6. Are there any statements in this Chapter that seem to ex- plain (i) the general conservatism of human society, and (2) the fact that old people are more conservative than young?
7. One sometimes hears it affirmed that we never really forget anything; that everything is remembered when the time comes for remembering it. How would you account for this opinion?
References James, Textbook, chs. xviii., xix. Sully, Human Mind, vol. i., chs. ix., x. Titchener, Outline, §§ 70-80. Wundt, Lectures, Lects. XIX., XX. Wundt, Outlines, §§ 16, 17 B.
CHAPTER XI Thought and Self-consciousness § 88. Language. — Among the bodily disturbances Emotion that express emotion are certain movements of Hmbs wj^uiTive ^ and features (§§ 60, 61). And among these, again, actions, we noted the presence of gesture movements. Re- membering the close relation that emotion bears to impulse in the developed mind (§ 70), we are forced to believe that all these expressive movements are, in their origin, of the nature of impulsive actions. They are now more or less decayed, more or less weakened by having outlived their usefulness, more or less modified by the concurrence of the other forms of affective expression. But, in themselves, the wince and start and clenching of the fist are either impulsive actions or the direct descendants of impulsive actions (§ 74).
Most important of all the impulsive expressions andespe- of emotion, however, are movements that we have articuiale so far taken for granted, — the movements of the speech, larynx which, in man, produce articulate speech. The spoken word is the medium of thought, as the visual idea is the medium of imagination. Hence the problem of the origin and development of lan- guage is one of prime importance for psychology.
Gesture movements are of two kinds. The one The two kind serves principally to express the feel-side of gesture, the emotion (subjective gesture); the other to ex- ThoitgJit ajid Self-consciousness press its situation-side (objective gesture). The ' sour look ' upon the face is a gesture of the former sort; the pointing of the finger in fear, the threatening with the fist in anger, and the drawing of an object in rough outHne by hand movements through the air, are objective gestures. Vocal sounds — cries, calls, exclamations — were as- sociated from the first with both these classes of gesture; but their development in the two direc- tions has been very far from uniform. Subjective speech to-day is inarticulate, or at most merely interjectory; objective speech, the speech whose function it is to communicate ideas, has attained an extraordinary degree of complexity in the va- rious languages of the civilised world.
The uttering of a cry under stress of emotion is not pecu- liar to man; it can be observed in very many of the lower animals, and especially in the social or gregarious animals. Moreover, when any one member of herd or flock sounds the ^ danger note,' the whole company is alarmed. The sound is understood; it carries a nieanmg with it. Hence it is perfectly natural that the first attempts at the distinc- tively human language, at articulate speech, should have been understood. The utterance of one tribesman must have meant something to his fellow-tribesmen, — all the more as it was eked out by objective gesture.
This mutual understanding within a herd or tribe is possible only bj-QUsht about, at the biddinsf of nature, by way of simultaneous association. The whole company has been sub- ject at some time, let us suppose, to the emotion of fear. Every one is thus made familiar with the expression of fear in his neighbour. If, therefore, any individual ' shows ' fear on a later occasion, his companions will catch the emotion from him, without themselves facing the situation which The origin of language is the warn- ing-note.
Language he is confronting. — Our understanding of a friend's con- versation, then, is the outcome of a lesson learned lower down in the scale of life at the stern command of nature, a lesson in which failure to understand meant death.
We shall never know what were the first words that our The earliest ancestors pronounced; but it is highly probable that they words, were imitative, descriptive words; words which supple- mented the gesture-drawing in the air by adding the sound which the object made. On the other hand, we are able to explain the fact that articulate speech has so far outrun its primitive associate, objective gesture, in use- fulness. In the first place, sounds are ' free,' while the The develop- limbs are tied to the body. Hence more variation can 1^^^^ °^ •" language.
•" language.
be obtained from words than from gestures {cf, the superi- ority of auditory to tactual rhythm: § 47). Secondly, words are heard more easily than gestures are seen: they are clearer-cut, less ambiguous, can be better apprehended from a distance, etc. Thirdly, there is less individuality about words than about gestures; it is more difficult for two people to make exactly the same gesture than to give the same sound. Hence the word is the better symbol.
Notice how the first beginnings of language illustrate Pro- fessor Wundt's statement (§ 70) that the general animal im- pulses are the earliest forms of emotion. The danger note may be regarded either as an expression of the emotion of fear, or as 'an impulsive action.
