Recognition, therefore, generally involves elements of content brought together by the process of assimilation, and so rests upon attention considered as a phenomenon of motor habit, that is, upon the more habitual ingredients in the attention symbolized by the A -^ a part of the whole Assifnilation, Recognition. 315 attention formula. The objective presented elements are of course most evident and important. Their presence is in so far only the familiar fact of association, which seems easy to understand because it is so familiar. But associa- tion is itself a case of looser and less effective assimilation. Every two elements whatever, connected in consciousness, are so only because they have motor effects in co7mnon. In association they have less in common. In recognition they have so much more in common that they are pre- sented as one, and the other elements of content associated with each of them in similar ways through common motor interests, cluster around the final outcome as the evident signs of the sameness of the new and the old. This is the fact of recognition by NebejivorstelliLugen signalized by Wundt, under which falls Lehmann's Benemmngsassocia- tion. It is what may be called recognition by an objective coefficient (H off ding's BekanntJieitsqiLalitdt), or in current phrase, 'relative recognition.'
I have before gathered up this side of recognition, based both upon mental analysis and objective experiment, in a formula which holds that the sense of familiarity with an object is due to the reinstatement of the apperceptive or relational process of the earlier presentation.^ According to this formula, taken alone, single unrelated homogeneous images such as bell-stroke, pure colour, etc., would not be recognized, single complex images such as human faces would be recognized somewhat in the degree in which the complexity had impressed itself in the first perception, and clear recognition would arise only when the relations at- tentively discerned were clearly brought out in the repro- 1 Handbook of Psychology, I. Senses and Intellect, 2d. ed., pp. 1 76-178, where the experiment given in the next paragraph is also mentioned.
3i6 Conscious Imitation, duced state. A further result would be that images, when reproduced, would largely depend upon and reinforce each other in producing the feeling of familiarity.
I once had an opportunity to test a little child six months and a half old, with these points in view, and the result was quite instructive. Her nurse, who had been with her continuously for five months, was absent for a period of three weeks, and on her return was instructed first to appear to the child simply in her usual dress, but to remain silent; then to withdraw from sight, but to speak as she had been accustomed to; and finally to appear and sing a nursery rhyme, which by special care the little girl had not been allowed to hear during the nurse's absence. The first result was, that the child gazed in a questioning way upon the face, but showed no positive sign of a recog- nition; yet the absence of positive fear and antipathy shown at first toward the substitute nurse indicated that the visual image was not entirely strange. Second, the tones of the nurse's voice were not at all recognized, as far as passive indications even of familiarity were concerned, — a result we would expect from the greater purity and simplicity of the auditory images. The third experiment was attended by complete and demonstrative recognition. The visual face and auditory rhyme images must have re- enforced one another, giving again the old established complex apperception of the nurse.
This case also shows, as far as any individual case can, that images from different senses vary greatly in intensity and in motor effect, especially in calling out influence upon the attention, in early child-life, that they are not well differentiated from one another, and that even at the very early age of six months special memories are becoming sufficiently permanent to fix general attitudes and habits of action in the child.
Observations are largely lacking as to what elements in the particular experiences of early childhood are most in- fluential in recognition. Close observations of the periods when children recognize pictures of familiar objects would throw some light upon the point. E. recognized pictures of a clock and a cat early in her twelfth month, and called them ' ti-ti ' (tick-tick) and ' ps-ps ' (puss-puss); but I know of no other exact observations.
But it is clear that the other element in the atten- tion-complex is also present. There is a change in the a factor itself with successive appearances of the same p content. This is not itself presented as part of the content, for it only appears in the relative ease, facil- ity, of attention itself. It seems to attach to the sub- ject, to the agent, to the ego who attends, not to the object or content.^ We have in the recognition of an object not only the identification of it as objectively the same, but also a feeling of * warmth,' ownership, self- reference. We do not recognize a thing simply /^r itself; we recognize it /(?r ourselves. It has become in a sense ours by having been present to us before. This is ac- 1 Ward {Mind, July, 1893, p. 353) has pointed out the analogy between the feeling of ' facility ' which we have when we perform a movement a second or third time, and the feeling of familiarity with an object. In my view, they are exactly the same thing, except that in the former case the subjective, i.e. motor, sense is nearly or quite the whole of the feeling. In object recognition the' objective content is still objective, but in the sense of motor facility the process of voluntary attention is identified directly with the movement, and finds in it its own appropriate outlet. The reader should also consult Ward's second article {Mind, October, 1894), which appears after my text is in type. In view of the similarity of his position and mine I may add that my view was published in the Philos. Review in July, 1892.
