These are the extreme forms of the imaginal complex, the typical memory-image and the typical image of imagination. There are many intermediate forms, which seem to contain both memory and imaginative elements. In particular, the imaginal complexes which represent objects in daily use, or objects of a familiar environment, appear to pass from the memory to the imaginative form; they become stable and persistent; but they are then wholly indifferent, felt neither as familiar nor as strange. We may regard them as corresponding, in image, to the direct apprehension of perception. The author is, indeed, disposed to believe that this observation may be generalised; that all direct apprehension, in remembrance and recollection, occurs in imagina- tive rather than in memory terms. When we solve a geometrical problem by help of a remembered figure, or of some previous re- sult, the figure or the result comes to us as a whole, clearly and substantially, almost as if it were a perception. There is here, of course, a danger of confusing fact with meaning; of supposing that, because the meaning of the older work is clear and permanent, therefore its representation in consciousness is also stable and sub- stantial. Nevertheless, it seems to the author that the conscious stuff of most habitual memories is not that of the typical memory- image, but much more nearly resembles the material of the image of imagination.
Is it not something of a paradox that the memory-image should be thus variable and instable? At first thought, yes: because we are ready to accept, from popular psychology, the notion that an image is a memory-image of itself, in its own right; and if that were the case, the image must of necessity copy or reproduce the perception. On reflec- tion, no: because the image is, after all, made into a mem- ory-image by the feeling of familiarity. So there is no reason in the world why it should copy the original experi- ence. All it has to do — if we may ourselves talk a popu- lar psychology — is to mean that experience (the meaning is given as the context of associated ideas and attitude) and to be recognised as meaning it. Suppose for a moment that memory-images were just weaker copies of the earlier perceptions, and nothing less or more: our mental life would, so far as we can.imagine it, be an inextricable con- fusion of photographically accurate records. It is, in reality, because the image breaks up, because nervous impressions are telescoped, short-circuited, interchanged, suppressed, that memory, as we have memory, is at all possible. The remark has often been made that, if we did not forget, we could not remember. That is true. But we may go farther and say that, if the mental image could not decay, it could not either be the conscious vehicle of memory.
On the other hand, if there is to be such a thing as im- agination, then the image of imagination must be persistent and substantial. An image is, psychologically, made into an image of imagination by the feeling of strangeness. But that the image should simply mean ' something new ' is not enough; it must be something new; it must stay to be looked at, to be described, to be expressed in artistic form; poet and painter and sculptor would be in sorry case if their minds were whirligigs of changing imagery. Why, then, do we not have the inextricable confusion of which we spoke just now? Because the image of imagination, 420 Memory and Imagination being new, has no associations; it stands singly at the focus of consciousness, as objects do that we perceive for the first time; and if it should, presently, remind us of some- thing, the associates will be memory-images, and not other images of imagination. Besides, the image of imagina- tion is not persistent in the sense of those weaker copies of perception with which the popular psychology of mem- ory operates. In this respect, too, it resembles perception: it is persistent and substantial under its own conditions; but if it has once gone, it must either be rebuilt, or recalled as an image of memory.
All through this chapter of psychology we see the danger of arguing from a preconceived theory, instead of appealing directly, introspectively, to mind itself. The associationist doctrine is that recognition implies the comparison of past image with present perception; identification follows. But that is not what happens in recognition. We are taught, similarly, that the memory-image copies the original experience. It may; but as a rule, again, it does not. We are taught that the image of imagination is a rest- less, irresponsible thing, always in the throes of dissolution and re- combination; but it is not. We are taught that mind moves, as if on stepping-stones, from idea to idea; once more, it does not. The contents of the preceding Sections are, indeed, a strong testi- monial to the value of the experimental method. But for that, we should still be repeating the traditional formulas. And if the Sections are scrappy, and their generalisations uncertain, this is not the fault of the method, but merely of its recency of application.
