

The next point to make clear is that, however complex the object may be, the thought of it is one undivided state of consciousness. As Thomas Brown says:[247]

That industry goes on to deal with the things thus given in perception. A man's empirical thought depends on the things he has experienced, but what these shall be is to a large extent determined by his habits of attention.

A thing may be present to him a thousand times, but if he persistently fails to notice it, it cannot be said to enter into his experience.

We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything distinct? On the other hand, a thing met only once in a lifetime may leave an indelible experience in the memory.

A thing may be present to him a thousand times, but if he persistently fails to notice it, it cannot be said to enter into his experience.

We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything distinct?

On the other hand, a thing met only once in a lifetime may leave an indelible experience in the memory. Let four men make a tour in Europe.

Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what consciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the character itself.

The problem with the man is less what act he shall now choose to do, than what being he shall now resolve to become.

Looking back, then, over this review, we see that the mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities.

Ascending still higher, we reach the plane of Ethics, where choice reigns notoriously supreme.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

To sustain the arguments for the good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle our longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinchingly on the arduous path, these are characteristic ethical energies. But more than these;

But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff.

Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos!

My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab!

Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them.

How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab!

But in my mind and your mind the rejected portions and the selected portions of the original world-stuff are to a great extent the same. The human race as a whole largely agrees as to what it shall notice and name, and what not.

… highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone.

In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.

No mind can take the same interest in his neighbor's me as in his own. The neighbor's me falls together with all the rest of things in one foreign mass, against which his own me stands out in startling relief.

Even the trodden worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suffering self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear conception either of himself or of what the universe may be.

He is for me a mere part of the world; for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place.

He is for me a mere part of the world; for him it is I who am the mere part.

Each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place.

Descending now to finer work than this first general sketch, let us in the next chapter try to trace the psychology of this fact of self-consciousness to which we have thus once more been led.

(a) The body is the innermost part of the material Self in each of us; and certain parts of the body seem more intimately ours than the rest. The clothes come next.

The old saying that the human person is composed of three parts—soul, body and clothes—is more than a joke.

We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves with them that there are few of us who, if asked to choose between having a beautiful body clad in raiment perpetually shabby and unclean, and having an ugly and blemished form always spotlessly attired, would not …

(b) A man's Social Self is the recognition which he gets from his mates. We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind.

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof.

If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met 'cut us dead,' and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well …

for these would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all.

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.

To wound any one of these his images is to wound him.[258] But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose …

"As a man I pity you, but as an official I must show you no mercy; as a politician I regard him as an ally, but as a moralist I loathe him;" etc., etc.

What may be called 'club-opinion' is one of the very strongest forces in life.

[259] The thief must not steal from other thieves; the gambler must pay his gambling-debts, though he pay no other debts in the world.

They are reactions, and they are primary reactions. Everything arouses them; for objects which have no other effects will for a moment contract the brow and make the glottis close.

It is as if all that visited the mind had to stand an entrance-examination, and just show its face so as to be either approved or sent back.

These primary reactions are like the opening or the closing of the door.

Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own.

I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I.

But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I 'pretensions' to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse.

I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I.

But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek.

My deficiencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I 'pretensions' to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse.

That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has 'pitted' himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn't do that nothing else counts.

He is to his own regard as if he were not, indeed he is not.

Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat, suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned the attempt to 'carry that line,' as the merchants say, of self at all. With no attempt there can be no failure;

The history of evangelical theology, with its conviction of sin, its self-despair, and its abandonment of salvation by works, is the deepest of possible examples, but we meet others in every walk of life.

There is the strangest lightness about the heart when one's nothingness in a particular line is once accepted in good faith.

All is not bitterness in the lot of the lover sent away by the final inexorable 'No.'

… Bostonians, crede experto (and inhabitants of other cities, too, I fear), would be happier women and men to-day, if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up a Musical Self, and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance.

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young,—or slender!

Thank God! we say, those illusions are gone. Everything added to the Self is a burden as well as a pride.

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young,—or slender! Thank God! we say, those illusions are gone.

Everything added to the Self is a burden as well as a pride.

A certain man who lost every penny during our civil war went and actually rolled in the dust, saying he had not felt so free and happy since he was born.

Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat, suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned the attempt to 'carry that line,' as the merchants say, of self at all.

With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation.

So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success:

A direct ethical judgment unquestionably also plays its part, and last, not least, we apply to our own persons judgments originally called forth by the acts of others.

It is one of the strangest laws of our nature that many things which we are well satisfied with in ourselves disgust us when seen in others.

With another man's bodily 'hoggishness' hardly anyone has any sympathy;—almost as little with his cupidity, his social vanity and eagerness, his jealousy, his despotism, and his pride.

We hear, in these days of scientific enlightenment, a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are given us why we should not pray, whilst others are given us why we should.

But in all this very little is said of the reason why we do pray, which is simply that we cannot help praying.

It seems probable that, in spite of all that 'science' may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner which nothing we know should lead us to expect.

All progress in the social Self is the substitution of higher tribunals for lower; this ideal tribunal is the highest; and most men, either continually or occasionally, carry a reference to it in their breast.

The humblest outcast on this earth can feel himself to be real and valid by means of this higher recognition.

And, on the other hand, for most of us, a world with no such inner refuge when the outer social self failed and dropped from us would be the abyss of horror.

that is, our desire is limited to the mere banishing of something, without regard to what shall take its place. In this state of mind there can unquestionably be genuine thoughts, and genuine acts, of suicide, spiritual and social, as well as bodily.

