essential in an experience, not only as tested by its unin- terrupted recurrence amid shifting and drifting details; but more especially by its regular calling out force upon me in some great fixed way of acting.
How experience gets collected, related, distinguished, in this way, is ordinarily the question of the function of con- 1 See above, Chap. VIII., § 4. The reader may compare the treatment of my Handbook, I., Senses and Intellect, where conception is discussed from the point of view solely of conscious content, the genetic feature, —the motor habit involved, — not being there spoken of.
Conception and TJiought. 329 sciousness itself. I prefer to call the process considered thus as mental function, apperception, and to say that both the percept and the concept arise by the apperceptive function of consciousness, to which I have given a genetic construction in the earlier pages. They become, on this view, simply different aspects of one thing — a synthesis of elements. Looked at backward, the product is an event, a particular, a percept; looked at forward, it is representative of other events, a general, a concept.
We are now able, in summing up, to make out two important points for psychology, I think. First, we see that this so-called apperception is genetically the simple fact of motor habit, with the assimilations and associations which it gives rise to. Motor habit is the great devouring thing which throws its arms around all mental details and unifies them in its embrace. The most refined and subtile form of it takes place higher in attention. Attention is the vehicle of apperception; as psychologists now agree it supplies the 'form' to every 'content.' To say this, how- ever, is only to say that attention, representing as it does the most refined and most central forms of motor reaction upon revived mental content — that its adjustments are the medium of conception, thought, reasoning, of all possi- ble groupings and arrangings in the mind. Thought, therefore, exhibits a new stage in motor accommodation. It shows the organism's adjustments to the relationships of truth, as memory, perception, sensation, show its adjust- ments to those of fact. The mechanism of voluntary attention, Jpy which this selection or adjustment proceeds, is described in a later chapter.
The second thing which may now be said, is that this view shows why we have never been able to find a mental 330 Conscious Imitation.
picture or content for a * general notion.' Attempts at this culminated but did not terminate with Hume. It is evident that the 'general' or 'abstract' is not a content at all. It is an attitude, an expectation, a motor tendency. It is the possibility of a reaction which will answer equally for a great many particular experiences. As far as there are the particular images which Hume pointed out, and such pro- cesses of composition as those made much of by Waitz, these are both mere partial statements of the associations and assimilations which have been given general treatment in the exposition above.^ From what has been said of the formation of the gen- eral notion, its relation to recognition becomes interesting. This point has never been made clear, I think, on any of the old theories. How is it that a single object is recog- nized as belonging to the class which is covered by a general concept } It is evident that this presents a dif- 1 I may note the agreement intimated in the following quotations from a Syllabus of Lectures by Professor Royce: " All general ideas are the mental aspects of habits of response in presence of those general characters of things to which the ideas in question relate. Without motor habits, no ideas"; "consciously general ideas are the mental aspects of deliberately formed habits of response to the general characters of things; and for that very reason are modifiable in definite ways, and are, accordingly, more or less suc- cessfully adjustable to decidedly novel conditions. Of such deliberate habits of response the processes of language are a familiar example." " These attri- butes of Deliberateness and Modifiability are in general due to the Influence of the Imitative P'unction. For imitation, although founded on instinct, implies for its development Deliberateness and Plasticity of adjustment. Rational General Ideas are therefore, on the whole, products of imitation, are the mental aspects of imitative motor habits of response to the socially recognized general aspects of things." I have not seen any development of these positions, by Mr. Rovce.
Conception as Class-recognition. 331 ferent phase of recognition from that which comes to view in the recognition of a single object as the same single object. Calling this further kind of recognition ' class- recognition,' we find it now possible to explain it.
