an external cause of our sensations.” Where shall these endless turnings and twistings have an end? The habits of the law-courts as condensed into “ rules of evidence,” the traditional rules of debate, the fashion of appealing to the “ good sense ” of honor¬ able gentlemen opposite, the motives of shame and fear, the dread of being called “ fantastical,” Philis¬ tine desire to think with the majority, Philistine 304 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY terror of all revolutionary suggestions, the fright or the anger of a man at finding some metaphysician trying to question what seem to be the foundations upon which one’s bread winning depends, — all these lesser motives are appealed to, and the one ultimate motive is neglected. The ultimate motive with the man of every-day life is the will to have an exter¬ nal world. Whatever consciousness contains, reason will persist in spontaneously adding the thought: “ But there shall be something beyond this.” The external reality as such (e. g. the space beyond the farthest star, any space not accessible, even whatever is not at any moment given in so far as it is viewed from that moment, in particular every past event) is never a datum. We construct but do not receive the external reality. The “ immovable certainty ” is not such a dead passive certainty as that with which we receive a pain or an electric shock. The pop¬ ular assurance of an external world is the fixed de¬ termination to make one, now and henceforth.
In the general popular conceptions of reality we find then the first use of postulates. W e have as yet no justification for them. But even thus we get no adequate idea of their use and of their number. W e must look at the facts of every-day mental life a lit¬ tle more closely. For there is a curious tendency of many to make these postulates appear something else than what they are. Often they are interpreted as if they were no postulates at all, but data of sense. Often, again, their active nature is disre¬ garded in yet another way, and they appear as blind passive faith. Such in fact they must appear if we THE WORLD OF THE POSTULATES reflect upon their mere content, and not upon the processes by which we get them. But if we inter¬ pret them rightly, we shall see that they ought to be regarded as beliefs, taken for the first on risk, and because the risk is worth taking.
IY.
Sometimes we hear men asserting that their be¬ liefs are independent of their will. Such a man will express himself in some such way as the follow¬ ing: — “ I try to conquer prejudice; but having done this, I can do no more. My belief, whatever it is, forms itself in me. I look on. My will has noth¬ ing to do with the matter. I can will to walk or eat; but I cannot will to believe. I might as well will that my blood should circulate.”
But is this expression a fair one? Does such a man really remain passive in the struggle that goes on within him? We think not. These beliefs in such a man have resulted, we hold, from a sort of struggle between him and the surrounding world. The world has tried sometimes to check his thought, and to confine it to one channel; sometimes to con¬ fuse his thought, and to scatter it into spray before the quick, heavy blows of innumerable, disconnected sense apparitions. But the man, if he is a man of energy, has controlled the current of his thought. He has fought hard, now for freedom from oppres¬ sive narrowness of thought, now for wholeness and unity of thought; and perhaps he has in so far con- 306 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY quered as to be the master of 'a manly and many- sided system of doctrine. W e think him responsible for this system; and we hold that any such man ought to admit the responsibility.
To study briefly the nature of the process involved in all such cases will be important for our whole doctrine. We shall see thereby how much our the¬ ory of the world must itself tend to fall under the head of the purely practical. We shall appreciate also the limitations of ordinary thought, and the need of some higher ideal standard to rescue us from the pure subjectivity of mere postulates. And we shall be contributing by the way to a question of ap¬ plied ethics, the question of the morality of belief.
Every one recognizes that at least our more ab¬ stract knowledge depends largely upon our own mental activity. Knowing is not mere passive re¬ ception of facts or of truths. Learning is not solely an affair of the memory. The man that without re¬ flection commits things to memory is justly com¬ pared to a parrot, and might yet more justly be compared to the sponge of Hamlet’s figure: “ It is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again.” No knowledge, then, without active hos¬ pitality in the mind that receives the knowledge. But as soon as we recognize in mental life this our power to modify our knowledge by means of our own activity, just so soon do all the old comparisons of the mind to a wax tablet, to a sheet of paper, or to other like passive subjects of impression, lose for us their meaning. Mental life becomes for us, in view of these facts, a field of constant activity. The com- THE WORLD OF THE POSTULATES 307 monest processes of knowledge acquire a new signifi¬ cance.
