Classics in the History of Psychology
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Christopher D. Green
ISSN 1492-3713
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By William James (1879)
First published in Mind, 4, 1-22.
Posted
March 2003
Everyone is now
acquainted with the Conscious-Automaton-theory to which Prof. Huxley[1] gave such publicity in his Belfast address; which the late
Mr. D. A. Spalding punctiliously made the pivot of all his book-notices in Nature;
which Prof. Clifford fulminated as a dogma essential to salvation in a
lecture on "Body and Mind"[2] but which found its
earliest and ablest exposition in Mr. Hodgson's magnificent work, The Theory
of Practice.[3] The theory maintains that in
everything outward we are pure material machines. Feeling is a mere collateral product of our nervous processes,
unable to react upon them any more than a shadow reacts on the steps of the
traveller whom it accompanies. Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger in the voyage of life, it
is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch the helm or handle the rigging.
The theory also
maintains that we are in error to suppose that our thoughts awaken each other
by inward congruity or rational necessity, that disappointed hopes cause sadness,
premisses conclusions, &c. The feelings are merely juxtaposed in that
order without mutual cohesion, because the nerve-processes to which they
severally correspond awaken each other in that order. [p. 2]
It may seem strange
that this latter part of the theory should be held by writers, who Like Prof.
Huxley have openly expressed their belief in Hume's doctrine of causality. That doctrine asserts that the causality we
seem to find between the terms of a physical chain of events, is an
illegitimate outward projection of the inward necessity by which we feel each
thought to sprout out of its customary antecedent. Strip the string of necessity from between
ideas themselves, and it becomes hard indeed for a Humian[sic] to say how the notion of causality
ever was born at all.
This, however, is an
argumentum an hominem which need not detain
us. The theory itself is an inevitable
consequence of the extension of the notion of reflex action to the higher
nerve-centres. Prof. Huxley starts from
a decapitated frog which performs rational-seeming acts although probably it
has no consciousness, and passing up to the hemispheres of man concludes that
the rationality of their performances can owe nothing to the feelings that
co-exist with it. This is the inverse of
Mr. Lewes's procedure. He starts from
the hemispheres, and finding their performances apparently guided by feeling concludes, when he comes to
the spinal cord, that feeling though latent must still be there to make it act
so rationally. Clearly such arguments as
these may mutually eat each other up to all eternity.
The reason why the
writers we speak of venture to dogmatise as they do on this subject, seems due
to a sort of philosophic faith, bred like most faiths from an aesthetic
demand. Mental and physical events are,
on all hands, admitted to present the strongest contrast in the entire field of
being. The chasm which yawns between them is less easily bridged over by the
mind than any interval we know. Why then
not call it an absolute chasm? And say not only that the two worlds are
different, but that they are independent? This gives us the comfort of all
simple and absolute formulas, and it makes each chain homogeneous to our
consideration. When talking of nervous tremors and bodily actions, we may feel
secure against intrusion from an irrelevant mental world. When, on the other
hand, we speak of feelings, we may with equal consistency use terms always of
one denomination, and never be annoyed by what Aristotle calls "slipping
into another kind". The desire on the part of men educated in laboratories
not to have their physical reasonings mixed up with such incommensurable factors as
feelings is certainly very strong. Nothing is commoner than to hear them speak
of conscious events as something so essentially vague and shadowy as even
doubtfully to exist at all. I have heard
a most intelligent [p. 3] biologist say: "It is high time for scientific
men to protest against the recognition of any such thing as consciousness in a
scientific investigation". In a
word, feeling constitutes the "unscientific" half of existence, and
any one who enjoys calling himself a "scientist" will be too happy to
purchase an untrammeled homogeneity of terms in the
studies of his predilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualism which,
in the same breath that it allows to mind an independent status of being, banishes
it to a limbo of causal inertness, from whence no intrusion or interruption on
its part need ever be feared.
But Common Sense
also may have its æsthetic demands, and among them may be a craving for unity.
The spectacle of an ultimate and inexplicable dualism in the nature of things
may be as unsatisfying as the obligation to calculate with heterogeneous
terms. Two "aspects," nemine adspiciente, seem
uncalled for. One may well refuse, until
absolutely overpowered by the evidence, to believe that the world contains
items which in no wise influence their neighbours; whose existence or
non-existence need, so far as the remainder go, be taken into no account. It is a smoother and more harmonious thought
to imagine all the items of the world without exception as interlocked in bonds
of action and reaction, and forming a single dynamic whole.
And now, who shall
decide between such rival æsthetic needs? A priori to shrink from a
"chasm" between the objects of one's contemplation is as respectable
as to dislike heterogeneity in the factors of one's reasoning operations. The truth is, then, that neither æsthetic
motives nor ostensible reasons entitle us to decide between the
Conscious-Automaton-theory and
the theory of Common Sense. Both alike
are conceptions of the possible, and for any one dogmatically to affirm the
truth of either is, in the present state of our knowledge, an extremely
unscientific procedure.
The question for us
then is: Can we get light from any facts hitherto ignored in the
discussion? Since the direct evidence of
our living feeling is ruled out of court as mendacious, can we find
circumstantial evidence which will incline the balance either way, and save us
from the dreary strife of prejudice and prepossession?
I think we can, and
propose in the remainder of this article to show that this presumptive evidence
wholly favours the efficacity of Consciousness. Consciousness, namely, has been slowly
evolved in the animal series, and resembles in this all organs that have a
use. Since the mere supernumerary
depicted by the Conscious-Automaton-theory would be useless, it follows [p. 4]
that if we can discover the utility of consciousness we shall overthrow that
theory.
Our problem
consequently is: Of what use to a nervous system is a superadded consciousness?
