Classics in the History of Psychology

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Christopher D. Green
York University, Toronto, Ontario

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History of Psychology: A Sketch and an Interpretation
Volume II

[p. 104] CHAPTER VI.

I. Social Psychology. -- Psychology has reflected the collectivistic tendency generally noticeable in late nineteenth-century thought. This tendency showed itself in certain well-marked movements. It appeared in evolution theory -- as Darwinism worked its way beyond the biological sciences as such -- in the substitution of the group for the individual, in cases of selection in which the utility subserved was collective. It was seen that social utility may replace individual advantage; that group competition may succeed to personal rivalry; that the "good of the whole " may be better than the "good of all." It appeared further in political theory in Hegel's view of the State,[1] in the stirring of the ferment of Rousseau's doctrines, and in the beginnings of Socialism.[2] In the matter of scientific method, Comte's Positivism was its vehicle; and the science of sociology, as projected by Comte, was to explain the theory, as well as apply the method, in the domains represented by social science and psychology.

In psychology, it became potent in consequence of the criticism of theories based on the concept of an isolated individual. The English "moral philosophy" had pointed out the power of sympathy and altruism, [p. 105] as against self-love, and the inherent strength of the collective instincts and springs of action. The affective motives were shown to run athwart the intellectual, as represented by the law of association of ideas, which had been formulated as a principle working within the individual mind. Meanwhile the sociologists were meeting with downright failure and suffering discredit, in their attempts to found a social science upon an un-social psychology. The "sociology" of the biological analogy, that of the struggle for existence, that of imitation, opposition, and repetition, that of the compounding of sensations, desires, and beliefs,[3] that of the association of ideas used to explain the association of human beings -- all these more or less futile sociologies put in evidence the need of a psychological theory of the social individual. The motives of collectivism clearly expressed in Darwin's theories of instinct, emotion, and morals were held in check by Spencer's ambitious pre-emption of the field of social science with a construction motived by individualism and founded on association. Moreover, the disciples of Comte, in England at least, spent their energies on practical questions and measures and on the negative criticism of metaphysics.

In England, too, the hindering influence of the theory of association was seen at work in the Oxford school of anthropologists. In Tylor [4] and Max Müller alike, dissimilar as they are, the psychology of primitive man is read in terms of that of the civilised; and this largely by means of the common and universal operation of association. [p. 106]

The need became apparent for a genetic and social psychology, which would reveal the state of the individual mind in given social conditions; the relation, that is, between individual and collective "representation," to extend somewhat the phraseology of the French writers referred to in the discussion of primitive thought.[5]

Put in Kantian form, the question of social psychology is this: How is a social subject or self possible? Is he a socialised individual self, or is he an individualised social self? The outcome of social psychology until now points plainly to a negative answer to the first, and a positive answer to the second, of these questions. It thus reverses the point of view of historical individualism, and gives collectivism its point d'appui in the processes of mental development itself.

The larger results upon which this verdict is based may be stated in order; in this way the present status and programme of social psychology will be brought out.

(1) The matter of "tradition" has been cleared up. It has already been pointed out that a true social heredity is to be recognised among animals, running parallel to physical heredity and supplementing it. In human groups this is enormously developed in what we call "culture," a body of beliefs, usages, and sanctions transmitted entirely by social means, and administered to growing individuals by example, precept, and discipline.[6] This constitutes the social store, the collective [p. 107] wealth of the group, its moral heritage. It constitutes the milieu, a body of influences which are necessary to the development of the individual mind. Such functions as language, spoken and written, play and art; such inventions as fire, building, and weaving, are not only conveniences of life; they are necessary means of growth. What sort of a being would develop without them? Just the primitive truncated being we actually find in the rudest men, only worse. The analogy of the immature child, born physically before its period, is more than a figure.

The society into which the child is born is, therefore, not to be conceived merely as a loose aggregate, made up of a number of biological individuals. It is rather a body of mental products, an established network of psychical relationships. By this the new person is moulded and shaped to his maturity. He enters into this network as a new cell in the social tissue,[7] joining in its movement, revealing its nature, and contributing to its growth.[8] It is literally a tissue, psychological [p. 108] in character, in the development of which the new individual is differentiated. He does not enter into it as an individual; on the contrary, he is only an individual when he comes out of it -- by a process of "budding" or "cell-division," to pursue the physiological analogy. Society is a mass of mental and moral states and values, which perpetuates itself in individual persons. In the personal self, the social is individualised.

(2) The more specific task of social psychology then appears. It is that of tracing out the internal development of the individual mind, its progressive endowment with individuality, under the constant stimulation of its entourage, and with nourishment drawn from it. A constant give-and-take process -- a "social dialectic" -- is found between the individual and his social fellows. By this process the materials of self-hood are absorbed and assimilated. The "self" is a gradually forming nucleus within the mind; a mass of feeling, effort, and knowledge. It grows in feeling by contagion, in knowledge by imitation, in will by opposition and obedience. The outline of the individual gradually appears, and at every stage it shows the pattern of the social situation in which it becomes constantly a more and more adequate and competent unit. This process the social psychologist has patiently traced out; and apart from details, on which opinions differ, it constitutes a positive gain to our knowledge.[p. 109]

The consciousness of the self, thus developed, carries with it that of the "alter"-selves, the other "socii," who are also determinations of the same social matter. The bond, therefore, that binds the members of the group together is reflected in the self-consciousness of each member. The external social organisation in which each has a certain status is reinstated in the thought of the individual. It becomes for each a psychological situation constituted by selves or agents, in which each shares the duties and rights common to the group. Upon the background of commonness of nature and community of interests the specific motives of reflective individuality -- self-assertion, rivalry, altruism -- are projected; but they are fruits of self-consciousness, they are not the motives that exclusively determine its form.[9] All through its history, individualism is tempered by the collective conditions of its origin.

