The answer to this seeming difficulty is evident when we remember one of the points already made. The accom- modation-reaction— the imitation dictated by pleasure and pain — is so regular in its kind, giving the circular process, and involves organic elements so much the same, that it has itself become a matter of habit. The tendency to imitate has thus become a hereditary thing, given by endowment in the motor organism. The idea of a move- ment has become, as psychologists so often tell us, itself a tendency to perform that movement; yea, the very beginning of the movement. The child is therefore ac- tuated by all the impetus of race history to imitate, to use his own motor apparatus upon every hint which he gets of a movement, and this tendency takes, of course, no account of exceptions. The pain, therefore, in which Origin of Alcnwry and Association of Ideas. 301 a certain new reaction results is, at first, only a partial check upon the reaction. It is, of course, in so far a new accoir.modation, and works by association, as far as it can do so, to inhibit the movement; but its influence is 'up- hill' It cannot once for all undo the old inherited ten- dency. And for a long time the latter wins the day.
When reflection begins, however, and with it volition, then the case is altered. Volition is not possible until just the breaking up, modifying, snubbing, of inherited habit, which it is the office of new pains and pleasures to bring about, is, to a degree, already accomplished. And volition is no more than just the ratification of this break-up, and the further accommodation to the conditions which have brought about the 'break-up.' Man then becomes an agent. He reflects upon both the old and the new, and his choice represents the best adjustment into which all the elements and tendencies within him may fall for future reaction or conduct. But then the fight with the dictates of pleasure and pain may become only more open, in the degree in which, in his deliberation, he may discern the permanent adaptations represented by self-denial, social co-operation, etc., as opposed to the temporary ones of pleasure and pain.
§ 2. TJie Origi7i of Memory mid Associatioft of Ideas.
The neurological function already described as 'the physical basis of memory,' ^ and the manner of its rise, will at once suggest the psychological doctrine as well. We have found the organism developing a system of central ganglia and connections for the purpose of being relieved of its dependence upon direct sense-stimulation. By this arrangement the processes corresponding to the memory of these sense experiences are aroused, from within, from other centres, or from without indirectly, by associated processes, in lieu of the action of the real original object. Such a process thus started gives to consciousness the picture or image of the object, which we call a 'memory.'
If, now, to keep within consciousness, the original sen- sation-content,— the stimulus which it is the business of the reaction to confirm by repeating, or to banish by fail- ing to repeat, thus illustrating imitation, — if this be con- sidered as respects the reaction which it arouses, then we may have the same function in kind ascribed to the mem- ory copy as to it. But the reaction will then have another office; its province will be to enable the organism to anticipate experiences, the consequences of which it has once suffered or enjoyed. It thus performs its life-preserv- ing reaction before the real stimulus comes, and so secures benefit, or avoids damage. The child rerneynbers the flame and the pain, and zvithdraws before tJie fire toitcJies him. He remembers the apple, and the pleasure, and secures the fruit for himself by reacJmig.
Further, we have seen how, on the neurological side, the processes ring one another up, so that one may release the reaction which originally belonged by right of imitation only to another. The question on the side of conscious- ness, as to how the different ' copies ' get to ring one another up, in such a system, is the question of association.
They can at first act together, it is plain, only as far as the original external things are together. For example, you speak a word; I at once write it. I can do this because I heard the word sound when I saw the written word and learned to trace it. To-morrow, by reason of a brain lesion.