Anything, anything, at such times, so as to escape and not to be!

But such conditions of suicidal frenzy are pathological in their nature and run dead against everything that is regular in the life of the Self in man.

What my comrades call my bodily selfishness or self-love, is nothing but the sum of all the outer acts which this interest in my body spontaneously draws from me.

My 'selfishness' is here but a descriptive name for grouping together the outward symptoms which I show.

When I am led by self-love to keep my seat whilst ladies stand, or to grab something first and cut out my neighbor, what I really love is the comfortable seat, is the thing itself which I grab.

With what tender admiration do we con over our own little deed of benevolence! our own frailties and misdemeanors, how ready we are to acquit ourselves for them, when we notice them at all, on the ground of 'extenuating circumstances'!

How much more really comic are our own jokes than those of others, which, unlike ours, will not bear being repeated ten or twelve times over!

How eloquent, striking, powerful, our own speeches are! How appropriate our own address! In short, how much more intelligent, soulful, better, is everything about us than in anyone else. The sad chapter of artists' and authors' conceit and vanity belongs here.

It remains to speak of it as cold intellectual self-estimation. We may weigh our own Me in the balance of praise and blame as easily as we weigh other people,—though with difficulty quite as fairly.

The just man is the one who can weigh himself impartially.

Impartial weighing presupposes a rare faculty of abstraction from the vividness with which, as Herr Horwicz has pointed out, things known as intimately as our own possessions and performances appeal to our imagination; and an equally rare power of vividly representing the affairs of others.

As well might he confound Paul's body, which he only sees, with his own body, which he sees but also feels.

Each of us when he awakens says, Here's the same old self again, just as he says, Here's the same old bed, the same old room, the came old world.

The sense of our own personal identity, then, is exactly like any one of our other perceptions of sameness among phenomena. It is a conclusion grounded either on the resemblance in a fundamental respect; or on the continuity before the mind, of the phenomena compared.

so here we think we experience an identical Self when it appears to us in an analogous way.

Continuity makes us unite what dissimilarity might otherwise separate; similarity makes us unite what discontinuity might hold apart.

And thus it is, finally, that Peter, awakening in the same bed with Paul, and recalling what both had in mind before they went to sleep, reidentifies and appropriates the 'warm' ideas as his, and is never tempted to confuse them with those cold and …

And it must not be taken to mean more than these grounds warrant, or treated as a sort of metaphysical or absolute Unity in which all differences are overwhelmed.

The past and present selves compared are the same just so far as they are the same, and no farther.

A uniform feeling of 'warmth,' of bodily existence (or an equally uniform feeling of pure psychic energy?) pervades them all; and this is what gives them a generic unity, and makes them the same in kind.

We hear from our parents various anecdotes about our infant years, but we do not appropriate them as we do our own memories. Those breaches of decorum awaken no blush, those bright sayings no self-complacency.

That child is a foreign creature with which our present self is no more identified in feeling than it is with some stranger's living child to-day.

Why? Partly because great time-gaps break up all these early years—we cannot ascend to them by continuous memories; and partly because no representation of how the child felt comes up with the stories. We know what he said and did;

It is this trick which the nascent thought has of immediately taking up the expiring thought and 'adopting' it, which is the foundation of the appropriation of most of the remoter constituents of the self.

Who owns the last self owns the self before the last, for what possesses the possessor possesses the possessed.

It is impossible to discover any verifiable features in personal identity, which this sketch does not contain, impossible to imagine how any transcendent non-phenomenal sort of an Arch-Ego, were he there, could shape matters to any other result, or be known in time by any …

"Thou art mine, and part of the same self with me." Each later Thought, knowing and including thus the Thoughts which went before, is the final receptacle—and appropriating them is the final owner—of all that they contain and own.

Each Thought is thus born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor.

As Kant says, it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motion but knowledge of it, and a first ball were to transmit both its motion and its consciousness to a second, which took both up into its consciousness and passed them …

Anon the hook itself will drop into the past with all it carries, and then be treated as an object and appropriated by a new Thought in the new present which will serve as living hook in turn.

The present moment of consciousness is thus, as Mr. Hodgson says, the darkest in the whole series.

It may feel its own immediate existence—we have all along admitted the possibility of this, hard as it is by direct introspection to ascertain the fact—but nothing can be known about it till it be dead and gone.

And the quick-witted reader probably noticed at the time, in hearing how one constituent was let drop and disowned and another one held fast to and espoused, that the phrase was meaningless unless the constituents were objects in the hands of something else.

A thing cannot appropriate itself; it is itself; and still less can it disown itself.

There must be an agent of the appropriating and disowning; but that agent we have already named. It is the Thought to whom the various 'constituents' are known. That Thought is a vehicle of choice as well as of cognition;

The Soul invoked, far from making the phenomena more intelligible, can only be made intelligible itself by borrowing their form,—it must be represented, if at all, as a transcendent stream of consciousness duplicating the one we know.

Altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of philosophizing whose great maxim, according to Dr. Hodgson, is: "Whatever you are totally ignorant of, assert to be the explanation of everything else."

Locke and Kant, whilst still believing in the soul, began the work of undermining the notion that we know anything about it.

Unquestionably this is the stronghold of the spiritualistic belief,—as indeed the popular touchstone for all philosophies is the question, "What is their bearing on a future life?"

The Soul, however, when closely scrutinized, guarantees no immortality of a sort we care for.

