The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)

The Perception of Reality

Belief and its opposites. The various orders of reality. 'Practical' realities. The sense of our own bodily existence is the nucleus of all reality. The paramount reality of sensations. The influence of emotion and active impulse on belief. Belief in theories. Doubt. Relations of belief and will.

Reasoning

'Recepts'. In reasoning, we pick out essential qualities. What is meant by a mode of conceiving. What is involved in the existence of general propositions. The two factors of reasoning. Sagacity. The part played by association by similarity. The intellectual contrast between brute and man: association by similarity the fundamental human distinction. Different orders of human genius.

Instinct

Its definition. Instincts not always blind or invariable. Two principles of non-uniformity in instincts: 1) Their inhibition by habits; 2) Their transitoriness. Man has more instincts than any other mammal. Reflex impulses. Imitation. Emulation. Pugnacity. Sympathy. The hunting instinct. Fear. Acquisitiveness. Constructiveness. Play. Curiosity. Sociability and shyness. Secretiveness. Cleanliness. Shame. Love. Maternal love.

The Emotions

Instinctive reaction and emotional expression shade imperceptibly into each other. The expression of grief; of fear; of hatred. Emotion is a consequence, not the cause, of the bodily expression. Difficulty of testing this view. Objections to it discussed. The subtler emotions, 468. No special brain-centres for emotion. Emotional differences between individuals. The genesis of the various emotions.

Will

Voluntary movements: they presuppose a memory of involuntary movements. Kinæsthetic impressions, 488. No need to assume feelings of innervation. The 'mental cue' for a movement may be an image of its visual or auditory effects as well as an image of the way it feels. Ideo-motor action. Action after deliberation. Five types of decision. The feeling of effort. Unhealthiness of will: 1) The explosive type; 2) The obstructed type. Pleasure and pain are not the only springs of action. All consciousness is impulsive. What we will depends on what idea dominates in our mind. The idea's outward effects follow from the cerebral machinery. Effort of attention to a naturally repugnant idea is the essential feature of willing. The free-will controversy. Psychology, as a science, can safely postulate determinism, even if free-will be true. The education of the Will. Hypothetical brain-schemes.

Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience

Programme of the chapter. Elementary feelings are innate. The question refers to their combinations. What is meant by 'experience'. Spencer on ancestral experience. Two ways in which new cerebral structure arises: the 'back-door' and the 'front-door' way. The genesis of the elementary mental categories. The genesis of the natural sciences. Scientific conceptions arise as accidental variations. The genesis of the pure sciences. Series of evenly increasing terms. The principle of mediate comparison. That of skipped intermediaries. Classification. Predication. Formal logic. Mathematical propositions. Arithmetic. Geometry. Our doctrine is the same as Locke's. Relations of ideas v. couplings of things The natural sciences are inward ideal schemes with which the order of nature proves congruent. Metaphysical principles are properly only postulates. Æsthetic and moral principles are quite incongruent with the order of nature. Summary of what precedes. The origin of instincts. Insufficiency of proof for the transmission to the next generation of acquired habits. Weismann's views. Conclusion.

INDEX.

PSYCHOLOGY.

After inner perception, outer perception! The next three chapters will treat of the processes by which we cognize at all times the present world of space and the material things which it contains. And first, of the process called Sensation.

SENSATION AND PERCEPTION DISTINGUISHED.

The words Sensation and Perception do not carry very definitely discriminated meanings in popular speech, and in Psychology also their meanings run into each other. Both of them name processes in which we cognize an objective world; both (under normal conditions) need the stimulation of incoming nerves ere they can occur; Perception always involves Sensation as a portion of itself; and Sensation in turn never takes place in adult life without Perception also being there. They are therefore names for different cognitive functions, not for different sorts of mental fact. The nearer the object cognized comes to being a simple quality like 'hot,' 'cold,' 'red,' 'noise,' 'pain,' apprehended irrelatively to other things, the more the state of mind approaches pure sensation. The fuller of relations the object is, on the contrary; the more it is something classed, located, measured, compared, assigned to a function, etc., etc.; the more unreservedly do we call the state of mind a perception, and the relatively smaller is the part in it which sensation plays.