Origin of Alcniory and Associaiioi oj Ideas. 303 I am unable to write the word when I hear you speak it, but I can still copy the word when you set it before me. The lesion has simply deprived me of the use of the internal visual copy which I imitated in writing, by cutting the writing-reaction apparatus off from its connection with the auditory seat from which this visual copy was accustomed to be 'rung up.' But the simpler imitation of the external visual copy remains possible. A step further: I see a man, and at once write his name. Here the visual image of the man rings up the auditory image of the name-word, this rings up the visual copy-image of the written word, and this I imitate by writing. But all of these images were once real external things to me and existed together, in my learning, by various twos and threes. Yet if any one had asked me why I wrote the man's name, I would have said: ' Because I remember it.' Each one of these images is itself a ' copy for imitation,' when needed for its own appropriate reaction, and only by this association does this typical character become obscured. A young child, on seeing the man, would say 'Man,' i.e., would imitate the auditory copy which the sight of the man rang up. And a certain child of mine would probably hasten to ask for a pencil in order to draw the man, thus imitating the sche- matic outline man fixed in her memory by earlier efforts to imitate the shape of the real thing. In all these cases the reaction follows either directly upon an external stim- ulus or upon a memory image which represents another external thins: existinc: at some time alonsfside the first.
In other words, association by contiguity is simply the progress from external togetherness into internal together- ness, from fact to memory. Your spoken word brings up my written word copy. Why '^. Because sound and written 304 Conscious Imitatioii.
copy existed together when I learned to write, and so on with all the instances.
But suppose a perfectly new external copy rings up another copy which is only internal: why is this? Thus a new man seen brings up an old name written. Why? Evidently because there are some other elements of copy either external or internal which have been together with each; this is association by resemblance or contrast. ' Man seen ' and * name heard ' were present together when I made the old acquaintance, and afterwards ' name heard ' and * name written ' were associated by contiguity. So when I hear the same name in conversation with a new face I think of the written name. The sound name, there- fore, has been common to both associations, and by it the written name arises when I see the new acquaintance.
I have used this last example, rather than the usual ones of the text-books drawn from direct resemblance (a photo- graph suggesting aman^), because it is evident that such association by resemblance is only a special and very open case of what I have called the principle of ' lapsed links.' In this case, the auditory sound image is just as truly a link between the new acquaintance's face and the written name of the old one, or between my images of the two faces, one in memory and one in perception, as actual similarity of feature would be. In such ordinary feature- resemblance both copies are in the same sense — the two faces are both seen. But similarity, so called, is really a much wider thing. Another centre — the auditory, in the case supposed — may come between, as a link.
Then this link lapses. I tend to behave toward the new man as I would toward the old; even speaking the same 1 See my Handbook, I., Senses and Intellect, Chap. XI.
Origin of Memory and Association of Ideas. 305 name to him is behaviour, of course. The new copy comes to usurp, as far as it may, the reaction belonging to the old, leavincf out the link of association altogether.
Take another case: a musician plays by reading printed notes, and forgets that in learning the meaning of the notes he imitated the movements and sounds which his instructor made; but the intermediate copies have so fallen away that his performance seems to offer no surface imi- tation at all, and pathological cases show that even the intervening brain processes become unnecessary, a 'short- cut ' being established between sight and movement. His hearing copy-system persists to the end only to guide or control his muscular reactions. But a musician of the visual type may go farther. He may play from memory of the printed notes; that is, he may play from a transplanted visual copy of notes which themselves are but shorthand, or substitute, expressions of earlier sound and muscular copies; and finally the name only of a familiar selection may be sufficient to start a performance guided only by a subconscious muscular copy series. So also in the case of the patient who can move a limb only when he sees it; we have to suppose that his properly imitative action on the basis of movement memories is now performed through the substitution for them of visual images.
Reflection convinces us that we have now reached a principle — when due weight is also given to the explana- tions earlier made on the neurological side ^ — of wide- reaching application in mental development. We see how it is possible for reactions which were originally simple imi- tative suggestions to lose all appearance of their true origin. Copy-links at first distinctly present as external things, and X 3o6 Conscious Imitatioii.
afterwards present with almost equal distinctness as inter- nal memories, may become quite lost in the rapid progress of consciousness. New connections get established in the network of association, and motor discharges get stimulated thus which were possible at first only by ifjtitation and owed their formation to it.
