[9] "So far is it from being true that we necessarily have as many feelings in consciousness at one time as there are inlets to the sense then played upon, that it is a fundamental law of pure sensation that each momentary state of the organism yields but one feeling, however numerous may be its parts and its exposures...To this original Unity of consciousness it makes no difference that the tributaries to the single feeling are beyond the organism instead of within it, in an outside object with several sensible properties, instead of in the living body with its several sensitive functions...The unity therefore is not made by 'association' of several components; but the plurality is formed by _dissociation_ of unsuspected varieties within the unity; the substantive thing being no product of synthesis, but the residuum of differentiation." (J. Martineau: A Study of Religion (1888), p. 193-4.) Compare also F. H. Bradley, Logic, book i. chap. ii.
[10] Such passages as the following abound in anti-sensationalist literature: "Sense is a kind of dull, confused, and stupid perception obtruded upon the soul from without, whereby it perceives the alterations and motions within its own body, and takes cognizance of individual bodies existing round about it, but does not clearly comprehend what they are nor penetrate into the nature of them, it being intended by nature, as Plotinus speaks, not so properly for _knowledge_ as for the _use of the body_. For the soul suffering under that which it perceives by way of _passion_ cannot master or _Conquer_ it, that is to say, know or understand it. For so Anaxagoras in Aristotle very fitly expresses the nature of knowledge and intellection under the notion of _Conquering_. Wherefore it is necessary, since the mind understands all things, that it should be free from mixture and passion, for this end, as Anaxagoras speaks, that it may be able to _master and conquer_ its objects, that is to say, to _know and understand_ them. In like manner Plotinus, in his book of Sense and Memory, makes to _suffer_ and to _be conquered_ all one, as also to _know_ and to _conquer_; for which reason he concludes that that which suffers doth not know...Sense that suffers from external objects lies as it were prostrate under them, and is overcome by them...Sense therefore is a certain kind of drowsy and somnolent perception of that passive part of the soul which is as it were asleep in the body, and acts concretely with it...It is an energy arising from the body and a certain kind of drowsy or sleeping life of the soul blended together with it. The perceptions of which compound, or of the soul as it were half asleep and half awake, are confused, indistinct, turbid, and encumbered cogitations very different from the energies of the noetical part,...which are free, clear, serene, satisfactory, and awakened cogitations. That is to say, knowledges." Etc., etc., etc. (R. Cudworth: Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, bk. iii. chap. ii.) Similarly Malebranche: "THÉODORE.--Oh, oh, Ariste! God knows pain, pleasure, warmth, and the rest. But he does not feel these things. He knows pain, since he knows what that modification of the soul is in which pain consists. He knows it because he alone causes it in us (as I shall presently prove), and he knows what he does. In a word, he knows it because his knowledge has no bounds. But he does not feel it, for if so he would be unhappy. To know pain, then, is not to feel it. ARISTE.--That is true. But to feel it is to know it, is it not? THÉODORE.--No indeed, since God does not feel it in the least, and yet he knows it perfectly. But in order not to quibble about terms, if you will have it that to feel pain is to know it, agree at least that it is not to know it clearly, that it is not to know it by light and by evidence--in a word, that it is not to know its nature; in other words and to speak exactly, it is not to know it at all. To feel pain, for example, is to feel ourselves unhappy without well knowing either what we are or what is this modality of our being which makes us unhappy...Impose silence on your senses, your imagination, and your passions, and you will hear the pure voice of inner truth, the clear and evident replies of our common master. Never confound the evidence which results from the comparison of ideas with the liveliness of the sensations which touch and thrill you. The livelier our sensations and feelings (_sentiments_) are, the more darkness do they shed. The more terrible or agreeable are our phantoms, and the more body and reality they appear to have, the more dangerous are they and fit to lead us astray." (Entretiens sur la Métaphysique, 3me Entretien, _ad init._) Malebranche's Théodore prudently does not try to explain how God's 'infinite felicity' is compatible with his not feeling joy.