Can a brain which has it function better than a brain without it? And to answer this question, we must know,
first, the natural defects of the brain, and secondly, the peculiar powers of
its mental correlate. Since consciousness is presumably at its minimum in
creatures whose nervous system is simple, and at its maximum in the
hypertrophied cerebrum of man, the
natural inference is that, as an organe de perfectionnement, it is most needed where the nervous
system is highly evolved; and the
form our first question takes is: What
are the defects characteristic of highly evolved nervous centres?
If we take the
actions of lower animals and the actions of lower ganglia in higher animals,
what strikes us most in them is the determinateness with which they respond to
a given stimulus. The addition of the
cerebral hemispheres immediately introduces a certain incalculableness into the
result, and this incalculableness attains its maximum with the relatively enormous
brain-convolutions of man. In the
beheaded frog the legs twitch as fatally when we touch the skin with acid as do
a jumping-jack's when we pull the string.
The machinery is as
narrow and perfect in the one case as in the other. Even if all the centres above the cord except
the cerebral hemispheres are left in place, the machine-like regularity of the
animal's response is hardly less striking.
He breathes, he swallows, he crawls, he turns over from his back, he
moves up or down on his support, he swims and stops at a given moment, he
croaks, he leaps forward two or three times -- each and all with almost
unerring regularity at my word of command, provided I only be an experienced physiologist and know what ganglia to
leave and what particular spur will elicit the action I desire. Thus if I merely remove his hemispheres and tilt my hand down, he
will crawl up it but not jump off. If I pinch him under the arm-pits, he
will croak once for each pinch; if I throw him into water, he will swim until I
touch his hands with a stick, when he will immediately stop. Over a frog with an entire brain, the
physiologist has no such power. The
signal may be given, but ideas, emotions or caprices will be aroused instead of
the fatal motor reply, and whether the animal will leap, croak, sink or swim or swell up without moving, is
impossible to predict. In a man's brain
the utterly remote and unforeseen courses of action to which a given impression
on the senses may give rise, is too notorious to need illustration. Whether we notice it at all depends on our
mental pre-occupations at the moment. If
we do notice it, our [p. 5] action again depends on the "considerations"
which it awakens, and these again may depend as much on our transient mood or
on our latest experience as on any constant tendencies organised in our nature.
We may thus lay it
down as an established fact that the most perfected parts of the brain are
those whose action are least determinate.
It is this very vagueness which constitutes their advantage. They allow their possessor to adapt his
conduct to the minutest alterations in the environing
circumstances, any one of which may be for him a sign, suggesting distant
motives more powerful than any present solicitations
of sense. Now it seems as if certain mechanical conclusions should be
drawn from this state of things. An
organ swayed by slight impressions is an organ whose natural state is one of
unstable equilibrium. We may imagine the various lines of discharge in the
cerebrum to be almost on a par in point of permeability -- what discharge a
given small impression will produce may be called accidental, in the sense in
which we say it is a matter of accident whether a rain-drop falling on a
mountain ridge descend the eastern or the western slope. It is in this sense that we may call it a
matter of accident whether a woman's first child be a boy or a girl. The ovum is so unstable a body that certain
causes too minute for our apprehension may at a certain moment tip it one way
or the other. The natural law of an organ constituted after this fashion can be
nothing but a law of caprice. I do not
see how one could reasonably expect from it any certain pursuance of useful
lines of reaction such as the few and fatally determined performances of the
lower centres constitute within
their narrow sphere. The dilemma in
regard to the nervous system seems to be of the following kind. We may
construct one which will react infallibly and certainly, but it will then be
capable of reacting to very few changes in the environment -- it will fail to
be adapted to all the rest. We may,
on the other hand, construct a nervous system potentially adapted to respond to
an infinite variety of minute features in the situation; but its fallibility
will then be as great as its elaboration.
We can never be sure that its equilibrium will be upset in the
appropriate direction. In short, a high
brain may do many things, and may do each of them at a very slight hint. But its hair-trigger organisation 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 for ever on a table. Unless
they be loaded, what chance is there that the highest number will turn up
oftener than the lowest? [p. 6]
All this is said of
the brain as a physical machine
pure and simple. Can consciousness
increase its efficiency by loading its dice?
Such is our next problem.
But before directly attacking
it, we must pause a moment to make sure that we clearly apprehend the import of
such expressions as useful discharge, appropriate direction, right reaction,
and the like, which we have been using.
They all presuppose some Good, End or Interest to be the animal's. Until
this goal of his salvation be posited, we have no criterion by which to
estimate the utility of any of his reactions. Now the important thing to notice
is that the goal cannot be posited at all so long as we consider the purely physical
order of existence. Matter has no
ideals. It must be entirely indifferent
to the molecules of C, H, N and O, whether they combine in a live body or a
dead one. What the present conditions
fatally necessitate that they do with equal infallibility and cheerfulness;
whether the result of their action be the perfume of a rose or the odour of
carrion, the words of a Renouvier or the crackling of
thorns under a pot, it is brought forth with as little reluctance in the one
case as in the other. Good involves the
notion of less good, necessitates comparison, and for a drop of water either to
compare its present state with an absent state or to compare its total self
with a drop of wine, would involve a process not commonly thought of as
physical. Comparison requires a tertium quid, a locus -- call it what you
will -- in which the two outward existences may meet on equal terms. This forum
is what is known as a consciousness. Even sensations cannot be supposed, simply
as such, to be aware of their relations to each other. A succession of feelings is not (as James
Mill reiterates) one and the same thing with a feeling of succession, but a
wholly different thing. The latter
feeling requires a self-transcendency of each item,
so that each not only is in relation, but knows its relation, to the
other. This self-transcendency of data constitutes
the conscious form. Where we suppose it
to exist we have mind; where mind exists we have it.