If this principle should be proved to be of universal application, we would then be able to say that every intel- lige?tt action is stimulated by imitative copies whose presence the action in question tends to maintain, or to snppi^ess.
A farther confirmation of the fact is seen in the pro- cess of learning to name objects. The child gets the required word by direct imitation of the sound heard by him. The application of the word to the object keeps his interest and stimulates his effort, but it is no part of his learning. But after he has learned to use the term easily, he speaks it directly at the object. He no longer needs to keep the sound copy before him, and it lapses so completely that if we had not been with him when he learned we would never suspect that the association be- tween name and thing was of imitative origin. He can name the thing only because he has imitated a sound, and then by association the visual image of the thing has usurped the reaction created by this imitation. Pathologi- cal cases show that this concealment of imitative origin may go so far that patients may be able to name objects seen when they can no longer imitate the same sounds when they hear them.^ It is as if the son of a washerwoman refuse to recognize his mother when he takes the social position of his wife, even though the wife is spending the money which the humble mother has earned.
1 See Bastian, Brain as Organ of Mind, p. 623.
Origin of Aleuiory and Association of Ideas. 307 The very great importance of this principle, apart from the question of fact, is seen in its genetic applications. It exhibits the higher mental functions as a great stride in accommodation. Memory and association do exactly the same thing for the organism, later, that perception, sensa- tion, contractility, do earlier. Association enables us to react to facts which are distant from present facts but allied to them. Memory enables us to react to the facts of the future as if they were present, thus conserving the lessons of the past. Perception enables us to set present facts in their proper setting, and thus to react upon them with full reference to their significance. Sen- sation enables us to react upon facts according to their immediate worth to the organism. Contractility, exhibit- ing itself in 'organic imitation,' is the original form of adaptive reaction which works through the whole process of development.
And with these higher reaches of accommodation, we now see, the method of it remains the same. Pleasure and pain, mixed up with the reactions of emotion, lead to the 'excess' discharge which is consolidated in the atten- tion, and selection by attention gets its highest fruition in the explicit selective function of consciousness, volition. ^ The actual dynamogenic parallel between simple sensa- tion, on one hand, and memory, on the other, appears in the different classes of ' suggestions,' known as sensori- motor and ideo-motor, illustrated in detail in an earlier place. The facts of suggestion should be constantly borne in mind, since they show the transitions in behaviour between reflexes and volitions, and bridge, in my view, what has been a chasm in earlier theories.
^ See Chaps. XIIT. an 1 XIV. for the discussion of the Genesis of Volition and Attention.
3o8 Conscious Imitation, § 3. Assimilation, Recognition.
There are several aspects of presentation and repre- sentation which seem more reasonable when brought into connection with our present topic. The principle of as- similation, made much of in recent discussions, clearly illustrates not only that a copy-image may be so strong and habitual in consciousness as to assimilate new expe- riences to its form and colour, but also that this assimila- tion is the very mode and method of the mind's digestion of what it feeds upon. Consciousness constantly tends to neglect the unfit, the nial apropos, the incongruous, and to show itself receptive to that which in any way conforms to its present stock. A child after learning to draw a full face — circle with spots for the two eyes, nose, and mouth, and projections on the sides for ears — will persist, when copying a face in profile, in draw- ing its circle, with two eyes, and two ears, and fail to see its error, although only one ear is visible and no eyes.^ My child H. having been told that her shadow was her- self, called all shadows ' ittle Henen ' (little Helen). The external pattern is assimilated to the memory copy, or to the word or other symbol which comes to stand for it. The child has a motor reaction for imitating the latter; why should not that answer for the other as well 1 As everybody admits, in one way or another, such assimilation is at the bottom of recognition, and of illusions which are but mistaken recognitions.
Let us look at each of these facts — assimilation and recognition — more closely, from the genetic point of view.