[12] Introd. to Hume, §§ 146, 188. It is hard to tell just what this apostolic human being but strenuously feeble writer means by relation. Sometimes it seems to stand for system of related fact. The ubiquity of the 'psychologist's fallacy' (see Vol. I p. 196) in his pages, his incessant leaning on the confusion between the thing known, the thought that knows it, and the farther things known about that thing and about that thought by later and additional thoughts, make it impossible to clear up his meaning. Compare, however, with the utterances in the text such others as these: "The waking of Self-consciousness from the sleep of sense is an absolute new beginning, and nothing can come within the 'crystal sphere' of intelligence except as it is determined by intelligence. What sense is to sense is nothing for thought. What sense is to thought, it is as determined _by_ thought. There can, therefore, be no 'reality' in sensation to which the world of thought can be referred." (Edward Caird's Philosophy of Kant, 1st ed. pp. 393-4.) "When," says Green again, "feeling a pain or pleasure of heat, I perceive it to be connected with the action of approaching the fire, am I not perceiving a relation _of which one constituent, at any rate, is a simple sensation? The true answer is, No._" "Perception, in its simplest form...--perception as the first sight or touch of an object in which nothing but what is seen or touched is recognized--_neither is nor contains sensation_" (Contemp. Rev., xxxi. pp. 746, 750.) "Mere sensation is in truth a phrase that represents no reality." "Mere feeling, then, as a matter unformed by thought, has no place in the world of facts, in the cosmos of possible experience." (Prolegomena to Ethics, §§ 46, 50.)--I have expressed myself a little more fully on this subject in Mind, x. 27 ff.
[13] Stumpf: Tonpsychologie, i. pp. 7, 8. Hobbes's phrase, _sentire semper idem et non sentire ad idem recidunt_, is generally treated as the original statement of the relativity doctrine. J. S. Mill (Examn. of Hamilton, p. 6) and Bain (Senses and Intellect, p. 321; Emotions and Will, pp. 550, 570-2; Logic, i. p. 2; Body and Mind, p. 81) are subscribers to this doctrine. Cf. also J. Mill's Analysis, J. S. Mill's edition, II. 11, 12.
[14] We can steadily hear a note for half an hour. The differences between the senses are marked. Smell and taste seem soon to get fatigued.
[15] In the popular mind it is mixed up with that entirely different doctrine of the 'Relativity of Knowledge' preached by Hamilton and Spencer. This doctrine says that our knowledge is relative _to us_, and is not of the object as the latter is in itself. It has nothing to do with the question which we have been discussing, of whether our objects of knowledge contain absolute terms or consist altogether of relations.
[16] What follows in brackets, as far as p. 27, is from the pen of my friend and pupil Mr. E. B. Delabarre.
[17] These phenomena have close analogues in the phenomena of contrast presented by the temperature-sense (see W. Preyer in Archiv f. d. ges. Phys., Bd. xxv. p. 79 ff.). Successive contrast here is shown in the fact that a warm sensation appears warmer if a cold one has just previously been experienced; and a cold one colder, if the preceding one was warm. If a finger which has been plunged in hot water, and another which has been in cold water, be both immersed in lukewarm water, the same water appears cold to the former finger and warm to the latter. In simultaneous contrast, a sensation of warmth on any part of the skin tends to induce the sensation of cold in its immediate neighborhood; and _vice versâ_. This may be seen if we press with the palm on two metal surfaces of about an inch and a half square and three-fourths inch apart; the skin between them appears distinctly warmer. So also a small object of exactly the temperature of the palm appears warm if a cold object, and cold if a warm object, touch the skin near it.
[18] Helmholtz, Physiolog. Optik, p. 392.