Let us return to the images. It is clear, from what we have learned of the imaginal complexes in memory and imagination, that the elementary imaginal process, the image of § 61, has two distinct forms. On the one side stands the image that may be confused with sensation. This image appears in perception, in the memory after-image, in synaesthesia, in hallucination, in the image of imagination, in habitual memories; it moves with move- ments of the eyes, and may leave an after-image. On the other § 119- The Imaginative Consciousness 421 side stands the image that is of filmier texture than sensation; it appears in the memory-image, does not move with eye-movement, and leaves no after-image. To explain the occurrence of the two forms, we must assume either that there are two modes of cortical function, or that the stable image somehow involves sensory stimulation, while the instable image is wholly of central origin. The former of these alternatives is possible; we know very little of the modes of cortical behaviour; but the second appears to the author to be, on the whole, the more probable. A recent writer has suggested that the stable image is really a secondary sensation; the stimulus which acts upon a sense-organ directly arouses its corresponding sensation; but the excitation irradiates in the cortex, spreads to other sensory areas, and thus indirectly arouses other sensations. We have here, then, a theory which might replace the theory of synaesthesia outlined on p. 197. It is, however, not easy to see why the secondary sensation, which itself corresponds not to a process of peripheral stimulation but to a central excita- tion, and is therefore aroused in the same manner as the instable image, should appear as sensation; and it is especially difficult to see why it should retain the sensory character when — as in the case of habitual memories, or of certain images of imagination — there is no peripheral stimulus' of any kind. The author suggests that the sensory character of the stable image may be due to an ac- tual stimulation of the sense-organ by way of the centrifugal sen- sory conduction-paths, — though the suggestion is worth little, so long as the conditions under which these paths are thrown into function remain obscure.
§ 119. The Imaginative Consciousness. — A great deal has been written about the imagination; but, as a matter of fact, we know very little indeed of the imaginative conscious- ness. Most of the psychological accounts are couched in terms of some psychological theory, and most of the in- trospective descriptions published in support of theory were obtained from untrained observers and without sufficient control of the conditions of observation.
422 Memory and Imagination It seems clear that an idea comes to us as imagined only if it comes as consciously unfamiliar, with the feeling of novelty or strangeness upon it; this feeling of strangeness is as characteristic of imagination as the feeling of famil- iarity is of memory. The consciousness in which the idea of imagination is set may then show the pattern either of primary or of secondary attention (pp. 275 f.), and we speak accordingly of passive or reproductive, and of active, creative or constructive imagination. Both types of con- sciousness are integrative rather than discursive; the sphere of attention is limited, the play of association regulated. Creative imagination shades off into thought, and thus completes the psychological circle of p. 414.
Two hypotheses of the nature of the imaginative consciousness are sharply opposed in current discussion. According to the one, the imaginative idea or constellation comes as if from without, by inspiration; the poem sings itself, the painting groups and colours itself, to the mental ear and eye; imagination is a native gift or endowment that finds rather than seeks expression. According to the other, the imaginative consciousness is profusely imaginal; associations throng about the focal process; and the product of imagination is the result of choice and arrangement of these associated ideas. On the former hypothesis, the imaginatively gifted individual is the dreamer of dreams and the seer of visions; on the latter, he is the planner, the moulder, the constructor. So imagination appears now as the typically passive and now as the typically active temperament: precisely as genius is described now as the capacity of doing great things without effort, and now as the capacity for taking infinite pains. And witnesses can be brought on both sides.
We have not the data for a final characterisation. To the author, however, the psychology of imagination takes shape somewhat as follows. Behind everything lies a cortical set, a nervous bias, perhaps inherited and permanent, perhaps acquired and temporary.