We found, it will be remembered, convenient, a certain formula in speaking of the elements involved in attention; the formula A -{- a -{- a. A represents the fixed, habitual, always-present strains, stresses, organic movings, etc., in- volved in every act at attention. This element involves the stable elements of the sense of self, and so carries self-recognition or personal identity in all acts of memory. This is the extreme case of recognition on the habit side. The third element, a, further, has already been seen to give us, in its changes from one to another experience of the same object or content, the sense of recognition at the other extreme, the accommodation extreme, the absolute recognitions to which objective complexity may be largely absent. Now, in the middle, in the a element, we find the very common fact of class-recognition accounted for, in the main. The formation of class notions we have seen to be by union, coalescence, and motor processes, with assimilations of new elements of content to old habitual schemes. Now the attention is directly imphcated in all these class formations. Indeed, it is by the training of attention in this way that the most stable class divisions are formed, i.e., those which mark off the great qualitytypes of mental processes. One's attention is visual, or auditive, or motor, as it gets habitually exercised with one or other of the senses.^ So the elements, in an act of attention, which arise from the contractions peculiar to one ^ This is taken up in some detail in the chapter on Attention (Chap. XV.).
Conscious Imitation.
kind of content, remaining relatively constant for all instances of that kind of content, give us the recognition- coefficient for that class. I recognize a visual picture as something I have sce7i, because it stirs up that a element of attention which consists in the motor revivals, reverbera- tions, etc., of the eye-brow, frown-muscles, scalp shiftings, etc., peculiar to visual attention. Auditory class-recog- nition proceeds, similarly, upon revived auditory attention- strains, etc. So we have in the a element in the attention formula, sufficient explanation of class-recognition, and of its position midway between recognition of self and recog- nition of single objects, qtia single. Of course, as Wundt says, just in as far as a single object is recognized as com- plex, and by reason of its complexity, just so far it tends to become a case of class-recognition; inasmuch as the relationships inside of which its assimilation proceeds are common nets for a possibly varied filling.
The three recognition phenomena, therefore, which my scheme sets in order are, self-identity {A), the great ground-swell of organic habit, and mental sameness; class- recognition {a)y covering the wide objective side, the con- tents subject to association or assimilation; and absolute recognition (a), the refined adjustments in which present functional elements are paramount. The motor formula for attention, then, adds up these three elements, all of which are simply facts of attention, giving A -\- a -\- a.
§ 3. Emotion and Sentiment} Again, in the affective life we find evidence of the working of the imitative principle. Emotion we have 1 The balance of this chapter, and the next (Chap. XIT.), give en resuj?i'' positions whicli are developed as topics of independent and practical value in EmofioJi ajid Soitinicnt. 333 seen to be, largely, in its qualitative marks, a revival product, a clustering, so to speak, of organic and muscular reverberations about revived elements of content. So the production of emotion depends upon the reinstatement, by association or action, of parts of the ideal copy system which it is the function of memory and association to build up and to preserve. This follows from what we have said in two earlier discussions, that on the nature of emotion, and that on the organic basis of memory and association.
There is, however, one class of emotions which show more clearly the fact that the framework of ideas to which emotion attaches is really a product of imitation; these are the sympathetic emotions. Sympathy may be called the imitative emotion par excellence. My child H. cried out when I pinched a bottle-cork in her fifth month, and wept in her twenty-second week, at the sight of a picture of a man sitting weeping, with bowed head in his hands, and his feet held fast in stocks.^ In such cases the pres- entation is assimilated to memory copies of personal suffer- ing, and so calls out the motor attitudes, /.^., the emotions, habitual to experiences of pleasure- or pain-giving objects. And the motor discharges, each time that they are re- peated, become better defined and more telling upon consciousness.
In many cases, however, I think the associative order the later volume of ' Interpretations.' They are given here under the general head of imitation, in order to make passibly complete the applications of the imitative principle; in this way also the treatment of the other volume is ren- dered somewhat less theoretical.
1 This is, I own, a remarkably early recognition of a pictorial rendering of expression; but I have the date recorded. The picture will be found on page 227 of Bissell's Biblical Antijuities.
in the sympathetic emotions is the reverse of this. The sight of the expression of emotion in another stimulates similar attitudes directly in us, and this in turn is felt as the state which usually accompanies such a reaction. The two cases of sympathy in my child, given above, illustrate the truth of both these accounts.