[23] Hering: 'Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne.'--Of these experiments the following (found on p. 24 ff.) may be cited as a typical one: "From dark gray paper cut two strips 3-4 cm. long and 1/2 cm. wide, and lay them on a background of which one half is white and the other half deep black, in such a way that one strip lies on each side of the border-line and parallel to it, and at least 1 cm. distant from it. Fixate 1/2 to 1 minute a point on the border-line between the strips. One strip appears much brighter than the other. Close and cover the eyes, and the negative after-image appears...The difference in brightness of the strips in the after-image is in general much greater than it appeared in direct vision...This difference in brightness of the strips by no means always increases and decreases with the difference in brightness of the two halves of the background...A phase occurs in which the difference in brightness of the two halves of the background entirely disappears, and yet both after-images of the strips are still very clear, one of them brighter and one darker than the background, which is equally bright on both halves. Here can no longer be any question of contrast-effect, because the _conditio sine quâ non_ of contrast, namely, the differing brightness of the ground, is no longer present. This proves that the different brightness of the after-images of the strips must have its ground in a different state of excitation of the corresponding portions of the retina, and from this follows further that both these portions of the retina were differently stimulated during the original observation; for the different after-effect demands here a different fore-effect...In the original arrangement, the objectively similar strips appeared of different brightness, because both corresponding portions of the retina were truly differently excited."
[24] Helmholtz, Physiolog. Optik, p. 407.
[25] In Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. xli. §. 1 ff.
[27] See Hering: Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. xli. S. 358 ff.
[28] Hering: Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. xl. S. 172 ff.; Delabarre: American Journal of Psychology, ii. 636.
[29] Hering: Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. xli. S. 91 ff.
[30] Die Gesichtsempfindungen u. ihre Analyse, p. 128.
[31] Mr. Delabarre's contribution ends here.
[32] Physiol. Psych., i. 351, 458-60. The full inanity of the law of relativity is best to be seen in Wundt's treatment, where the great '_allgemeiner Gesetz der Beziehung_,' invoked to account for Weber's law as well as for the phenomena of contrast and many other matters, can only be defined as a tendency _to feel all things in relation to each other_! Bless its little soul! But why does it change the things so, when it thus feels them in relation?
[33] Ladd: Physiol. Psych., p. 348.
[34] Mind, x. 567.
[35] Zwangemässige Lichtempfindung durch Schall (Leipzig, 1881).
[37] Physiological Psychology, 385, 387. See also such passages as that in Bain; The Senses and the Intellect, pp. 364-6.
[38] "Especially must we avoid all attempts, whether avowed or concealed, to account for the _spatial_ qualities of the presentations of sense by merely describing the qualities of the simple sensations and the modes of their combination. It is position and extension in space which constitutes the very peculiarity of the objects as _no longer_ mere sensations or affections of the mind. As sensations, they are neither _out_ of ourselves nor possessed of the qualities indicated by the word spread-out." (Ladd, _op. cit._ p. 391.)
[39] A. Riehl: Der Philosophischer Kriticismus, Bd. ii. Theil ii. p. 64.
[40] On Intelligence, part ii. bk. ii. chap. ii. §§ vii, viii. Compare such statements as these: "The consequence is that when a sensation has for its usual condition the presence of an object more or less distant from our bodies, and experience has once made us acquainted with this distance, we shall situate our sensation at this distance.--This, in fact, is the case with sensations of hearing and sight. The peripheral extremity of the acoustic nerve is in the deep-seated chamber of the ear. That of the optic nerve is in the most inner recess of the eye. But still, in our present state, we never situate our sensations of sound or color in these places, but without us, and often at a considerable distance from us...All our sensations of color are thus projected out of our body, and clothe more or less distant objects, furniture, walls, houses, trees, the sky, and the rest. This is why, when we afterwards reflect on them, we cease to attribute them to ourselves; they are alienated and detached from us, so far as to appear different from us. Projected from the nervous surface in which we localize the majority of the others, the tie which connected them to the others and to ourselves is undone...Thus, all our sensations are wrongly situated, and the red color is no more extended on the arm-chair than the sensation of tingling is situated at my fingers' ends. They are all situated in the sensory centres of the encephalon; all appear situated elsewhere, and a common law allots to each of them its apparent situation." (vol. ii. pp. 47-53.)