When the self has become a conscious and active person, we may say that the mental individual as such is born. But the individual remains part of the whole out of which he has arisen, a whole that is collective in character and of which he is a specification. He lives and moves and has his being still in a system of collective facts and values. He is a "socius," an element in a social network or situation; only by this can his individuality and independence become possible or have any meaning. In this new sense is the Aristotelian dictum confirmed -- "man is a social animal." But we may express the whole truth more adequately by saying that man is a society individualised; for in the new [p. 110] individual society comes always to a new expression of itself.[10]

(3) Once introduced, the inch develops into the ell.  The social strain in the normal working of most of the mental functions has been made out. Biological intimations of social conditions have been pointed out in bashfulness, organic sympathy, gregarious impulses, etc. Apart from the specific means by which the processes of socialising and training go on -- contagion, imitation,[11] play, sympathy, obedience, language, moral sense, etc.-- the element of "community " has been found to extend to the operations considered by earlier thinkers the most individualistic. Self-love is never free from a colouring of sympathy, invention rests upon imitation, rebellion involves the recognition of the rights of others, rivalry is a form of co-operation. Thought no less than life is shot through with the motive of collectivism. Opinion is formed on social models, social authority precedes logical validity, private judgment is never really private. Even in the processes of deductive reasoning, funda-[p. 111] mental social conditions of genesis are never wholly concealed: the "proposition " is a social "proposal" or suggestion; the conclusion is held to be valid for all persons as well as for all cases; even the constructive categories of thought are founded on racial experience ingrained in individual endowment. There is a synnomic force in all reflective thought, in all science.[12]

II. Affective Psychology. -- Under this heading we may place for our present purposes the psychology of the functions which are included under the "motive powers" of the Scottish writers and the Gemüth of the Germans: the general phenomena of feeling and will. [p. 112] The recent advances made in these subjects are important, but not surprising, seeing that in the historical development of theories they have been neglected. Knowledge and thought have had a "trust."

The Kinæsthetic Theory. -- For Locke and the French spiritualists the "sense of effort" was the citadel of the inner life. It was connected with mental activity because it seemed to be the channel by which mental initiative expressed itself. The outgoing nervous currents were its agents in moving the muscles.

This was formulated in the "innervation theory" of effort. According to a group of writers, of whom Wundt [13] remained long the protagonist, the seat of physical effort was the centre of actual discharge of energy from the brain, the process being the "innervation" of this centre; in straining to move the arm, and succeeding, we feel the motor or "efferent" energy passing out, proportional in quantity to the effort made.

Bastian [14] and James radically disputed this theory. It was declared that effort was sensational, due, like other sensations, to "incoming" or "afferent" currents, to peripheral excitation. Various sensational accompaniments were pointed out in the muscles of the throat, scalp, and organs affected, without which the particular effort could not be made.

The experimental examination of muscular sensation in general came to reinforce this contention. It was confirmed also by phenomena observed in troubles of speech and writing. [15] This view, known as the kin-[p. 113] [figure -- James] [p. 114] æsthetic or peripheral theory, in opposition to the innervation or central theory, has gradually come to prevail. Effort is always directed in certain channels; and what we feel is the incipient stirring up of the sensational processes involved in the muscular action effected by means of these channels.

Late discussion, moreover, shows that the feeling of outgoing energy is not necessary for the grounding of spiritualism. The consciousness of effort remains the same in any case. The "outgoing" or discharge of energy is as much a physical process as the "incoming "; it amounts to what a group of recent sensationalist writers have called "centrally initiated sensation "[16] -- the differences characteristic of central states being concealed under the term sensation.

The kinæsthetic point of view rapidly extended itself. Thanks largely to pathological cases and to medical research in aphasia, paralysis, hysteria, etc., it came to be applied to voluntary movement as a whole, as has been indicated above. In the theory of muscular movement, based on kinæsthesis, it is contended that a sign, image, or "cue" immediately or remotely [17] equivalent to sensations of movement must be in the mind before the will to move can take form in concrete effort or issue in movement. The effective "idea" of how the movement "feels" must be present to start the energies of actual movement. This equivalent " idea" is a mass of kinæsthetic reverberations due to earlier movements.[p. 115]

The applications of the principle were not yet finished, however. Two writers, C. Lange [18] and W. James, applied it about the same time to emotional expression and to emotion itself.

