Chapter 4

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

II

THE AIM OF PSYCHOLOGY

The only safe basis of psychotherapy is a thorough psychological knowledge of the human personality. Yet such a claim has no value until it is entirely clear what is meant by psychological knowledge. We can know man in many ways. Not every study of man's inner life is psychology and the careless mixing of different ways of dealing with man's inner life is largely responsible for the vagueness which characterizes the popular literature of psychotherapy. It is not enough to say that a statement is true or not true. It may be true under one aspect and entirely meaningless under another. For instance, a minister's discussion of man's energies may be full of deep truth and may be inspiring; and yet it may not contain the slightest contribution to a really psychological knowledge of those energies, and would mislead entirely the physician were he to base his treatment of human energies on such a religious interpretation.

Can we not look from different standpoints even on any part of the outer world? I see before me the ocean with its excited waves splashing against the rocks and shore, I see the boats tossed on the stormy sea and I am fascinated by the new and ever new impulses of the tumultuous waves. The whole appears to me like one gigantic energy, like one great emotional expression, and I feel deeply how I understand this beautiful scenery in appreciating its unity and its meaning. Yet would I ever think that it is the only way to understand this turmoil of the waters before me? I know there is no unity and no emotion in the excited sea; each wave is composed of hundreds of thousands of single drops of water, and each drop composed of billions of atoms, and every movement results from mechanical laws under the influence of the pressing water and air. There is hydrogen and there is oxygen, and there is chloride of sodium, and the dark blue color is nothing but the reflection of billions of ether vibrations. But have I really to choose between two statements concerning the waves, one of which is valuable and the other not? On the contrary, both have fundamental value. If I take the attitude of appreciation, it would be absurd to say that this wave is composed of chemical elements which I do not see; and if I take the attitude of physical explanation, it would be equally absurd to deny that such elements are all of which the wave is made. From the one standpoint, the ocean is really excited; from the other standpoint, the molecules are moving according to the laws of hydrodynamics. If I want to understand the meaning of this scene every reminiscence of physics will lead me astray; if I want to calculate the movement of my boat, physics alone can help me.

As long as we deal with outer nature, there is hardly a fear of confusing the various attitudes; but it becomes by far more complex when we deal with man and his inner life. We might abstract entirely from æsthetic appreciation or from moral valuation, we might take man just as an object of knowledge; and yet what we know about him may be entirely different in accordance with our special attitude. Each kind of knowledge may be entirely true, and yet true only from the particular standpoint. Let us consider two extremes. If I meet a friend and we enter into a talk, I try to understand his thoughts and to share his views. I agree or disagree with him; I sympathize with his feelings, I estimate his purposes. In short, he is for me a center of aims and intentions which I interpret: he comes in question for me as a self which has its meaning and has its unity. The more I am interested in his opinions, the more I feel in every utterance, in every gesture, the expression of his will and his purposes; their whole reality for me lies in the fact that they point to something which the speaker intends; his personality lies in his attitude towards the surroundings, towards the world. Yet I may take an entirely different relation to the same man. I may ask myself what processes are going on in his mind, what are the real contents of his consciousness, that is, what perceptions and memory pictures and imaginative ideas and feelings and emotions and judgments and volitions are really present in his consciousness. I watch him to find out, I observe his mental states, I do not ask whether I agree or disagree; his will is for me now not something which has a meaning, but simply something which occurs in his inner experience; his ideas now have for me no reference to something in the world, but they are simply contents of his consciousness; his memories now are for me not symbols of a past to which he refers, but they are present pictures in his mind; in short, what I now find is not a self which shows itself in its aims and purposes and attitudes, but a complex content of consciousness which is composed of numberless elements. I might say in the first place that my friend was to me a subject whom I tried to understand by interpreting his meaning, and in the second case, an object which I understand by describing its structure, its elements, and their connections.

Both ways of looking on man are constantly needed. We might alternate between them in any experience. In the heat of argument, my friend will certainly be for me the subject with whose meanings I try to agree or disagree, whose emotions carry me away, whose ideas open the world to me. Yet in the next moment, I may notice that his ideas were shaped and determined by certain earlier experiences; that they linked themselves in memory according to certain laws of mental flow; that the vividness of his ideas made him overlook certain impressions of the surroundings; and that may turn my attention to an entirely different aspect of his inner life. His feelings and emotions, his volitions and judgments now have for me simply the character of processes which go on and which are observed, which coincide and which succeed each other, which fuse and overlap, and which are composed of smaller parts. My interest is now no longer in the meaning and intentions of this self, but it belongs to the structure and the connections in this system of mental facts. At first, I wanted to understand him by living with him, by participating in his attitudes, and by feeling with his will; now I want to understand him by examining all the processes which go on in his consciousness, by studying their make-up and their behavior, their elements and their laws. In one case I wanted to interpret the man, and finally to appreciate him; in the other case I wanted to describe his inner life, and finally to explain it. The man whose inner life I want to share I treat as a subject, the man whose inner life I want to describe and explain I treat as an object.

I might express these two standpoints still otherwise. If my neighbor is to me a subject, for instance, in the midst of an ordinary conversation, he comes in question only with reference to his aims and meanings: whatever he utters has a purpose and end. I understand his inner life by taking a purposive point of view. On the other hand, the man whose inner life is to me an object can satisfy my interest only if I understand every particular happening in his mind from its preceding causes. I transform his whole life into a chain of causes and effects. My standpoint is thus a causal one. No doubt in our daily life, our purposive interest and our causal interest may intertwine at any moment. I may sympathize with the hopes and fears of my neighbor in a purposive way, and may yet in the next moment consider from a causal standpoint how these emotions of his are perhaps affected by his fatigue or by some glasses of wine, or by a hereditary disposition, or by a suggestion; in short, at one time I look out for the meaning of the emotion as a part of the expression of a self, and at another time for the structure and appearance of the emotion as a part of a causal chain of events. In both directions I can go on with entire consistency, and there cannot be any part of inner experience which cannot be fully brought under either point of view. How far we have a right to mix the two standpoints in practical life, we shall carefully examine; but it is clear that if we want to understand the true meaning of the study of inner life, we have no longer any right carelessly to mix the two standpoints without being conscious of their fundamental difference. We must understand exactly what the aim of the one and of the other is, and where each has its particular value; science certainly has no right to throw together such different views of life. And now this may be said at once: the causal view only is the view of psychology; the purposive view lies outside of psychology.

Such a separation does not at all aim to indicate that the one view is more important than the other, or that the one has more scientific dignity than the other; both yield us truth, and both may be carried from the simplest and most trivial observations of daily life to the highest elaborations of scholarship. To those who are inclined to give all value and all credit only to the strictly psychological view, it may be replied at once that surely our most immediate life experience is carried on by the non-psychological attitude. If we love our family and like our friends, and deal with the man of the street, we are certainly moving in a world of purposive reality. We try to understand each other, to agree and to disagree, to be in sympathy and antipathy, without asking how those volitions and feelings and ideas of other people are built as mental structures, and from what causes they arose; we are satisfied to understand what they mean. In the same way with ourselves. We live our lives by hinging them on our aims and purposes and ideas, and do not ask ourselves what are the causes of our attitudes and of our thoughts.

This purposive view has in no respect to disappear if we move on from our personal intercourse to a scholarly study of reality. The historian, for instance, who tries to understand the will relations of humanity, is the more the true historian the more he sticks to this purposive view of man. The truth which he seeks is to interpret the personalities, to understand them through their attitudes, to make their will living once more, and to link it by agreement and disagreement, by love and hate, with the will of friends and enemies, groups and parties, nations and mankind. It is only a loose popular way of speaking, if this purposive analysis of a character is often called psychological. In a stricter sense of the word, it is not psychological. If the historian really were to take the psychological attitude, he would make of history simply a social psychology, seeking the laws of the social mind, and treating the individual, the hero, and the leader, merely as the crossing-point of psychological law. For such a psychological view the mental life of the hero would not be more important or more interesting than the mental life of a scoundrel, and the psychology of the king would not draw his interest more than the psychology of the beggar. The historian has to shape all that from an entirely different standpoint: his scientific interest depends upon the importance of men's attitudes and actions, and such importance refers to the world of purposes.

In the same way, we have to stick to the non-psychological point of view whenever man's life, his thoughts and feelings and volitions, are to be measured with reference to ideals; that is in ethics and æsthetics and logic, sciences which ask whether the volitions are good or bad, whether the feelings are valuable or worthless, whether the thoughts are true or false. The psychologist does not care; just as the botanist is interested in the weed as much as in the flower, the psychologist is interested in the causal connections of the most heinous crime not less than in those of the noblest deed, in the structure of the most absurd error not less than in that of the maturest wisdom. Truth, beauty, and morality are thus expressions of the self in its purposive aspect.

We can go one step further. Those who narrowly seek every truth only in the scientific understanding, ought to be reminded that this seeking for causal connections is itself, after all, only a life experience which as such is not of causal but of purposive character. "Life is bigger than thought." In the immediate reality of our purposive life we aim towards mastering the world by a causal understanding, and for this end we create science; but this aim itself is then a purpose and not an object. The first act is thus for us, the thinkers, not a part of the causal events, but a purposive intention towards an ideal. Therefore, our purposes have the first right; they represent the fundamental reality; the value of causal connections and thus of all scientific and psychological explanation, depends on the value of the purpose. Causal truth can be only the second word; the first word remains to purposive truth. From this point of view we may understand why there is no conflict between the most consistent causal explanation of mental life on the one side, and an idealistic view of life on the other side; yes, we can see that the fullest emphasis on a scientific psychology--which is necessarily realistic and, to a certain degree, materialistic--is fully embedded in an idealistic philosophy of life, and that without conflict. And we shall see how this consistency in sharply separating the psychological view from the non-psychological, secures much greater safety for true idealism than the inconsistent popular mixing of the two principles, where scientific psychology is constantly encroached upon by demands of faith and religion, and where faith and religion seem constantly in danger of being overturned by new discoveries in physiological psychology. We may, indeed, remove from the start the mistaken fear that a consistent causal aspect of life leads to injustice to the higher aims and ideal purposes of mankind. If we want to have psychology,--and that means if we want to consider the mental life in a system of causes and effects,--we must proceed without prejudices, and without side-thoughts.

From a psychological standpoint our own mental life and that of our neighbor, that of the man and that of the child, that of the normal and that of the insane, that of the human being and that of the animal, are to be considered as a series of mental objects. They are to be analyzed, and to be described, and to be classified and to be explained, just as we deal with the physical objects in the outer world. How are these objects of the psychologist different from the objects of the physicist, from the pebbles on the way and the stars in the sky? There is only one fundamental difference and all other differences result from it. Those outer objects which we call physical, are objects for everybody. The star which I see is conceived as the same star which you see, the table which I touch is the table which you may grasp, too. But every psychical object is an object for one particular person only. My visual impression of the star, that is, my optical perception, is a content of my own consciousness only, and your impression of the star can be a content of your consciousness only. We both may mean the same by our ideas, but I can never have your perception and you can never have my perception. My ideas are enclosed in my mind. I may awaken in your mind ideas which have the same purpose and meaning, but they are new copies in your mind. We both may be angry, but your anger can never be my anger, and your volitions can never enter my mind. Every possible psychical fact thus exists in one consciousness only, while every physical fact exists for every possible consciousness.