_Sensation, then, so long as we take the analytic point of view, differs from Perception only in the extreme simplicity of its object or content._[1] Its function is that of mere acquaintance with a fact. Perception's function, on the other hand, is knowledge _about_[2] a fact; and this knowledge admits of numberless degrees of complication. But in both sensation and perception we perceive the fact as an immediately present outward reality, and this makes them differ from 'thought' and 'conception,' whose objects do not appear present in this immediate physical way. From the physiological point of view both sensations and perceptions differ from 'thoughts' (in the narrower sense of the word) in the fact that nerve-currents coming in from the periphery are involved in their production. In perception these nerve-currents arouse voluminous associative or reproductive processes in the cortex; but when sensation occurs alone, or with a minimum of perception, the accompanying reproductive processes are at a minimum too.

I shall in this chapter discuss some general questions more especially relative to Sensation. In a later chapter perception will take its turn. I shall entirely pass by the classification and natural history of our special 'sensations,' such matters finding their proper place, and being sufficiently well treated, in all the physiological books.[3]

THE COGNITIVE FUNCTION OF SENSATION.

A pure sensation is an abstraction; and when we adults talk of our 'sensations' we mean one of two things: either certain objects, namely simple qualities or attributes like hard, hot, pain; or else those of our thoughts in which acquaintance with these objects is least combined with knowledge about the relations of them to other things. As we can only think or talk about the relations of objects with which we have acquaintance already, we are forced to postulate a function in our thought whereby we first become aware of the bare immediate natures by which our several objects are distinguished. This function is sensation. And just as logicians always point out the distinction between substantive terms of discourse and relations found to obtain between them, so psychologists, as a rule, are ready to admit this function, of the vision of the terms or matters meant, as something distinct from the knowledge about them and of their relations inter se. Thought with the former function is sensational, with the latter, intellectual. Our earliest thoughts are almost exclusively sensational. They merely give us a set of thats, or its, of subjects of discourse, with their relations not brought out. The first time we see light, in Condillac's phrase we are it rather rather than see it. But all our later optical knowledge is about what this experience gives. And though we were struck blind from that first moment, our scholarship in the subject would lack no essential feature so long as our memory remained. In training-institutions for the blind they teach the pupils as much about light as in ordinary schools. Reflection, refraction, the spectrum, the ether-theory, etc., are all studied. But the best taught born-blind pupil of such an establishment yet lacks a knowledge which the least instructed seeing baby has. They can never show him what light is in its 'first intention'; and the loss of that sensible knowledge no book-learning can replace. All this is so obvious that we usually find sensation 'postulated' as an element of experience, even by those philosophers who are least inclined to make much of its importance, or to pay respect to the knowledge which it brings.[4]

But the trouble is that most, if not all, of those who admit it, admit it as a fractional part of the thought, in the old-fashioned atomistic sense which we have so often criticised.

Take the pain called toothache for example. Again and again we feel it and greet it as the same real item in the universe. We must therefore, it is supposed, have a distinct pocket for it in our mind into which it and nothing else will fit. This pocket, when filled, is the sensation of toothache; and must be either filled or half-filled whenever and under whatever form toothache is present to our thought, and whether much or little of the rest of the mind be filled at the same time. Thereupon of course comes up the paradox and mystery: If the knowledge of toothache be pent up in this separate mental pocket, how can it be known cum alio or brought into one view with anything else? This pocket knows nothing else; no other part of the mind knows toothache. The knowing of toothache cum alio must be a miracle. And the miracle must have an Agent. And the Agent must be a Subject or Ego 'out of time,'--and all the rest of it, as we saw in Chapter X. And then begins the well-worn round of recrimination between the sensationalists and the spiritualists, from which we are saved by our determination from the outset to accept the psychological point of view, and to admit knowledge whether of simple toothaches or of philosophic systems as an ultimate fact. There are realities and there are 'states of mind,' and the latter know the former; and it is just as wonderful for a state of mind to be a 'sensation' and know a simple pain as for it to be a thought and know a system of related things.[5] But there is no reason to suppose that when different states of mind know different things about the same toothache, they do so by virtue of their all containing faintly or vividly the original pain. Quite the reverse. The by-gone sensation of my gout was painful, as Reid somewhere says; the thought of the same gout as by-gone is pleasant, and in no respect resembles the earlier mental state.