3i8 ConscioMS Imitation, counted for by the fact that just this motor element it is that carries along with it the habitual attention strains, and these attention strains are in large part the stable, 'identical' element in the sense of self. So self becomes implicated in all recognition just to the extent in which the attention is easily stimulated.
Now, although we have found the objective aspect of recognition in the represented complexity of content just spoken of, — the apperceptive or associative meaning of the thing, — so it still remained to find the more uniform element of subjective reference common, in a measure, to different recognitions. This I find in the varying readiness or ease of attention in the reinstatement of the content by assimilation to its old image and escort; that is, in the motor sensations of adjustment, which indicate in a series the varying degrees of strain or effort of the attention.
The motor associates of each sensory intensity are, therefore, looked at broadly, the A -\- a -{- a factors in at- tention, and each such reaction of the attention, when taken in a particular case, has also in it a certain degree of readiness or ease of the a factor. This has more proof in later chapters which deal with 'Attention,' and the conditions of ' Internal Speech and Song.' When a presentation comes a second time into consciousness, it is adjusted to more easily because its apperception in attention proceeds upon a basis of ready formed associa- tion of both these kinds. The relative ease of adjustment is felt as the subjective aspect of recognition, and the consequent assimilation going on in the content itself is the objective aspect.
Cases are now well known and discussed of so-called Its Pliylogenctic Value. 319 'absolute' recognition, in which, i.c.y there are no evident presented associations to mediate the recognition. The vital question is raised: How do such recognitions pro- ceed? The two clear cases known are the recognition of simple tones, and that of simple colours. In both these cases, as is now evident, the recognition is due to the second (a) factor which I have brought out above — the relative ease of attention in adjusting itself to such a tone or colour a second time.
§ 4. Phylogenetic Value of Memory and Recognition.
It need hardly be said that memory is a function of extraordinary value in race development. Creatures which have in them the faculty of anticipating experiences, both pleasurable and painful, by the recall of memory pictures in something of the original setting, and which can, in consequence, anticipate the actual experiences to secure or avoid them by an adapted reaction, are most fit for natural selection. Of course they survive. This has always been seen by those writers who have found in memory a product of the organic accommodation of the creature to its environment. But a farther word is neces- sary to point out the proper value for selection of the added fact of recognition. For a creature might well reproduce its experiences as memory pictures and react upon them well, and still not recognize them, just as pa- thology shows is the case in certain anaesthetic hysterics. These patients respond in writing to questions which they do not understand, or describe in writing persons whom they do not recognize. The whole group of facts of 'physiological' or organic suggestions described in my 320 Conscious Imitation.
earlier pages ^ show the kind of ' organic memory ' which enables the organism to act upon an experience as if it recognized it, when the actual recognition does not take place in consciousness. What is absent in these cases is, as we now know, the finer motor, synthetic, adjustments of the attention which by their variations constitute recognition.
The adaptations of most of the organisms below mam- malian life, and some 'mammals, possibly, take place, no doubt, by such 'organic memory.' They have conscious- ness and also memory in the sense of recall of images of past experience; but they do not recognize these images with that peculiarly ' warm ' sense of ownership which we have when we greet the familiar. The attention has not grown to be the medium of a sense of self, nor has its development gone far enough to give differentiated re- actions to many contents. They have what may be called first stage associations with what they remember, i.e.y asso- ciations of pleasure and pain, and of direct adjusted movement.
The additional fact of recognition, therefore, must have a farther value than that of simple memory. And it has, as may be readily pointed out.
By the recognition of an object a creature gets full possession of all the benefits both of immediate and of remote association, i.e., second-stage association, let us say. Recognition follows to reinforce or inhibit the reaction of simple memory, for it is constituted by the set-back wave of firm motor associates already described as neces- sary for the assimilation of the new to the old. It means, therefore, that the creature that recognizes takes a certain Its Phylogcuetic Value. 321 attiUide, a motor state of contraction, expansion, etc., a condition of readiness for the protective or defensive action for which the motor habits of the organism have grown to provide. But these may be different from the reactions dictated by simple memory. Recognition is a sense of meaning as opposed to that of bare appearance, and its reaction is often the violent checking even of the impulses due to more organic sensibility, or its revival. Creatures which consciously recognize, therefore, have an evident shield from the ills of the world and a mortgage upon its benefits. The dog which sees the whip only for the first time gets the flogging; but the next time he sees the whip, he recognizes it with the immediate impulse to startled attention, fear, and flight. The motor elements which underlie are, on the theory now developed, what, in his consciousness, is^ in part, the sense of recognition. I need not add that the escape of the dog from his cruel master is the survival of the creature that is fit to survive. Phylogenetically, the difference in value between mem- ory and recognition is only one of degree, just as the motor adjustments and the escort of associates of all kinds represented in the two cases differ only in degree of co-ordination and complexity. Memory of the organic type, without recognition, is present when there is a first- degree association between two sense areas, or between a sense and a movement area. The reaction represents a first-degree accommodation. But in recognition we have the motor organization represented by attention and complex central development in the cortex. Its reactions therefore represent all the accommodations of skill and art, and all the adjustments of will to the demands of the life of conduct.