The psychologist's final task is to explain the appearance and disappearance, the connections and sequences of these mental objects, the contents of consciousness. But before he can start on explanation of the facts, he has to describe them, and describing means analyzing them into their elements and fixating those elements and their combinations for an exact report. Such descriptive work is in a way preparatory for the further task of real explanation; yet it is in itself important, complicated, and difficult. Of course, it may be easy to separate the complex content into some big groups of facts, to point out that this is a memory idea and this an imaginative idea and the other an abstract idea, and this a perception and that a feeling, this an emotion and that a volition. But such clumsy first discrimination does not go further, perhaps, than does the naturalist's, who tells us that this is a mountain and that a tree, this a pond and that a bird. The real description would demand, of course, an exact measurement of the height of the mountain and the geological analysis of its structure, or an exact classification of the tree and the bird, with a complete description of their organs, and in each organ the various tissues have to be described, and in each tissue the various cells, and the microscopist goes further and describes the structure of the cell. Certainly in the same way the psychologist has to go on to resolve every one of those complex structures; he has to examine the mental tissues and the mental cells of which a volition or a memory idea or a perception are composed. And while he cannot use a microscope for these mental elements, yet his studies may cause elements to appear which the naïve observation remains entirely unaware of.

Perhaps he finds in his consciousness the perception of the table before him which lingers for a little while in his mind. He finds no difficulty in analyzing it into color sensations and tactual sensations; and yet he is aware of so much more in it. The table, for instance, has form for him and he may find that these form perceptions involve the sensations of the eye movements which he makes from one corner of the table to the other; he may find that if the idea lasts in him, he becomes aware of the time by sensations of tension; he finds that in his perception of the table lies an idea of its use, and he discovers that that is made up of elements which are partly memory reproductions of earlier impressions, partly sensations of movement impulses; he also finds that the table feels smooth, and he discovers by his analysis that this impression of smoothness results from a special combination of tactual sensations and movement sensations; and again those movement sensations he analyzes further into sensations of muscle contraction and sensations of pressure in the joints and sensations of tension in the tendons. Before a zoölogist has completed his description of a bird in the landscape, he has given account of hundreds of thousands of things; but before the psychologist would complete the enumeration of the mental elements which enter into the seeing of the table, he would have to give account of by far more psychical elements. Every point in the surface of the table has its own light value, perhaps different in its quality and intensity and saturation, in its hue and tint and shade from the next one, and at whatever point of the table's edge our attention is directed, each one involves numberless shades in the vividness of all the other points and numberless mental relations of space perception among the various parts of the table. In the thorough analysis of the describing psychologist, every single idea, and in the same way, every single emotion or feeling or judgment becomes complex like a living organism, an aggregate of thousands of mental tissues, and yet made up from "the stuff that dreams are made of."

But there is one particular difficulty which makes the psychological description so much harder than that of the physicist, and which gives rise to many disagreements and discussions in psychological literature. The psychologist has not only to tear the complex into pieces and thus to seek the elements, but he has to fixate those elements for the purpose of communication, as, of course, a scientific description demands that he be able to give account to others of what he experiences. The physicist has no difficulty whatever in that line because, as we saw, the world of physical things is the world which all men are sharing together. Every element which I find in it, I can show to every other person, and if I cannot show that particular thing, because I cannot yet carry the mountain to another place, then I can at least measure it, as we share those standards of space. Thus natural science has in its objective measurements the possibility of describing every part of the physical world. The psychical world, on the other hand, is as we saw, the world which is private property. Every effort at description is thus entirely in vain as long as our mental facts cannot somehow be linked with physical happenings. If I say that I have in my mind sweetness or sourness, or bitterness or saltness, I cannot carry any understanding to anyone else and therefore cannot give any description until I have agreed that I mean by sweetness the sensation which sugar gives me, and by saltness the sensation of salt. The sugar and salt I can point out to my neighbor and only in that way I understand what he means if he says that he tastes salt and sweet; otherwise I should have no means whatever to discriminate whether that which he calls a sweet taste sensation is not just what I call headache. Where no such direct relation for a physical thing is known, description of the mental element would remain impossible. Of course, every perception of the outer world, all our seeing and hearing, and touching and tasting, offers us at once such definite connection between the inner experience and a piece of the physical universe. Our own organism is also such a piece of physical nature: just as I describe my tasting or touching, I may describe the perception of my arms and legs or my inner organs. Thus everything which is material of perception gives us a handle for a real psychological description. Psychology usually calls the elements of these perceptions sensations. Whatever is composed of sensations is thus describable.

On the other hand, no other way of description is open. If there were mental states which are composed of other elements than sensations, they would necessarily remain indescribable; we could not grasp them because they would not have any definite relation to the common physical world. We might say, for instance, that our mental content is made up of sensations and feelings, but if such feelings were really entirely different from sensations, they would have to remain for all time mysterious and unknown. We could not compare notes. The feeling which I call joy may feel just like the one which you call despair. The consistent development of modern psychology and its emancipation from vagueness and superficial analysis became possible only through the fact that such recourse to indescribable elements has become unnecessary. Modern psychology has been able to demonstrate more and more that the same elements which constitute our perceptions are also the elements of the other contents of consciousness. In other words modern psychology has recognized that the volitions and emotions and feelings and judgments, and the whole stream of inner life, are made up of sensations. Millions of sensations in all degrees of vividness and clearness, of intensity and fusion, in endless manifoldness of rhythms and relations constitute their whole content. It is a discovery quite similar to the one which chemistry made when it found that the same elements which are part of the inorganic substances are also the only possible elements of the organic world.

From a strictly psychological standpoint, the ideas and the not-ideas contain thus nothing but sensations. Their grouping, their shading, their combination, their succession decide whether we have before us a perception or an imagination, a volition or an emotion. What are we ourselves then for the psychologist? Evidently we ourselves belong also to the inner experiences which we know; and psychology has succeeded in analyzing this idea of our own self just in the same way as it analyzes our idea of the moon. In this analysis, psychology finds its idea of the self as a content of consciousness crystallized about the sensations from the body. Every one of our bodily activities is represented in our consciousness by movement sensations, and these sensations form the core of the complex aggregate which develops into the idea of ourselves. Organic sensations from our inner organs, pain sensations and pleasure sensations fuse with the movement sensations, and the whole complex shapes itself slowly into the idea of the personality of the self in contrast to the idea of other personalities. We ourselves are for ourselves a complex combination of sensations; and yet all our feelings and emotions and volitions are only a part of it. Psychology thus necessarily considers those experiences of feeling and will and character simply as changes in the midst of that central experience of personality which is itself made up of bodily sensations. Each bit of will and emotion must be decomposed into its finest elements. There is no passing mood, and no floating half-thought in our mind, no dream and no intuition, no slightest change of attention, no instinct and desire which cannot be analyzed thus into its sensation elements or rather which must not be analyzed, if we are to describe it at all, and that means if we are to give a psychological account. Psychology is endlessly far from this ideal to-day. It has been claimed, not without justice, that psychology has reached to-day only the level which physics attained in the seventeenth century; but psychology must insist that its ideal lies in this direction. No one takes a real psychological view of the human mind who does not understand this endless complexity of the material, and who does not see that even the simplest mental state practically presents a most complex problem to scientific analysis. The physician who really aims towards scientifically exact influence on the human mind has reached the first step of his preparation as soon as he understands that the content of consciousness is composed of hundreds of thousands of elements. To treat the mind as if there were only a few large pieces, one thing called memory and one thing called will and one called emotion and so on, is as if a surgeon were to perform an operation, knowing that there are arms and legs, but not knowing the ramifications of the nerves and blood-vessels which his knife may injure. Yet the description of these complex facts is only the beginning of psychology. We saw that the real aim is their explanation.

III

MIND AND BRAIN

The central aim of the psychologist must be to explain the mental facts. It is not sufficient to describe the procession of mental experiences in us, we must understand the causes which determine that now this and now that appears and disappears, and appears just in this combination of elements. The astronomer is not satisfied with describing the stars, he wants to explain their movements and to determine which movements are to be expected. The psychologist, like the naturalist, aims towards explanation, and it is this demand which forces him to look from the psychical facts to the physical ones, from the mind to the brain. He is under an illusion if he fancies that he can explain mental facts by themselves. The purposive mind has its connection in itself, the causal psychological mind demands for its connection the body. To understand this necessity is the first step towards understanding the relation of mind and brain.

The psychologist's problem of explanation is in one way entirely different from that of the physicist. The physicist finds a world of an unlimited number of atoms which are ultimately conceived as all alike, but each one in a different place, and all the changes in the universe, the movements of the stars, the waves of the ocean, are to be explained by the causal connections of the movements of these atoms. The psychologist, on the other hand, finds an endless manifoldness of elements which are not in space, and which have no space form whatever. My will is neither triangular nor oval; my emotion is neither shorter than five feet nor longer; my memory image of a melody has no thickness and no tallness; my contents of consciousness are as such not in space; their elements cannot pass through any space movements like the atoms of the physicist. Instead of it, the psychical atoms, the sensations, have different qualities, are blue and green, and cold and warm, and sweet and sour, and toothache and headache. The changes which go on in such a system are thus not changes of position and movements, but changes in kind and strength and vividness and fusion; and exactly such changes are the processes which the psychologist wants to explain. He wants to make us understand why this idea grows up and the other fades away, why this impression stands out with clearness as an attended object while the other lacks vividness and disappears, why this volition grows out of that emotion, why this feeling leads to this imaginative thought.

The first step towards such explanation is, of course, in psychology, as in all other sciences, the careful observation of regularities. It quickly leads us to formulate some general laws. Psychology has known, for instance, for two thousand years, that if we have perceived two things together, and later we see the one again, the new perception brings us a memory image of the other thing. If we saw a man's face and heard at the same time his name, seeing his face may later awaken in us the memory of his name, or the hearing of his name may later awaken in us a reproduced memory image of his face. On such a basis, for instance, we formulate some general laws of association of ideas, and as soon as we have such laws laid down, we consider the appearance of such a memory image by association as sufficiently explained. We feel that it gives us sufficient basis to predict that in the future this idea will stir up in us the other idea. Psychology has formulated plenty of such general statements, and they serve well for a first orientation.