The enjoyment of the atom-like simplicity of their substance in sæcula sæculorum would not to most people seem a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Moreover, in the general advance of our moral ideas, there has come to be something ridiculous in the way our forefathers had of grounding their hopes of immortality on the simplicity of their substance. The demand for immortality is nowadays essentially teleological.

We believe ourselves immortal because we believe ourselves fit for immortality.

A 'substance' ought surely to perish, we think, if not worthy to survive; and an insubstantial 'stream' to prolong itself, provided it be worthy, if the nature of Things is organized in the rational way in which we trust it is.

whilst every one will pass away whose reality is justified only in a transitory phase of the world's course. That this principle admits of no further application in human hands need hardly be said.

We surely know not the merits which may give to one being a claim on eternity, nor the defects which would cut others off.

"[275]

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.

I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself and may truly be said not to exist.

… setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.

Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions.

Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change;

The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, nor of the material of which it is composed."

But Hume, after doing this good piece of introspective work, proceeds to pour out the child with the bath, and to fly to as great an extreme as the substantialist philosophers.

As they say the Self is nothing but Unity, unity abstract and absolute, so Hume says it is nothing but Diversity, diversity abstract and absolute;

For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic and confess that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding, I pretend not, however, to pronounce it insuperable. Others, perhaps,... may discover some hypothesis that will reconcile these contradictions."[277]

Hume is at bottom as much of a metaphysician as Thomas Aquinas.

No wonder he can discover no 'hypothesis.' The unity of the parts of the stream is just as 'real' a connection as their diversity is a real separation;

both connection and separation are ways in which the past thoughts appear to the present Thought;—unlike each other in respect of date and certain qualities—this is the separation; alike in other qualities, and continuous in time—this is the connection.

In demanding a more 'real' connection than this obvious and verifiable likeness and continuity, Hume seeks 'the world behind the looking glass,' and gives a striking example of that Absolutism which is the great disease of philosophic Thought.

The chain of distinct existences into which Hume thus chopped up our 'stream' was adopted by all of his successors as a complete inventory of the facts. The associationist Philosophy was founded.

The feelings or consciousnesses which belong or have belonged to it, and its possibilities of having more, are the only facts there are to be asserted of Self—the only positive attributes, except permanence, which we can ascribe to it."[284]

Mr. Mill's habitual method of philosophizing was to affirm boldly some general doctrine derived from his father, and then make so many concessions of detail to its enemies as practically to abandon it altogether.

[285] In this place the concessions amount, so far as they are intelligible, to the admission of something very like the Soul.

Our Thought is not composed of parts, however so composed its objects may be. There is no originally chaotic manifold in it to be reduced to order.

There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurly-burly in her womb.

If we are to have a dualism of Thought and Reality at all, the multiplicity should be lodged in the latter and not in the former member of the couple of related terms.

… are performed.[288] And yet there is reason to think that at bottom he may have had nothing of the sort in mind.[289] In this uncertainty we need again do no more than decide what to think of his transcendental Ego if it be an agent.

Well, if it be so, Transcendentalism is only Substantialism grown shame-faced, and the Ego only a 'cheap and nasty' edition of the soul.

All our reasons for preferring the 'Thought' to the 'Soul' apply with redoubled force when the Soul is shrunk to this estate. The Soul truly explained nothing;

but at least she had some semblance of nobility and outlook. She was called active; might select; was responsible, and permanent in her way.

The Ego is simply nothing: as ineffectual and windy an abortion as Philosophy can show.

It would indeed be one of Reason's tragedies if the good Kant, with all his honesty and strenuous pains, should have deemed this conception an important outbirth of his thought.

Here again, however, I am uncertain of the facts of history, and know that I may not read my authors aright. The whole lesson of Kantian and post-Kantian speculation is, it seems to me, the lesson of simplicity.

With Kant, complication both of thought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced by the musty academicism of his Königsberg existence. With Hegel it was a raging fever.

Terribly, therefore, do the sour grapes which these fathers of philosophy have eaten set our teeth on edge. We have in England and America, however, a contemporary continuation of Hegelism from which, fortunately, somewhat simpler deliverances come;

The whole lesson of Kantian and post-Kantian speculation is, it seems to me, the lesson of simplicity. With Kant, complication both of thought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced by the musty academicism of his Königsberg existence. With Hegel it was a raging fever.

Terribly, therefore, do the sour grapes which these fathers of philosophy have eaten set our teeth on edge.

We have in England and America, however, a contemporary continuation of Hegelism from which, fortunately, somewhat simpler deliverances come; and, unable to find any definite psychology in what Hegel, Rosenkranz, or Erdmann tells us of the Ego, I turn to Caird and Green.

The intelligence is able to understand the world, or, in other words, to break down the barrier between itself and things and find itself in them, just because its own existence is implicitly the solution of all the division and conflict of things."[293]

This dynamic (I had almost written dynamitic) way of representing knowledge has the merit of not being tame.

To turn from it to our own psychological formulation is like turning from the fireworks, trap-doors, and transformations of the pantomime into the insipidity of the midnight, where

The most frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experiences. Such accounts we almost always make both more simple and more interesting than the truth.

We quote what we should have said or done, rather than what we really said or did; and in the first telling we may be fully aware of the distinction. But ere long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns in its stead alone.

This is one great source of the fallibility of testimony meant to be quite honest. Especially where the marvellous is concerned, the story takes a tilt that way, and the memory follows the story. Dr.

and in the first telling we may be fully aware of the distinction. But ere long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns in its stead alone. This is one great source of the fallibility of testimony meant to be quite honest.