§ 89. Thought. — The word ' thought ' is used in various uses various senses. We say, *^ I can't think what his ° ^ ^^^ ^' name is!" when we should say, in strictness, '^I can't remember." And we say, *' I can't think how you could have done it! " when we should say, *^ I can't imagine." Accurately defined, however, thought is the verbal counterpart of active imagination. Active imagination is thinking in images; thinking is active imagination carried on in words.
Thought and Self-consciousness Thought the analogue of active imagi- nation.
An account of the mechanism of thought will be nothing more, therefore, than the account of § 87, with ' words ' substituted for ^ images ' in every case. The thinker comes to his subject-matter in the state of active attention; works over it, feature by feature; and finally reaches a verbal * conclusion ' as the result of the term of effort, — precisely as the painter faces his mass of image material, and produces his picture after a period of strenuous endeavour. And there is a further likeness. Thought, which in psychology is only one process amongst others, forms the sole subject of a special science, logic; and imagination, also one psychological process amongst many, is the sole subject of the science of aesthetics. Logic has reached a far higher level of development, however, than aesthetics; so that we have in this Chapter a good number of technical thought-terms to define and explain. The farther a science advances, the more complicated does its word-machinery become.
Words and images.
Changes of sound and meaning in words.
The difference between the word and the image is that the latter is photographic, a copy of reality, while the for-j\ mer is symbolic (§ 41), a sign of a reality which is wholly unlike itself. There is a close resemblance between the inventor's mental forecast of a machine and the actual machine; there is none between the word ^ telephone^ and the actual telephone. We must remember, however, that the earliest words were, in all probability, photographic, — sound-images: it was only by slow degrees that the word acquired its symbolic character. On the one hand, the sound of the word became modified by frequent use, by climatic conditions, by growing ease of articulation, etc.; on the other, the meaning became modified, as the idea which was originally expressed grew more definite § 9^- Jitdgmciit and Reasoning 215 and accurate, or was altogether ousted by a newer idea. Change of sound and change of meaning have deprived words of their primitive naturalness, of their life-likeness to the ideas which are expressed by them. And as the sound- images gradually ceased to be sound-images, and became symbolic, other words came into use, which could never have been sound-images, — words, e.g,^ which symbolised visual or tactual, not auditory impressions.
These facts help us to answer a very common question: Can we the question whether we can ' think ' without words. If we ' ^^^"^ ^^^^" out words?
go back to the beginnings of thought, to the time when active imagination and thought Were identical, we must answer yes, — active imaging can be done without words, and active imaging is the earhest kind of thought. If we take ^ thought ' in the narrower sense, the answer will be negative.
§ 90. Judgment and Reasoning. — The simplest The judg- thought-process, the unit of thinking, is the judg- ment. Certain material is presented, and worked over in the state of active attention. Some one feat- ure, or some group of features, is selected, drawn out from the mass; is supplemented by associated ideas; and so forms a new total idea. Henceforth, in place of the original, undifferentiated material, we have a jiidgme7it; there are two complexes instead of one. We have, on the one hand, the original mass, in the state in which its working-over by the attention has left it, and on the other the supplemented aspect or feature of the mass. The first of these is expressed by a word which we call the 'subject,' the second by what is called the * predicate ' of the judgment. The holding together of the crude material, and the hold- ing together of subject and predicate, are both alike matters of association.
Thought and Self-conscioitsness Reasoning.
Instance of judgment.
It is but seldom, however, that the material is exhausted by a single judgment. As a rule, the forming of one judgment suggests the forming of another; so that we have a train of judgments, or reasoning. The train of judgments, like the train of ideas, is held together by successive association.
The splitting up of the material in judgment must not be understood as a simple halving, to be followed by an equally simple rejoining. In the first place, the feature seized upon by the attention is not taken bodily out of the material: it persists as part of the subject. In the second, the predicate is not merely the feature of the mass that the attention seized upon; it is that feature supplemented by other, connected ideas. — Let us take an instance.
Suppose that flints, which appear to have upon them the marks of human workmanship, are found in a Pliocene bed, which has apparently remained undisturbed. The archaeologist is called upon to decide whether this is reliable evidence of the existence of man in Tertiary times. First of all he forms a series of judgments as to the disturbance or non-disturbance of the bed: feature after feature is attended to, and each in its turn supplemented by ideas derived from previous knowledge. The outcome of the judgment-series, of the reasoning, is a final judg- ment: "This bed has not been disturbed." The original total idea of ' Pliocene-bed-undisturbedness ' has been worked over; the ' undisturbedness ' drawn out from it and supplemented; and the two ideas put together again as subject and predicate of a judgment. _^ The same course is taken with regard to the flints. The investigator starts with the total idea of ' humanly worked flints,' and transforms it into the judgment: " These flints are of human workmanship." Then the two final judgments are united, and the conclusion is reached that man existed on the earth in the Tertiary period.