Yet can this ever be considered as a last word of scientific explanation of psychical facts? Can psychology really in this way reach an ideal similar to that of scientific astronomy or chemistry? Would the scientist of nature ever be satisfied with this kind of explanation, which is nothing but generalization of certain sequences? Does not the explanation of the naturalist contain an entirely different element? He does not merely want to say that this effect has sometimes been observed and that there is thus probability that it will come again, when similar causes are given. No, the physicist wants to understand those connections of cause and effect as necessary ones. He tries to find sequences which cannot be otherwise because they cannot be thought in any other way. Therefore he is not satisfied with complex regularities, but analyzes them until he can bring them down to simple physical connections, and these physical connections finally to mechanical processes, which realize for us logical necessities. That matter lasts and cannot disappear is such a presupposition, which comes to us with the necessity of logical thinking. We simply cannot think it otherwise. And the whole idea of natural science is to conceive the physical universe in such a way that all changes in the outer world can be understood as the movements of its parts in accordance with such necessary physical axioms. If we knew all the atoms of the present status of the universe, and we knew every present movement of every atom, we should be able to foresee the position of every atom in the next moment and in the following moment and in all following moments, and all that by the necessary continuation of the substance and its energies. That alone is the background of all special physical inquiry, and we rely on the special laws of physics and chemistry, because we trust that this universe, as a whole, could be ultimately understood as such a system of necessary changes in the positions of the lasting atoms.

For the psychologist there is no hope of finding such necessity in the mental processes. The point is not that psychology is to-day too far removed from the fulfillment of such an ideal, the point is rather that such an ideal would be meaningless for the psychologist. His materials, the psychical contents of consciousness, are by their nature unfit to enter into such necessary connections; they cannot do it because they cannot last. The physical object, we saw, is the object which is common property, which we all feel in common, which must thus exist for all time. The things in nature may burn down or decay, but no atom of them can ever disappear from the universe, each must enter into new and ever new combinations and last through all changes. The psychical thing, on the other hand, can exist only for the one immediate experience. Every sensation which enters into my ideas or volitions or emotions is a new creation of the instant which cannot last; each one flashes up and is lost with the moment's experience. My will to-day may have the same aim as my will of yesterday, but as psychical object, my will to-day is a new will, is a new creation in every pulse beat of my life. I must will it again, I cannot store it up. And my joy of to-day can never be as psychical fact the same joy which I may have to-morrow. Mental objects as such, as psychological material, are not destined to last. It has no meaning whatever to think of their being kept over until another time. It is a coarse materialism to conceive the mental contents like pebbles which may remain on the road from one day to another. Our ideas and feelings are mental appearances which have their existence in the act of the one experience; each new experience must be an entirely new creation.

If I remember my last year's perception, I do not dig it out from an under-mind, in which it was stored up and buried, but I create an entirely new memory picture, just as I may make to-day a speech which says the same thing which I said last year, and yet my action of speaking is not last year's speech movement. It is a new action, and the movement did not lie over somewhere during the interval. Mental life is produced anew in every moment. When the first experience is gone and the second comes, nothing of the stuff from which the first was made still has existence in the content of consciousness. By this fact it becomes entirely impossible ever to conceive necessary connections in the sense of physical necessity in the world of consciousness. The one idea may bring to me another idea by association, but as long as I consider both strictly as mental facts, I can never understand why this association happens, I can never grasp the real mechanism of the connection, I can never see necessity between the disappearance of the one and the appearance of the other. It remains a mystery which does not justify any expectation that the same sequence will result again. Whatever belongs to the psychical world can never be linked by a real insight into necessity. Causality there remains an empty name without promise of a real explanation.

Only when we have recognized this fundamental difficulty in the efforts for psychological explanation, can we understand the way which modern psychology has taken most successfully. The end of this way is simply this: every psychical fact is to be thought of as an accompaniment of a physical process and the necessary connections of these physical processes determine, then, the connections of the mental facts. Indeed this has become the method of modern psychology. It has brought about the intimate relation between psychology and the physiology of the brain, and has given us, as foundation, the theory of psychophysical parallelism; the theory that there is no psychical process without a parallel brain process. But the real center of the theory lies indeed in the fact which we discussed; it lies in the fact that we cannot have any explanation of mental states as such at all, if we do not link them with physical processes.

Is it necessary to express again the assurance that such statements of a parallelism between mind and brain in no way interfere with an idealistic view of inner life? Have we not seen clearly enough that these mental facts which are conceived parallel to physiological brain processes do not represent the immediate reality of our inner life, that our life reality is purposive and as such outside of all causal explanation, and that we have to take a special, almost artificial, point of view to consider inner life at all as objects, as contents of consciousness, and thus as psychological material? But since we have seen that for certain purposes such a point of view is necessary, as soon as we have taken it we must be consistent. Our inner life in its purposive reality has therefore nothing to do with brain processes, but if we are on the psychological track and consider man as a system of psychological phenomena, then to be sure, we must see that our only possible interest lies in the finding of necessary causal connections. But these cannot be found otherwise than by linking the mental facts with the physical ones, the psychological material with the processes of the brain.

Of course, that mental experience stands in intimate relations to the body is a knowledge which does not wait for such philosophical arguments. That mind and body come in contact is a conviction which goes with every single sense perception. I see and hear because light and sound stimulate my sense organs, and the sense organs stimulate my brain. The explanation of perception through causes in the physical system seems the more natural as it is evident that in such cases there are no psychical causes which might have brought forward the perception. If I suddenly hear bells ringing, there was on the mental side nothing preceding which could be responsible for my sound perception. And the same holds true if the physical source lies in my own body, if perhaps my tooth begins to ache, although no expectation preceded it.

In the same way it seems a matter of course that mind and body are connected wherever an action is performed. I have the will to grasp for the book before me, and obediently my arm performs the movement; the muscles contract themselves, the whole physical apparatus comes into motion through the preceding mental fact. The same holds true where no special will act arouses the muscles. If a thought is in my mind and it discharges itself in appropriate words, those words are after all as physical facts the movements of lips and tongue and vocal cords and chest; in short, a whole system of physical responses has set in through a mental experience. But the same thought may be the starting-point for many other bodily changes; it may make me blush, and that means that large groups of blood-vessels become dilated; or I may get pale, the blood-vessels are contracted. Or I may cry, the lachrymal gland is working; or it may spoil my appetite, the membranes of my stomach cease to produce; or my muscles may tremble, or my skin may perspire; in short, my whole organism may resound with mental excitement which some words may set up.

But it is not only the impression of outer stimuli and the expression of inner thoughts in which mind and body come together. Daily life teaches us, for instance, how our mental states are dependent upon most various bodily influences. If the temperature of the blood is raised in fever, the mental processes may go over into far-reaching confusion; if hashish is smoked, the mind wanders to paradise, and a few glasses of wine may give a new mental optimism and exuberance; a cup of tea may make us sociable, a dose of bromide may annihilate the irritation of our mind, and when we inhale ether, the whole content of consciousness fades away. In every one of these cases, the body received the chemical substance, the blood absorbed and carried it to the brain, and the change in the brain was accompanied by a change in the mental behavior. Even ordinary sleep at night presents itself surely as a bodily state--the fatigued brain cells demand their rest, and yet at the same time the whole mental life becomes entirely changed. It is not difficult to carry over such observations of daily life to the more exact studies of the psychological laboratory and to examine with the subtle means of the psychological experiment the mental variations which occur with changes of physical conditions. We might feel, without instruments, that our ideas pass on more easily after a few cups of strong coffee, but the laboratory may measure that with its exact methods and study in thousandth parts of a second, the quickening or retarding in the flow of ideas. Every subjective illusion is then excluded, our electrical clocks, which measure the rapidity of mental action and of thought association, will show then beyond doubt how every change in the organism influences the processes of the mind. Bodily fatigue and indigestion, physical health and blood circulation, everything, influence our mental make-up. In the same way it is the laboratory experiment which shows by the subtlest means that every mental state produces bodily effects where we ordinarily ignore them. As soon as we apply the equipment of the psychological workshop, it is easy to show that even the slightest feeling may have its influence on the pulse and the respiration, on the blood circulation and on the glands; or, that our thoughts give impulse to our muscles and move our organs when we ourselves are entirely unaware of it.

Again we may turn in another direction. Pathology shows us how every physical disablement of the brain is accompanied by mental processes. If the blood supply to the brain is cut off, we faint; a blow on the head may wipe out the memory of the preceding hours, and a hemorrhage in the brain, the bursting of a blood vessel which destroys groups of brain cells, produces serious defects in the mental content. A tumor in the brain may completely change the personality; the bodily disease of certain convolutions in the brain brings with it the loss of the power of speech; paralysis of the brain dissolves the whole mental personality. Physical inhibition in the growth of the brain involves, on the mental side, feeble-mindedness and idiocy. Of course, all this is not sufficient to bring out a definite parallelism between special mental functions and special physical processes, as the phenomena are extremely complex. If a patient who has suffered from a mental disturbance dies, and his brain is examined, there is no simple correlation before us. It may be difficult to diagnose exactly the mental symptoms. If we have heard that the man was unable to read, we do not know from that what really happened in his brain. He may not have read because he did not see the words, or because the letters were confusing, or because he had lost memory for the meaning, or because he had lost the impulse to speak the words, or because he felt unable to turn his attention, or because the impulse to read aloud was not carried out by his organism, or because an inner voice told him that it is a sin to read, or for many similar reasons; and yet each one represents psychologically an entirely different situation. On the other hand, on the physical side, the destruction is probably not confined to one particular spot. Complications have crept over to other places or the disturbance in one part works as inhibitory influence on other brain parts, or a tumor may press on a far-removed part, or the disturbance may be one which cannot be examined with our present microscopic means. In short, we have always a complex mental situation and a complex physical one, and to find definite correlations may be possible only by the comparison of very many cases.

Other methods, however, may supplement the pathological one. The comparative anatomist shows us that the development of the central nervous system in the kingdom of animals goes parallel to the development of the mental functions, and that it is not only a question of progress along all lines. Any special function of the mind may have in certain animal groups an especially high development, and we see certain parts correspondingly developed. The dog has certainly a keener sense of smell than the man--the part of the brain which is in direct connection with the olfactory nerve is correspondingly much bulkier in the dog's brain than in the human organism. Here too, of course, research may be carried to the subtlest details and the microscope has to tell the full story. Not the differences in the big structure, but the microscopical differences in the brain cells of special parts are to be held responsible. But comparison may not be confined to the various species of animals; it may refer not less to the various stages of man. The genetic psychologist knows how the child's mind develops in a regular rhythm, one mental function after another, how the first days and first weeks and first months in the infant's life have their characteristic mental possibilities, and no mental function can be anticipated there. The new-born child can taste milk, but cannot hear music. The anatomist shows us that correspondingly only certain nervous tracts have the anatomical equipment by which they become ready for functioning. Most of the tracts at first lack the so-called medullar sheath, and from month to month new paths are provided with this physical equipment.