The theory of "emotional expression" announced by Darwin in his book on the subject [19] started new interest in the life of feeling. It established an important link in the Darwinian chain binding man to the animals. To Darwin all emotional expressions -- seen at their best in facial expression -- were either (1) survivals of "serviceable associated habits," (2) movements antithetic to these habits, (3) or movements resulting from "direct nervous discharge." On these three cases his three laws of expression were based. That of "serviceable associated habits" was the revolutionary one. It recognised, in the great fixed expressions accompanying emotion, useful defensive and offensive actions, acquired by the animal in crises involving high emotion. The expression of fear, for example, is what remains of actions found serviceable by the animals in conditions occasioning fear; that is, in danger of some kind. This principle was concretely demonstrated by Darwin, and is rarely disputed to-day.[20]

The further application of kinæsthesis consisted in saying that all consciousness of emotional expression, like that of effort, is kinæsthetic or afferent in its [p. 116] [figure -- Fechner] [p. 117] nervous basis; and, further, that this consciousness is no more nor less than the emotion itself. In experiencing an emotion, we are conscious of the incipient stirring up of a mass of expression. This would mean that instead of having an emotion and acquiring its expression by the law of associated habits, one should say that the habits acquired by the animals in defence and offence have left after-effects which are felt as emotion.

This has been widely admitted for the "coarser" inherited expressions. James' last pronouncement tended to limit it to these. The higher emotions and sentiments, intellectual, æsthetic, etc., which have less evident expression, are in dispute.[21]  It would seem that if the emotion is due to a previously established adaptive and serviceable action, some principle of direct excess-discharge, such as that supposed by Darwin and Bain, would have to be assumed to account for this adaptation; and in that case we may say that this discharge may be a factor which in its nervous seat, and possibly also in consciousness, is not kinæsthetic.[22]

The importance of the kinæsthetic principle, however, is undisputed. It results in handing over the entire body of movements, both voluntary and involuntary, and much of the life of feeling, to the sensationalist [p. 118] theory. The motor consciousness becomes one of sensations of movement and their reinstatement; and sensations of movement are merely a special class, or number of classes, like those of sight and hearing.[23] The theory of mental activity and spiritual reality must find its claim elsewhere than in the superficial sense of activity which accompanies muscular movement.

As further result, the theory that considers emotions as compounded of pleasures and pains receives its death-blow; as also does the intellectualist theory, according to which all emotion is due to the play of ideas.

Later analysis distinguished feeling from sensation. Physical pain has been isolated as a sensation; mental discomfort remains a feeling. Bain found feeling to reside in a certain ruffling or "exciting" effect upon consciousness. Mere consciousness itself is looked upon by many as feeling. One "feels," as Bradley holds, the operation of each and all the functions alike; feeling is then identified with "immediacy" to consciousness, or with mere subjectivity.

A broad formulation justifies the use of the terms "affection" and "affective" as applying both to concrete feelings or emotions (called "objective feelings") and to cases in which conditions of consciousness or the Self are directly reflected ("subjective feelings"). Between these extremes lie the more vague qualitative sentiments, moods, etc., in which the objective conditions are less definite.[24][p. 119][figure -- Ribot][p. 120]

Affective Revival and Affective Logic. -- The movement away from the intellectualist theory of feeling has assumed the proportions of a thoroughgoing revolt, led by Ribot. Ribot asserted not only that feeling -- emotion, sentiment, etc. -- was an original state, not dependent on presentation; but also that feeling had its own independent revival (mémoire affective), association, and generalisation (logique affective). There is a "logic," a series of imaginative and subsumptive processes, in which feelings -- not ideas nor "ideas of feeling," but feelings themselves -- are the subject-matter.[25]

The bearing of this appears as soon as the current intellectualist theory of revival is recalled to mind. According to it only states of knowledge, consisting of images, cognitions, relations, etc., can he revived. All memories are cognitive; only presentations can be recalled as representations. This means that the memory of a feeling or emotion is never produced directly, but always by means of the memory of the thing, idea, or bit of knowledge to which the feeling was earlier attached. The feeling is, therefore, new, and not revived; it attaches to an old cognition; it is never the reproduction of an old feeling.

This seems on the surface artificial and unlikely enough; but it "went without saying" until Ribot challenged it. Since then a variety of analyses, facts, and arguments [26] have established, in the opinion of [p. 121] many, the truth of affective revival; and its bearings are beginning to be worked out, with fruitful results, in a wide range of topics.[27] Those who accept it hold, in principle, (1) that feelings are directly remembered and associated; (2) that they are subject to a sort of "generalisation" in moods or sentiments; and (3) that in the general form they are available for more or less complex processes of description, intercourse, ejection, etc., in a way that presents analogies with the logic of concepts. Feeling has its "logic."