Especially where the marvellous is concerned, the story takes a tilt that way, and the memory follows the story.

Dr. Carpenter quotes from Miss Cobbe the following, as an instance of a very common sort:

Every one must have known some specimen of our mortal dust so intoxicated with the thought of his own person and the sound of his own voice as never to be able even to think the truth when his autobiography was in question.

Amiable, harmless, radiant J. V.! mayst thou ne'er wake to the difference between thy real and thy fondly-imagined self!

[300]

I was never really dupe of these illusions, but my mind grew often tired of incessantly correcting the new impressions, and I let myself go and lived the unhappy life of this new entity.

I had an ardent desire to see my old world again, to get back to my old self.

This desire kept me from killing myself.... I was another, and I hated, I despised this other; he was perfectly odious to me; it was certainly another who had taken my form and assumed my functions."[305]

I had an ardent desire to see my old world again, to get back to my old self. This desire kept me from killing myself....

I was another, and I hated, I despised this other; he was perfectly odious to me; it was certainly another who had taken my form and assumed my functions.

"[305]

Here is the first thing of which I retain a clear remembrance. I was alone, and already a prey to permanent visual trouble, when I was suddenly seized with a visual trouble infinitely more pronounced.

Objects grew small and receded to infinite distances—men and things together.

I was myself immeasurably far away, I looked about me with terror and astonishment; the world was escaping from me.... I remarked at the same time that my voice was extremely far away from me, that it sounded no longer as if mine.

… and as bears and panthers were numerous in the woods, and rattlesnakes and copperheads abounded everywhere, her friends told her of the danger to which she exposed herself, but it produced no other effect than to draw forth a contemptuous laugh, as she said, '

I know you only want to frighten me and keep me at home, but you miss it, for I often see your bears and I am perfectly convinced that they are nothing more than black hogs.

'

She refuses the name of Léonie and takes that of Léontine (Léonie 2) to which her first magnetizers had accustomed her.

'That good woman is not myself,' she says, 'she is too stupid!'

To herself, Léontine or Léonie 2, she attributes all the sensations and all the actions, in a word all the conscious experiences which she has undergone in somnambulism, and knits them together to make the history of her already long life.

Serious and grave, instead of being a restless child, she speaks slowly and moves but little. Again she separates herself from the waking Léonie 1. 'A good but rather stupid woman,' she says, 'and not me.' And she also separates herself from Léonie 2:

'How can you see anything of me in that crazy creature?' she says. 'Fortunately I am nothing for her.'

"

I had hoped by suggestion, etc., to run the two personalities into one, and make the memories continuous, but no artifice would avail to accomplish this, and

Mr. Bourne's skull to-day still covers two distinct personal selves.

The case (whether it contain an epileptic element or not) should apparently be classed as one of spontaneous hypnotic trance, persisting for two months.

In a word, they ought to become, if time were given, accomplished connoisseurs of sculpture. Anyone may judge of the probability of this consummation.

Surely an eternity of experience of the statues would leave the dog as inartistic as he was at first, for the lack of an original interest to knit his discriminations on to.

Meanwhile the odors at the bases of the pedestals would have organized themselves in the consciousness of this breed of dogs into a system of 'correspondences' to which the most hereditary caste of custodi would never approximate, merely because to them, as human beings, the …

… have, then, utterly ignored the glaring fact that subjective interest may, by laying its weighty index-finger on particular items of experience, so accent them as to give to the least frequent associations far more power to shape our thought than the most frequent ones possess.

The interest itself, though its genesis is doubtless perfectly natural, makes experience more than it is made by it.

Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence.

Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground—intelligible perspective, in a word.

Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground—intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.

Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground—intelligible perspective, in a word.

It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive. Such an empiricist writer as Mr.

The interest itself, though its genesis is doubtless perfectly natural, makes experience more than it is made by it.

Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.

Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence.

getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start; the pensée de derrière la tête fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about.

Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue.

But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—also without reason that we can discover—an energy is given, something—we know not what—enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, the background-ideas become effective, and the …

This reflex and passive character of the attention which, as a French writer says, makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice, is the first thing which the teacher must overcome.

It never is overcome in some people, whose work, to the end of life, gets done in the interstices of their mind-wandering.

The passive sensorial attention is derived when the impression, without being either strong or of an instinctively exciting nature, is connected by previous experience and education with things that are so. These things may be called the motives of the attention.

These things may be called the motives of the attention. The impression draws an interest from them, or perhaps it even fuses into a single complex object with them; the result is that it is brought into the focus of the mind.

A faint tap per se is not an interesting sound; it may well escape being discriminated from the general rumor of the world. But when it is a signal, as that of a lover on the window-pane, it will hardly go unperceived.

Herbart writes:

… would be exercised at once by one whom we might suppose at a dinner-party resolutely to listen to a neighbor giving him insipid and unwelcome advice in a low voice, whilst all around the guests were loudly laughing and talking about exciting and interesting things.

There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time.

What is called sustained voluntary attention is a repetition of successive efforts which bring back the topic to the mind.[342] The topic once brought back, if a congenial one, develops; and if its development is interesting it engages the attention passively for a time. Dr.

During all this time, however, note that it is not an identical object in the psychological sense (p. 275), but a succession of mutually related objects forming an identical topic only, upon which the attention is fixed.

No one can possibly attend continuously to an object that does not change.

Now there are always some objects that for the time being will not develop. They simply go out;

and to keep the mind upon anything related to them requires such incessantly renewed effort that the most resolute Will ere long gives out and lets its thoughts follow the more stimulating solicitations after it has withstood them for what length of time it can.