This instance may seem to be unnecessarily complicated. The reader may know nothing of geological periods or the problems of archaeology. Why should one choose such an § 90- Judgment and Reasonijtg 217 illustration, instead of taking a simple sentence like: " The grass is green? " The reason is that judging, thinking, is a process of rare Judgment a occurrence in consciousness. Man has dubbed himself ^^^^ process. homo sapiens, and defined himself as ^ rational animal '; but he rarely thinks. For we are, all of us, born into a society where judgments await us ready-made; every gen- eration receives a heritage of judgments from the preceding generations. Hence facts that cost our ancestors immense pains to work out come to us as matters of course. Society is already organised: then we need not trouble ourselves to make judgments about social organisation. A form of re- ligion is established: we need not judge for ourselves in religious matters. A code of conduct has been laid down: we need not judge in matters of conduct. The apphcations of scientific principle are to be seen all about us: we need not understand the principles, — we may take the steam- engine and the telegraph for granted. Life is made smooth for us by the accumulated work of past generations. And even if we wish to judge for ourselves, there are so many past judgments on record in books, and so many others to be had for the asking from our elders, that independent thought is difficult. — It follows from all this that propositions Hke "The grass is green " are not judgments at all; they do not express results which we have gained labori- ously by active attention. That they have the form of judgment may be due either to the fact that they w^ere judgments once, generations ago, or merely to the fact that we cannot utter more than one word at a time, and must therefore give the parts of our idea successively. It is only when (as in the instance given) a total idea is actively divided up that true judgment occurs.
It must not be supposed, however, that we think less than But man our forefathers did. They did not sit down, in any particu- ^^"^•'^ ^^' lar century, and actively discuss forms of social organisation and codes of conduct, thus arriving at a judgment which we sluggishly accept. Their thinking was done as ours is, httle TlioiLgJit mid Self-consciousness and this raises him high above the animals.
bit by bit. But this is the point: that thinking is confined for most of us, as it always has been for the majority of mankind, to some one corner of the field of knowledge, and to a few years of our life. Outside of our ' special subject ' we accept what other people tell us; and when we have passed beyond early manhood, our thought moves but lazily even there, — we are slaves of the brain-habits set up in youth. When the channels of such acquired tendencies are supplied by numerous tributaries, when the train of habitual ideas is richly supplemented by associates, we have talent; when active thought continues into mature life, genius.
Again: we must not lose sight of the advantage that even a little thinking gives man over the animals. There is evi- dence that the higher animals are, at times, actively imagi- native (§§ 31, 32). But it is highly significant that, although many of them have the physical means of speech, man alone has developed an articulate language, the vehicle of sym- bolic imagination or thought. The very fact that he can accept judgments ready made, that he can be passively attentive to groups of word-ideas, is a clear indication of his mental superiority. ^^^ The material which calls for a judg- ment to set it in order is termed an aggregate idea.
§ 91. Aggregate Ideas and Concepts. — The 'material ' which is worked over and divided up by the attention in judgment or active imagination consists of per- ceptions, ideas, tags of meaning and what not, — a mixed medley of the processes derived from sensation. It is not an idea, in the strict sense of the word^ sometimes, it is not even a complex of simultaneous associates; idea may follow idea within it, by suc- cessive association. Nevertheless, it has a peculiar singleness of character, due to the fact that the meaning of the central idea in the total complex remains the same throughout. It is therefore given a special name, aggregate idea.
§91- Aggregate Ideas a7id Concepts 219 Instances of aggregate ideas that we have had so far are those of Siegfried and his adventures, the playing of Hamlet, the plot of The Hoicse of the Seven Gables^ Pliocene-bed - undisturbedness, humanly-worked-flintness. In each case the dominant idea of the aggregate, the ' topic ' of thought, remains unchanged through all the changes of associated ideas. — A good illustration is afforded by the idea of the coming sentence that you have in mind before you speak. There must be some total idea already formed, or you could not carry your sentence to its end grammatically; but it is a /(^/(^/idea, a mass which has not yet taken on the judgment form.