Finally we have the experiment of the physiologist. His vivisectional experiments, for instance, demonstrate that the electrical stimulation of a definite spot on the surface of a dog's brain produces movements which we should ordinarily take as expressions of mental states, movements of the front legs or of the tail, movements of barking or whining. On the other hand, the dog becomes unable to fulfill the mental impulses if certain definite parts of his brain are destroyed. The physiologist may show from the monkey down to the pigeon, to the frog, to the ant, to the worm, how the behavior of animals is changed as soon as certain groups of nervous elements are extirpated. It is the mental emotional character of the pigeon which is changed when the physiologist cuts off parts of his brain. In short, stimulation and destruction demonstrate, by experiments which supplement each other, that mental functions correspond to brain functions.

There is thus no lack of demonstration from all quarters that mental facts and brain processes belong together; and yet, however much we may cumulate such popular and scientific observations, they would never by themselves admit of the sweeping generalization that there cannot be any mental state which is not accompanied by a process in the central nervous system. Someone might say, to be sure, the perceptions and memory images, the volitions and instincts and impulses, have their physiological basis, but there remain after all acts of attention, or decisions, or subtle feelings, or flights of imagination, which are independent of any brain action. Here, indeed, observation cannot settle such a general principle. Its real hold lies in the fact with which we started: there is no causal connection in the mental states as such. If we want to understand mental facts as such in a chain, of causal events, we have first to conceive them as parallel to physical events. The principle of psychophysical parallelism, that is, the principle that every psychical process accompanies a physiological change is thus not a mere result of observation. It is simply a postulate. Every science begins with postulates and only that which fulfills such postulates has the dignity of truth in the midst of that scientific realm. The astronomer cannot find by observation that there is no star the movements of which are not the effects of foregoing causes. He knows it beforehand, he demands it, he does not recognize any movement as understood until he has found the causes, he presupposes that such causes exist, that no star moves simply by a magic power, and that nowhere in the astronomical universe is the chain of causality broken. He postulates it, and where he does not discover the causes, he is sure that he has not solved the real problem.

In the same way the psychologist who aims towards explanation of mental facts must postulate that there cannot be any mental state which is not an accompaniment of a physical brain process, and is as such connected through physical means with the preceding and the following events in the psychophysical system. Only when such a general framework of theory is built up by a logical postulate, is the way open to make use of all those observations of the laboratory and of the clinic, of the zoölogist and of the anatomist. It is the theory which has to give the right setting to those scattered observations. However far we may be from being able to point to the special brain process which lies at the bottom of the higher mental state, we know beforehand that there is no shadow of an idea, no fringe of a feeling, no suggestion of a desire which does not correspond to definite processes in the brain. The details may and must be material for diverging theories, but the conflict of such hypothetical opinions has nothing to do with the certainty of the underlying conviction that if we knew the whole truth, we should recognize every single mental happening as parallel to physical processes in the nervous system. To explain mental facts means to think them as parallel to the brain processes which have their own causal connections in the physical world.

We started, for instance, from the old observation that two impressions which come to our mind at the same time have a tendency to reawaken one another; and we saw that psychology was well able to formulate these facts in general statements of the association of ideas. But we realized that that in itself is not really explanation. If the odor which we smell awakes in us the name of a chemical substance, and if we now bring this under the general heading of association of ideas, an explanation is not really given by it. That smell sensation itself is not really understood as a cause of those sound sensations of the word. We have no insight into the connection of those two happenings. But the situation is entirely changed, if we consider the smell effect from the point of view of the parallelistic theory. Now the association of facts would indicate that we got the first two impressions together, because two brain processes were going on at the same time. My nose brought me the smell stimulus, my ear gave me the sound stimulus, each going on in a particular center, or, to express it in a simplified schematic way, each reaching particular brain cells, and the excitement of these brain cells being accompanied by the particular sensations. The physiologist has many possibilities of conceiving the further stages of the process, in order to satisfy the demand of explanation. He may say the excitement of each of these two brain cells, the one in the olfactory center, the other in the auditory center, irradiates in all directions through the fine branches of the brain fibers. Each cell has relations to every other cell in the brain; thus there is also one connecting path between those two cells which were stimulated at once. Now if the two ends of an anatomical path are excited at the same time, the path itself becomes changed. The connecting way becomes a path of least resistance, and that means that if, in future, one of the two brain cells becomes excited again, the overflow of the nervous excitement will not now go on easily in all directions, but only just along that one channel which leads to that other brain cell. A theory like this explains in real explanatory terms, in ways which physics and chemistry can demonstrate as necessary, that any excitement of the odor cell runs over into the sound cell and vice versa. In short, the psychological association of ideas, which we should simply have to accept as inexplainable fact, is thus transformed into a connection which we understand as necessary; and the fact is really explained.

This simple scheme of the physiology of association for a hundred years has given a most decided impulse to the progress of psychology. As the association process can so easily be expressed in physiological terms, the aim was prevalent to understand the interplay of mental life more and more as the result of association. The underlying thought of this whole association psychology was thus a conviction that whenever two mental experiences occur together, either of them keeps the tendency to reawaken the other at a later time. Through the endless combination which life's impressions awaken in the mind from the first hour after birth, the whole stream of memory images and thoughts and aims and imaginations is thus to be explained.

The whole theory of physiological associationism works evidently with two factors. First, there are millions of brain cells of which each one may have its particular quality of sensation, and second, each brain cell may work with any degree of energy, to which the intensity of the sensation would correspond. If I distinguish ten thousand different pitches of tone, they would be located in ten thousand different cell groups, each one connected through a special fiber with a special string in the ear. And each of these tones may be loud or faint, corresponding to the amount of excitement in the particular cell group. Every other variation must then result from the millionfold connections between these brain cells. Indeed, the brain furnishes all possibilities for such a theory. We know how every brain cell resolves itself into tree-like branch systems which can take up excitements from all sides, and how it can carry its own excitement through long connecting fibers to distant places, and how the endings of these fibers clasp into the branches of the next cell, allowing the propagation of excitement from cell to cell. We know further how large spheres of the brain are confined to cells of particular function, that for instance cells which serve visual sensations are in the rear part of the brain hemispheres, and so on. Finally we know how millions of connecting fibers represent paths in all directions, allowing very well a coöperation by association between the most distant parts of the brain. The theories found their richest development, when it was recognized that large spheres of our brain centers evidently do not serve at all merely sensory states, but that their cells have as their function only the intermediating between different sensory centers. Such so-called association centers are thus like complex switchboards between the various mental centers. Their own activity is not accompanied by any mental content, but has only the function of regulating transmission of the excitement from the one to the other. Above all their operation would make it possible that through associative processes, the wonderful complexity of our trains of thought may be reached.

Yet even the highest development of the association theories did not seem to do justice to the whole richness of the inner life. We may well understand through those association processes that a rich supply of memory pictures is at our disposal, that ideas stream plentifully to our minds and enter into new and ever new combinations. But that alone is not an account of our inner experience. If there is anything essential for inner life, it is the attention which gives emphasis to certain states and neglects others. And that means that certain mental contents are growing not only in strength but in vividness and clearness, and that others are losing their vividness, are inhibited and suppressed. Here were always the real difficulties of the association theories; they seemed so entirely unable to explain from their own means why certain states become foremost in our minds and others fade away, why some have the power to grow and others are neglected. These facts of attention and vividness, inhibition and fading, worked almost as a temptation to give up the physiological explanation altogether and to rely on some mystical power, some mental influence which could pull and push the ideas without any interference and help from the side of the brain. Yet since we have seen that the truth of psychophysical parallelism has the meaning of a postulate which we cannot escape unless we want to give up explanation altogether, it is evident that such falling back into un-physiological agencies would be just as inconsistent as if the naturalist should posit miracles in the midst of chemistry or astronomy. If the facts which cluster about attention cannot be understood by the simple scheme of associationism, the demand must be for a better physiological theory.

The development of physiological psychology in recent years has indeed shown the way to such a wider theory, which furnishes the physiological accompaniment also for those experiences of attention and vividness which form the weakness of associationism. This new development has come up with the growing insight that the brain's mental functions are related not only to the sensory impressions, but at the same time to the motor expressions. The older view, still prevalent to-day in popular writings, made the brain the reservoir of physical stimuli, which come from the sense organs to the cortex of the brain hemispheres. There the perceptions arose and through associative interplay the memory pictures and the ideas of action and the feelings arose, and the whole inner life was thus bound up with the processes in these sensorial spheres. When the mind had done its work, finally an impulse was sent to some motor apparatus in the brain which then sent off the impulse to some acting muscles. That whole motor part was thus a kind of appendix to the brain process. The psychical life had nothing to do with it but to give the command for its action. The process in the motor part thus began when the mental proceeding was completed. But it became clear that this view was only the outgrowth of the strong interest which physiology took in the sense processes. If a neutral fair account of the brain actions is attempted, there can hardly be doubt that this whole sensorial view of the brain is only half of the story and that the motor half has exactly the same right to consideration. The cortex of the brain, the functions of which are accompanied by mental processes, is always and everywhere not only the recipient of sensory stimuli but at the same time the starting point of motor impulses. That which is centripetal, leading to the cortex, is therefore not more important for the central process than that which is centrifugal, leading from the cortex. The cortex is the apparatus of transmission between the incoming and the outgoing currents, between the excitements which run to the brain and the discharges which go from the brain, and the mental accompaniments are thus accompaniments of these transmission processes. If the channels of discharge are closed and the transmission is thus impossible, a blockade must result at the central station and the accompanying mental processes must be entirely different from those which happen there when the channels of discharge are wide open. Here too all the special theories are still in the midst of tumultuous discord. Yet this new emphasis on the motor side of the psychical process seems to influence modern psychology more and more.

Nobody can deny that first of all this is the necessary outcome of a biological view of the brain. What else can be the brain's function in the midst of nature than the transforming of impressions into expressions, stimuli into actions? It is the great apparatus by which the organism steadily adjusts itself to the surroundings. There would be no use whatever biologically in a brain which had connections with the sense organs, but which had no connections with the muscular system, and on the other hand, a brain which had motor nerves and muscular adjustment would be entirely useless if it had not sensory nerves and sense organs connected with it. In the one case the world would be experienced, but no response would be possible; in the other case, the means for response would be given, but no adjustment could set in because no experience of the surroundings would be possible. Adjustment every moment demands the relation of the brain in both directions. Through the sensory nerves the brain receives; through the motor nerves the brain directs, and this whole arc from the sense organs through the sensory nerves, through the brain, through the motor nerves and finally to the muscles, is one unified apparatus of which no part can be thought away. The brain in itself would be just as useless for the organism as the heart would be without the arteries and veins.

We must keep this intimate and necessary relation between the sensory and motor parts constantly in view, and must understand that there cannot be any sensory process which does not go over into motor response. Then only the ways are open to develop physiological views which give a physical basis to the processes of attention and vividness and inhibition, just as well as to the processes of memory and association. Such motor theories take many forms. Perhaps we shall most quickly bring the most essential factors together, if we say that full vividness belongs only to those sensations for which the channels of motor discharge are open, while those are inhibited for which the channels of discharge are closed; and any channel of discharge is closed, if action is proceeding in the opposite channel. If I open my hand, the motor paths which lead to closing my fist are blocked; and if I close my fist, the channels which lead to the opening of the hand are closed. Now if only those ideas are vivid which find the channels open, it is clear that all the ideas which would lead to the opposite action have no chance for development; they remain inhibited, and just this relation between the vividness of certain ideas and inhibition for those ideas which lead to the opposite action is the characteristic of the process of attention.