There are topics known to every man from which he shies like a frightened horse, and which to get a glimpse of is to shun.

Such are his ebbing assets to the spendthrift in full career. But why single out the spendthrift when to every man actuated by passion the thought of interests which negate the passion can hardly for more than a fleeting instant stay before the mind?

It is like 'memento mori' in the heyday of the pride of life. Nature rises at such suggestions, and excludes them from the view:—

How long, O healthy reader, can you now continue thinking of your tomb?

—In milder instances the difficulty is as great, especially when the brain is fagged. One snatches at any and every passing pretext, no matter how trivial or external, to escape from the odiousness of the matter in hand.

Their ideas coruscate, every subject branches infinitely before their fertile minds, and so for hours they may be rapt.

But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.

And, when we come down to the root of the matter, we see that they differ from ordinary men less in the character of their attention than in the nature of the objects upon which it is successively bestowed.

But, whether the attention come by grace of genius or by dint of will, the longer one does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has.

And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.

No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about.

No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about.

The only general pedagogic maxim bearing on attention is that the more interest the child has in advance in the subject, the better he will attend.

Induct him therefore in such a way as to knit each new thing on to some acquisition already there;

The practical and theoretical life of whole species, as well as of individual beings, results from the selection which the habitual direction of their attention involves. In Chapters XIV and XV some of these consequences will come to light.

Suffice it meanwhile that each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

The immediate effects of attention are to make us:

When watching for the distant clock to strike, our mind is so filled with its image that at every moment we think we hear the longed-for or dreaded sound. So of an awaited footstep.

Every stir in the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugitive his pursuers.

Every bonnet in the street is momentarily taken by the lover to enshroud the head of his idol. The image in the mind is the attention; the preperception, as Mr. Lewes calls it, is half of the perception of the looked-for thing.[369]

So of an awaited footstep. Every stir in the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugitive his pursuers.

Every bonnet in the street is momentarily taken by the lover to enshroud the head of his idol.

The image in the mind is the attention; the preperception, as Mr. Lewes calls it, is half of the perception of the looked-for thing.[369]

So of an awaited footstep. Every stir in the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugitive his pursuers. Every bonnet in the street is momentarily taken by the lover to enshroud the head of his idol.

The image in the mind is the attention; the preperception, as Mr. Lewes calls it, is half of the perception of the looked-for thing.

[369]

It is for this reason that men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught to discern.

Any one of us can notice a phenomenon after it has once been pointed out, which not one in ten thousand could ever have discovered for himself.

thereafter, however, they see them every time. In short, the only things which we commonly see are those which we preperceive. and the only things which we preperceive are those which have been labelled for us, and the labels stamped into our mind.

If we lost our stock of labels we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world.

Organic adjustment, then, and ideational preparation or preperception are concerned in all attentive acts. An interesting theory is defended by no less authorities than Professors Bain[370] and Ribot,[371] and still more ably advocated by Mr. N.

The accommodation and the resultant feeling are the attention.

We don't bestow it, the object draws it from us.

The object has the initiative, not the mind.

Thus the notion that our effort in attending is an original faculty, a force additional to the others of which brain and mind are the seat, may be an abject superstition.

Attention may have to go, like many a faculty once deemed essential, like many a verbal phantom, like many an idol of the tribe.

It may be an excrescence on Psychology. No need of it to drag ideas before consciousness or fix them, when we see how perfectly they drag and fix each other there.

Attention may have to go, like many a faculty once deemed essential, like many a verbal phantom, like many an idol of the tribe. It may be an excrescence on Psychology.

No need of it to drag ideas before consciousness or fix them, when we see how perfectly they drag and fix each other there.

I have stated the effect-theory as persuasively as I can.[380] It is a clear, strong, well-equipped conception, and like all such, is fitted to carry conviction, where there is no contrary proof.

But at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other way.

If a real river could feel, it would feel these eddies and set-backs as places of effort.

"I am here flowing," it would say, "in the direction of greatest resistance, instead of flowing, as usual, in the direction of least. My effort is what enables me to perform this feat."

We may then regard attention as a superfluity, or a 'Luxus,' and dogmatize against its causal function with no feeling in our hearts but one of pride that we are applying Occam's razor to an entity that has multiplied itself 'beyond necessity.'

But Occam's razor, though a very good rule of method, is certainly no law of nature.

The laws of stimulation and of association may well be indispensable actors in all attention's performances, and may even be a good enough 'stock-company' to carry on many performances without aid;

One might put it otherwise by saying that "the mind can always intend, and know when it intends, to think of the Same."

This sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking.

We saw in Chapter X how the consciousness of personal identity reposed on it, the present thought finding in its memories a warmth and intimacy which it recognizes as the same warmth and intimacy it now feels.

In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again.

A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hollo! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.

Most of the objects of our thought, however, are to some degree represented as well as merely pointed out. Either they are things and events perceived or imagined, or they are qualities apprehended in a positive way.

I hope, therefore, that I shall not be accused of huddling mysteries out of sight, when I insist that the psychology of conception is not the place in which to treat of those of continuity and change.

Conceptions form the one class of entities that cannot under any circumstances change.

They can cease to be, altogether; or they can stay, as what they severally are; but there is for them no middle way.

and the mere mystery, as such, of the knowledge, is equally great, whether generals or singulars be the things known.

In sum, therefore, the traditional universal-worship can only be called a bit of perverse sentimentalism, a philosophic 'idol of the cave.'