If this logic of feeling is founded in the active life, as some of its advocates hold, the theory joins hands with the motor and habit theories of generalisation, attention, synthesis, interest, etc., worked out by the functional psychologists.[28]  In this wider movement, Ribot was also one of the pioneers.[29]

Animism and Ejective Processes. -- The ghost of animism has haunted the psychological house ever since the corner-stone of the structure was laid by the Greeks. Beginning with mystic "participation" and [p. 122] occult "possession," as revealed by the anthropologists and students of human culture, it passed into the "pan-psychism" and "anthropomorphism" of early speculation, as narrated by the historians, and became popular in the religious dogmas of "transmigration" and " demon-worship," as recorded in many sacred books. The history of psychology down to Descartes shows, as we have seen, a prolonged effort to restrict the sphere of the mind-term of what became at last a strict dualism of substances.[30]

As with the other spontaneous solutions of the riddle of the world, animism recurred in the reflection of later philosophy, in the form of reasoned pan-psychism and psychic atomism. The grounding of such positions, however, hd to be more secure than that given to animism in early social tradition and religious faith. The result took form both in attempts to account for the tendency to "animate" nature -- to find the motive of animism in general -- and in attempts to find out how much truth it really embodies. Allow to primitive man definite motives for believing in the soul-life, the Beseelung, of nature, how far, it is then asked, is he right in doing so?

This distinction of questions is brought out in one of the influential theories of recent times, the theory of "introjection" of Avenarius.[31] This writer finds in animism a necessary and universal procedure for the apprehension of the world, having its roots in social situations and extending to animal life. The dog that [p. 123] sees another dog eyeing the same bone with himself acts in a manner to show that he finds in the second dog a sort of mind. In some crude way he apprehends the other dog as having the character we call mental. He is, then, in so far animistic. This appears in the jealousy of animals, sometimes directed even toward inanimate things. This is "introjection."

On this view, the presence of Animism in early societies and in the earliest speculation is well-motived and necessary.  Its universality as reported by the anthropologists would lead us to expect this. It is further supported by the fact that there is in social and individual thought, alike, a "projective" period in which the first panoramic apprehension of things sees them as in movement, as-if-animate, not as dead and still.[32] A sort of mind-meaning is projected into things.

Avenarius answers the second question also. He finds that although introjection or animism is necessary, in the development of thought, it is none the less mistaken. The world is not what the animistic interpretation takes it to be. It is the business of reflection to correct it, by a re-interpretation of the phenomena on which it is based. In other words, after the development of dualism there comes always historically the interpretation of dualism; an interpretation extending to the genetic motives by which the dualism itself was created. One of these interpretations (not that supported by Avenarius, however [33]) looks upon animism as a stage [p. 124] in the evolution of thought, not necessarily wrong, certainly not illusional, but relatively crude; a first interpretation.

The vitality of the animistic position is seen in its recent history. It still lives in its mystic and occult forms as a psychosophy, no less than in philosophical and psychological theories. We have with us the emotional and mystical spiritists, as well as those who reach the same conclusion by way of "psychic research," the revelations of "telepathy," or other more or less serious methods. A remarkable outbreak of psychosophy or occultism, together with earnest attempts to deal with its problems scientifically, has marked the history of the last generation.[34]

Alterations of Personality and the Unconscious. -- A departure of more evident scientific importance, bearing on the question of the unity of the mental principle, is found in research in the field of double and multiple personality. Beginning with the investigation of hysterical patients whose field of personal consciousness was much restricted, through the loss of [p. 125] sensibility in localised areas of touch, vision, etc., [35] it extended to the observation of trance conditions, in which alternating or simultaneous personalities appeared in the same living body. Among the most remarkable cases are those reported by Flournoy and Prince.[36] It has been shown that portions of the nervous system may function in relative isolation and detachment, the disturbance showing itself in the presence of partial mental aggregates which tend, in James' phrase, to "take on personal form."  Interpretations of these parts vary from the purely physiological to the psychological and spiritistic. The advocates of pan-psychism explain it by the hypothesis of elementary psychic or "soul" properties, supposed to attach to each living cell or unit of the body. Materialists find in it evidence of a real disintegration or decomposition of mind, the normal unit personality giving evidence merely of the larger unity of organisation of the brain.[37] A radically functional view of mind sees in these phenomena merely the consequence of psycho-physical parallelism. If, it may be asked, binocular vision can be so deranged that the two eyes see "double," why may not the same be true of any more or less distinct portions of the nervous system? -- assuming, that is, that each preserves its own functional integrity.

A secondary result appears in the new light these facts throw upon the question of the unconscious. In the cases cited, evidently, the sensations, memories,[p. 126] etc., which are outside the "primary" or normal consciousness are not really unconscious; they are present in a subsidiary or "secondary" consciousness, so far as they remain mental at all.

Ejection and Semblance. -- A new form taken on by the animistic concept has appeared in modern discussion of religion, in the theory of the "eject." The English positivist, Clifford,[38] defined God as the form in which the human mind "ejects" its own being or self out into the world. The human self, at each stage of culture, is idealised and set up as a personal object of worship. God becomes, in the phrase of Romanes, the "world-eject"; like the world-soul of the ancients, it is a projection on a larger canvas of the image of the human soul.[39] God is made in the image of man rather than man in the image of God.