From such a point of view, the total mental life can be brought into the psychophysical scheme. We now have not two variable factors, but three, namely, the qualities of the elements, the intensities of the elements, and, as a third, the vividness of the elements. The quality corresponds, as we saw in the association theory, to the local position and connection of the brain cells; the intensity corresponds to the energy of the excitement; and the vividness, we may add now, corresponds to the relation to motor channels. The whole mental life thus becomes the accompaniment of a steady process of transmitting impressions and memories into reactions. That every experience involves millions of such elements we saw when we spoke of the description of mental life. The effort to explain mental life shows us now that this millionfold manifoldness belongs to a system of reactions of which all parts are in steady correlation: a moving equilibrium of unlimited complexity. Surely no one can reduce this wonderful manifoldness to those clumsy concepts with which popular psychology is reporting the story of the mind and its relations to the brain.

It may seem that such a psychological view of inner life annihilates that which we feel as the most essential characteristic of our inner experience, its unity and its freedom. In one sense that is certainly true. In the real life which we live and fight through, where our duties and our happiness lie, we know a unity and freedom of our personality which psychology must destroy. Of course that does not mean that psychology denies the truth of that freedom and unity. Moreover it would condemn itself if it were to deny that which gives meaning to the endeavors of our life and thus also to every search for truth. Psychology claims only that we must abstract from it, when we take the psychological standpoint towards life. Freedom of our real life means that we must know ourselves in the midst of our life work as guided by aims and obligations, and that in this purposive existence of ourselves we do not feel ourselves as determined by causes. I will the fulfillment of my ideals only because I will them. That this will itself may be the effect of foregoing causes is an aspect which does not belong to my naïve experience. Our freedom means that in our real life our will is not related to causes, that the point of view of causality is thus meaningless for the value of our achievements. And the other man's will too comes in question for us as something to be interpreted and to be appreciated, but not to be explained by connection with causes. As long as we move in this sphere of purposive interest, we are free and deal with free selves; but if in the midst of these free aims, the will arises to consider the actions of others and of ourselves from the standpoint of causality, then we have ourselves decided to enter a new sphere in which it would be meaningless to seek for any will which is not determined by causes. As soon as we have chosen the psychological standpoint and are in the midst of the work of causal reconstruction, any will which is not understood as determined by causes is simply an unsolved problem. In the midst of a causal construction, absence of causes would never mean real freedom.

In that purposive world of immediate life experience, we also are unities inasmuch as we ourselves know us as the same in every new will of ours. We remain identical with ourselves because every purpose is posited in the midst of, and bound up with, the general purpose of ourselves. And in this internal unity of meaning, nothing breaks ourselves into pieces, and the whole manifold of experience is thus expressed by a personality which knows itself in its purposive unity. But this unity again is denied by our own intention as soon as we decide to take the causal view of inner life. The purposive unity must now transform itself into an endless complexity, and our own self becomes a composite of hundreds of thousands of elements.

On the other hand, all this does not mean that psychology cannot have its own consistent conception of the mind's unity and freedom. Our psychological mind is a unity because its manifold is a system in which all parts hang together. A change in any one part involves changes in the whole system. The interrelation, to be sure, is not a strictly psychical one, for we have seen that the causal connection as such appears at the physical side. But, inasmuch as there is no psychical process which does not belong to a physiological one, the interconnection of the mental facts is complete and involves the totality of neural processes of which after all a small part only has its psychological record. We might compare those hundreds of millions of neurons in each brain with the hundreds of millions of individuals who make up the population of the nations, and the psychical accompaniment we might compare with the written historical record of mankind. The written records themselves have no direct interconnection, they are only accompaniments of what happens in these millions of men. And again only the higher layer of the neurons in the population sees its doings recorded in the annals of history; and yet whatever those leaders of action and thought and emotion may achieve is dependent upon and working on the actions of those millions of subcortical population neurons. The historical record has its unity through the interrelation of all parts of historical mankind.

But after all the psychologist has no less a right to speak of freedom. Of course his freedom cannot mean exemption from causality. Whatever happens in the psychological system must be perfectly determined by the foregoing causes. But the psychologist has good reason to discriminate between those actions which result from the normal psychophysical factors and such actions as result from broken machinery. If the brain is poisoned by alcohol or in fever, if an infectious disease has destroyed the brain cells, action is no longer the outcome of the normal coöperation of the organs, and even those clusters of neural activities which are accompanied by the consciousness of the own personality lose their control of the motor outcome. The man in delirium or paralysis acts without causal connection with his past; the action is, therefore, not the product of his whole personality, and the psychologist is justified in calling the man unfree. But, whenever the motor response results from the undisturbed coöperation of the normal brain parts, then the inherited equipment and the whole experience and the whole training, the acquired habits and the acquired inhibitions will count in bringing about the reaction. This is the psychological freedom of man. The unity of an interconnected composite and the freedom of causal determination through normal coöperation of all its parts characterize the only personality which the psychologist has to recognize.

IV

PSYCHOLOGY AND MEDICINE

We are now ready to take the first step towards an examination of the problem of curing suffering mankind. So far we have spoken only of the meaning of psychology, of its principles and of its fundamental theories as to mind and brain. We have moved in an entirely theoretical sphere. Now we approach a field in which everything is controlled by a practical aim, the treatment of the sick. Yet our discussion of psychology should have brought us much nearer to the point where we can enter this realm of medicine. Everything depends on the right point of entrance. That an influence on the inner life of man may be beneficial for his health is a commonplace truth to-day for everybody. Every serious discussion of the question has to consider which influences are appropriate, and in which cases of illness the influence on inner life is advisable. The popular treatises usually start this chapter by speaking of the "mental and moral" factors; and this coupling of mental influences and moral influences characterizes large parts of the discussions of the Christian Scientists and the Christian half-scientists. Yet we must insist that the right entrance to psychotherapy is missed if the difference between morality and mentality is not clearly recognized from the beginning. The confusion of the two harms every statement. To avoid such a fundamental mistake, we had to take the long way around and to examine carefully what psychology really means and what it does not mean.

We know now that inner life can be looked on from two entirely different standpoints: a purposive one and a causal one, and we have seen that these two ways of looking on inner life bring about entirely different aspects of man's inner experience, serve different aims, and stand in different relations to the immediate needs of our real life. We know that the one, the causal aspect, belongs to psychology, while the non-psychological, the purposive aspect, belongs to our immediate mutual understanding in the walks of life. If the physician is to make use of inner experience in the interests of overcoming sickness, he must first decide whether to take the causal or the purposive point of view in dealing with the patient's mind. This problem is too carelessly ignored and through that neglect arises much of the popular confusion. Of course just this carelessness becomes in some ways the ground for apparent strength for many a superstition and prejudice. If the doors of the causal mind and of the purposive mind are both open, and the spectator does not notice that there are two, any trick on thought and reason can easily be played. Whatever cannot pass through the causal door slips in through the other, and whatever does not go in through the door of purpose marches through the entrance of causality. With such methods anything can be proved, and the most unscrupulous doctrines can be nicely demonstrated. If we are to avoid such logical smuggling, we must see clearly which attitude towards mental life belongs properly to the domain of psychotherapy.

But what we have discussed now leaves little doubt as to the necessary decision. The physician is interested in the mental life with the aim of producing a certain effect, namely, that of health. Thus the mental life of the whole personality comes in question for him as belonging to a chain of causes and effects; whichever levers he may move, everything is to be a cause which, in accordance with causal laws, is to produce a certain change. Inner life is thus, in the interests of medical treatment, necessarily a part of a causal system. This means the standpoint of scientific psychology is the only adequate one. The purposive view of inner life ought not to be in question when the patient enters the doctor's office.

To characterize the difference, it may be said at once that it is a purposive view which belongs to the minister. If the minister says to his despairing parishioner, "Be courageous, my friend, and be faithful," nothing but a strictly purposive view gives meaning to the situation. The word friend indicates it, that one subject of will approaches another subject of will, with the intention of sympathy and understanding of the attitude of the other; and the advice to be courageous and faithful means an appeal which has its whole meaning in the relation to aims and ends. The speaker and the hearer are both moving in a sphere of will relations, purposes and ideals, sin and virtue, hope and belief. To take the other extreme: if the neurasthenic in his state of depression and in his feeling of inability seeks relief from the nerve specialist, he too may say: "My friend, be courageous and faithful," yet his words have an entirely different purpose. They are not appeals to a common interest of belief; they are subtle tools with which to touch and to change certain psychophysical processes, certain states in mind and brain; there each word is a sound which awakens certain mental associations, and these associations are expected to be causes of certain effects and these effects are to inhibit those disturbing states of emotional depression. If a few grains of sodium bromide were to produce the same effect, they would be just as welcome. The whole consideration moves in a sphere in which only physiological and psychological processes are happening. Thus the physician may work with the ideas of religious belief, but those ideas are then no longer religious values but natural psychophysical material, which is to be applied whenever it appears as the right means to secure a certain effect.

On the other hand the minister also knows, of course, that every word which he speaks has its psychological effect, but he abstracts from that entirely, as his belief should appeal directly to the struggling will of the man. As minister, he is thus not a psychologist. He works with moral means; the physician, with causal means. The view which the doctor has to take of the man before him is therefore thoroughly psychological; whereas that of the religious friend is thoroughly unpsychological, or better, apsychological. Indeed it is misleading, or at least demands a special kind of definition, if people say that the minister has to be a good psychologist. It is just as misleading as the claim, which we hear so often, that for instance Shakespeare was a great psychologist. No, the poet deals with human beings from the purposive standpoint of life and the mere resolving of complex purposes into parts of purposes is not psychology in the technical sense of the term. The poet makes us understand the inner life, but he does not describe or explain it; he makes us feel with other people, but he does not make those feelings causally understood. The realistic novelists sometimes undertake this psychological task, but they are then on the borderland of literature, the analysis of their heroes becomes then a psychological one. Shakespeare understood human beings better than anyone and therefore the men and women whom his imagination created are so fully lifelike that the psychologist may feel justified in using them as material for his psychological analysis, but Shakespeare himself did not enter into that psychological dissection; he kept the purposive point of view. In the same way certainly the minister--the same holds true for the lawyer or the tradesman or anyone who enters into practical dealings with his neighbor--may resolve complex attitudes of will into their components, but each part still remains a will attitude which has to be understood and to be interpreted and to be appreciated, while the psychologist would take every one of those parts as a conscious content to be described and to be explained. But here we abstract from the purposive relations. Our attention belongs now to the doctor's dealing with man; for him cause and effect are the only vehicles of connection. Thus he has to exclude the purposive interpretation of inner life and has to understand every factor involved from a psychological point of view: his psychotherapy must be thoroughly applied psychology.