In what has been said of the principle of association, we Assimilation, Recognition. 309 find ground for the reduction of its particular forms to the one law of assimilation. This matter has been ably discussed by Wundt.^ In assimilation — and in the 'ap- perception ' of the Herbartians — we have the general statement of all the forms, nets, modes of grouping, which old elements of mental content bring to impose upon the new. In the light of their motor effects, we are able to construe all these elements of content under the s:eneral principle of habit, and say that the assimilation of any one element to another, or the assimilation of any two or more such elements to a third, is due to the unifying of their motor discharges in the single larger discharge which stands for the apperceived result. The old discharge may itself be modified — it cannot remain exactly as it was when it stood for a less complex content. So this larger discharge represents the habit of the organism in as far as both the earlier tendencies to discharge belonging to these elements of content are represented in it; but it also rep- resents accommodation — i.e, if the assimilation, appercep- tion, synthesis, is smoothly accomplished — since it stands for a richer objective content. Presentations are associated by contiguity because they unite in a single motor discharge; by similarity, because both of them, through their association with a third, have come to unite in a common discharge. The energy of the new presentation process finds itself drawn off in the channels of the discharo:e of the old one which it resembles; the motor associations, therefore, and with them all the organic and revived mental elements stirred up by them, come to identify or unite the new content with the old. Among these revised ele- ments the attention strains are of the first importance; 1 Philos. Studien, VII., heft 3, pp. 345 ff.
3IO Conscious Imitation.
they constitute largely the sense of activity in mental synthesis or apperception everywhere.
It is commonly held that assimilation stands midway between absolute identity of presentations, on the one hand, and such difference of presentations, on the other hand, as is found in the relative independence of asso- ciated ideas, such as, for example, the association 'stable — horse.' But this is not the true view of assimilation, for there is no such thing as absolute identity of presentation, or of mental content of any kind. Assimilation is always present. It is the necessary basis of the earliest associa- tion. For association is, as we have seen, on the organic side and at the start, only another statement for the con- solidating of the different reactions which arise when the stimulations are multiple or not simple. These reactions are reduced to orderly habitual discharges — this is associ- ation by assimilation, more or less adequate to give the sense of synthesis, or unity, or identity. Association has, accordingly, a motor foundation from the first. The ele- ments hold together in memory because they are 7ised together in action. And as the action becomes one, but yet complex, so the mental content tends to become one, but yet complex also.
This becomes more evident when we call to mind that the 'objects ' of the external world are very complex men- tal constructions. They are for the most part made by association. Objects have some very general aspects in common, such as colour, resistance, odour, etc. But these bare qualities, taken alone, might go to constitute one object about as well as another; and really would consti- tute none. What kind of an object such or such a bare stimulus shall turn out to be — this is largely a matter of association and suggestion. Hence if the mind has to construct anyhow, in each case, and to depend largely upon memory of earlier instances for its material, then it falls back at once upon those habitual reactions by which groups of associated elements are reinstated together and as one content. These old groups thus usurp the new elements by assimilation, if it be within the range of organic possibility.
Put generally, therefore, we may say that assimilation is due to the tendency of a new sensory process to be drawn off into preformed motor reactions; these preformed reactions in their turn tending to reinstate, by the principle of imitation, the old stimulations or memories which led to their preformation, with all the associations of these memories. These memories, therefore, tend to take the place or stand for the new stimulations which are being thus assimilated.
All perception is accordingly a case of assimilation. The motor contribution to each presented object is just beginning to be recognized in cases of disease called by the general term apraxia, i.e., loss of the sense of the use, function, utility, of objects. A knife is no longer recog- nized by these patients as a knife, because the patient does not know Jioiv to use it, or what its purpose is. The com- plex system of elements is still there to the eye, all to- gether: the knife is a thing that looks, feels, etc., so and so. This is accomplished by the simple contiguous asso- ciation of these elements, which has become hardened into nervous habit. But the central link by which the object is made complete, by which, that is, these different ele- ments were originally reproduced together by being imi- tated together in a single act, — this has fallen away. So 312 Conscious Imitation.
the apperception, the synthesis which made the whole complex content a thing for recognition and for use, this is gone.