The sympathetic emotion, in fact, shows the 'circular' form of reaction. The motor attitude seen, we may say, is itself the copy which tends to bring about its own duplica- tion in the person seeing it. And all emotion has the same origin as this. The ' expression ' of fear, for example, is a reinstatement of motor and organic disturbances which were, first of all, utility reactions upon a stimulation. But all utility reactions upon a stimulation are simply those elements, in a larger diffused 'excess' discharge, which were selected just because they were fitted to maintain or avoid, as the case may be, a particular kind of stimulation. So just in as far as the position is valid that all adapted movements are illustrations of the fundamental vital adap- tations represented by reaching-out and drawing-in move- ments, just so far all the revivals of them, which break into consciousness as emotion, are imitative in their origin.
There are, further, two or three special illustrations of this function of imitation in the genesis of emotion so clear in the making, in children, that I shall briefly trace them. First let us consider the sense of self, with its remarkable group of emotions.
I have described in an earlier place the kind of responses which infants make in the presence of persons, and the main facts may be here recalled. We have seen that one of the most remarkable tendencies of the very young child Emotion and Sentiment. 335 in its responses to its environment is the tendency to recognize differences of personality. It responds to what I have called * suggestions of personality.' As early as the second month, it distinguishes its mother's or nurse's touch in the dark. It learns characteristic methods of holding, taking up, patting, kissing, etc., and adapts itself, by a marvellous accuracy of protestation or acquiescence, to these personal variations. Its associations of person- ality come to be of such importance that for a long time its happiness or misery depends upon the presence of certain kinds of 'personality suggestion.' It is quite a different thing from the child's behaviour towards things which are not persons. Things get to be, with some few exceptions which are involved in the direct gratifica- tion of appetite, more and more unimportant; things get subordinated to regular treatment or reaction. But per- sons get constantly more important, as uncertain and dominating agents of pleasure and pain. The fact of movement by persons and its effects on the infant seem to be the most important factor in this peculiar influence; later the voice gets to stand for a person's presence, and at last the face and its expressions equal the person, in all his attributes.
I think this distinction between persons and things, between agencies and objects, is the child's very first step toward a sense of the qualities which distinguish persons. The sense of uncertainty or lack of confidence grows stronger and stronger in its dealings with persons — an uncertainty contingent upon the moods, emotions, miaiices of expression, and shades of treatment, of the persons around it. A person stands for a group of experiences quite unstable in its prophetic as it is in its historical 33^ Coiiscioics hnitation.
meaning. This we may, for brevity of expression, as- suming it to be first in order of development, call the ^projective stage '^ in the growth of the personal con- sciousness, which is so important an element in social emotion.
Further observation of children shows that the instru- ment of transition from such a 'projective' to a subjective sense of personality, is the child's active bodily self, and the method of it is the principle of imitation. As a matter of fact, accommodation by actual muscular imitation does not arise in most children until about the seventh month, so utterly organic is the child before this, and so great is the impetus of its inherited instincts and tendencies. But when the organism is ripe, by reason of cerebral develop- ment, for the enlargement of its active range by new accommodations, then he begins to be dissatisfied with 'projects,' with contemplation, and so starts on his career of imitation. And of course he imitates persons. Persons have become, by all his business with them and theirs with him, his interesting objects, the source of his weal or woe, his uncertain factors. And further, persons are bodies which move. And among these bodies which move, which have certain projective attributes, as already de- scribed, a very peculiar and interesting one is his own body. It has connected with it certain intimate features which all others lack. Besides the inspection of hand and foot, by touch and sight, he has experiences in his consciousness which are in all cases connected with this body, — strains, stresses, resistances, pains, etc., — an inner 'felt 1 See the detailed observations and analysis of these ' personal projects,' above, Chap. VI., § 3. The use of the word ' project ' is justified in the earlier connection.