You may, it is true,
ascribe mind to a physical process. You may allow that the atom engaged in some
present energy has a dreamlike consciousness of residual powers and a judgment
which says, "Those are better than this". You may make the rain-drop flowing downhill
posit an impossible ascent as its highest good.
Or you may make the C, H, N and O atoms of my body knowingly to conspire
in its construction as the best act of which they are capable. But if you do this, you have abandoned the
sphere of purely physical relations.
Thus, then, the words Use, Advantage, Interest, Good,
find no application in a world in which no consciousness exists. [p. 7] Things
there are neither good nor bad; they simply are or are not. Ideal truth to exist at all requires that a
mind also exist which shall deal with it as a judge deals with the law, really
cresting that which it professes only to declare.
But, granting such a
mind, we must ·furthermore note that the direction of the verdict as to whether
A or B be best, is an ultimate, arbitrary expression of feeling, an absolute
fiat or decree. What feels good is good; if not it is only because it
negates some other good which the same power of feeling stamps as a Better.[4]
Thus much, then, is
certain, that in venturing to discuss the perfection and uses of the brain at all,
we assume at the outset the existence of some one's consciousness to
make the discussion possible by defining some particular good or
interest as the standard by which the brain's excellence shall be measured.
Without such measure Bismarck's brain is no better than a suicidal maniac's,
for the one works as perfectly as the other to its end. Considered as mere existence, a festering
corpse is as real as a live chancellor, and, for aught physics can say, as
desirable. Consciousness in declaring
the superiority of either one, simply creates what
previous to its fiat had no existence. The judge makes the law while announcing
it: if the judge be a maggot, the suicide's brain will be best; if a king the
chancellor's.
The consciousness of
Mr. Darwin lays it down as axiomatic that self-preservation or survival is the
essential or universal good for all living things. The mechanical processes of
"spontaneous variation" and "natural selection" bring about
this good by their combined action; but being physical processes they can in no
sense be said to intend it. It merely
floats off here and there accidentally as one of a thousand other physical
results. The followers of Darwin rightly
scorn those teleologists who claim that the physical process, as such; of evolution
follows an ideal of perfection. But now
suppose that not only our Darwinian consciousness, but with even greater energy
the [p. 8] consciousness of the creature itself, postulates survival as its summum bonum, and
by its cognitive faculty recognises as well as Mr. Darwin which of its actions
and functions subserves this good; would not the addition of causal efficacy to
this consciousness enable it to furnish forth the means as well as fix the end --
make it teleologically a fighter as well as a standard-bearer? Might not, in other words, such a
consciousness promote or increase by its function of efficacity
the amount of that "usefulness" on the part of the brain which it
defines and estimates by its other functions?
To answer such a question, we must analyse somewhat closely the
peculiarities of the individual consciousness as it phenomenally presents
itself to our notice.
If we use the old
word category to denote every
irreducibly peculiar form of synthesis in which phenomena may be combined and
related, we shall certainly have to erect a category of consciousness, or what
with Renouvier we may, if we prefer, call a category
of personality This category might be
defined as the mode in which data are brought together for comparison with a
view to choice.[5]
Both these points, comparison and choice, will be found alike
omnipresent in the different stages of its activity. The former has always been
recognised; the latter less than it deserves.
Many have been the
definitions given by psychologists of the essence of consciousness. One of the most acute and emphatic of all is
that of Ulrici, who in his Leib
und Seele and elsewhere exactly reverses the
formula of the reigning British school, by calling consciousness a discriminating
activity -- an Unterscheidungsvermögen. But
even Ulrici does not pretend that consciousness
creates the differences it becomes aware of in its objects. They pre-exist and consciousness only
discerns them; so that after all Ulrici's definition
amounts to little more than saying that consciousness is a faculty of cognition
-- a rather barren result. I think we
may go farther and add that the powers of cognition, discrimination and
comparison which it possesses, exist only for the sake of something beyond
themselves, namely, Selection. Whoever
studies consciousness, from any point of view whatever, is ultimately brought
up against the mystery of interest and selective attention. There [p. 9] are a great many things which consciousness is
in a passive and receptive way by its cognitive and registrative
powers. But there is one thing which it does, suâ sponte, and which seems an original peculiarity
of its own; and that is, always to choose out of the manifold experiences
present to it at a given time some one for particular accentuation, and to
ignore the the [sic]
rest. And I shall now show how, from its
simplest to its most complicated forms; it exerts this function with
unremitting industry.
To begin at the
bottom, even in the infra-conscious region which Mr. Spencer says is the lowest
stage of mentality. What are our senses themselves but organs of
selection? Out of the infinite chaos of
movements, of which physics teaches us that the outer world consists, each
sense-organ picks out those which fall within certain limits of velocity. To these it responds, but ignores the rest as
completely as if they did not exist. It
thus accentuates particular movements in a manner for which objectively there
seems no valid ground; for, as Lange says, there is no reason whatever to think
that the gap in nature between the highest sound-waves and the lowest
heat-waves is an abrupt break like that of our sensations, or that the
difference between violet and ultra-violet rays has anything like the objective
importance subjectively represented by that between light and darkness. Out of what is in itself an
undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or
emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring
that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, in a
word, of picturesque light and shade.
If the sensations we
receive from a given organ have their causes thus picked out for us by the
conformation of the organ's termination, the attention, on the other hand, out
of all the sensations yielded, picks out certain ones as worthy of its notice
and suppresses all the rest; Helmholtz's immortal
work on Physiological Optics is little more than a study of those visual
sensations of which common men never become aware -- blind spots, muscae volitantes, after-images,
irradiation, chromatic fringes, marginal changes of colour, double images,
astigmatism, movements of accommodation and convergence, retinal rivalry, and
more besides. We do not even know, as Professor William B. Rogers pointed out,
on which of our eyes an image falls, until trained to notice the local sensation. So habitually over-looked is this by most men that one may be blind for years of a
single eye and not know it.[6][p.