§ H9- The Imaginative Consciousness 423 This background may not appear in consciousness at all; or it may appear as a vague, conscious attitude (passive imagination), or again as a more or less definite plan, aim, ambition, intention (active imagination). Whether conscious or not, the nervous dis- position determines the course of consciousness. It also helps to initiate the imaginative complex, the first concrete clue to which usually comes, in fact, as an inspiration, a happy thought: some external situation, or some group of associative tendencies that is active at the moment, touches off the disposition, and the initial idea flashes into consciousness. Whether the idea is crude or complete, and whether the following consciousness is narrow or broad, concentrated or richly imaginal, these things depend al- together upon circumstances. If we are dealing with active imag- ination, the subsequent stage, in which the idea is worked up and worked over, — while, no doubt, it may be relieved here and there by other happy thoughts, — is essentially a stage of skilled labour, of secondary attention, that ends only with the expression of the idea in objective terms. Meanwhile, consciousness has been variously emotive. The imaginative ideas bring with them the feeling of strangeness. But just as the pleasantness of recognition may be lost in the stronger unpleasantness of the recognised object, so may the strangeness of imagination be lost in the pleasure of success, or merged in the stronger unpleasantness of failure; and these feelings may themselves alternate, so that consciousness swings between the poles of affective experience. Meanwhile, also, all sorts of empathic complexes have formed about the focal pro- cesses, vivifying and personalising the partial products of the construc- tive effort. Whatever happens, the total consciousness is directed and regulated by the underlying nervous disposition. In memory, the observer is always within a certain universe of discourse; there are limits, set by the fixity of the past occurrence, which he may not transgress; but within this breadth of context he can move at will; consciousness is discursive. In imagination, consciousness proceeds, as a whole, from the fountain-head of disposition; there are no limits of any kind, save those of individual capacity and experience; but the stream, whatever its volume, flows always in a determinate direction; consciousness, as we have said, is integrative.
424 Memory and Imagination But what are the focal processes? One is tempted to say, off- hand, — images. And the answer is probably correct, if one may define the term 'image.' Oftentimes, of course, there are images in the literal sense, visual, auditory-kinaesthetic, kinaesthetic. Often- times there are verbal images. But the name must also be ex- tended to processes that merely symbolise perceptual experience, and are no more like perception than the printed report of an operatic performance is like the performance. When we trace the images of imagination beyond the stage of perceptual complexity (§ 118), we find that they undergo translation and reduction: translation out of one sense-department, along the line of least nervous resist- ance, into another; and reduction from explicit representation to symbolism. Reduction does not mean approximation to a type; what takes place is that a mere schema, or part-aspect, or fragment of the complex comes to do shorthand service for the whole. This seems to be the truth in the text-book statements that the images of imagination tend to grow vague, general, abstract, to become shadows of their original selves. They never grow vague, in the ordinary sense of the word; on the contrary, all of them, images proper, words, and reductions, are sensory in their reality and sub- stantialness; that is a point that we have already emphasised, and that we must by no means lose sight of; but they do become simple and conventionalised, they do tend to symbolise rather than to represent. — The reader may be reminded that this account is tentative, and far outruns the experimental data. It has the merit of reconciling the two hypotheses mentioned at the outset, and it accords with such introspective observations as we have. It may, however, be very seriously modified by future investigation.
§ 120. Illusions of Recognition and Memory. — Illusory memories and recognitions are of two kinds. We may re- member or recognise something which is really, objectively unfamiliar to us, and we may fail to recognise or remember something which once formed part of our experience. Both types of illusion are quite common.
§ 120. Illusions of Recognition and Memory 425 Most persons, perhaps, have had occasional experience of what is called paramnesia or false recognition, a ' feeling that all this has happened before,' which persists for a few seconds in spite of the knowledge that the experience is novel. Various explanations have been offered of the phenomenon. It occurs most frequently after periods of emotional stress, or in the state of extreme mental fatigue; that is, at a time when the associative tendencies are abnormally weak. And it seems to depend, essentially, upon a disjunction of processes that are normally held together in a conscious present. Suppose the following case: you are about to cross a crowded street, and you take a hasty glance in both directions, to make sure of a safe passage. Now your attention is caught, for a moment, by the contents of a shop window; and you pause, though only for a moment, to survey the window before you actually cross the street. Paramnesia would then appear as the feeling that you had already crossed; the preliminary glance, which naturally connects with the crossing in a single, total experience, is disjoined from the crossing, through the abnormal weakness of the associative ten- dencies, and comes to consciousness separately as the memory of a previous passage. As you cross, you think, ' Why, I crossed this street just now: ' your nervous condition has severed two phases of a single consciousness; the one is referred to the past; and the other, under the regular laws of memory, arouses the feeling of familiarity.