The day of applied psychology is only dawning. The situation is indeed surprising. The last three or four decades have given to the world at last a really scientific study of psychology, a study not unworthy of being compared with that of physics or chemistry or biology. In the center of the whole movement stood the psychological laboratory with its equipment for the most subtle analysis and explanatory investigation of mental phenomena. The first psychological laboratory was created in Leipzig, Germany, in 1878. It became the parent institution for laboratories in all countries. At present, America alone has more than fifty psychological laboratories, many of them large institutions equipped with precious instruments for the study of ideas and emotions, memories and feelings, sensations and actions. Still more rapid than this external growth of the laboratory psychology was the inner growth of the experimental method. It began with simple experiments on sensations and impulses, and it seemed as if it would remain impossible to attack with the experimental scheme the higher and more complex psychical structures. But just as in physics and chemistry the triumphal march of the experimental method could not be stopped, one part of the psychological field after another was conquered. Attention and memory, association and inhibition, emotion and volition, judgment and feeling all became subjected to the scientific scheme of experiment. And that was all supplemented by the progress of physiological psychology, pathological psychology, child psychology, animal psychology. In this way the last decades created a science which of course was by principle a continuation of the old psychology, but yet which had good reason to designate itself as a "new" psychology.

But in this whole development, until yesterday, the curious fact remained that it was going on without any narrow contact with practical life; it was a science for the scientist and measured by its practical achievements in daily life, it seemed barren and unproductive. Psychology was studied as palæontology and Sanscrit were studied, without any direct relation to the life which surrounds us. And yet after all it deals with the mental facts which have to enter into every one of our practical deeds, if we are to consider mental life from a psychological point of view. The psychologists were certainly not to be blamed for sticking to their theoretical interests. More than that, they were certainly justified in their reluctance, as everything was in the making, and incomplete theories can easily do more harm than good. But slowly a certain consolidation has set in; large sets of facts have been secured, and psychology seems better prepared to become serviceable to the practical tasks. On the other hand, it has been noticeable for some time that not a few of the psychological results have gone over into unprofessional hands and have been thrown on the market places and have been brought into many a home where no one knew how to deal with them rightly. Thus the need seems urgent that the psychologists give up their over-reserved attitude and recognize it as their duty to serve the needs of the community.

It is not sufficient for that end, simply to take odds and ends of psychology and to hand them over to anyone who can see some use for them. We must have a systematic scientific work done for the special purpose of adjusting psychological knowledge to the definite practical tasks and of examining the psychological facts with that practical end in view. A science must be developed which is related to psychology as engineering is related to physics and chemistry. Just as the technological laboratories of the engineer bring out many new problems which the physicist would never have approached, in the same way we may expect that special institutions for applied psychology will shape the psychological inquiry in a new way.

Such a new science of applied psychology of course has before it a field just as large and manifold as the field of technology, where physical engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering and so on are separated. Such a future psychological technology would deal, for instance, with psychopedagogical problems. There belongs everything which refers to the psychology of memory or attention, of discipline, of fatigue, of habit, of imitation or effort; in short, all those mental factors which have to be considered whenever the schoolchild is looked on from a causal point of view. Further there is the psycholegal field where the memory and the perceptions, the suggestibility and the emotions of the witness are to be studied, where the psychological conditions which lead to crime, the means to tap the hidden thoughts of the criminal, the inhibitions for the prevention of crime, the mental effects of punishment and similar causal processes must be determined. There are the psychoscientific problems referring to psychological influences on the observations and judgments and discriminations of the scholar who watches the stars or who translates an inscription. There are the psychoæsthetic problems where the task is to examine causally the factors which lead to the agreeable effects of beautiful surroundings, and from the height of the psychology of æsthetics in painting and sculpture, the inquiry may go to the psychology of the pleasant effects in dress-making or cooking. There are the large groups of psychotechnical problems where the effort refers to the application of psychology in securing the best conditions for labor and industry and commerce. It leads from the mental effects of signals or the mental fatigue in mills to the secrets of advertisements and salesmanship. There are especially important psychodiagnostical studies where the aim is to determine the individual differences of man by experimental methods and to make use of them for the selection of the right man for the right place. There are psychosocial problems where we examine the psychological factors which have to enter into public movements, into social reforms, into legislation and into politics. In this way new and ever new groups may be added; every time the central thought is: how far can causal psychological knowledge help us to reach a certain end? Together with these forms of applied psychology, we find the psychomedical problems; here belongs everything which allows the application of causal psychology in the interests of health.

It might be answered that this demand for a strictly causal point of view can hardly be fulfilled, because, if I am acting,--it may be in the interest of education or law or technique or medicine,--I must always have an end in view and to select such an end belongs after all to my system of purposes. If I am a teacher and have to deal with children, then it may be said that after all, my knowledge of causal psychology cannot help me if I am uncertain for which ideals I want to educate these children. Psychology can tell me that I need these means, if I want to reach certain effects, but I cannot find out by psychology which effects are desirable. Psychology may tell me how to make a good business man or a good scholar or a good soldier out of my boy, but whether I want him to become a soldier or a merchant I must decide for myself with reference to general aims, and that leads me back to the purposive view of life. Such argument is entirely correct. Yes, it is evident that it is in full harmony with our whole understanding of the purpose of psychology. We saw that psychology with its causal treatment of man's mind does not express the immediate reality, but is a certain reconstruction which allows a calculation of certain effects. Thus it is itself a system existing for a subject who has certain ends in view. The whole causal view of man is thus a tool in the service of the purposive man. This is the reason why it is indeed utterly absurd to think that psychology can ever help us to determine which end we ought to reach.

In education, for instance, very many different ends might be reached; psychology cannot decide anything. The decision as to the aims of education must be made by ethics, which indeed takes not a causal but a purposive attitude. Only after ethics has selected the aim, psychology can teach us how to reach it. Of course this principle must hold for the physician too. All his causal dealing with the mind presupposes that he has selected a certain end in harmony with his purpose. The only difference is that, in the case of the physician, there can be no possible doubt as to the desirable end; what he aims at is a matter of course, namely, the health of the patient. To desire the health of the sufferer is thus itself a function which belongs entirely to the purposive view of the world, and only in the interest of this purpose does the physician apply his knowledge of psychology or of the causal sciences of physics, physiology, and chemistry. Indeed only with this limitation have we the right to say that the psychotherapist takes the causal,--and that means the psychological,--view of his patient. As far as he decides to take care of the health of his patient, this decision itself belongs to the purposive world and to his moral system. The physician is thus ultimately just like the minister and just like anyone who deals with his neighbor, a purposive worker; but while the minister, for instance, remains on this purposive track, the physician puts a causal system into the service of his purpose. He knows the end, and his whole aim is to apply his causal knowledge of the physical and psychical world to the one accepted end of restoring the health of the patient. He has to ask thus in general: what has psychology to-day to offer which can be applied in the interests of medicine?

It would be an inexcusable narrowness to confine that chapter of applied psychology which is to deal with the psychomedical problems to the work of psychotherapy. Medicine involves diagnosis of illness as well as therapeutics. Between the recognition and the treatment of the illness lies the observation of its development and all this is preceded by steps towards the prevention of illness. In every one of these regions, psychology may be serviceable. Psychotherapy is thus only one special part of psychomedicine. But the situation becomes still more complex by the fact that the illness to be treated or the disturbance to be removed may stand in different relations to the psychophysical processes. The illness may be a disturbance in the psychophysical brain parts, or it may belong to other brain parts which are only in an indirect way under the influence of mental states or which are themselves indirectly producing changes in the mental life. And finally the disturbance may exist outside of the brain in any part of the body, and yet again through the medium of brain and nervous system it may produce effects in the mind or be open to the influence of the mind. Thus we have entirely different groups of medical interests and it would be superficial to ignore the differences.

Both psychodiagnostic and psychotherapeutic studies must be devoted to cases in which the mind itself is abnormal, further to cases in which the normal minds registers the abnormalities in other parts of the body, and finally to cases in which the normal mind influences abnormal processes in the body. These latter two cases have to be subdivided into those where the bodily disturbance still lies in the brain parts and those where it lies outside of the brain. But the situation becomes still more complex by the mutual relations of those various processes. The impulse to take morphine injections may have reached the character of a mental obsession and thus represent an abnormality of the mind, but yielding to it produces at the same time disturbances in the whole body which thus become again external sources for abnormal experiences in otherwise normal layers of the mind.

Of course the interest of the psychologist as such remains always related to the psychological factor, but the relation of the psychological factor itself to the total disturbance may be of most different character. If I diagnose or treat the fixed idea of a psychasthenic, the psychological factor itself represents the disturbance. On the other hand, if I study the pain sensations of a patient who suffers from a disease of the spinal cord, then the sensations themselves, the only psychological factor in the case, are only indications of a disease which belongs to an entirely different physical region; the mind itself is normal. Or, on the other hand, if I try to educate a sufferer from locomotor ataxia to develop his walking by building up in his mind new motor ideas to regulate his coördinated movements, the mind again is entirely normal but the physician needs his psychology on account of the influence which the mind has on the bodily system. Again, we must insist that psychomedicine covers this whole ground. Wherever a psychical factor enters into the calculations of the physician either by reason of its own abnormality or by its relation as effect or as cause to a diseased part of the body in the brain or without, there we have a psychomedical task, and as far as it is therapeutic, we have psychotherapy.

The psychodiagnostic research lies outside of the compass of our book, but we cannot emphasize sufficiently the great importance which belongs to that work. Moreover, just in the field of psychodiagnostics, the methods of the modern experimental psychological laboratory are most promising and successful. Let us not forget that we deal with such psychological factors even when we test the functions of eye and ear and skin and nose by examining the sensations and perceptions. The oculist who analyzes the color sensations of a patient and the aurist who finds defects in the hearing of the musical scale and discovers that certain pitches cannot be discriminated, is certainly dealing, for diagnostic purposes, with the material that the psychological laboratory has sifted and studied. Even that sensation symptom which enters into so many diseases, the sensation of pain, belongs certainly within the compass of the psychologist and it is only to be regretted that the systematic study of the pain sensations, mostly for evident practical reasons, has been much neglected in the psychological laboratory.

The psychologists have been at work all the more eagerly in the fields of association and memory, attention and emotion, habit and volition, distraction and fatigue. Here subtle methods have been elaborated, methods which surely common sense cannot supply, and which showed differences of mental behavior with the exactitude with which the microscope reveals the hidden differences of form. If physicians are slow in accepting the help which the psychological laboratory can furnish, it may be in good harmony with the desirable conservative policy in medicine, but finally the time must come when this instinctive resistance against new methods will be overcome. The recent attachment of psychological laboratories to certain leading psychiatric clinics is a most promising symptom. Yet the diagnostic studies with the means of the psychological laboratory cannot be confined to the cases of mental disease. The mild abnormalities of the mind, and especially the nervous disturbances which exist outside the field of insanity, demand this support of psychology much more. And even the normal personality will be more safely protected from disease and from social dangers for its mental constitution if the resources of experimental psychology are employed. The more we know of the psychological constitution of the individual, the more we can foresee the development which is to be hoped for or feared and which may be encouraged or retarded.