--Similarly Schopenhauer: "I will now show the same by the sense of sight. The immediate _datum_ is here limited to the sensation of the retina which, it is true, admits of considerable diversity, but at bottom reverts to the impression of light and dark with their shades, and that of colors. This sensation is through and through subjective, that is, inside of the organism and under the skin." (Schopenhauer: Satz vom Grunde, p. 58.) This philosopher then enumerates _seriatim_ what the Intellect does to make the originally subjective sensation objective: 1) it turns it bottom side up; 2) it reduces its doubleness to singleness; 3) it changes its flatness to solidity; and 4) it projects it to a distance from the eye. Again: "_Sensations_ are what we call the impressions on our senses, in so far as they come to our consciousness as states of our own body, especially of our nervous apparatus; we call them _perceptions_ when we form out of them the representation of outer objects." (Helmholtz: Tonempfindungen, 1870, p. 101.)--Once more: "Sensation is always accomplished in the psychic centres, but it manifests itself at the excited part of the periphery. In other words, one is conscious of the phenomenon in the nervous centres,...but one perceives it in the peripheric organs. This phenomenon depends on the experience of the sensations themselves, in which there is a _reflection_ of the subjective phenomenon and a tendency on the part of perception to return as it were to the external cause which has roused the mental state because the latter is connected with the former." (Sergi: Psychologie Physiologique (Paris, 1888), p. 189.)--The clearest and best passage I know is in Liebmann: Der Objective Anblick (1869), pp. 67-72, but it is unfortunately too long to quote.
[41] This is proved by Weber's device of causing the head to be firmly pressed against a support by another person, whereupon the direction of traction ceases to be perceived.
[42] Lotze: Med. Psych., 428-433; Lipps: Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, 582.
[43] Injuries to Nerves (Philadelphia, 1872), p. 350 ff.
[44] In reality it probably means only a restless movement of desire, which he might make even after he had become aware of his impotence to touch the object.
[45] Revue Philosophique, vii. p. 1 ff., an admirable critical article, in the course of which M. Janet gives a bibliography of the cases in question. See also Dunan: _ibid._ xxv. 165-7. They are also discussed and similarly interpreted by T. K. Abbot: Sight and Touch (1864), chapter x.
[46] The intermediary and shortened locations of the lost hand and foot in the amputation cases also show this. It is easy to see why the phantom foot might continue to follow the position of the artificial one. But I confess that I cannot explain its half way-positions.
[47] It is from this confused assumption that the time-honored riddle comes, of how, with an upside-down picture on the retina, we can see things right-side up. Our consciousness is _naïvely_ supposed to inhabit the picture and to feel the picture's position as related to other objects of space. But the truth is that the picture is non-existent either as a habitat or as anything else, for immediate consciousness. Our notion of it is an enormously late conception. The outer object is given immediately with all those qualities which later are named and determined in relation to other sensations. The 'bottom' of this object is where we see what by touch we afterwards know as our _feet_, the 'top' is the place in which we see what we know as other people's heads, etc., etc. Berkeley long ago made this matter perfectly clear (see his Essay towards a new Theory of Vision, §§ 93-98, 113-118).
[48] For full justification the reader must see the next chapter. He may object, against the summary account given now, that in a babe's immediate field of vision the various things which appear are located _relatively to each other_ from the outset. I admit that _if discriminated_, they would appear so located. But they are parts of the content of one sensation, not sensations separately experienced, such as the text is concerned with. The fully developed 'world,' in which all our sensations ultimately find location, is nothing but an imaginary object framed after the pattern of the field of vision, by the addition and continuation of one sensation upon another in an orderly and systematic way. In corroboration of my text I must refer to pp. 57-60 of Riehl's book quoted above on page 32, and to Uphues: Wahrnehmung und Empfindung (1888), especially the _Einleitung_ and pp. 51-61.
CHAPTER XVIII.
IMAGINATION.
_Sensations, once experienced, modify the nervous organism, so that copies of them arise again in the mind after the original outward stimulus is gone._ No mental copy, however, can arise in the mind, of any kind of sensation which has never been directly excited from without.