Two kinds of activity are concerned in the attain¬ ment of knowledge. One kind consists in simply receiving impressions from without, such as sensa¬ tions, or, on a higher plane, statements of truth; the other consists in modifying and in organizing these impressions. The receptive activity is partly a phys¬ ical activity, since the one who receives information must use his eyes and ears, must keep awake, must at times move about; and this receptive activity is also partly made up of the mechanical processes of the memory. Association by contiguity, or learning by rote, is in the main a receptive process, though this process of reception requires some active effort on the part of the receiver. Committing words and sentences to memory is often hard labor, as we all of us learned when we first were tortured with ill- wrought geographies and grammars, or with merci¬ less Latin declensions and conjugations. But of the whole of this receptive activity we shall make no further mention in this connection. Simply receiv¬ ing, keeping your mind in a submissive attitude, turning your eyes in the proper direction, using your ears, writing down your notes, memorizing whatever needs memorizing — all this is essential to knowl¬ edge, but has no reactive effect, does not modify the form or the matter of your knowledge. Secondly, however, knowledge is determined for each of us by his own reaction upon what he receives; and this second mentioned kind of mental activity, that which forms our topic at present, consists in a modi- 308 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY fication as well as in an organization of what we have received from without. All processes of reasoning, and so all original discoveries in science and in phi¬ losophy, all speculations, theories, dogmas, controver¬ sies, and not only these complex processes, but, as we shall see, even simple judgments, commonplace beliefs, momentary acts of attention, involve such independent reaction upon the material furnished to us from without. The nature of this reaction we are further to examine.
Let us consider simpler forms of knowledge. Sense-impressions constantly suggest to us thoughts; in fact, we have few thoughts that are not either im¬ mediately suggested by sense - impressions, or else sustained in their course by a continuous stream of suitable sense-impressions. To carry on even a train of abstract reasoning, sense-impressions either pres¬ ent or repeated seem necessary as supports. But when sense-impressions come to us, what transforms them into thought?
The answer is, First of all, attention, an active mental process. The sense-impression is itself not yet knowledge. A sense-impression to which we give no attention slips through consciousness as a man’s hand through water. Nothing grasps and re¬ tains it. Little effect is produced by it. It is un¬ known. You cannot even tell what it is. For to know what such an unnoticed impression is would be to pay attention to it. But let us now consider some familiar examples of the working of attention. A simple instance will bring home to us how the boundaries of our consciousness are crowded with un* THE WORLD OF THE POSTULATES 309 known impressions — unknown, because not attended to; but yet in some inexplicable way a part of our consciousness, since an effort of attention serves to bring them, any one of them, clearly into mental vision. At this instant you are looking at some¬ thing. Now, without moviug your eyes, try, by merely attending to your visual impressions, to say what is now in the field of vision, and where is the boundary line of the field of vision. The experi¬ ment is a little hard, because our eyes, condensed embodiments as they are of tireless curiosity, are al¬ ways restless, and rebel when you try to hold them fast. But conquer them for an instant, and watch the result. As your attention roams about the arti¬ ficially fixed visual field, you will at first, indeed, be confused by the vagueness of all but the centre; but soon you will find, to your surprise, that there are more different impressions in the field than you at first can distinguish. One after another, many va¬ rious impressions will appear. But notice: you can keep your attention fixed on only a portion of the field at a time. The rest of the field is always lost in a dim haze. You must be receiving impressions all the time from all points of the field. But all of these, except the few to which you pay attention, nearly or quite disappear in the dim thickets that seem to surround the little forest-clearing made by our attentive consciousness. A like experiment can be tried with the sense of hearing, when you are in a large room full of people who are talking all around you in many independent groups. A mass of sound comes to your ear. Consciousness interferes to make 310 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY you pick out one or another of the series of sounds, an act which is indeed made possible by the natural analytic tendency of the human auditory sense, but which does not take place without a noticeable effort of attention. When you are learning a foreign lan¬ guage, and are for a while much among those who speak it, there comes a time when your ear and mind are well enough trained to follow and under¬ stand ordinary speakers with only a little effort of attention; but yet, at this stage, you are able, by simply withdrawing your attention a mere trifle, to let very common phrases run through your sense without your understanding them one whit. You can thus, by a slight change of attention, convert the foreign language from a jargon into a familiar speech, and back again into a jargon, just as, in the fixed visual field, you can make yourself see an ob¬ ject pretty plainly, or lose it altogether, by ceasing to give attention.