10]
Helmholtz says we only use our sensations as signs. The
sensations from which we avert our attention are those which are valueless as
tokens of the presence of objective things. These things are called the
Objects of perception. But what are they? Nothing, as it seems to me,
but groups of coherent sensations. This
is no place to criticise Helmholtz's treatment of
perception, but I may say, in passing that I think his rather indefinite and
oracular statements about the part played by the intellect therein have
momentarily contributed to retard psychological
inquiry. We find the Kantian
philosophers everywhere hailing him as the great experimental corroborator of
their master's views. They say he has
proved the present sensation to have nothing to do with the construction of the
Object that is an original act of the intellect which the sensation merely
instigates but does not furnish forth: it contains ultra-sensational
elements. All that Helmholtz
really does prove is, that the so-called Object is constituted of absent
sensations. What he has not
explicitly noticed is, that among these the mind picks out certain particular
ones to be more essential and characteristic than the rest. When, for example, on getting a peculiar
retinal sensation with two acute and two obtuse angles, I perceive a
square table-top, which thus contradicts my present image; what is the squareness but one out of an infinite number
of possible retinal sensations which the same object may yield? From all these the mind, for æsthetic
reasons of its own, has singled out this one and chosen to call it the object's
essential attribute? Were room here
given, I think it might be shown that perception involves nothing beyond association and selection. The antithesis is not, as Helmholtz's
admirers would have it, between sensations on the one hand as signs and
original intellectual products, materially different from [p. 11] sensations on
the other, as Objects. It is between
present sensations as signs and certain absent sensations as Objects, these
latter being moreover arbitrarily selected out of a large number as being more
objective and real than the rest. The
real form of the circle is deemed to be the sensation it gives when the line of
vision is perpendicular to its centre -- all its other sensations are signs of
this sensation. The real sound of the
cannon is the sensation it makes when the ear is close by. The real colour of the brick. is the sensation
it gives when the eye looks
squarely at it from a near point, out of the sunshine and yet not in the gloom;
under other circumstances it gives us other colour-sensations which are not
signs of this -- we then see it
looks pinker or blacker than it
really is. The reader knows no object
which he does not represent to himself by preference as in some typical
attitude, of some normal size, at some characteristic
distance, of some standard tint, &c., &c. But all these essential characteristics,
which together form the genuine objectivity of the thing and are contrasted
with the subjective sensations we may happen to get from it at a given moment, are themselves sensations pure and
simple, susceptible of being fully
given at some other moment. The
spontaneity of the mind does not consist in conjuring up any new
non-sensational quality of objectivity.
It consists solely in deciding what the particular sensation shall be whose native objectivity shall be held more valid than that of all
the rest.[7]
Thus perception
involves a twofold choice. Out of all present
sensations, we notice mainly such as are significant of absent ones: and out of
all the absent associates which these suggest, we again pick: out a very few to
be the bearers par excellence
of objective reality. We could have no more exquisite
example of the mind's selective industry.
That industry goes
on to deal with the objects thus given in perception. A man's Empirical Thought depends on the
objects [p. 12] and events he has experienced, but what these shall be is to a
large extent determined by his habits of attention. An object 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, an object met only once in a
life-time may leave an indelible experience in the memory. Let four men make a tour in Europe. One will
bring home only picturesque impressions-costumes and colours, parks and views
and works of architecture, pictures and statues. To another all this will be
non-existent; and distances and prices, populations and drainage-arrangements,
door- and window-fastenings, and other useful statistics will take their place A third will
give a rich account of the theatres, restaurants, and public balls, and naught beside; whilst the fourth will
perhaps have been so wrapped in his own subjective broodings as to tell little
more than a few names of places through which he passed. Each has selected, out
of the same mass of presented objects, those which suited his private interest
and has made his experience
thereby.
If, now, leaving the
empirical combination of objects, we ask how the mind proceeds rationally to
connect them we find selection again to be omnipotent. In an article on "Brute and Human
Intellect " in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, July 1878, p.
236 I have tried to show that
all Reasoning depends on the ability of the mind to break up the totality of
the phenomenon reasoned about into partial factors or elements, and to pick out
from among these the particular one which, in our given theoretical or
practical emergency, may lead to the proper conclusion. Another predicament will need another conclusion,
and require another element to be picked out.
The man of genius is he who will always stick-in his bill, as it were,
at the right point, and bring it out with the right element --
"reason" if the emergency be theoretical, "means" if it be practical-transfixed
upon it? Association by similarity I have shown to be an important help to
this breaking-up of represented things into their elements. But this association is only the minimum of
that same selection of which picking out the right reason is a maximum. I here confine myself to this brief
statement, but it may suffice to show that Reasoning is but another form of
that selective activity which appears to be the true sphere of mental
spontaneity.
If now we pass to
the Æsthetic activity of the mind, the application of our law is still more
obvious. The artist notoriously selects
his items, rejecting all tones, colours, shapes, which do not harmonise with
each other and with the main purpose of [p. 13] his work. That unity, harmony, "convergence of characters,"
as M. Taine calls it, which gives to works of art
their superiority over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination. Any
natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one
feature of it as characteristic, and suppress all merely accidental items which
do not harmonise with this.
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 longing
for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinchingly on the arduous path,
these are characteristic ethical energies.