It may seem hardly necessary to add (what follows as a matter of course from pp. 229-237, and what has been implied in our assertions all along) that nothing can be conceived twice over without being conceived in entirely different states of mind.

We never can break the thought asunder and tell just which one of its bits is the part that lets us know which subject is referred to; but nevertheless we always do know which of all possible subjects we have in mind.

Introspective psychology must here throw up the sponge; the fluctuations of subjective life are too exquisite to be arrested by its coarse means.

It must confine itself to bearing witness to the fact that all sorts of different subjective states do form the vehicle by which the same is known; and it must contradict the opposite view.

Compare the form in which facts appear in a text-book of physics, as logically subordinated laws, with that in which we naturally make their acquaintance.

The conceptual scheme is a sort of sieve in which we try to gather up the world's contents.

Most facts and relations fall through its meshes, being either too subtle or insignificant to be fixed in any conception.

But this is an erroneous view, the undeniable fact being that any number of impressions, from any number of sensory sources, falling simultaneously on a mind which has not yet experienced them separately, will fuse into a single undivided object for that mind.

The law is that all things fuse that can fuse, and nothing separates except what must.

What makes impressions separate we have to study in this chapter. Although they separate easier if they come in through distinct nerves, yet distinct nerves are not an unconditional ground of their discrimination, as we shall presently see.

With them all such things are evasions, subterfuges, come-offs, loop-holes, etc.

They would hang a man for horse-stealing under a statute against sheep-stealing; and would laugh at you if you quibbled about the distinction between a horse and a sheep.

"[423]

Any personal or practical interest, however, in the results to be obtained by distinguishing, makes one's wits amazingly sharp to detect differences.

The culprit himself is not likely to overlook the difference between a horse and a sheep.

And long training and practice in distinguishing has the same effect as personal interest. Both of these agencies give to small amounts of objective difference the same effectiveness upon the mind that, under other circumstances, only large ones would have.

I trust I have said enough to convince the student that this minimum time by no means measures what we consciously know as discrimination. It only measures something which, under the experimental conditions, leads to a similar result.

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same.

Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.[440]

It only measures something which, under the experimental conditions, leads to a similar result. But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same.

Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

[440]

Much, then, of what I have said of difference in the course of this chapter will apply, with a simple change of language, to resemblance as well.

We go through the world, carrying on the two functions abreast, discovering differences in the like, and likenesses in the different.

To abstract the ground of either difference or likeness (where it is not ultimate) demands an analysis of the given objects into their parts.

The departures from Weber's law in regions where it does not obtain, he explains by the compounding with it of other unknown laws which mask its effects.

As if any law could not be found in any set of phenomena, provided one have the wit to invent enough other coexisting laws to overlap and neutralize it!

The whole outcome of the discussion, so far as Fechner's theories are concerned, is indeed nil. Weber's law alone remains true, as an empirical generalization of fair extent:

An ever larger part of the latter's work would go to overcoming the resistances, and an ever smaller part to the realization of the feeling-bringing state.

Weber's law would thus be a sort of law of friction in the neural machine.

[462] Just how these inner resistances and frictions are to be conceived is a speculative question. Delbœuf has formulated them as fatigue; Bernstein and Ward, as irradiations.

It is surely in some such way as this that Weber's law is to be interpreted, if it ever is.

The Fechnerian Maasformel and the conception of it as an ultimate 'psychophysic law' will remain an 'idol of the den,' if ever there was one.

Fechner himself indeed was a German Gelehrter of the ideal type, at once simple and shrewd, a mystic and an experimentalist, homely and daring, and as loyal to facts as to his theories.

"What remembers? The spiritualist says, the soul remembers; it abides across the years and the flow of the body, and gathering up its past, carries it with it" (p. 28).

Why, for heaven's sake, O Bowne, cannot you say 'knows it'? If there is anything our soul does not do to its past, it is to carry it with it.

[421] Sensations of Tone, 2d English Ed., p. 65.

The laws of the arbiter, of the cogitandum, of what we ought to think, are to the former as the laws of ethics are to those of history.

Who but an Hegelian historian ever pretended that reason in action was per se a sufficient explanation of the political changes in Europe?

There are, then, mechanical conditions on which thought depends, and which, to say the least, determine the order in which is presented the content or material for her comparisons, selections, and decisions.

and she ought by right to be able to hug it all the closer, after years wasted out of its presence. The contrary arrangements seem quite fantastic and arbitrary, but nevertheless are part of the very bone and marrow of our minds.

Reason is only one out of a thousand possibilities in the thinking of each of us.

Who can count all the silly fancies, the grotesque suppositions, the utterly irrelevant reflections he makes in the course of a day? Who can swear that his prejudices and irrational beliefs constitute a less bulky part of his mental furniture than his clarified opinions?

Reason is only one out of a thousand possibilities in the thinking of each of us. Who can count all the silly fancies, the grotesque suppositions, the utterly irrelevant reflections he makes in the course of a day?

Who can swear that his prejudices and irrational beliefs constitute a less bulky part of his mental furniture than his clarified opinions?

It is true that a presiding arbiter seems to sit aloft in the mind, and emphasize the better suggestions into permanence, while it ends by dropping out and leaving unrecorded the confusion. But this is all the difference.

A fourth factor in tracing the course of reproduction is congruity in emotional tone between the reproduced idea and our mood. The same objects do not recall the same associates when we are cheerful as when we are melancholy.

Nothing, in fact, is more striking than our utter inability to keep up trains of joyous imagery when we are depressed in spirits.

Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty, and perishing afflict unremittingly the imaginations of melancholiacs. And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are high, find it impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts.

Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty, and perishing afflict unremittingly the imaginations of melancholiacs. And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are high, find it impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts.

In an instant the train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine, and images of spring and hope.

The records of Arctic or African travel perused in one mood awaken no thoughts but those of horror at the malignity of Nature; read at another time they suggest only enthusiastic reflections on the indomitable power and pluck of man.

And if I hear a friend describe a certain family as having blotting-paper voices, the image, though immediately felt to be apposite, baffles the utmost powers of analysis.

The higher poets all use abrupt epithets, which are alike intimate and remote, and, as Emerson says, sweetly torment us with invitations to their inaccessible homes.

In these latter instances we must suppose that there is an identical portion in the similar objects, and that its brain-tract is energetically operative, without, however, being sufficiently isolable in its activity as to stand out per se, and form the condition of a distinctly …

Why, in these latter brains, action should tend to focalize itself in small spots, while in the others it fills patiently its broad bed, it seems impossible to guess.

Whatever the difference may be, it is what separates the man of genius from the prosaic creature of habit and routine thinking.

In Chapter XXII we shall need to recur again to this point.

In short, the absence of an item is a determinant of our representations quite as positive as its presence can ever be.

The gap becomes no mere void, but what is called an aching void.

If we try to explain in terms of brain-action how a thought which only potentially exists can yet be effective, we seem driven to believe that the brain-tract thereof must actually be excited, but only in a minimal and sub-conscious way.

This feeling of the blank form of relationship before we get the material quality of the thing related will surprise no one who has read Chapter IX.

From the guessing of newspaper enigmas to the plotting of the policy of an empire there is no other process than this.

We trust to the laws of cerebral nature to present us spontaneously with the appropriate idea:

… those offered by spontaneous redintegration.[488] But the rapidity with which this selection is made, owing to the familiarity of the ways in which spontaneous redintegration runs, gives the process of reasoning the appearance of evoking images that are foreseen to be conformable to the purpose.

There is no seeing them before they are offered; there is no summoning them before they are seen.

The other circumstance is, that every kind of reasoning is nothing, in its simplest form, but attention."[489]

When the outer stimulus comes and those tracts vibrate with the sensation A, they discharge as directly into the paths which lead to B as when there is no outer stimulus and they only vibrate with the idea a.

To say that the process A can only reach these paths by the help of the weaker process a is like saying that we need a candle to see the sun by.

A replaces a, does all that a does and more; and there is no intelligible meaning, to my mind, in saying that the weaker process coexists with the stronger. I therefore consider that these writers are altogether wrong.

Fear is a transfer of the bodily hurt associated by experience with the thing feared, to the thought of the thing, with the precise features of the hurt left out.

Thus we fear a dog without distinctly imagining his bite.

Love is the association of the agreeableness of certain sensible experiences with the idea of the object capable of affording them.

We should make appropriate speeches, though unaware of any word except the one just on our lips; we should decide upon the right policy without ever a glimpse of the total grounds of our choice.

Our consciousness would be like a glow-worm spark, illuminating the point it immediately covered, but leaving all beyond in total darkness.

Whether a very highly developed practical life be possible under such conditions as these is more than doubtful; it is, however, conceivable.

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs.

Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

As a poet, quoted by Mr. Hodgson, says,

Omitting the specious present, it consists of three ... nonentities—the past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of the specious present."

In short, the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.

The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were—a rearward- and a forward-looking end.[516] It is only as parts of this duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to the other …

To 'realize' a quarter of a mile we need only look out of the window and feel its length by an act which, though it may in part result from organized associations, yet seems immediately performed.

To realize an hour, we must count 'now!—now!—now!—now!—' indefinitely.

Each 'now' is the feeling of a separate bit of time, and the exact sum of the bits never makes a very clear impression on our mind.

In general, a time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.

A week of travel and sight-seeing may subtend an angle more like three weeks in the memory; and a month of sickness hardly yields more memories than a day.

The length in retrospect depends obviously on the multitudinousness of the memories which the time affords. Many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immediately widen the view as we look back. Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel up.

and a month of sickness hardly yields more memories than a day. The length in retrospect depends obviously on the multitudinousness of the memories which the time affords. Many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immediately widen the view as we look back.

Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel up.

In Von Holtei's 'Vagabonds' one Anton is described as revisiting his native village.

"Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount.

Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour.

"

Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out.

But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

So much for the apparent shortening of tracts of time in retrospect. They shorten in passing whenever we are so fully occupied with their content as not to note the actual time itself.

All because you attend so closely to the mere feeling of the time per se, and because your attention to that is susceptible of such fine-grained successive subdivision.

The odiousness of the whole experience comes from its insipidity; for stimulation is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience, and the feeling of bare time is the least stimulating experience we can have.

[549] The sensation of tæedium is a protest, says Volkmann, against the entire present.

The odiousness of the whole experience comes from its insipidity; for stimulation is the indispensable requisite for pleasure in an experience, and the feeling of bare time is the least stimulating experience we can have.[549]

The sensation of tæedium is a protest, says Volkmann, against the entire present.

Exactly parallel variations occur in our consciousness of space. A road we walk back over, hoping to find at each step an object we have dropped, seems to us longer than when we walked over it the other way.

So much for the apparent shortening of tracts of time in retrospect. They shorten in passing whenever we are so fully occupied with their content as not to note the actual time itself.