Emotion and Sentiment. 2)Z1 series matching the outer presented series. But it is only when a new kind of experience arises which we call effort — a set opposition to strain, stress, resistance, pain, an experience which arises, I think, first as imitative effort — that there comes that great line of cleavage in his experience which indicates the rise of volition, and which separates off the series now first really subjective. Persist- ent imitation with effort is typical case of explicit voli- tion, and the first germinating nucleus of self-hood over against object-hood. Situations before accepted simply, are now set forward, aimed at, wrought; and in the fact of aiming, working, the fact of agency, which we have found to arise from the child's realization of the possible capriciousness of character, is the nascent sense of sub- ject.^ The subject sense, then, is an actuating sense. What has formerly been 'projective' now becomes 'subjective.' The associates of other personal bodies, the attributes which made them different from things, are now attached to his own body with the further peculiarity of actuation. This we may call the subjective stage in the growth of the self-notion. It rapidly assimilates to itself all the other elements by which the child's own body differs in his experience from other active bodies, — the passive inner series of pains, pleasures, strains, etc. The self suffers as well as acts. All get set over against lifeless things, and against living bodies which act, indeed, but whose actions 1 It is in exhibition of this new sense of agency, or power over its own actions, ivith their suggcstiveness to others, that the child's first conscious deceptions, 'lies,' appear; and these lies are generally of great value as being the means of bringing out, in its earliest forms, the originality and invention of the boy or girl. I shall give instances of this with * Interpretations,' in detail, in my proposed volume.
Z 338 ConscioMs Imitation, do not contribute to his own sense of actuation or of suffering.
Again, it is easy to see what now happens. The child's subject sense goes out by a kind of return dialectic, which is really simply a second case of assimilation, to illuminate these other persons. The project of the earlier period is now lighted up, claimed, clothed on with the raiment of self-hood, by analogy with the subjective. The projective becomes ejective; that is, other people's bodies, says the child to himself, have experiences in them such as mine has. They are also me s: let them be assimilated to my me copy. This is the third stage; the ejective, or 'social* self, is born.i The ego and the alter are thus born together. Both are crude and unreflective, largely organic, an aggregate of sensations, prime among which are efforts, pushes, strains, physical pleasures and pains. And the two get purified and clarified together by this twofold reaction between project and subject, and between subject and eject. My sense of myself grows by imitation of you, and my sense of yourself grows in terms of my sense of myself. Both ego and alter are thus essentially social; each is a sociiis, and each is an imitative creation. So for a long time the child's sense of self includes too much. The circum- ference of the notion is too wide. It includes the infant's mother, and little brother, and nurse, in a literal sense; for they are what he thinks of and aims to act like, by imitating, when he thinks of himself. To be separated from his mother is to lose a part of himself, as much so as 1 I think an adequate apprehension of the distinctions conveyed by the three words * projective,' 'subjective,' and 'ejective,' would banish the popular ' psychologists' fallacy ' beyond recall.
Emotion and Sentiment, 339 to be separated from a hand or foot. And he is dependent for his growth directly upon these suggestions which come in for imitation from his personal viilieii} It will be seen by readers of R. Avenarius,^ that the two stages of this development correspond to the two stages in his process of Introjection, whereby the ' hypothetical ' (personal-organic) element of the naturlicJien Weltbegriff is secured. Avenarius finds, from analytical and anthrop- ological points of view, a process of 'attribution,' read- ing-in {Einlcgung), by which a consciousness comes to interpret certain peculiarities attaching to those items in its experience which represent organisms and afterwards persons. The second stage is that whereby these peculi- arities get carried back and attached to its own organism {Selbstei7itegting), and recognized as 'subjective' (sen- sations, perceptions, thoughts), in both organisms, over against the regular ' objective ' elements contained in the rest of the world experience.
This genera] doctrine of Avenarius finds better justifica- tion than he gives it, I think, from the genetic sphere, into which he does not go. The two phenomena, ' personality suggestion' and 'imitation,' supply just the support for a revised doctrine of ' Introjection.' First comes what I have called, in what precedes, the 'projective' stage of the self-notion. It is the stage in which the infant gets 'per- ^ Prof. Josiah Royce has expressed, in an article in the Philosophical Review, November, 1894, a view of the growth of the self-notion in the child's consciousness in close agreement, in most points, with this; and I take pleas- ure in referring to his development as something similar to that which my own detailed statement will be in my later volume. My present text appeared, in much the same words as now, in Mind iox January, 1894, and was thought out some months before I wrote it out, in October, 1S93, for that journal.
- Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, and also Der menschlichc Weltbegriff.
sonality suggestions.' It is simply the infant's way of getting * more copy ' of a peculiar kind from the personal element in its objective surroundings. The second stage is secured by imitation. The child reproduces the copy thus obtained, consisting of the physical signs and, through them, of the mental accompaniments. Here the imitation of emotional expressions has its great influence. By this reproduction it 'interprets' its projects as subjective in itself, and then refers them back to the 'other person' again, with all the gain of this interpretation. Avenarius, as far as I have been able to discover, has no means of passing from the first to the second stage, from project to subject. He speaks^ of a certain confusion ( VerzvecJiseliing) of the projective experience {T-ErfaJirmig) with the remain- ing personal elements in consciousness {M-Erfahmiig): but what the true leading-thread into this ' confusion ' and out of it is, he does not note. This is just what I claim it is the function of imitation to do; it supplies the bridge with two reaches. It enables me — the child — to pass from my experience of what you are, to an interpretation of what I am; and then from this fuller sense of what I am, back to a fuller knowledge of what you are.^ 2 In the use of the two facts, ' personality suggestion ' and * imitation/ my development is quite unindebted to Avenarius, v/ho writes from the point of view of race history and criticism. I do not adopt the word ' introjection,' since it covers too much. My word 'project' signifies the child's sense of others' personality before it has a sense of its own. The rest proceeds by imi- tation. This distinction of method raises a further question which, as 1 have already said (Chap. I.), should be carefully discussed in all problems for which a genetic solution is sought, i.e., how far the genetic process itself in the indi- vidual's growth has become a matter of race habit or instinct. That is, granted a process of origin correctly depicted, to what extent must we say that each new individual of the race passes through it hi all its details? The origin of impulse and instinct illustrate the effects of habit in abbreviating these pro- Eviotioji and Sentiment. 341 Further, this process of taking in elements from the social world by imitation and giving them out again by a reverse process of invention (for such the sequel proves invention to be: the modified way in which I put things together in reading the elements which I get from nature and other men, back into nature and other men again) — this process never stops. We never outgrow imitation, nor our social obligation to it. Our sense of self is con- stantly growing richer and fuller as we understand others better — as we get into social co-operation with them, — and our understanding of them is in turn enriched by the additions which our own private experience makes to the lessons which we learn from them. These and other aspects of social emotion, which come to mind in con- nection with this amazingly suggestive topic, must be reserved. 1 I think some light falls on the growth of ethical feeling, also, from the psychology of imitation, although I must again disclaim adequacy of treatment. The two principles, habit and imitative accommodation, seem to get appli- cation on this higher plane: the plane which is the theatre of the rise of moral sentiment. Moral sentiment arises evidently around acts and attitudes of will. It is accord- ingly to be expected that the account of the genesis of volition will throw some light upon the conditions of the cesses and starting the individual from points of higher vantage. I am not prepared to say that an isolated child, for example, might not get a high self- notion (as he might learn to speak somehow) if deprived of all social sugges- tions; but that fact would be subject to explanation as part of the 'learning' which is the outcome, on a large scale, of the very genetic process which it appears to supersede.
1 See, however, Chap. XII. In my later work I hope to discuss this; and also the higher aspect of ' Recapitulation ' referred to in the preceding note.
342 Conscious Imitation.
rise of conscience. So if it be true that present character is the deposit of all former reactions of whatever kind, and that what we call will is a general term for our concrete acts of volition, and further that volition represents a co-ordination of tendencies, then according as these ten- dencies are suggestions from other persons, on the one hand, and represent partial expressions of one's own per- sonal character on the other hand, there arises a division within that sense of voluntary agency which is the germ of the notion of self. Your suggestion to me may conflict with my desire; my desire may conflict with my own pres- ent sympathy. Self meets self, so to speak. The self of accommodation, imitation, the self that learns, collides with the self of habit, of character, the self that seeks to domi- nate. It is no longer a matter of simple habit vej'stis sim- ple suggestion, as is the case in infancy, before the self gets the degree of complexity which constitutes it a vol- untary agent, as a later chapter shows. It is now that form of habit which is personal agency, coming into con- flict with that form of suggestion which is also personal to me as representing my social self. Your example is pow- erful to me intrinsically; not because it is abstractly good