But, more than these; for these but deal with the means of compassing
interests already felt by the man to be supreme. The ethical energy par excellence has to go farther and choose which
interest out of several equally coercive shall become supreme. The issue here is of the utmost
pregnancy, for it decides a man's entire career. When he debates, Shall I
commit this crime? choose that profession? accept that office, or marry this
fortune? -- his choice really
lies between one of several equally possible future Selves. What his entire empirical Ego shall
become, is fixed by the conduct of this moment.
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 very complexion of the character. The problem with the man is less what act he
shall now choose to do, than what kind of a 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.
Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the
selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting
agency of attention. The 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 highest distillate thus represents
in the last analysis nothing but sensational elements. But this is far from
meaning that it implies nothing but passive faculty of sensation. As well
might one say that the sculptor is passive, because the statue stood from eternity
within the stone. So it did, but with a
million different ones beside it. The
world as a Goethe feels and knows it all lay embedded in the primordial chaos
of sensations, [p. 14] and into these elements we may analyse back every
thought of the poet. We may even, by our
reasonings, unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming
atoms which science calls the only real world.
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, as the sculptor extracts his statue by simply rejecting the other
portions of the stone. Other sculptors,
other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same
chaos! Goethe's world is but one in a
million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. Some such
other worlds may exist in the consciousness of ant, crab and cuttle-fish.
After this perhaps
too long analysis let us now look back. We have found that the unaided action
of the cerebral hemispheres would probably be random and capricious; that the nerve-process
likely to lead to the animal's interests would not necessarily predominate at a
given moment. On the other hand, we have found that an impartial consciousness
is a non-entity, and that of the many items that ever occupy our mental stage
Feeling always selects one as most congruous with the interests it has taken
its stand upon. Collating these two
results, an inference is unavoidable. The "items" on the mental stage
are the subjective aspects of as many nerve-processes, and in emphasising the representations
congruous with conscious interest and discouraging all others, may not
Attention actually reinforce and inhibit the nerve-processes to which the
representations severally correspond?
This of course is
but a hypothetical statement of the verdict of direct personal feeling -- a
verdict declared mendacious by Professor Clifford. But the intricate analysis by which it has been
reached gives it great plausibility. I
shall strengthen the probability by further facts in a moment. But I beg the reader to notice here the
limitations of the power of Feeling, if power there be. All the possibilities of representation, all
the images are furnished by the brain.
Consciousness produces nothing, it only alters the proportions. Even the miraculous action of free will can
only consist in the quantitative reinforcement of representations already given
qualitatively. A sonorous plate has no
proper note of its own. It is most
impossible by scraping it to reproduce twice an identical tone. The number of Chladni's
sand-figures it will furnish is as inexhaustible as the whimsies which may turn
up in a brain. But as the physicist's
finger pressing the plate here or there determines nodal points that throw the
sand into shapes of relative fixity, [p.
15] so may the accentuating finger of consciousness deal with the fluctuating
eddies in the cerebral cortex.
That these eddies
are stirred by causes that have no connection with either dominant interests or
present impressions seems manifest from the phenomena of dreaming. The chaotic imagery there appears due to the
unequal stimulus of nutrition in different localities. But if an accidental variation in nutrition
is sufficient to determine the brain's action, what safeguard have we at any time against its random
influence? It may of course be reasonably objected that the exceptional state
of sleep can afford no proper clue to the brain's operations when awake. But Maury in his
classic work, Le Sommeil, has conclusively
proved the passage of dreams through "hypnagogic
hallucinations" into that meteoric shower of images and suggestions,
irrelevant to the main line of thought, the continual presence of which every
one who has once had his interest awakened in the subject, will without
difficulty recognise in himself.
Ordinarily these perish in being born, but if one by chance saunters into the mind, which is
related to the dominant pursuit of the moment, presto! it is pounced upon
and becomes part of the empirical Ego.
The greatest inventions, the most brilliant thoughts often turn up
thus accidentally, but may mould for all that the future of the man. Would they
have gained this prominence above their peers without the watchful eye of
consciousness to recognise their value and emphasise them into permanence?
Nur allein der Mensch
Vermag das Unmögliche.
Er unterscheidet, wählet und richtet,
Er kann dem augenblick
Dauer verleihen.[*]
The hypothesis we
are advocating might, if confirmed, considerably mitigate one of the strongest
objections to the credibility of the Darwinian theory. A consciousness which should not only
determine its brain to prosperous courses, but also by virtue of that
hereditary influence of habit (nowadays
so generally believed in by naturalists) should organise from generation to
generation a nervous system more and more mechanically incapable of wandering
from the lines of interest chosen for it at first, would immensely shorten the
time and labour of natural selection.
Mr. Darwin regards animated nature as a sort of table on which dice are
continually being thrown. No intention presides over the throwing, but lucky
numbers from time to time fortuitously turn up and are preserved. If the
ideas we have advanced concerning the instability of a complicated cerebrum be
true, we should have a sort of extension of this reign of accident into the
functional life of [p. 16] every individual animal whose brain had become
sufficiently evolved. As his body
morphologically was the result of lucky chance, so each of his so-called acts
of intelligence would be another; and ages might elapse before out of this
enormous lottery-game a brain should emerge both complex and secure. But give
to consciousness the power of exerting a constant pressure in the direction of
survival, and give to the organism the power of growing to the modes in which
consciousness has trained it, and the number of stray shots is immensely
reduced, and the time proportionally shortened for Evolution. It is, in fact,
hard to see how without an effective superintending ideal the evolution of so
unstable an organ as the mammalian cerebrum can have proceeded at all.