Y CHAPTER XI.
Conscious Imitation (continued); the Origin of Thought and Emotion.
§ I. Conception and TJwught.
Passing on to the sphere of conception and thought, we find a remarkable opening for the law of imitation. The principle of Identity which represents the mental demand for consistency of experience, and the mental tendency, already remarked, to the assimilation of new material to old schemes, is seen genetically in the simple fact that repetitions are pleasurable to the infant, and to us all, because of the law of habit in our reactions. Just in as far as a new experience repeats an old one, to this degree it accomplishes what direct imitation would have accom- plished, and so makes easy future repetitions of it, by the reaction born of the old. This kind of accommodation by repetition we have seen to be both indicative of pleas- ure, and in developed organisms, also, the cause of it. So in the fact of assimilation, we have both the method of central organic development, and the platform upon which the structure of thought must be built. To say that identity is necessary to thought, therefore, is only to say that it expresses in a generalization the method of mental development by imitative reaction.
Conception and ThongJil. 323 In my earlier work^ I have depicted the progress of consciousness through the operations of reasoning — con- ception, judgment, syllogism — in its search for identities, and I need not enlarge upon it here. The new doctrine of judgment, which goes by the name of Brentano, for the first time did justice to the demand for unity found everywhere in mental operations. Judgment always deals with one object, not two. So the mental demand for identity is really a demand^ i.e.y an irresistible tendency to act in one way npon a variety of experiences. Identity is the formal or logical expression of the principle of Habit. It is for logic, which deals with units and copulas, what smooth assimilation and swift apperception are for psychology, which deals with elements and processes.
The principle of Sufficient Reason is subject to a corre- sponding genetic expression, on the side of Accommoda- tion. Sufficient reason, in the child's mind, is an attitude, a belief: anything in its experience which tends to modify the course of its habitual reactions in a way which it must accept, endorse, believe — this has its sufficient reason, and he accommodates to it. I have argued elsewhere ^ that a conflict between the established, the habitual, the taken for granted, on one hand, and the new, raw, and violent, on the other hand, is necessary to excite doubt, which is the preliminary to belief. And belief follows only when a kind of assimilation or reconciliation takes place. But this assimilation of the new, the doubtful, to the old, the established, is only done by the union of the potencies for action, in a common plan of action. Belief 1 Handbook, Vol. I., Senses ajid Intellect, Chap. XIV. See also my article Feeling, Belief, and Judgment, in Mind, N. S., Vol. I., p. 403.
2 Handbook, Vol. II., Chap. VII.
324 Consciotis Imitation.
arises in the child in the readjustment or accommodation of himself actively to new elements of reality. Only then does he pass from 'reality-feeling,' which accompanies un- impeded habit, to belief, which comes from a new adjust- ment of the claims of impeded and split-up habits.
In as far as there is truth in this view, in so far does Sufficient Reason become a formal or logical statement of the fact of Accommodation. It is for logic, again, what the more violent reconciliations, hard bought synthesis, strains to compass all in a single 'area of consciousness,' are for psychology.
Put more broadly: whenever we believe a new thing or accept it as real, we accommodate our attitude to its pres- ence, we make place for it in our store of acquisitions for future use; this means that we are prepared to reproduce it voluntarily and involuntarily, to make it a part of that copy system which hangs together in our memory, as rep- resenting a consistent course of conduct and the best adjustment we have been able to effect to our physical and moral environment. And on the other hand, anything which cannot get into this system is not believed; and we say we do not believe it because it lacks just in this suffi- cient ground or reason. The fact is, that not believing a thing simply means that we have not been able to link it up and hold it in the system of copy elements which we have established by long and patient action.
So here also imitation is the method by which our milieu of thought and feeling in all its aspects gets carried over and reproduced within us in a system of relationships to which we have learned to react. We live by faith, now, not by sight, because we depict truth in these relationships whose very establishing by our own action has given us Cojucptioji and Thought. 325 the only warrant we have of their security. Our conscious- ness of the relationships of the elements of this reproduced world, as sustaining one another — and sustaining our trust — this is our sense of sufficient reason. Our accompanying sense of acceptance and endorsement of these copies as suited to draw out our action — this is belief; and the familiarity which repetition engenders, betokens the growth of habit and the sense of identity.