The psychologist may determine, for instance, the degree of attention with its resistance against distracting stimuli, the power of memory under various conditions and on various material, the mental excitability and power of discrimination, the quickness and correctness of perception, the chains of associations, the rapidity of the associative process for various groups, the types of reaction, the forming of habits and their persistence, the conditions of fatigue and of exhaustion, the emotional expressions and the emotional stability, the time needed for recreation and the resistance against drugs, the degree of suggestibility and the power of inhibition: and every result in any of these lines may contribute to the diagnosis and prognosis of cases. The chronoscope here measures the reaction times and association times in thousandths of a second; the kymograph, by the help of the sphygmograph, writes the record of the pulse and its changes in emotional states, while the pneumograph records the variations of breathing, and the plethysmograph shows the changes in the filling of blood vessels in the limbs which is immediately related to the blood supply of the brain. Here belongs also the ergograph, which gives the exact record of muscular work with all the influences of will and attention and fatigue, the automatograph which writes the involuntary movements, especially also the galvanoscope which may register the influence of ideas and emotions on the glands of the skin, and thus lead to an analysis of repressed mental states, and hundreds of other instruments which are used in the psychological laboratory.

Yet it would be misleading to think only of complex apparatus when experimental psychology is in question. An experiment is given whenever the observation is made under conditions which are artificially introduced for the purpose of the observation. Thus there is no need of the physical instrument. If I bring a spoonful of soup to my mouth at dinner and I become interested in the combination of warmth sensation and touch sensation and taste sensation and smell sensation, then I have performed an experiment if I take one more spoonful of soup just for the purpose of the observation. The physician too may carry out important psychological experiments, without needing the outfit of a real laboratory. Association experiments, for instance, promise to become of steadily growing importance. To make them serviceable to the problems of his office, nothing but a subtle psychological understanding is needed, inasmuch as any routine work schematically applied to every case alike would be utterly useless. Give your man perhaps a hundred words and let him speak the very first word which comes to his mind when he hears the given ones. You call rose, and he may say red or flower or lily or thorn; you call frog and he may answer pond or turtle or green or jump, and if you choose your hundred words with psychological insight, his hundred answers will allow a full view of his mental make-up. This is an experiment which does not require any instruments at all but a man's subtle analysis of the replies. That is not seldom sufficient to secure the diagnosis of complex mental variations. The method yields still more if the time for such a reply is measured, but there again not the costly chronoscope of the laboratory is indispensable; a simple stop watch which gives the fifths of a second would be fully sufficient for all practical purposes. From such simple facts of the mental inventory the association experiments may lead to complex questions which slowly may disentangle the confused ideas, for instance, of a dementia præcox, and thus lead to subtle differential diagnosis.

The psychological laboratory alone can also elaborate the methods of studying, for instance, the feeble-minded with all the individual variations. New and ever new methods have been tried; the memory was tested by reading and repeating figures or letters, or colored papers were shown or cardboards of different forms or nonsense syllables, and the powers of remembering were studied. Or the accuracy of arm movements was examined, or the quickness of understanding associated words, or the success in planning a complex movement like throwing a ball at a target, or the tapping of a key in the rhythm of a metronome, or the discrimination and recognition of the pieces in the game of dominoes and many another scheme. The laboratory has to analyze the conditions for such methods and the psychologist has to prepare the means for the use of the physician, just as the chemist has to prepare the sleeping powders. In a similar way the laboratory may furnish means to analyze the mental disturbances by a comparison with the experimental results of artificial influences, for instance, of over-fatigue or half-sleep, of drugs or alcohol, of poisons and emotional excitements. The psychological resolving of the mental symptoms may of course, in the same way, furnish the diagnosis where the mental variation is only a distant effect of a bodily ailment. The changes in the emotions, for instance, may lead to the recognition of a heart disease; lack of attention may be a hint of the overgrowth of the adenoids; irritability or apathy or delirious character of the mental behavior may indicate whether uræmic acid is in the system or an infectious disease: anæmia and undernutrition may be diagnosed and the psychology of fever demands too a much closer analysis with the means of the psychological laboratory than it has received so far.

We have not spoken as yet about those psychological methods which themselves introduce abnormal mental states like hypnotism, and which also not seldom are only means for diagnostic purposes. The hypnotic state may bring to memory forgotten experiences of which the physiological effects may have lasted in the brain and which may have brought injury to the psychophysical system. Hypnotic inquiry can thus lead to the recognition of the first causes in many hysterical states and where hypnotism is not the best adjusted tool, a certain dreamlike staring may be more effective. We have to return to much of that later in full detail because just for instance in hysteria, the clear recognition of the sources and of the character of the disease may at the same time prove to be in itself the right starting point for curative treatment.

We have spoken so far only about the relations of psychology and medicine from the point of view of diagnosis; the relations from the point of view of therapy will make up the second part of this book. We shall describe the methods and the results, the possibilities and the limitations with manifold detail. That is the chief topic of this volume. All that is needed to prepare for this principal problem is on the one side a preparatory clearing up of some fundamental conceptions, especially of those two which have played the chief rôle in the whole discussion, namely the subconscious and suggestion. And on the other side, we may consider at first some fundamental discriminations which steadily influence the inquiries and controversies in the field. I think of the difference between normal and abnormal mental states, between psychical and physical facts in psychotherapy, between functional and organic diseases, and to return to our starting point, between mental and moral influences.

Every curative effort presupposes that the normal state of health has been lost and that a diseased state has set in. Yet the mental analysis suggests still less than the bodily inquiry, just where the normal functioning is really lost. It would be easy to draw a demarcation line if the pathology of the mind introduced any mental features which are unknown in our normal existence, but the opposite is true. No mental disease introduces elements which do not occur in the sphere of health. A degenerated brain cell looks differently under the microscope from a normal one, but the ideas of a paranoiac, the emotion of a maniac, the volition of a hysteric, the memory idea of a paralytic is each in its own structure not different from such elements in any one of us. The total change lies thus only in the proportion; there is too much or too little of it. The pathological mental life is like a caricature of a face--each feature is contained, as in the ordinary portrait, but the proportion is distorted, there is too much or too little of chin or of nose. But who can indicate exactly the point where the distortion of the features constitutes a caricature? Every grotesque change in the relations ruins the healthy state: what makes us sure that the harmony of health is spoiled?

Certainly we cannot settle it by mere statistics. The norm never means merely a majority. Even if the overwhelmingly larger part of mankind suffered from phthisis, the few who were free from it would be recognized as well and all the others would be considered ill. In mental life still more, no one ought to propose that the exceptional function is the symptom of disease. The few persons who never had a dream in their lives differ much in their mental experience from the large majority and yet their peculiarity is certainly not a symptom which needs curative treatment. The only real test of health is the serviceableness to the needs of life. We have an unhealthy state of the personality before us wherever the equilibrium of the human functions is disturbed in a way which diminishes the chances of existence, and the seriousness of the ailment depends upon the degree of this diminishing power. Seen from a strictly psychological point of view, we must expect thus a broad borderland region between the entirely normal well-balanced mental life and that unbalanced disorder of functions which really interferes with the chance for self-protection and effectiveness. That the melancholic who declines to take any nourishment, or the paranoiac who misjudges his surroundings, is unable to secure by his own energies the safety of his life cannot be doubted. The balance is completely destroyed and the will and the intellect of the physician and of the nurse must be substituted for his own mental powers, if his life is to be prolonged at all. But the misjudgment and the depression of the insane are only an exaggeration of that which may occur in any man.

There are therefore thousands of steps which lead from the normal error or regret to the destructive disturbance. Everyone knows persons whose pessimistic temperament makes them inclined to an over-frequent depression, or others whose silly disposition brings out constantly those emotional tendencies which the maniac shows in an exaggerated degree. The stupid mind shows those lacks of association and connection which reach their maximum degree in the mind of the idiot. We know from daily life the timid, undecided man who cannot come to a will impulse; the hasty man who rushes towards decisions; the inattentive man who can never focus his consciousness; and the overattentive man who can never dismiss any subject; the indifferent man on whom nothing produces evident impression and feeling; the over-sensitive man who reacts on slight impressions with exaggerated emotion; and yet every one of such and a thousand similar variations, needs only the projection on a larger scale to demonstrate a mental life which is self-destructive. The silly girl and the stupid boy, the man who has the blues and the reckless creature, are certainly worse equipped for the struggles of existence than those who are intellectually and emotionally and volitionally well-balanced. They will take wrong steps in life, they may be unsuccessful, their stupidity may lead them to the poorhouse, their recklessness may lead them to the penitentiary. And yet we do not speak of them as patients because their disproportionate mental features may be sufficiently corrected by other mental states which are perhaps more strongly developed.

Further, inasmuch as human life just in its mental functions is related to its social surroundings, much must depend on the external conditions, whether the disproportion and abnormality has to be treated as pathological. The mind which may find perhaps its way under the most simple rural conditions would be unable to protect life under the complex conditions of a great city. The man who in certain surroundings may appear a crank has to be treated as a patient in a different set of life conditions. Wherever psychotherapeutic work is in question, perhaps nothing is more important than to keep steadily in mind this continuity between normal and abnormal mental features. The mental disturbance must constantly be looked upon as a change of proportions between functions which, as such, belong to every normal life. We have to train and to develop, and thus to reënforce, that which is too weak, and we have to drain off and to suppress and to inhibit that which is too strong.

Yet just this functional view of disease must remind us strongly from the beginning that it would be utterly in vain to draw any demarcation line between psychical disturbances and physical ones. We have seen from the start that from the point of view of physiological psychology, there can be no psychical process without an accompanying physiological process in the brain. Every disturbance in mental actions is thus at the same time a disturbance in the equilibrium of nervous functions. Yet that alone would not exclude the possibility of considering some diseases, for instance, exclusively from the mental side, and we should be justified in doing so if those parts of the brain which are the seat of the mental processes could remain in the diseased state without influence on other parts of the nervous system and of the whole body. In such a case it would indeed be sufficient to consider the psychophysical disturbance from the psychological point of view only, that is, to speak of the disease as a disorder of intellect, of emotion or will, without thinking of changes in the brain cells. But such isolation does not exist in nature. Not only the bodily factors like nutrition and circulation and sexual functions have a thousandfold influence on the psychophysical processes, and these in turn change the vegetative functions of the body, but especially the other parts of the brain and nervous system can be affected in most different ways. If we want to consider whether a certain variation of the personality demands curative treatment, we certainly cannot confine ourselves to the mental variations. They are after all only parts of the whole group of changes in the organism and are thus symptoms of a disease which has to be studied in its totality. The mental symptoms alone may be relatively slight variations, which in themselves might be sufficiently balanced not to disturb the equilibrium of life, and yet they may be symptoms of a brain disturbance which as a whole must interfere with the safety of life. On the other hand, mental life may appear like a chaos and yet the disturbance may be the symptom of merely a slight brain affection and the treatment of the mental symptoms in their apparent severity would be a useless effort. The mental disturbance, for instance, of the intoxicated or the hashish smoker, even the delirium of the feverish, does not suggest a fight against the mental symptoms during the attack.