It cannot but happen, when one considers the con- The concept. stancy of man's physical surroundings, the routine character of daily life, that one and the same feature will attract the attention in a large number of aggre- gate ideas. In other words: there will be many judgments in which the subjects are different, but the predicates the same. A predicate which is common to several judgments is termed a concept.
The aggregate idea may be made up of images or of The abstract words. The concept is always a word: when we speak of ^ ^^* the corresponding image-process, we term it not concept but abstract idea. Thus the word ^ horse * is a concept; it may be predicated of a vast number of animals. But the animal-picture in my mind which stands for the typical, standard horse is an abstract idea. The abstract idea, then, is made up of images which have attracted the attention in a long series of aggregate ideas.
There has been much dispute, in the history of psychology, The controwith regard to the nature of abstract ideas. John Locke (1632- ^^^^^3^ ^°^" 1704), the founder of modern empirical psychology, speaks in his abstract Essay concerning Human Understanding of the abstract idea of ideas. a triangle as an imagined figure which is " neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all 220 ThoiigJit and Self -consciousness and none of these at once." George Berkeley (i 685-1 753), who ranks only after Hume in the subtlety of his metaphysical thought, criticises Locke in these terms: " If any man has the faculty of framing in his mind such an idea of a triangle as is here described, it is in vain to pretend to dispute him out of it, nor would I go about it. All I desire is that the reader would fully and certainly inform himself whether he has such an idea or no...The idea of ' man ' that I frame to myself must be either of a white or a black or a tawny, a straight or a crooked, a tall or a low or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described.'^ What are the facts? (i) In many cases, there certainly may be an abstract idea of the kind that Locke describes. Take, e.g.^ the abstract idea of ^ horse.' If real horses are so much alike that I can at once recognise every separate specimen as a horse, there will evidently be distinct marks of ^ horsiness ' that can be represented in the abstract idea: a peculiar wavy outline, a peculiar posture, a mane, etc. My idea will not be the picture of any special horse, but a picture of average horsiness. (2) Where the individuals differ so much as the individual tri- angles do, no such idea is possible at any given moment. But an idea is a process: it need not all be present at the given moment. Hence I may have an abstract idea of a triangle in the sense that equilateral and scalene and isosceles triangles melt into one another, in quick succession, like dissolving views. The group of processes would mean ^ triangle,' and not ' tri- angles'; and so might be fairly termed an idea. (3) As a rule, however, the abstract idea (while it still remains abstract so far as meaning is concerned) takes the form of the memory-idea of a particular object. When we learned geometry at school, we found in our text-books little equilateral figures which stood for the word ^triangle.' It is probable, then, that when we think of ^triangle' in the abstract we see one of these little figures. Our abstract triangle is not a triangle of all sorts, but an equi- lateral triangle. So our abstract horse will probably have a good deal of some particular (favourite or dreaded) horse about it. (4) Since we are born into a world of words, we learn concept- words long before we learn to think, and associate them hap- hazard to the.objects first called by their names. In after life, the picture of this hap-hazard object often serves as the abstract idea corresponding to the concept. Thus the author's abstract idea of ^ hour ' consists of the picture of a small outline square drawn on a white background; and this square is one of the squares of the daily report-cards upon which the marks for every hour^s work were entered at the first school that he attended. In a case known to him, the abstract idea of ' squareness ' is a mental picture of one of the wood-squares in which honey-comb is sold.
§ 92. Comparison, Relation and Abstraction. — In the The logic of logical treatment of thought we find frequent mention the pV- of the processes of comparison or discrimination, of choiogy of relation and of abstraction. The terms serve a use- ful purpose in logic, since they enable the logician to divide up his subject into parts, and to discuss it part by part. On the other hand, they have been the source of much confusion in psychology. Psycholo- gists have been incUned to think that, as they stand for different processes in logic, they must also stand for distinct processes in psychology; so that the mind must be regarded as endowed with a peculiar power of discrimination, with another power of relating, etc., — or at least that thought or judgment must be ranked as a fundamental psychological process alongside of sensation and affection.
Plainly, however, psychology cannot allow logic to settle a question of this sort. We must find out, for ourselves, what the words mean when they are trans- lated into psychological processes; and then we must decide for ourselves (by an appeal to introspection) whether or not the psychological processes are of a new kind, or of a kind already familiar to us.