Conception then arises, too, and it proceeds by identi- ties and sufficient reasons; and we get in this connection a new genetic view of the general notion. The child begins with what seems to be a general. His earliest experiences, carried over into memory, become general copies which stand as assimilative nets for every new event or object. All men are 'papa,' all colours are 'wed,' all food 'mik.' Professor Cattell informs me that his little girl, after getting pain from certain biniips of head, etc., got to calling all bodily pain 'bump-bump.' And her little brother further generalized the term to apply to all mental discomforts, such as disagreeable emo- tions, fears, etc. What this really means is, that the child's motor attitudes are fewer than his receptive experiences. Each experience of man calls out the same attitude, the same incipient movement, the same coefficient of attention, on his part, as that, e.g., with which he hails 'papa.' In other words, each man is a repetition of the papa copy, and carries the child out in action, just as his own early response to the presence of the real papa carried him out. But of course this docs not continue. By his learning new accommodations, by his having experiences which will not assimilate, this dominancy of habit is, in part, counteracted, his classes grow more numerous as his reactions do, his 326 Consciotts Imitation.
general notions become more 'reasonable,' and he is on the proper way to a * rectification of the concept.'
The ordinary question of the rise of the * concept ' from the * percept ' may, accordingly, get its answer in this view; and it is well to go a little more into details. It is only partially true that the concept arises from the per- cept at all. It is rather true that the two arise together, by the same mental movement, which is apperception or motor synthesis. Going back again to that neglected period, infancy, we may ask, as a matter of fact, what takes place.
Suppose, after the very common method of the day, a single presentation. A, in the infant consciousness; then suppose it removed. The child is now ready to germinate in two different ways, forward and backward, future-ward and past-ward. He remembers and he expects. Viewed as memory^ his experience, A, is particular, a sensation, after a time a percept. But it includes more than his simple receptive state. He reacts to it, and so stands ready to react to it again. This readiness is his expectation, — the only tendency he has to a definite reaction; and as the only one, it stands ready to 'go off' on any kind of stimulus which is locally near enough to discharge that way. His mem- ory then becomes a concept after a fashion. For viewed as expectation, it is the whole of the child's reality; it is what will happen, for it is all that can happen; he knows nothing else. Whatever then actually does happen is at first reacted to as A, and remains A, by this active con- firmation, if it is possible for the child's consciousness to keep it A. This fact that past experience, taken as rep- resenting future experience, is general, I may call the coficept of the first degree. It means that at this stage Conception and Thought. 327 particular experiences are the measure of all things, of things generatly; since they are all that the organism is accommodated to, and they are the copies to which all experiences are assimilated if possible. The child is under the reign or habit or identity.
But as particulars increase, they limit one another, both in memory and in expectation. In expectation, because they are brought only partially under common tendencies of discharge in action; in memory, because by this tendency to partial disunion in action they are subject to the great processes of assimilation, association, and inhibition. In- stead of A (red colour) happening, B (green colour) happens; and instead of all my reds being red squares, and all my greens, green squares, I have red circles and green circles, red and green triangles, fantastic shapes of red and green, etc. This means two things in the growth of concepts: first, that my expectation is no longer of all reds, i.e., my red is no longer a general of the first degree. It cannot, by assimilation through a single motor discharge, stand for all colours. Green is in part refractory. So red is now a particular as compared with green. And, second, my expectation is no longer that all my reds will be square, for the same reason as before. There will be circular, triangular, irregular reds. But with it all they are equally red. In this respect they do assimilate, i.e., my red is still general as compared with particular instances of red. Now this particularizing of experiences in reference to one another is the function of perception, and this gen- eralizing of experience, with reference to its own single instance, is conception, which gives tJie general of tJie second degree. So conception and perception arise together.
At the same time, experience takes on another psycho- 328 Conscious Imitation.
logical aspect. New experience not only adds new items opposed to old items, but it leads to revision of the old — all through the law of assimilation by means of motor reaction. What passed for greens turn out to be partly blues; they accordingly require and secure a modified action; so in my expectation of greens, I may no longer accept blues. So also I leave out the demand that my greens be either square, or circular, or triangular, i.e., I leave out figure. This means that in my more generalized motor reaction to colour, I leave out the more special eye explorations which contribute the figure-value to the com- plex content. Or, to give a more concrete example, first, boat is boat, with spread sails, three masts, and sailors in the rigging; then sailors are dropped, sails and masts go, etc. What is left is ordinarily said to be abstracted, as, for instance, the concept colour, a quality abstracted from par- ticular instances. But true abstraction is not a singling out; it is rather a paring down, a wearing off, an erosion, due to the progress in adjustment which the organism has been able to effect under the law of the reduction of motor habits by compounding.^ Thus is reached a gen- eral i7i tJie thii'd degree. It represents that which is