The hypothesis of ejection has worked forward to suggest exact empirical research, as well as backward to confirm the studies of the anthropologists. In two recent departures we see its reinstatement: one in the statement of the process of individual growth in self-consciousness (already adverted to, and to be discussed more fully in the chapter on "Interpretation"[40]); the other, in the discovery of the facts of æsthetic "semblance" or "empathy."[41][p. 127]

In spite of passing anticipations,[42] the credit belongs to Th. Lipps of having investigated the facts and formulated the rules of the sort of semblant or imaginative reading of the self into æsthetic objects which he calls Einfühlung.[43] In his important work, Æsthetics, the principle is made one of universal explanation.[44]

It appears to explain the fact that in æsthetic appreciation the spectator has a certain sympathy or " fellow-feeling" (Mitchell) for the object, apprehending it as-if it could itself feel; that is, as if it were animate. In this broad tendency, we see the kinship of the movement with those of animism and ejection, and this suffices to give to it its first classification.

But we find that the treatment of the æsthetic object as if it could feel, or as if it were a self or subject of feeling, involves the sort of mental movement that all as-if or "semblant" functions involve: a sense of " make-believe," "self-illusion" (Groos, bewusste Selbst-täuschung), willing deception (Paulhan, mesonge), Schein. We speak of the "illusions" of the theatre, the "make-believe" of play, the artificial conventions and "hypocrisies" of social life; all these contain alike an element of "as-if" or pretence, which we all agree to and allow to pass. This results in a second and narrower classification of the æsthetic phenomenon: it [p. 128] is a case of semblance. The æsthetic object simulates the real; it does not assert reality. It depicts; it does not narrate.

But we have not yet come to the differentia of Einfühlung or empathy. The æsthetic object is not only (1) a semblant object which (2) falls in the class of beings that feel; it is further (3) endowed with the human life and with the very feeling of the spectator himself.  It is a process of ejection, of the semblant re-reading, of the personal self; it is an auto-projection of the self into the work of art or the beautiful thing.

Apart from other possible criteria or essential marks of æsthetic experience -- such as idealisation -- this, it is claimed, is one criterion and essential mark.

This discovery, apart from the unchastened use made of it in certain of the more speculative German treatises,[45] is recognised by many as a notable advance. It seems to include and to unify many of the partial insights of earlier writers on æsthetics. It is vigorously opposed, especially by the "intellectualist" [46] and "technical" theorists, who find æsthetic value respectively in a rational idea and in the technical sufficiency of the work of art. It constitutes, however, a notable advance in the understanding of the æsthetic sentiment as such.

The Attention. -- As remarked above; the problem of attention was neglected until modern times.  It was taken up by Condillac and the French spiritualists, [p. 129] notably Laromiguière, who found in it evidence of pure mental activity. Fries distinguished "involuntary" from "voluntary" attention.[47] Its growing importance in recent psychological theory is the result of several somewhat distinct causes.

In the first place, the discovery of hypnotism and its investigation brought the attention into critical notice. The two schools of Paris and Nancy, differing widely in theory, still agreed on the technique of hypnotism, as requiring the induction of a fixed or static state of attention, directed upon a single idea (monoidéisme). It was through this state that the sleep in which the "suggestion," essential to the Nancy view, was found to take place, and also the states of relative trance, considered characteristic of it by the Paris authorities, were alike induced.[48] This has remained perhaps the greatest gain from researches on hypnotism; for light was thrown upon the function and the effects of attention. In pathology, it has resulted in the resort to mental symptoms and diagnosis, as supplementary to and to theories based upon a variety of disturbances of the attention, found in mental disorders.[49]

Again, investigations in both experimental and animal psychology have shown the attention to be of capital importance. States of distraction, preoccupation, over-concentration, etc., are matters of high importance in the control necessary to experimentation [p. 130] upon the mind; and the psychology of these different conditions is still to be worked out.  In connection with reaction time, differences have been made out due to sorts or types of attention. In experiments on animals, the pre-requisite to any sound results -- in investigation on learning, imitation, etc. -- is that the attention be effectively attracted and normally engaged.[50]

These special indications converge upon the attention; and with them go indications given by the general psychology of effort and volition.

The result is a body of theories about attention and some experiments upon it. The theories are in general those which typical views of the mental life would respectively welcome. The "intensity," "inhibition," and "motor" or "dynamic" theories are the present-day alternatives. In the intensity theory one recognises the Herbartian and Humian notion that high intensity or vividness in a presentation is what is meant by attention; there is no function as such, called "the attention," which may be on occasion focused upon the presentation. This is, in short, a "content" theory, either sensational or presentational. In its sensational form it was stated by Condillac.

The "motor" theories are at the other extreme. They recognise a functional concentration or fixation of the mind upon the presentation, either drawn by the content or selective of it. For this theory it is "the attention," the "activity" of the spiritualist psychology identified with a mass of active or motor processes.[p. 131] In the development of the mental life, the motor processes act as the adaptive and fixing agent; the attention is an organ of intellectual, as the muscles are of organic, accommodation The actual motor elements involved have been variously described.[51]

The "inhibition" theory is, in a sense, a negative rendering of the intensity point of view. According to it, there is nothing intrinsic about a given presentation that it should be attended to; it is attended to, when it is, because of the inhibition or restraint of other contents, by reason of which these cease to be rivals to the former. 'The rival presentations fall away, or are held back, and the one left free stands in relative isolation, and so secures the vividness which we call attention.[52]

Contemporary Views of the Mind. [53] -- The present [p. 132] day sees the refined and reflective re-statement of older theories, but has its own preferences as well. The pendulum swing widely to the left in the late nineteenth century, when the "new" nerve physiology and pathology substituted the brain for the mind, and the advocates of the experimental method talked of a "new psychology without a soul." The middle point of the return swing was touched in the theory of psycho-physical parallelism and in the scientific agnosticism which professed a neutral attitude in respect to the nature of mental reality. This had the merit, at least, of silencing much of the philistinism of the "new" departures just referred to.