That consciousness should
only be intense when nerve-processes are retarded or hesitant, and at its
minimum when nerve-action is rapid or certain, adds colour to the view that it
is efficacious. Rapid, automatic action
is action through thoroughly excavated nerve-tracks which have not the defect
of uncertain performance. All instincts
and confirmed habits are of this sort. But when action is hesitant there always
seem several alternative possibilities of nervous discharge. The feeling awakened lay the nascent
excitement of each nerve-track seems by its attractive or repulsive quality to
determine whether the excitement shall abort or shall become complete. Where indecision is great, as before a dangerous leap,
consciousness is agonisingly intense.
Feeling, from this point of view, may be likened to a cross-section of
the chain of nervous discharge, ascertaining the links already laid down, and
groping among the fresh ends presented to it for the one which seems best to
fit the case.
The remarkable
phenomena of "vicarious function"
in the nervous centres form another link in our chain of circumstantial
evidence. A machine in working order
functions fatally in one way. Our
consciousness calls this the right way. Take out a valve, throw a wheel out of
gear or bend a pivot, and it becomes a different machine, functioning just as
fatally in another way which we call the wrong way. 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. Why, if its performances
blindly result from its structure, undirected by any feeling of purpose, should
it not blindly continue now to throw off inappropriate acts just as before its
mutilation it produced appropriate ones? As a matter of· fact, however, its
performances become from day [p. 17] to day more normal, until at last a
practised eye may be needed to suspect anything wrong. If we suppose the
presence of a mind, not only taking cognisance of each functional error,
but able to exert an efficient pressure to inhibit it if it be a sin of
commission, to lend a strengthening-hand if the nerve-defect be a weakness or
sin of omission,-- nothing seems more natural than that the remaining parts of
the brain, assisted in this
way, should by virtue of the principle of habit grow back to the old
teleological modes of exercise for which they were at first incapacitated. Nothing, on the contrary, seems at first
sight more unnatural than that they should vicariously take up the duties of a
part now lost without those duties as such exerting any persuasive or coercive
force.[8]
There is yet another
set of facts which seem explicable by the supposition that consciousness has
causal efficacity. It has long been noticed that
pleasures are generally associated with
beneficial, pains with detrimental, experiences. All the fundamental vital processes
illustrate this law. Starvation, suffocation, privation of food, drink and sleep, work when exhausted, burns,
wounds, inflammation, the effects of poison, are as disagreeable as filling the
hungry stomach, enjoying rest and sleep after fatigue, exercise after rest, and
a sound skin and unbroken bones at all times, are pleasant. Mr. Spencer, in the
chapter of his Psychology entitled "Pleasures and Pains," has suggested that these
coincidences are due, not to any pre-established harmony, but to the mere
action of natural selection which would certainly kill off in the long run any
breed of creatures to whom the fundamentally noxious experience seemed
enjoyable. An animal that should take
pleasure in a suffocation would, if that pleasure were efficacious make him
immerse his head in water, enjoy a longevity of four or five minutes. But if pleasures and pains have no efficacity, one does not see (without some such à[sic] priori rational harmony as would be scouted by the "scientific"
champions of the Automaton-theory) why
the most noxious acts, such as burning, might not give a thrill of delight, and
the most necessary ones, such as breathing, cause agony.[9] The exceptions to this law [p. 18] are, it is
true, numerous, but relate to experiences that are either not vital or not
universal. Drunkenness, for instance,
which though noxious is to many persons delightful, is a very exceptional
experience. But, as the excellent physiologist
Fick remarks, if all rivers and springs ran
alcohol-instead of water, either all men would hate it or our nerves would have
been selected so as to drink it with impunity.
The only very considerable attempt, in fact, that has ever been made to
explain the distribution of our feelings is that of Mr. Grant Allen in
his suggestive little work Physiological Æsthetics; and his reasoning is
based exclusively on that causal efficacity of
pleasures and pains which the "double-aspect" partisans so strenuously
deny.
Thus, then, from
every point of view the circumstantial
evidence against that theory is very strong. A priori
analysis of both brain and conscious action shows us that if the latter
were efficacious it would, by its selective emphasis, make amends for the
indeterminateness of the former; whilst the study it à[sic] posteriori of the distribution
of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ
added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
The conclusion that it is useful is, after all this, more than
justifiable. But, if it is useful,
it must be so through its efficaciousness, and the Conscious-Automaton-theory must succumb to the theory of Common
Sense.
Our discussion might
fairly stop here save for the possible difficulty some readers may have in
appreciating the full utility of having certain nervous possibilities
emphasised above the rest. The measure
of all utility is, as we have seen, some standard posited by Desire. The standard of survival or self-preservation
is most potent. But there exist a host
of other standards, aesthetic and moral, imperative so long as they do not
conflict with this one and sometimes imperative over this one. In the preliminary selection by the senses of
certain objective orders of movement, it is difficult to see what standard [p.
19] is subserved. The utility of not
having a sense for magnetism when we have one for heat, is not obvious. We may
at most suspect a possible æsthetic brightness and clearness to result, from
the wide intervals. But passing by this obscure region we see without the least difficulty why
we ignore those ingredients of sensation which are not signs of things. What
the peculiarity is in itself which makes Smith's voice so different from Brown's,·we need never inquire so long as whenever we hear
it we say, "There is
Smith". For our practical interest in recognising whom we have to deal
with outweighs our interest in the shades of sound per se. The selection
again of certain attitudes, expressions, &c., in Smith, to stand as
characteristic of him so that when others are present we say, "He does not
look like himself," and if he is sitting to us for his portrait we spend
an hour perhaps in placing him and lighting him so as to bring out with the
utmost clearness these selected traits -- this selection, I say, is equally explicable by various
æsthetic standards, permanency simplicity, harmony, clearness, and the
like. Passing now from traits to things,
the utility of selection is obviously created and measured by the interests
the man has made his own. If Edward never walks out without finding a
four-leafed clover, while Oliver dies of old age without having seen one, this
is merely due to the fact that Edward has somehow been led to stake his
happiness on that particular branch of discovery, and out of a visual field identical
with that of Oliver has picked the details that minister to this somewhat
arbitrary interest. Granted the
interest, we cannot deny the use of the picking-out power. That Edward, having this interest in common
with many others, should finally succeed in emphasising certain of those others
and suppressing this, would be an example of the utility of selection in the
ethical field, supposing always that the new interest chosen were of a higher
order and not, like making puns, for example, as trivial an end as the one
forsaken.