The blind may dream of sights, the deaf of sounds, for years after they have lost their vision or hearing;[49] but the man _born_ deaf can never be made to imagine what sound is like, nor can the man _born_ blind ever have a mental vision. In Locke's words, already quoted, "the mind can frame unto itself no one new simple idea." The originals of them all must have been given from without. Fantasy, or Imagination, are the names given to the faculty of reproducing copies of originals once felt. The imagination is called 'reproductive' when the copies are literal; 'productive' when elements from different originals are recombined so as to make new wholes.
_After-images_ belong to sensation rather than to imagination; so that the most immediate phenomena of imagination would seem to be those tardier images (due to what the Germans call _Sinnesgedächtniss_) which were spoken of in Vol. I, p. 617,--coercive hauntings of the mind by echoes of unusual experiences for hours after the latter have taken place. The phenomena ordinarily ascribed to imagination, however, are those mental pictures of possible sensible experiences, to which the ordinary processes of associative thought give rise.
When represented with surroundings concrete enough to constitute a _date_, these pictures, when they revive, form _recollections_. We have already studied the machinery of recollection in Chapter XVI. When the mental pictures are of data freely combined, and reproducing no past combination exactly, we have acts of imagination properly so called.
OUR IMAGES ARE USUALLY VAGUE.
For the ordinary 'analytic' psychology, each sensibly discernible element of the object imagined is represented by its own separate idea, and the total object is imagined by a 'cluster' or 'gang' of ideas. We have seen abundant reason to reject this view (see Vol. I, p. 276 ff.). An imagined object, however complex, is at any one moment thought in one idea, which is aware of all its qualities together. If I slip into the ordinary way of talking, and speak of various ideas 'combining,' the reader will understand that this is only for popularity and convenience, and he will not construe it into a concession to the atomistic theory in psychology.
Hume was the hero of the atomistic theory. Not only were ideas copies of original impressions made on the sense-organs, but they were, according to him, completely adequate copies, and were all so separate from each other as to possess no manner of connection. Hume proves ideas in the imagination to be completely adequate copies, not by appeal to observation, but by _a priori_ reasoning, as follows: "The mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality, without forming a precise notion of the degrees of each," for "'tis confessed that no object can appear to the senses; or in other words, that no impression[50] can become present to the mind, without being determined in its degrees both of quantity and quality. The confusion in which impressions are sometimes involved proceeds only from their faintness and unsteadiness, not from any capacity in the mind to receive any impression, which in its real existence has no particular degree nor proportion. That is a contradiction in terms; and even implies the flattest of all contradictions, _viz._, that 'tis possible for the same thing both to be and not to be. Now since all ideas are derived from impressions, and are nothing but copies and representations of them, whatever is true of the one must be acknowledged concerning the other. Impressions and ideas differ only in their strength and vivacity. The foregoing conclusion is not founded on any particular degree of vivacity. It cannot therefore be affected by any variation in that particular. An idea is a weaker impression; and as a strong impression must necessarily have a determinate quantity and quality, the case must be the same with its copy or representative."[51] The slightest introspective glance will show to anyone the falsity of this opinion. Hume surely had images of his own works without seeing distinctly every word and letter upon the pages which floated before his mind's eye. His dictum is therefore an exquisite example of the way in which a man will be blinded by _a priori_ theories to the most flagrant facts. It is a rather remarkable thing, too, that the psychologists of Hume's own empiricist school have, as a rule, been more guilty of this blindness than their opponents. The fundamental _facts_ of consciousness have been, on the whole, more accurately reported by the spiritualistic writers. None of Hume's pupils, so far as I know, until Taine and Huxley, ever took the pains to contradict the opinion of their master. Prof. Huxley in his brilliant little work on Hume set the matter straight in the following words: "When complex impressions or complex ideas are reproduced as memories, it is probable that the copies never give all the details of the originals with perfect accuracy, and it is certain that they rarely do so. No one possesses a memory so good, that if he has only once observed a natural object, a second inspection does not show him something that he has forgotten. Almost all, if not all, our memories are therefore sketches, rather than portraits, of the originals--the salient features are obvious, while the subordinate characters are obscure or unrepresented.