A day full of excitement, with no pause, is said to pass 'ere we know it.' On the contrary, a day full of waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a small eternity.

Tædium, ennui, Langweile, boredom, are words for which, probably, every language known to man has its equivalent. It comes about whenever, from the relative emptiness of content of a tract of time, we grow attentive to the passage of the time itself.

Expecting, and being ready for, a new impression to succeed; when it fails to come, we get an empty time instead of it; and such experiences, ceaselessly renewed, make us most formidably aware of the extent of the mere time itself.[548]

Close your eyes and simply wait to hear somebody tell you that a minute has elapsed. The full length of your leisure with it seems incredible.

You engulf yourself into its bowels as into those of that interminable first week of an ocean voyage, and find yourself wondering that history can have overcome many such periods in its course.

… brain, and the brain's successions as forces stamping their image on the mind,[552] still, between the mind's own changes being successive, and knowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as between the object and subject of any case of cognition in the world.

A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession.

And since, to our successive feelings, a feeling of their own succession is added, that must be treated as an additional fact requiring its own special elucidation, which this talk about outer time-relations stamping copies of themselves within, leaves all untouched.

The chapter which lies before us deals with the way in which we paint the remote past, as it were, upon a canvas in our memory, and yet often imagine that we have direct vision of its depths.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion.

Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours, or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

and the more of this there is, the more influence does the original state have, and the more permanent a factor is it of our world. An indelibly-imprinted pain may color a life; but, as Professor Richet says:

"To suffer for only a hundredth of a second is not to suffer at all; and for my part I would readily agree to undergo a pain, however acute and intense it might be, provided it should last only a hundredth of a second, and leave after it neither reverberation nor recall."

[567]

for psychical objects (sensations for example) simply recurring in successive editions will remember each other on that account no more than clock-strokes do. No memory is involved in the mere fact of recurrence.

The successive editions of a feeling are so many independent events, each snug in its own skin.

Yesterday's feeling is dead and buried; and the presence of to-day's is no reason why it should resuscitate. A farther condition is required before the present image can be held to stand for a past original.

No memory is involved in the mere fact of recurrence. The successive editions of a feeling are so many independent events, each snug in its own skin.

Yesterday's feeling is dead and buried; and the presence of to-day's is no reason why it should resuscitate.

A farther condition is required before the present image can be held to stand for a past original.

The handkerchief being seen, the knot is seen, and this sensation recalls the idea of the commission, between which and itself the association had been purposely formed."[581]

In short, we make search in our memory for a forgotten idea, just as we rummage our house for a lost object.

In both cases we visit what seems to us the probable neighborhood of that which we miss. We turn over the things under which, or within which, or alongside of which, it may possibly be;

And this same law of habit is the machinery of retention also. Retention means liability to recall, and it means nothing more than such liability. The only proof of there being retention is that recall actually takes place.

The retention of an experience is, in short, but another name for the possibility of thinking it again, or the tendency to think it again, with its past surroundings.

Whatever accidental cue may turn this tendency into an actuality, the permanent ground of the tendency itself lies in the organized neural paths by which the cue calls up the experience on the proper occasion, together with its past associates, the sense that the self …

For, according to all analogy, such a modification can only result in making the next excitation more smooth and rapid. This might make it less conscious, perhaps, but could not endow it with any reference to the past.

The gutter is worn deeper by each successive shower, but not for that reason brought into contact with previous showers.

Psychology (which Dr. Maudsley in his next sentence says "affords us not the least help in this matter") puts us on the track of an at least possible brain-explanation.

Let the quality of permanence in the paths be called the native tenacity, or physiological retentiveness. This tenacity differs enormously from infancy to old age, and from one person to another.

Some minds are like wax under a seal—no impression, however disconnected with others, is wiped out. Others, like a jelly, vibrate to every touch, but under usual conditions retain no permanent mark.

These latter minds, before they can recollect a fact, must weave it into their permanent stores of knowledge. They have no desultory memory.

No one probably was ever effective on a voluminous scale without a high degree of this physiological retentiveness.

In the practical as in the theoretic life, the man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing, whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their own.

A Charlemagne, a Luther, a Leibnitz, a Walter Scott, any example, in short, of your quarto or folio editions of mankind, must needs have amazing retentiveness of the purely physiological sort.

The great memory for facts which a Darwin and a Spencer reveal in their books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a brain with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness.

Let a man early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem.

Their relations to the theory will hold them fast; and the more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory memory.

In mental terms, the more other facts a fact is associated with in the mind, the better possession of it our memory retains.

Each of its associates becomes a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up by when sunk beneath the surface.

Together, they form a network of attachments by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. The 'secret of a good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain.

Each of its associates becomes a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up by when sunk beneath the surface. Together, they form a network of attachments by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought.

The 'secret of a good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain.

But this forming of associations with a fact, what is it but thinking about the fact as much as possible?

This is the intellectual reason why habits of continuous application should be enforced in educational establishments.

Of course there is no moral turpitude in cramming.

If it led to the desired end of secure learning it would be infinitely the best method of study. But it does not; and students themselves should understand the reason why.

are caught up, in fact, into a pre-existing net-work, like the merchant's prices, or the athlete's store of 'records,' and are recollected easier, although the mere native tenacity is not a whit improved, and is usually, in fact, impaired by age.

It is a case of better remembering by better thinking.

Similarly when schoolboys improve by practice in ease of learning by heart, the improvement will, I am sure, be always found to reside in the mode of study of the particular piece (due to the greater interest, the greater suggestiveness, the generic similarity with other …