In the present decade the pendulum is moving to the right, toward a re-statement of the spiritual theory. It appears in the return to consciousness, considered as the first datum of knowledge -- as in the movements of "neo-criticism," "immanentism," "radical empiricism." [54] The mind is said to be just what it seems to be, just what it shows itself doing and experiencing. The substance view of the soul is replaced by an "actuality" [55] view of the mind. Mind is what we actually find it to be; just as body is what the physicists find the properties of matter actually are. Psychology is as capable of dealing with mental changes and laws as physics is with physical.

This is supported also by thinkers whose interests are [p. 133] moral. It permits the reassertion of the point of view of Lotze, according to which the mind has its own synthetic function, different from that of the brain, and possibly under some conditions -- realised, it may be, in another life -- independent of it.

This also appears in various forms of "intuitionism" and "immediatism." Of the former, the movement in France is especially noteworthy, where the revolt against the logical pretensions of the formal idealists is based upon a negative critique of conceptual knowledge.  The resort is to immediate intuition, and to direct experience of life and the world.[56]

The immediatism which results from a critique of logical thought takes on various forms. Both feeling and will are resorted to, to make good the defects of knowledge. There is a new affectivism and a new voluntarism. The former takes shape in constructive æsthetic theory -- a renewal of the pancalistic suggestions of Plato and Kant -- and in thinly disguised mysticism. Voluntarism appears in forms varying from pragmatic relativism and psychological theories of value -- considered as being more fundamental than truth -- to the return to absolute will. Just now we have the day of feeling, passion, striving, as before the year nineteen hundred we had the day of reason, logic, conceptual knowledge.

[1] Hegel, Die Philosophie des Rechts (1833).

[2] The first edition of Vol. I of Marx's Das Kapital appeared in 1867.

[3] The search for the "elementary social fact" has been analogous in sociology to that for the original "element" in psychology.

[4] E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871); M. Müller, Science of Religion (1870).

[5] Chapter II. of Vol. I.

[6] In certain extreme statements of this view, society is made an organ of constraint, a sort of new Leviathan, by which individuality as such is crushed out. See Durkheim, Le Suicide, and cf. Maudsley, Physiology and Pathology of Mind.

[7] A phrase used by L. Stephen in Science of Ethics.

[8] Certain of the books in which this and the following points are discussed from different points of view are Bosanquet, Philosophical Theory of the State (2nd ed.); G. Simmel, Soziologie (1908); P. Barth, Die Philosophie der Geschichte als Soziologie (1906); Lacombe, De l'Histoire considérée comme science (1894); Tarde, La Logique sociale (1893), and Études de psychologie sociale (1898); Ribot, La Logique des Sentiments; Guyau, Education et Héredité and Esquisse d'une Morale. The point of view of collective psychology was carried into ethical discussion in England by S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress (1889), and L. Stephen, The Science of Ethics (1882); see also Ormond, The Foundations of Knowledge (1900), and Dewey and Tufts, Ethics (1908). The terminology in this field is not well developed. I follow that employed in my work Social and Ethical Interpretations (1897); certain of the terms -- such as "socius," "social heredity," "social situation," "social dialectic," etc., have now been widely adopted. There are no general summaries of results; the Introduction to Social Psychology by McDougall (1908) comes perhaps nearest to it, though it is also a first-hand study of the problems. See also Ellwood, Sociology in its Psychological Aspects (1912). The annual "Social Psychology" issues of the Psycholog. Bulletin may he consulted; and the select lists of titles given in the Dict. of Philos. and Psych., sub verbis.

[9] Of course, the instinctive self-seeking and egoistic motives are present along with the social from the start.

[10] There is room here for a great diversity in philosophical interpretation. The Positivist, seeing his collectivism confirmed, rests with satisfaction upon his oars, or seeks to carry out a socialistic programme. The Spiritualist finds the social dialectic merely a drawing out or education of the social "faculties" of the soul, born with the body. The Hegelian finds in it empirical evidence of the wider dialectic of the absolute Self coming to consciousness in man. To one who holds the radically genetic point of view it is a process of new formation, a formative process sui generis. The self is made out of social ingredients. Without them the inherited mental characters would have no chance to complete themselves in a person. As in other cases of radical genesis, the outcome cannot be reduced to its elements or explained by them; it is a new "genetic mode" of reality.

[11] An early anticipation of the place of imitation in social life is to be found in Bagehot, Physics and Politics (1872).