"Now, when several complex impressions which are more or less different from one another--let us say that out of ten impressions in each, six are the same in all, and four are different from all the rest--are successively presented to the mind, it is easy to see what must be the nature of the result. The repetition of the six similar impressions will strengthen the six corresponding elements of the complex idea, which will therefore acquire greater vividness; while the four differing impressions of each will not only acquire no greater strength than they had at first, but, in accordance with the law of association, they will all tend to appear at once, and will thus neutralize one another.
"This mental operation may be rendered comprehensible by considering what takes place in the formation of compound photographs--when the images of the faces of six sitters, for example, are each received on the same photographic plate, for a sixth of the time requisite to take one portrait. The final result is that all those points in which the six faces agree are brought out strongly, while all those in which they differ are left vague; and thus what may be termed a _generic_ portrait of the six, in contradistinction to a _specific_ portrait of any one, is produced.
"Thus our ideas of single complex impressions are incomplete in one way, and those of numerous, more or less similar, complex impressions are incomplete in another way; that is to say, they are _generic_, not _specific_. And hence it follows that our ideas of the impressions in question are not, in the strict sense of the word, copies of those impressions; while, at the same time, they may exist in the mind independently of language.
"The generic ideas which are formed from several similar, but not identical, complex experiences are what are called _abstract_ or _general_ ideas; and Berkeley endeavored to prove that all general ideas are nothing but particular ideas annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall, upon occasion, other individuals which are similar to them. Hume says that he regards this as 'one of the greatest and the most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters,' and endeavors to confirm it in such a manner that it shall be 'put beyond all doubt and controversy.'
"I may venture to express a doubt whether he has succeeded in his object; but the subject is an abstruse one; and I must content myself with the remark, that though Berkeley's view appears to be largely applicable to such general ideas as are formed after language has been acquired, and to all the more abstract sort of conceptions, yet that general ideas of sensible objects may nevertheless be produced in the way indicated, and may exist independently of language. In dreams, one sees houses, trees, and other objects, which are perfectly recognizable as such, but which remind one of the actual objects as seen 'out of the corner of the eye,' or of the pictures thrown by a badly-focussed magic lantern. A man addresses us who is like a figure seen in twilight; or we travel through countries where every feature of the scenery is vague; the outlines of the hills are ill-marked, and the rivers have no defined banks. They are, in short, generic ideas of many past impressions of men, hills, and rivers. An anatomist who occupies himself intently with the examination of several specimens of some new kind of animal, in course of time acquires so vivid a conception of its form and structure that the idea may take visible shape and become a sort of waking dream. But the figure which thus presents itself is generic, not specific. It is no copy of any one specimen, but, more or less, a mean of the series; and there seems no reason to doubt that the minds of children before they learn to speak, and of deaf-mutes, are peopled with similarly generated generic ideas of sensible objects."[52] _Are Vague Images 'Abstract Ideas'?_ The only point which I am tempted to criticise in this account is Prof. Huxley's _identification of these generic images with 'abstract or general ideas' in the sense of universal conceptions._ Taine gives the truer view. He writes: "Some years ago I saw in England, in Kew Gardens, for the first time, araucarias, and I walked along the beds looking at these strange plants, with their rigid bark and compact, short, scaly leaves, of a sombre green, whose abrupt, rough, bristling form cut in upon the fine softly-lighted turf of the fresh grass-plat. If I now inquire what this experience has left in me, I find, first, the sensible representation of an araucaria; in fact, I have been able to describe almost exactly the form and color of the plant. But there is a difference between this representation and the former sensations, of which it is the present echo. The internal semblance, from which I have just made my description, is vague, and my past sensations were precise. For, assuredly, each of the araucarias I saw then excited in me a distinct visual sensation; there are no two absolutely similar plants in nature; I observed perhaps twenty or thirty araucarias; without a doubt each one of them differed from the others in size, in girth, by the more or less obtuse angles of its branches, by the more or less abrupt jutting out of its scales, by the style of its texture; consequently, my twenty or thirty visual sensations were different. But no one of these sensations has completely survived in its echo; the twenty or thirty revivals have blunted one another; thus upset and agglutinated by their resemblance they are confounded together, and