There is no difficulty in discovering what goes on Comparison, in our own minds when we compare and relate and abstract, (i) When we compare, we look at two ob- Thought and Self-consciottsness jects or two ideas attentively, the one after the other, and presently find in consciousness the word * like ' or * different.' That is all. Sometimes the comparison is passive: the word arises without thought, by way of successive association. Sometimes it is active; the word arises as the predicate of a judgment.
relation, (2) The Same thing is true of relation. When one idea succeeds another in the train of ideas, the two are by that very fact brought into relation with each other: this is passive relating. And when the feat- ure drawn out of the aggregate idea by the attention has been supplemented, and the new complex is predicated of the old, the two are, again, brought abstraction, into relation: this is active relating. (3) Lastly: when the attention has drawn the predicate-feature out of the aggregate idea, the process of abstraction has taken place. We have * abstracted ' the feature, * abstracted from ' (neglected) the rest of the idea.
The reader will recall the parallel discussion in the case of recognition (§ 79). When a perception has the mark of famili- arity, there is a ^ recognition ' before us: we find no peculiar process of recognising, over and above the addition of the famili- arity mark. So when two ideas associate, there is a relation be- fore us: we find no peculiar process of relating, over and above the associative connection. — One is tempted to suggest that Lewis Carroll has satirised this juggling with words, out of psychology into logic and back again, in the various names of the White Knight^s Song {Through the Looking Glass ^ ch. viii.).
and their The processcs themsclvcs, then, are all old friends.
ing^concepts. Nevertheless, they offer a new problem for solution. How do we come to name them } The names ' com- parison,' * relation,' etc., are evidently concepts; but, as evidently, they are concepts of a different order from those mentioned in § 91. The concept ^ horse' has an abstract idea corresponding to it, an idea made up from many perceived horses. But ' rela- tion' and * abstraction ' are just words; there is nothing in perception, nothing in visual idea, that corresponds to them. Granted that two associated ideas are related, how did we ever come to attend to the fact of their relation as something quite apart and distinct from them and their meaning t The question is one that psychology is, undoubt- edly, called upon to answer. And it can be answered only by following out the history of mental develop- ment, and more especially of mental development as borne witness to by language. This history shows {cf. § 61) that all concepts were originally of the ^ horse ' kind, words that stood for definite abstract ideas. As thought advanced, however, words were used more freely, with less and less of reference to any corresponding abstract idea: objects of thought took their place alongside of objects of perception. Now, we have a large stock of verbal ideas, all with clear-cut and valuable meanings, which stand not for things or processes of the outside world, but simply for our own interpretations of these things and pro- cesses, for thought-objects; and among them are to be counted the concept-ideas of relation and com- parison and abstraction with which logic, the science of thought, has to deal.
To trace out the development of concepts in detail would be to write a Chapter, and that not a short one, in the psy- chology of language (see § 120). We can no more do that here than we can write Chapters in the psychology of custom TIioiLght and Self-conscioitsness The history of a con- cept-word.
The per- ceived self.
or art or law: it would take us too far afield. A single instance must suffice.
If a logician were speaking of the relation which the concept ^ whiteness ' bears to the substance ' snow/ he would call it an attribute of that substance. An attribute is a characteristic or property or mark of a substance. How has the concept been formed?
We find in English, German and Latin the words thorps Dorf and tribiis^ which are all, philologically, the same word. Tribics means ^ tribe ^; and thorp and Dorf mean ^village.'' The origi- nal meaning of the three, then, is that of a community, a society of men. — In Latin we find the verb tribuo, ' to assign ' or ^give '; and the past participle of this is kept in the English tribute. ^ Tribute ' means ^ what is done by the tribe '; and ' what is done by the tribe ' is to pay for protection, to give or bestow some- thing upon a chieftain or a more powerful tribe in return for favours received. The special meaning retained in ^ tribute' has become a general meaning (^ to give,' simply) in the verb tribuo. — Finally, from tribuo comes ' attribute,' that which is assigned or granted to something. It is a long road that leads from the village community through the assessment of the community tO' the logical characteristic; but it is without doubt the road that this concept travelled. ^^^~ § 93. The Concept of Self. — We have in the con- cept of self an exceedingly good instance of concepts in general. For on the image side we have various stages, from the perception of self to its abstract idea; and on the word side similar stages, from the concept corresponding to the abstract idea up to ar- concept that has been refined to the utmost limits of logical subtlety. It will be worth while, therefore, to find out as definitely as we can what comes into consciousness along with the words * I ' and * me ' and ^ my.'
(i) The primitive, perceptual self is made up chiefly of a mass of cutaneous and organic sensations, partly