The great importance of this fact of assimilation be- comes more evident also when we take note more in detail of the nature of the motor processes by which it takes place. When we say that a new element is assimilated to old contents by exciting the motor associates, and with them all the other entrained associates of the old, we lay ourselves open to the task of showing what the motor processes are which are thus established by habit in any particular case.
We have shown that in a developed organism, the ' excess ' discharge which secures accommodation, by rein- stating a stimulus, takes on two great forms by the law of habit. First, we have the gross general activities of the muscles, reflexes, utility reactions in emotion, etc. already established; and with these, second, the constant modifications of them made in getting new acquisitions of skill, etc. These represent respectively biological habit and accommodation. But then we find also the more special kind of motor reaction upon mental content found in attention. This has still to be described as a more or less consohdated reaction upon mental contents, fixed by habit. We shall also see, in considering the attention, how it is that every mental content tends to call out the attention, and how, in turn, the attention modifies the con- tent which calls it out. There is, therefore, just as far as this reaction of attention upon content is a constant gen- eralized thing, a general demand for the assimilation of all contents in certain great nets or categories representing forms of action; and, in particular, these mental categories Assimilation, Recognition, 313 are due to felt movements of the attention. This may be deferred for later discussion. But this is not all of the attention. We find that there is a balance of attention process — reflex motor influence, muscular strains here and there — peculiar to each great quality of content, as being from eye, or ear, etc., and inside of this, again, a balance peculiar to each particular individual content ex- perienced. We not only have a common attention, involv- ing the brow-muscles, etc., but various special attentions, such as visual, auditory, etc., and further, different succes- sive attentions for each experience of the same quality, i.e.y let us say three successive repetitions of the same sight. If A be the gross movements of attention, a, a\ a," a" may stand for the peculiar attentions to sight, sound, etc., and a, a, a\ a'' for the successive acts of the attention given under one of the latter, say under a.
This means that the sense of assimilation in each suc- cessive experience of the same objective content varies with the different motor shadings of attention, just as it also varies for the different sense qualities by reason of the different motor associations, strains, etc., involved in accom- modating to the different sense qualities.
Now let us see what the different cases are which will arise in successive presentation of the same external object. Let/ be a new object, a peach. A + a -{- a, then, by what precedes, stands for attention to it; in which A gives the sensations of gross contraction, a gives the sensations of special-sense contractions, such as rolling of the eyes, etc., and a gives the sensations of contraction peculiar to this particular object only, — say the visual exploration of its figure. Now all this works, as we have seen, by the law of assimilation, changes in the content p; / gets a lot of 314 Conscious Imitation.
associates attached to it by which it is brought into harmony or connection with earlier /'s. It is put into the category P, the Peach.
Now suppose that instead of being an absolutely new p, this / has been seen once before and so has become /'. Then we have again the formula for attention, A -\- a -\- a, where a differs from the former a. What is this difference? In consciousness I submit the difference is just this, that we recognize p\ Analyzed out as it has now been, we are able to see what this peculiar sense of recognition rests on. For a differs from a in two respects: first, in the greater ease with which the movements of the eye, etc., for which a stands, are made in tracing out the figure of /' (or whatever other contractions constitute one attention different from another inside the same sense-quality — what I call the 'motor associates' of/'), and, second, in the presence of the images belonging to the earlier expe- rience now brought up in regular association. As to the first of these elements, it is the so-called * subjective aspect' of recognition to be mentioned below. As to the latter element, it is evident that all the old images will be asso- ciated directly with/'. But among them will now be the image of memory left by the earlier experience of /. With this the new /' is assimilated, to such a degree that the two are not held apart at all, but the result is one object under the category P, with a group of associated elements. We say, then, that /' is recognized.