The same weakening of the associative tendencies may bring it about that a familiar, meaningful word stands out as novel and meaningless. The experience is very unpleasant; but it loses its strangeness if we synthetise it experimentally. Repeat a word over and over again, with sustained attention to the auditory-kin- aesthetic complex. The word soon becomes meaningless; the direction of attention has given a sort of hypnotic narrowness to consciousness, the associative context of the word is cut off, and the bare perception remains.
This loss of meaning, once more, may appear on the grand scale in the state known as depersonalisation. There are moments of unusual depression or lassitude or fatigue, when the whole world about us seems new and strange, though rather negatively than 426 Mt mory and Imagination positively, — new and strange as a shadowy dream-world, where things are pictures, and men are pictured automata, and we hear and contemplate our own voice and action as foreign and indif- ferent spectators. Here the normal context and the normal feel- ing of familiarity are entirely lacking; the kinaesthetic and other organic reactions have lapsed; the cortical set that adjusts us to a world of external reality has disintegrated. We know nothing in detail of the physiological conditions of depersonalisation, but it is evidently related to the apparently opposite phenomenon of false recognition.
Other illusions of memory, which follow naturally from the course of the image and the structure of the memory conscious- ness, need not here be specified.
References for Further Reading § 112. On the course of the image, J. Philippe, Sur les transforma- tions de nos images mentales, in Revue philosophique, xliii., Mai 1897, 481 ff. On the memory after-image, G. T. Fechner, Element e der Psy- chophysik, ii., 1907, ch. xliv. (b). On perseverative tendency, G. E. Miiller and A. Pilzecker, Experimented Beitr'dge zur Lehre vom Gedachtniss, 1900, 58 ff.
§ 114. F. Galton, inquiries into Human Faculty and its Develop- ment, 1883 (reprinted as no. 263 of Everyman's Library); E. B. Titchener, Experimental Psychology, I., ii., 1901, 387 ff.; A. Fraser, Visualisation as a Chief Source of the Psychology of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and I fume, in American Journal of Psychology, iv., 1891, 230 ft.
§ 115. E. A. McC. Gamble and M. W. Calkins, Die reproduzierte Vorstelluug beim Wiedererkennen und beim Vergleichen, in Zeits. f. Psychol., xxxii., 1903, 177 ff.; xxxiii., 1903, 161 ff.
§ 117. Cf. a series of articles by F. Kuhlmann, in American Journal of Psychology, xvi., 1905. 337 ff.; Psychol. Rev., xiii., 1906. 3 1 6 ff.; Journ. Philos. Psychol. Set. Meth., iv.. 1907, 5 ff.; American Journal of Psy- chology, xviii., 1907, 389 ff.; x\\, 1909, 194 ff.
§ 118. References to current investigation, and an account of the experiments upon which this Section is chiefly based, will be found in an article by C. W. Perky, American Journal of Psychology, xxi., 1910, 422 ff. On secondary sensations, see B. Sidis, Psychol. Rev., xv., 1908, References for Farther Reading 427 §119. T. Ribot, Essay on the Creative Imagination, tr. 1906; E. Lucka, Die Phantasie, eine psychologische Untersuchutig, 1908.