[12] This has become more and more plain as the "psychologising" of logic has gone on in a series of works in which thought has been treated not merely formally, as of old, but as an actual instrument: the "Logics" of Lotze, Sigwart, Erdmann, Wundt, Bradley. In English this movement has been contributed to by Venn, Empirical Logic (1889), and Jevons, Principles of Science (1873). See also R. Adamson, The Development of Modern Philosophy, Vol. II (1903). Psychologies which show this tendency are those of Jodl, Lehrbuch der Psychologie (1896); Brentano, Psychologie, Vol. I (1874); James, Principles of Psychology (1901), and Baldwin, Handbook of Psychology, Vol. I (1889) and Experimental Logic, Vol. II of Thought and Things (1908). The theory of judgment has become the storm centre, since Brentano announced his view that judgment is an original function. In the outcome, the Aristotelian logic has lost much of its importance; it has been driven to interpret the formal elements of thought either, on the one hand, as symbols of an absolute principle, with Hegel; or, on the other hand, as symbols of mere logical and mathematical relationship, with the "symbolic" and algebraic logicians. Symbolic logic in the latter sense was founded by Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854). The movement of "psychologism" has been further accentuated since the impulse of the genetic point of view has been added to that of the psychological, in the later treatises of the pragmatic school. A note on "Psychologismus" is to be found in Klemm, Geschichte der Psychologie, pp. 165 ff; the reaction against it in Germany is led by Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (1901-1902).

[13] W. Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 1st ed.; in later editions Wundt has gradually modified his view, attempting, however, to save his "terminology" (see 6th ed., 1908-1910).

[14] Charlton Bastian, Brain as an Organ of Mind (1880), who suggested the term "kinæsthesis"; W. James, The Sense of Effort (1880).

[15] See E. Stricker, Über die Bewegungsvorstellungen (1882), and Über die Sprachvorstellungen (1880), and the literature of the "internal speech" and volition, summarised in the writer's Mental Development in the Child and the Race, Chaps. XIV (especially) and XIII.

[16] See Külpe, Grundriss der Psychologie (1890).

[17] See James' later discussion. Principles of Psychology (1890), chapter on "Will."

[18] C. Lange, Über Gemütsbewegungen (German translation, 1887, from the Danish); James, Mind, ix, 1884, and Principles of Psychology (1890). James' later revised formulation is to be found in the Psychological Review, I, Sept. 1894.

[19] Ch. Darwin, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Other works on expression are Bell, The Anatomy of Expression; Mantegazza, Physiognomy and Expression; Mosso, Fear.

[20] Darwin's other laws are in dispute, especially that of  "antithesis."  The "direct " nervous discharges of a convulsive confused sort, produced in conditions of strong emotion, seem to be general phenomena of intensity and overflow of a kind
which the principle of "dynamo-genesis'' would lead us to expect. So far as this leads to new accommodations, it recalls the "excess discharges" and "overproduced movements" made use of in the Spencer-Bain theory explained above.

[21] A thorough discussion is to be found in Lehmann, Die Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gefühlslebens (1892). Recent experimental results on feeling are discussed by Titchener, Elementary Psychology of the Feeling and Attention (1908).

[22] Bastian, an English physician, the first kinæsthetic extremist, so to speak, does not generally receive due credit.  He held that the brain-centres usually called "motor" are not discharge centres, but centres of "kinæesthesis.

[23] Experimental analysis has shown that the tactile-muscular group of sensations includes several sense-qualities which probably have distinct nervous elements, i. e., "pressure" sensations, "joint" sensations,"temperature" sensations, as well as sensations of "touch" and "muscular contraction."

[24] So far from lending itself to a theory of an ultimate "element" known as "affection," this latter term is justified only by reason of its extreme abstractness and generality. Indeed: "affection" has about the same relation to concrete "affections" that "feeling'' has to "feelings."

[25] This may well be called the "autonomous" theory of feeling, in contrast with " intellectual'' and "organic" theories.

[26] Principally in French: see Ribot, La Logique des Sentiments (1904), and Problèmes de la Psychologie affective (1909); Paulhan, La Fonction de la mémoire, etc. (1904) : Dauriac, Essai sur l'espirit musical (1904); various authors in the Revue philosophique for recent years.

[27] Such as those of "valuation," "common" emotion, "community" in morals and art, etc.

[28] The extension of the idea of "affective memory," like that of the kinæsthetic, seems to be "destined." It is fit to survive; no doubt in part on account of the extreme unfitness of the intellectual theory, which breaks down in many fields.  Musical phenomena, and those of fine art generally, furnish rich data, the more because these sentiments have never had any plausible theoretical treatment. The present writer feels free to say this because of his own conversion to the affective theory, occurring between the publication of the "theory of social matter" based on intellectualism (Social and Ethical Interpretations, 4th ed., 1906, Chap. XII), and that of the "logic of practice" (Interest and Art, Vol. III of Thought and Things, Chaps. VI and VII), where the logic of feeling and interest is accepted and extended. The literature, apart from the French writers cited, is not extensive: see Urban, Valuation, its Nature and Laws (1909), and Psychological Review, VIII, Nos. 3 and 4, and the literature of Valuation (both pro and con).

[29] Ribot, La Psychologie de l'attention (1895).

[30] A historical account and appreciation of animism is given in W. McDougall's Body and Mind, a History and a Defence of Animism (1911).

[31] Richard Avenarius, Der menschliche Weltbegriff (1891); see also his Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (1888-1890).

[32] The term "projective" is freer than "introjection" from positive implications, and also from the further special bearings given to introjection by Avenarius.