In the ethical field
the importance of choosing one's paramount interest is universally recognised.
But it is not so
commonly known how, when the
interest is once fixed upon,
the selective activity must ceaselessly work to detect its presence or absence
in each emergency that turns up. Take,
for example, an inebriate struggling with temptation. The glass is before him, and the act of drinking
has an infinity of aspects and may be defined in as many ways. If he selected the aspect of its helping him
to write an article, of its being only lager-beer, of its being the fourth of
July, of his needing it as medicine, of his
never having formally signed the pledge of this particular drink
"not counting," or else of its giving him the strength to make a much
more powerful resolution for the future than any of his [p. 20] previous ones, or whatever other sophistries his
appetite may instigate, he does
but accentuate some character really contained in the act, but needing this
emphasising pressure of his attention to be erected into its essence. But if, out of all the teeming suggestions
with which the liquor before him inspires his brain, respectively saying,
"It is a case of this good, of that interest, of yonder end," his
mind pounces on one which repeats, "It
is essentially a case of
drunkenness!" and never lets that go, his stroke of
classification becomes his deed of virtue.
The power of choosing the light name for the case is the true moral
energy involved, and all who posit moral ends must agree in the supreme utility
of, at least, this kind of selective attention.
But this is only one
instance of that substitution for the entire phenomenon of one of its partial
aspects which is the essence of all reasoned thought as distinguished from mere
habitual association. The
utility of reasoned thought is too enormous to need demonstration. A reasoning animal
can reach its ends by paths on which the light of previous experience has never
shone. One who, on the contrary, cannot
break up the total phenomenon and select its essential character must wait till
luck has already brought it into conjunction with his End before he can guess
that any connexion obtains between the two.
All this is elaborated in the article "On Brute and Human
Intellect" to which I have ventured to refer the reader. In that article (p. 274) I stated that I had found it
impossible to symbolise by any mechanical or chemical peculiarity that tendency
of the human brain to focalise its activity on small points which seems to
constitute the essence of its reasoning power.
But if such focalisation be really due not so much to structural
peculiarity as to the emphasising power of an efficacious consciousness
superadded, the case need no longer perplex us.
Of course the
materialist may still say that the emphasised attention obeys the strongest
vibration and does not cause it, that we will what we do, not do what we will,
-- that, in short, interest is passive and at best a sign of strength of
nerve-disturbance. But he is immediately confronted by the
notorious fact that the strongest tendencies to automatic activity in the
nerves often run most counter to the selective pressure of consciousness. Every day
of our lives we struggle to escape some tedious tune or odious thought
which the momentary disposition
of the brain keeps forcing upon us. And,
to take more extreme cases, there are murderous tendencies to nervous discharge
which, so far from involving by their intensity the assent of the will, case
their subjects voluntarily to repair to asylums to escape their dreaded
tyranny. In all these cases of voluntas paradoxa or
invila, the individual selects out of
the two possible selves [p. 21] yielded by his cerebral powers one as the true Ego;
the other he regards as an enemy until at last the brain-storm becomes too
strong for the helmsman's power. But
even in the depths of mania or of drunkenness the conscious man can steady
himself and be rational for an instant if a sufficient motive be brought to
bear. He is not dead, but sleepeth.
I should be the last
to assert that the Common-Sense-theory leaves no difficulties for
solution. I feel even more strongly than
Professors Huxley and Clifford that the only rational nexus is that of
identity, and that feeling and nerve-tremor are disparate. I feel too that those who smile at the idea
of calling consciousness an "organ," on a par with other organs, may
be moved by a fundamentally right instinct. And I moreover feel that that
unstable equilibrium of the cerebrum which forms the pivot of the argument just
finished may, with better knowledge, be found perfectly compatible with an
average appropriateness of its actions taken in the long run. But with all these concessions made, I still
believe the Common-Sense-theory to merit our present credence. Fragmentary probabilities supported by the
study of details are more worthy of trust than any mere universal conceptions,
however tempting their simplicity. Science has won all her credit by the former
kind of reasoning, Metaphysics has lost hers by the latter. The impossibility of motion, of knowledge,
either subjective or objective, are proved by arguments as good as that which
denies causality to feeling, because of its disparity with its effects. It is
really monstrous to see the prestige of "Science"
invoked for a materialistic conclusion, reached by methods which, were they
only used for spiritualistic ends, would be booted at as antiscientific in the
extreme. Our argument, poor as it is,
has kept at any rate upon the
plane of concrete facts. Its circumstantial
evidence can hardly be upset until the Automaton-theorists shall have
condescended to make or invoke some new discoveries of detail which shall
oblige us to reinterpret the facts we already know. But in that case I feel
intimately persuaded that the reinterpretation will be so wide as to transform
the Automaton-theory as thoroughly as the popular one. The Automaton-theory in its present state
contents itself with a purely negative deliverance. There is a chasm, it says, between feeling
and act. Consciousness is impotent. It exists, to be sure, but all those manners
of existence which make it seem relevant to our outward life are mere meaningless coincidences,
inexplicable parts of the general and intimate irrationality of this disjointed
world. What little continuity and reason
there seems to be, it says, lies wholly in the field of molecular physics. [p.