§ 120. G. Hey mans, Eine Enqnete ilber Depersonalisation und ' Fausse Reconnaissance,"1 in Zeits. f. Psychol., xxxvi., 1904, 321 ff.; xliii., 1906, 1 ff.; J. Linwurzky, Zum Problem des falschen Wiederer* kcnnens (deja vu), in Arch. f. d. ges. Psychol., xv., 1909, 256 ff.
ACTION § 121. The Reaction Experiment. — In the year 1796, the astronomer in charge of the Greenwich Observatory! found himself obliged to dismiss an otherwise competent assistant, who, in the preceding year, had fallen into the habit of recording stellar transits some half second too late, and had now increased his error to almost a whole second. The assistant disappeared; but the error, after passing without further notice for a quarter of a century, became the topic of prolonged scientific discussion, and as the 'personal difference ' or ' personal equation ' gave rise to the psychological study of reaction times.
A reaction, in the technical sense in which we are here using the term, is a movement made in response to an external stimulus. A simple reaction is a movement made in direct response to such a stimulus. In the reaction experiment, we subject the observer to some prearranged form of stimulation (say, a flash of light), to which he has to reply by some prearranged movement (say, the slipping of the forefinger from the button of a telegraph key). Instruments are employed which permit us to measure the time elapsing between the exhibition of the stimulus and the performance of the answering movement. This time is named the reaction time, and, in the case of direct response, the simple reaction time.
The experiment may be made more complicated, both 1 N. Maskelyne, Astronomical Observations made at the Royal Observatory 4tt Greenwich, 1795, pt. iii., 339.
§ 121. The Reaction Experiment on the side of stimulus and on that of mode of reaction. We then have various forms of compound reaction, with the corresponding compound reaction times.
The passage of a star across the meridian was formerly deter- mined by means of the eye and ear method. The field of the telescope is divided up, let us say, by five fine wires, set vertically and at equal distances. The middle wire corresponds to the meridian. Before putting his eye to the instrument, the observer reads off the time from a clock, and then counts the beats of the pendulum as he watches the progress of the star. He notes its position at the last beat before, and the first beat after, it crosses the middle wire, and thus estimates the time of the actual cross- ing. Thus, if the star is at a when the twelfth beat is counted, and at b when the thirteenth is counted, the time of transit, estimated in tenths of a second, will be so many hours, so many minutes, 12.7 seconds.
It is in estimations of this sort that the personal difference appeared. The phrase ' personal equation ' arose from the custom- ary statement of the difference in com- parative terms. Thus, A — B = 0.8 sec. means that the observer A records a transit, on the average, 0.8 sec. later than observer B. Here the one observer, probably the more skilled of the two, is made the standard of reference for the other. The equation evi- dently has only a relative value; the magnitude of B's error is not determined.
The discussion of the personal difference led directly to the experiments on accommodation of attention described in § 83. It also led, indirectly, to the experiments on reaction time. For these may be regarded as absolute determinations of the error of the observer: if A responds to the flash of light in 290 0- (1 <r = rtnnr sec-)> an<^ B va 180 <r, then we may not only write A—B = 1100-, which expresses the personal equation, but may also say, absolutely, that A and B have postdated the flash of light by the • • i a s^ 4 i Action amount of their respective reaction times. Nor are we bound to the technique of the experiment as it is given in the text; the con- ditions of astronomical observation may be exactly repeated; an artificial star may register its own passage across the line of the meridian, and the observer may react as he would do in the case of a real transit, recorded by the eye and ear method. We cannot here trace the history of the reaction experiment. It must suf- fice to say that, as astronomy perfected its own methods, the experiment passed into the service of physiology, and was used for the deter- mination of the velocity of the nervous impulse. The assumption was, in the rough, that if two parts of the body, at different dis- tances from the brain, are stimulated in the same way, and the reaction times com- pared, the difference in these times will correspond to the difference in the length of the sensory nerve- FIG. 62. Hipp's Chronoscope, an electrical trunks involved, and will clock whose unit is 1 <r: commonly em- thus show the rate of af- ployed in the reaction experiment. -,