All these instances, which could be indefinitely multiplied, prove, first, that what we call attention modifies the knowledge that we at any moment get; and secondly, that this modification, through atten¬ tion, may take place without any change in the im¬ pressions that at any moment come from without. The first stage in getting knowledge from bare sense- impressions is therefore the modification of sense by attention — a process belonging wholly to the sub¬ jective side; i. e. to our own minds.
But what is attention? and how. does it modify sensation? Apparently, attention in the previous instances has been merely a power to increase or to THE WORLD OF THE POSTULATES 311 diminish the intensity of impressions. But is this all that attention does? No: there are many cases in which attention directly affects the quality, at least of our complex impressions. This direct modi¬ fication is commonly attended by some alteration of our emotional state. It is a familiar fact, that in listening to a series of regular and even beats, such as the strokes of an engine, or of a pendulum, or the ticking of a watch, we have a tendency to modify the impressions by introducing into their series the more elaborate regularity of rhythm. In paying at¬ tention to them, we increase, at our pleasure, the in¬ tensity of every third or fourth beat as heard, and so make a rhythm, or series of measures, out of the actually monotonous impressions. Now attention, which here first acts by modifying the intensity of impressions, soon produces the effect of qualitatively modifying our total impression of the whole series. If I have taken the fancy to listen to the even strokes in quadruple time, intensifying by my own act every fourth stroke, the character of the series is changed for me. The impressions are less monoto¬ nous, and they arouse new associations. They seem to be caused by some force that rhythmically in¬ creases and decreases. Perhaps a melody, or some phrase of a few words, arises in my mind, and per¬ sists in associating itself with the strokes. Probably some vague feeling, as of rhythmic motion through the air, or of pleasure or of displeasure in the pres¬ ence of some rhythmically moving living being, is awakened. Qualitatively, my consciousness is thus altered through my attention. I seem to be experi- 312 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY encing something that, as an objective reality, I do not experience. More striking becomes this quali¬ tative alteration of experience through attention, in case you bring two watches of different beat, or a watch and a clock, and listen to both at once at the distance of a few inches, first, perhaps, stopping one ear to avoid confusion. Here, by attention, you make or try to make a compound rhythm, and this effort alters a good deal the total impres¬ sion that you derive from the sound. If the two series are such that a simple small multiple of the interval of one gives you a simple small multiple of the other’s interval, you can combine the two series into one rhythm, and then there is an immediate impression as if the two series were really but the complex ticking of one source of sound. But if the series will not agree, there is an odd sense of some¬ thing wrong, a disappointed effort to combine, joined, perhaps, with a tendency to hasten one of the series, so as to make it agree with the other. An¬ other case where attention alters the quality of total impressions, and not merely the intensity of any part, appears in certain psychological laboratory ex¬ periments, described by W undt in his “ Physiolo- gische Psychologie.” Here, for the sake of deter¬ mining the actual time taken by an act of attention, an observer is to make an electric signal as soon as he becomes conscious of a certain impression, while the impression itself is produced by an assistant at a time exactly determined. The source of the impres¬ sion is the ringing of a bell, the flash of an electric spark, or something of the kind agreed upon at the THE WORLD OE THE POSTULATES outset. To distinguish from one another the various causes of the delay of the signal, the conditions of experiment are variously modified. In one set of experiments, the observer does not know beforehand whether he is to experience a flash of light, or a sound, or some sensation of touch, nor how intense the sensation will be, nor when it will come; but he knows that he is to be on the lookout for one of the three kinds of sensation. He waits, with attention all aroused. In this case, it always takes him longei to signal than if he knew beforehand the kind and O O the strength of the coming sensation. Moreover, his attention now makes him uneasy; the coming sen¬ sation is expected, with signs of excitement, and is often received with a start. Here the feeling of ef¬ fort that accompanies attention affects by its strength the character of the impression received. Moreover, in many of these experiments there appear phenom¬ ena that show that attention alters our perception of time, not merely as to length, but also as to se¬ quence; so that under circumstances, an impression that really precedes another can appear in conscious¬ ness as succeeding it. Yet more: attention some¬ times serves to combine two sets of simultaneous im¬ pressions, and to make them seem as if proceeding from one source.