[33] Avenarius' interpretation is based upon an experiential criticism, Empiriocriticismus, of the whole of experience considered as a system; see the Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. This has been developed by Rehmke Höfler, and other writers of the "immanental" school, who have emphasised the presence of "form" in mental operations. To them "form quality" Gestaltsqualitätat, qualities in consciousness; such as the identical form of the same melody when rendered in different keys (J. Rehmke, Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Psychologie, 2nd ed., 1905; H. Höfler, Psychologie, 1897).

[34] As to the results, opinions differ from the negative of most of the professional psychologists to the more favourable verdict ot those who think that the separate existence of the soul and its immortality have been scientifically demonstrated. See Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1882 ff.); also Hyslop, Problems of Psychical Research (1909).

[35] Binet and Féré, Animal Magnetism (1886); Binet, Altérations de la personalité (1892), in English translation; Janet, L'Automatisme psychologique (1889). In these investigations, hypnotism proved to be a valuable instrument.

[36] Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars (3rd ed., 1910); M. Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality (1905).

[37] See H. Maudsley, Body and Mind (2nd ed., 1973).

[38] W. K. Clifford, Seeing and Thinking (1879).

[39] A modern statement of the world-soul theory is to be found in Fechner's Nana (1849); see also his Zend-Avesta (2nd ed., 1900-1902).

[40] Chapter VII, below.

[41] A term suggested by Titchener and Ward as rendering for the German Einfühlung. "Æsthetic semblance" is the equivalent of "empathy." It is to be hoped the confusions may be avoided in English that have made the German term almost useless. It has become equivalent to "animism." Empathy is no doubt the best term for the strictly æsthetic movement, some other and more general word such as "semblance" being used for the entire group of analogous imaginative processes.

[42] Notably that of Lotze in Über den Begriff der Schönheit (1845). See also his Microcosmus (1856).

[43] Th. Lipps, Raumaesthetik (1893-1897); Aesthetische Einfühlung (1900); Aesthetik (1903-1906).

[44] See also K. Groos, Der ästhetische Genuss (1902). In English the literature is not extensive: see Mitchell, Structure and Growth of the Mind; W. M. Urban, Valuation, its Nature and Laws (1902); Baldwin, Interest and Art (1911). For a full exposition of German discussions see V. Basch, Revue Philosophique, Vol. XXXVII, Nos. I and II, and for thoroughgoing criticism, Ch. Lalo, Les Sentiments esthétiques. Cf. also Paulhan, Les Mensonges de l'art (1906).

[45] The passage from the strict æsthetic mode of ejection to the broader meanings of semblance and animism has brought confusion into the discussion and opened the door to hostile criticism. Instead of the empirical meaning of the sense of self, of whatever grade, a metaphysical principle, "the Self," is invoked to explain the facts.

[46] For a presentation of the intellectualist theory, see B. Bosanquet, History of Æsthetics (1892), a work written from a very ex parte point of view.

[47] The former belonging to the "lower order" of processes, memory, habit, and association with imaging.

[48] The Paris school is represented by the authorities of the Salpêtrière hospital led by Charcot; the Nancy school, by Liégeois and Bernheim.

[49] See especially the work, Les Névroses, etc. (1898), of P. Janet, who suggested the term "psychasthenia" as being more appropriate in many cases than "neurasthenia."

[50] The ever-present difficulty is to secure experimental conditions so natural that, the animal is not distracted, confused, or made afraid. This is especially difficult when the natural gregarious habits are interrupted under conditions of isolation.

[51] See Ribot, Psychologie de l'attention. In the writer's scheme, for example, Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1886), the attention to a thing or idea may be analysed into elements, as shown in the following formula, Att = A + a + a. A stands for the gross muscular and organic tensions of "getting ready," necessary to any act of attention; a for the more special processes of concentration to a class of things, as of the eye muscles in vision; and a for the most special processes of seizing upon and recognising the single thing or presentation. Every act of attention has "general" elements, "class"  elements, and "individual" elements, all of them motor in character.

[52] Two recent summarising books are by E. B. Titchener, The Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention (1908) and W. B. Pillsbury, Attention (1908). Both these authors do scant justice to the "motor" theory.

[53] There are other special departures which might be noted before closing our brief exposition. Most important work has been done in mental pathology. The investigation of individual heredity and character was given a fruitful impulse by the works of F. Galton (Natural Inheritance, and Enquiries into Human Faculty), to whose initiation also -- reinforced by the statistical methods used by K. Pearson on investigations on "bionomics" it is due that the undertaking called ''eugenics'' starts out with promise for practical psychology and morals.

[54] A phrase given currency by W. James. The point of view was explicitly taken up by Shadworth Hodgson (Philosophy of Reflection, 1878, and Metaphysic of Experience, 1898), in a sustained and original analysis of experience. As in Hume, the dualism of inner and external worlds is derived by this writer within the sphere of experience itself. With Bain and James, Hodgson (who died in 1912) takes his place as one of the foremost modern representatives of empiricism.

[55] See Paulson, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892).

[56] See Bergson, Les Donées immédiates de la conscience (1890), and l'Évolution créatrice (1907).