22]
Thither Science may
retreat and hump her strong back against the mockeries and phantasms that
people the waste of Being around. Now the essence of the Common-Sense-theory, I
take it, is to negate these negations.
It obstinately refuses to believe Consciousness irrelevant or
unimportant to the rest. It is there for
a purpose, it has a meaning But as all
meaning, relevancy and purpose are symbolised to our present intelligence in
terms of action and reaction and causal efficacy, Common Sense expresses its
belief in the worth of Feeling by refusing to conceive of it out of these
relations. When a philosophy comes
which, by new facts or conceptions, shall show how particular feelings may be
destitute of causal efficacy without the genus Feeling as a whole becoming the
sort of ignis fatuus
and outcast which it seems to be to-day to so many "scientists"
(loathly word!), we may hail Professors Huxley and Clifford as true prophets.
Until then, I hold that we are incurring the slighter error by still
regarding our conscious selves as actively combating each for his interests in
the arena and not as impotently paralytic spectators of the game.
Wm. James.
Footnotes
[1] Fortnightly
Review, Vol. XVL, p. 555.
[4] I
have treated this matter of teleology being an exclusively conscious function
more at length in an article on "Spencer's Definition of Mind" (Journal of Speculative Philosophy,
Jan., 1878), to which I take the liberty of referring the reader. The fact that each consciousness simply stakes its ends and challenges
the world thereby is most conspicuous in the ease of what is called Self-love.
There the end staked by each mind is peculiar to itself, whilst in respect of
other ends many minds may unite
in a common position. But m their psychological essence these impersonal ends
in no wise differ from self-interest.
Abolish the minds to whom they seem good and they have no status; any
more than the categorical imperative that perish who may John
Smith must wax fat and prosper, has a ratio existendi after Smith's peculiar lusts have
been annihilated.
[5]
Neither 'association' nor 'dissociation' is synthesis of a peculiar kind; they
are mere generic modes, and are wholly unfit to serve as differentiae of
psychical phenomena in any general philosophical classification. Comparison and choice, on the contrary, are
each sui generis.
Let it not be said that a magnet compares the different filings in a
machine-shop to choose the iron filings from the heap. There is no proof that the brass filings appeal to it at an. In comparison, both terms equally appeal
to consciousness.
[6]
If one cared to indulge in à[sic] priori constructions à[sic]
la Spencer one might easily show how the differentiation of sense-organs
arose in the primitive polyp through this reinforcement by' a selective
attention (supposed efficacious) of particular portions of the feeling yielded
by an organ already nascent. The
integument of the animal might, for instance, at first be affected both by
light-vibrations and by those far below them. But if the former were picked out
by the consciousness as most interesting, the nervous movements world soon grow
more and more harmonious with them, and
more and more out of tune with the rest. An optic nerve and retina would
thus result. One might corroborate this
reasoning by pointing to what happens in cases of squint. The squinting eye gives double images which
are so inconvenient that the mind is forced to abstract its attention from
them. This resolute refusal to attend to
the sensations of one eye soon makes it totally blind. It would seem, indeed,
that the attention positively suppressed the function of the retina, for the
presence of cataract which keeps the image from It altogether, results in no
such paralysis. I do not insist on this
point, partly because such speculation is rather cheap -- "all may raise
the flowers now, for all have got the seed" -- and partly because there
seems some reason to doubt whether the usually received explanation of strabismic blindness be correct.
[7] When I say Objects are wholly formed of associated and selected sensations, I hope the reader will not understand me to profess adhesion to
the old atomic doctrine of association, so thoroughly riddled of late by
Professor Green. The association of
sensations of which I speak,
presupposes comparison and memory which are functions not given in any one
sensation. All I mean is, that these mental functions
are already at work in the first beginnings of sensation and that the simplest
changes of sensation moreover involve consciousness of all the categories --
time, space, number, objectivity,causality. There is not first a passive act of sensation
proper, followed by an active production or projection ("inference")
of the attributes of objectivity by the mind.
These all come to us together with the sensible qualities, and their
progress from vagueness to distinctness is the only process psychologists have
to explain. What I mean to say in the text is, that this process involves nothing
but association and selection, all new production of either material or formal
elements being denied.
Only man [the human]
is able to accomplish the impossible.
He distinguishes,
chooses, and judges,
And he can give
permanence to the moment.
(Translation
courtesy of Thomas Teo, York University)
[8]
This argument, though so striking at first eight, is perhaps one which it would
he dangerous to urge too dogmatically. It may be that restitution of cerebral
function is susceptible of explanation on drainage-principles, or, to use Stricker's phrase, by "collateral innervation".
As I am preparing a separate essay on this subject, I will say no more about
the matter here.
[9] I
do not overlook an obvious objection suggested by such an operation as
breathing. It, like other motor
processes, results from a tendency to nervous discharge. When this takes place
immediately, hardly any feeling but the rather negative one of ease results.
When, however, a nervous discharge is checked it is a universal law that consciousness of a disagreeable kind
is awakened, reaching in the case of suffocation the extremity of agony. An
Automatist may then say that feeling here, so far from playing a dynamic part, is a mere passive index or symptom of
certain mechanical happenings; and if here, then elsewhere. It may be replied
that even were this true of completely habitual acts like breathing where the
nervous paths have been thoroughly organised for generations, it need not be
true of hesitant acts not yet habitual; it need not be true of pains and
pleasures, such as hunger and sleep, not connected with motor discharge;
and even in the instance chosen it leaves out the possibility that the nervous
mechanism, now automatically perfect, may have become so by slowly organised
habit acquired under the guidance of conscious feeling.