So much for the influence of attention alone. But what is attention? We reply, evidently an active process. When impressions are modified by atten¬ tion, they are actively modified. And if you ask about the nature of this active process, the reply is, attention, in its most elementary forms, is the same 314 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY activity that in a more developed shape we commonly call will. We attend to one thing rather than to another, because we will to do so, and our will is here the elementary impulse to know. Our attention leads us at times into error. But this error is merely an accompaniment, the result of our will activity. We want to intensify an impression, to bring it within the sphere of knowledge. But in carrying out our impulse, we do more than we meant. W e not only bring something into clearer consciousness that was before out of clear consciousness, but we quali¬ tatively modify this thing in attending to it. I want to observe a series of beats, and in observing it, I make one beat in three or four seem heavier than the others, or I even alter the apparent length of one in¬ terval in three or four, by making it seem longer than the others. I observe a series of visual im¬ pressions, and at the same time a series of auditory impressions; if there is a certain agreement between them, I irresistibly unite these two series by my act of attention into one series, and refer them to a com¬ mon cause. And so in the other cases. Attention seems to defeat, in part, its own objfct. Bringing something into the field of knowledge seems to be a modifying, if not a transforming, process.
W e all know how this same law works on a higher plane. Giving our whole attention for a time to a particular subject seems necessary for the growth of our knowledge. Yet such attention, if long kept up, always modifies our power to know, affects our whole mental condition, and thus injures our power to ap¬ preciate the relations between the subject of our THE WORLD OF THE POSTULATES study and the other things in the world. Constant attention to one thing narrows our minds, until we fail to see the very thing we are looking at. Our lives are thus really passed in a constant flitting from one more or less partial and distorted view of things to another, from this one-sided judgment to that. Change the book you are reading, and your whole notion of the universe suffers some momentary change also. Think this week in the fashion of Carlyle, attending to things as he brings them to your attention, and human life — in fact, the whole world of being as you thought of it last week, when you were following some other guide — becomes mo¬ mentarily clouded. This truth seems out of relation to that. Your change of attention qualitatively alters your apprehension of truth. Attending now even to the same things, you view them in new lights. The alteration of mental attitude becomes confusing to yourself. But refuse to make any such changes, set¬ tle down steadfastly to some one way of regarding all things, and your world becomes yet more misty. You see only a few things, and those in such a bad light that you are in danger of utter darkness. Fre¬ quent change of mental view (we of course do not mean constant change of creed or of occupation, but only frequent alteration of the direction of our thought) is essential to mental health. Yet this alteration implies at least some temporary change in our knowing powers, and so some change in our ap¬ preciation of truth.
Before going on to speak of the effect of our own activity upon our knowledge, when attention is com- 316 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OE PHILOSOPHY bined with active recognition' of impressions, we want to formulate the law that governs the action of attention upon sense-impressions apart from rec¬ ognition. This law seems pretty well established by experience, and is, at all events, quite simple. It is this: Any act of attention tends, first, to strengthen the particular set of impressions to which it is at the moment adapted; and secondly, to modify those im¬ pressions in such a way as shall make the total im¬ pression derived from them all as simple an impres¬ sion as possible. These two statements could be reduced to one, thus: Attention constantly tends to make our consciousness more definite and less complex; that is, less confused and more united. More definite, less confused attention tends to make consciousness; since, out of many vague impressions, attention fixes upon one or a few, and helps them to crowd out the others. Less complex and more united or integrated attention makes the impressions attended to; as when, for the indefinite multiplicity of the successive even beats of a watch or of an en¬ gine, attention substitutes the simpler form of a ris¬ ing and falling rhythm of more and less emphatic beats, or as when two parallel series of impressions are reduced to one, by combination. If impressions are so complex and so imperative in their demands as to impede greatly the simplifying and clarifying efforts of attention, the result is a disagreeable feel¬ ing of confusion, that may increase to violent pain.
This law, that our consciousness constantly tends to the minimum of complexity and to the maximum of definiteness, is of great importance for all our THE WORLD OF THE POSTULATES