On the whole, there is a far-reaching independence between the apparent mental variations and the seriousness of the brain affection. Light hysteric states may produce a strong absenting of the mind while severe epileptic conditions of the brain may be accompanied by very slight mental changes. Every neurasthenic state may play havoc with mental life, while grave brain destructions may only shade slightly the character or the intellect. To deal with the mental changes as if they belonged to a sphere by itself, to the soul which is well or ill through its own independent alterations without steadily relating the changes to the total organism, leads therefore necessarily to failure. The mind reflects only symptoms of the disease; the disease itself belongs always to the organism. Psychotherapy has suffered too much from the belief that the removal of mental symptoms is a cure of disease.

Certainly the psychophysical symptoms may often stand in the foreground of the disease, and in that case it may be left to the special needs whether we deal with them as psychical or as physical changes. Even the patient may be made to see them in one or the other way in accordance with his special needs. To tell him that his brain cells are in disorder and that they can be cured will be the right thing for him who takes only the introspective view of his suffering and is in despair because his own will seems powerless to overcome those mental changes. For the next patient, the opposite may be wiser. The belief that his brain is ill may have induced him to give up effort of the will instead of helping along by steady self-suggestion. He will be helped more if he understands that his mind is working wrongly. But the full truth is that both mind and body are in disorder; the function of the disturbed brain cells accompanies the ineffective will, and to reënforce the will means to bring into equilibrium again the disturbed brain cells. For the psychotherapist the temptation of giving the attention to the mental symptoms only is strong. The more firmly the physician sticks to the standpoint of psychophysiology, the better he will see ailment and cure in their right proportion.

This demand for the consideration of the whole personality, mind and body, ought not to be influenced by the popular separation between organic and functional diseases. If we call organic diseases of the mind those in which the mental disturbance is the accompaniment of a brain disturbance, and functional those in which no brain disturbance exists, we leave entirely the ground of modern psychology. As soon as we believe that the mind can be disturbed without a change in the functions of the brain, we give away all that which has brought scientific order into the study of psychological existence. Every mental disturbance corresponds to a disorder in the brain's functions. But there cannot be a change in the functions of the brain without a change in its structure. Thus we must claim that all those so-called functional disturbances like neurasthenia and hysteria, fixed ideas and obsessions, phobias and dissociations of the personality, as well as the typical insane states of the maniac or paranoiac have their basis in a pathological change of the anatomical structure of the brain. This postulate cannot be influenced by the fact that the microscope has been unable to detect the character of most of these changes.

Of course all this does not exclude its being perfectly justifiable to separate those diseases for which a definite destruction of the brain parts can be detected, as in paralysis of the brain, from those where that is impossible. We may also expect that those disturbances in the brain which we cannot as yet make visible, may allow more easily an organic repair and thus a restoration to the normal functions. Just as a disjointed arm may be brought to function quickly again, a broken arm slowly, an amputated arm never, each brain cell too may suffer lesions which are reparable in different degrees. But it is evident that it remains then an entirely empirical question whether the invisible damage allows repair or not. We have no right to say that where the destruction cannot be seen under the microscope there is no organic change and the disturbance is therefore only a psychical one and can be removed by mental means. All changes are physical and experience has to decide whether they are accessible to psychological influences or not. States like epilepsy may not allow any recognition of definite brain destruction and are yet on the whole inaccessible to mental influence, while many a brain disturbance with visible alterations, resulting perhaps from anæmia or hyperæmia, may be caused to disappear. If on the other hand we say that we can cure with psychotherapeutic means only the functional brain diseases and define as functional simply those diseases which can be cured by such means, we move, of course, in the most obvious circle and yet just that is the too frequent fate of the discussions in certain quarters.

Every psychical disturbance is organic inasmuch as it is based on a molecular change which deranges the function. Some of these changes are beyond restitution; some can be brought back to a well-working structure by strictly physical agencies like drugs or electricity; others can be repaired by physiological stimuli which reach directly the higher brain cells through the sense organs and which we call psychical under one aspect, but which certainly remain physiological influences from another aspect. And these psychophysiological influences of the spoken words or similar agencies are thus indeed for therapeutic effect entirely coördinated with the douche and the bath and the electric current and the opiate. It is a stimulation of certain brain cells, an inhibition of certain others: a subtle apparatus which must be handled with careful calculation of its microscopical causes and effects. That these words from an entirely different point of view may mean a moral appeal and have ethical value, point to moral and religious ideas and reënforce the spiritual personality, lies entirely outside of the psychotherapeutic calculation. As long as the curing of the patient is the aim, the faith in God is not more valuable than the faith in the physician and the moral appeal of no higher order than the influence through the galvanic current. They come in question only as means to an end and they are valuable only in so far as they reach the end. That they can be related to an entirely different series of purposes, to the system of our moral ideas, ought not to withdraw the attention of the psychotherapist from his only aim, to cure the patient. The highest moral appeal may be even a most unfit method of treatment and the religious emotion may just as well do harm as good from the point of view of the physician. Psychotherapy has suffered too much from the usual confusion of standpoints.

V

SUGGESTION AND HYPNOTISM

Psychotherapy has now become for us the effort to repair the disturbed equilibrium of human functions by influencing the mental life. It is acknowledged on all sides that the most powerful of these influences is that of suggestion. This is an influence which is most easily misunderstood and which has most often become the starting point for misleading theories. Before we enter into the study of the practical effects of suggestion and the psychotherapeutic results, we must examine this tool in the hand of the psychotherapist from a purely psychological viewpoint. The patient may perhaps sometimes profit from suggestion the more, the less he understands about its nature, but the physician will always secure the better results, the more clearly he apprehends the working of this subtle tool. Of course, that does not mean that any psychology is able to explain the process of suggestion to a point where all difficulties are removed, but at least the mysteries can be removed and the effects can be linked with other well-known processes.

Let us be clear from the start that suggestion is certainly nothing abnormal and exceptional, nothing which leads us away from our ordinary life, nothing which brings us nearer to the great riddles of the universe. There is no human life into which suggestion does not enter in a hundred forms. Family life and education, law and business, public life and politics, art and religion are carried by suggestion. A suggestion is, we might say at first, an idea which has a power in our mind to suppress the opposite idea. A suggestion is an idea which in itself is not different from other ideas, but the way in which it takes possession of the mind reduces the chances of any opposite ideas; it inhibits them. It is indeed the best result of any successful education, that the teachings have taken hold of the mind of the young in such a way that all the opposite tendencies and impulses and wishes do not come to development. The well-educated person does not need to participate in a struggle between good and bad motives, for that which has been impressed upon his mind does not allow the other side to come up at all. Our life would be crowded with inner conflicts if education had not secured for us from the start preponderance for the suggestions of our educators.

The love of family and friends, of our country and our party are in the same way such suggestions. We may hear arguments for the other side, arguments which easily convince the man of the other party, but they do not appeal to us: they are emasculated before they enter our minds; they have no chance to overcome the resistance because suggestions stand in their way. No argument will overwhelm the suggestion which religion has settled in our inner life, and from this strongest suggestion which can stand against any temptation of life small psychological steps lead down to the little bits of suggestion with which our daily chance life is over-flooded. Every advertisement in the newspaper, every display in the shop-window, every warm intonation in the voice of our neighbor has its suggestive power, that is, it brings its content in such a way to our minds that the desire to do the opposite is weakened. We do buy the object that we do not need, and we do follow the advice which we ought to have reconsidered. And what would remain of art if it had not this power of suggestion by which it comes to us and wins the victory over every opposing idea? We believe the painter and we believe the novelist, if their technique is good. We do not remember that the inventions of their genius are contrary to our life experience; we feel sympathy with the hero and do not care in the least that he has no real life. The suggestion of art has inhibited in us every contrary idea.

Such daily experience shows us that suggestive power may belong to different men in different degree. There are lawyers whose arguments and whose presentation open our mind, it seems, to any suggestion: while others leave us indifferent; we understand their idea, we follow their thoughts, and yet we remain accessible to opposite influences. There are teachers whose authority gives to every word such an impressiveness and dignity that every opposite thought disappears, while others throw out words which are forgotten. On the other hand, the readiness to accept suggestions is evidently also quite different with different individuals. From the most credulous to the stubborn, we have every degree of suggestibility, the one impressed by the suggestive power of any idea which is brought to his mind, the other always inclined to distrust and to look over to the opposite argument. Such a stubborn mind is indeed not only without inclination for suggestions, but it may develop even a negative suggestibility; whatever it receives awakens an instinctive impulse towards the opposite. Moreover we are all in different degrees suggestible at different times and under various conditions. Emotions reënforce our readiness to accept suggestions. Hope and fear, love and jealousy give to the impression and the idea a power to overwhelm the opposite idea, which otherwise might have influenced our deliberation. Fatigue and intoxicants increase suggestibility very strongly. To look out on a wider perspective, we may add at once that an artificial increase of suggestibility is all which constitutes the state of hypnotism.

At first, however, we want to understand the ordinary process of suggestion in that normal form in which it enters into every hour of our life and into every relation of our social intercourse. But if we begin to examine the structure of the process, we can no longer be satisfied with the vague reference to ideas and their opposites. What does it mean after all if we speak of opposite ideas? Can we not entertain any ideas peacefully together in our consciousness? From a logical standpoint, ideas may contradict each other, but that refers to their meaning. As mere bits of psychological experience, I may have any ideas together in my consciousness. I can think summer and winter or day and night or right and left or black and white or love and hate in one embracing thought. As mere mental stuff, the one idea does not interfere with the other. On the other hand, this is evident: I cannot will to turn to the right and to turn to the left at the same time. There may be a wrangling between those two impulses, but as soon as my will stands for the one, the other is really excluded. Any action which I am starting to do thus crowds out the impulse to the opposed action.

In the sphere of psychological facts, we have here indeed the only relation between two happenings which necessarily involves an opposition. We could never understand why one brain cell might not work together with any other brain cell, but we do understand that nature must provide for an apparatus by which the impulse to one action makes the impulse to the opposite action ineffective. There is no action which has not its definite opposite. The carrying out of any impulse involves the suppression of the contrary impulse, and the impulse not to do an action involves the suppression of the impulse to do it. When we spoke of the relations of mind and brain, we mentioned that such a corelation of mental centers indeed exists. Physiological experiments have demonstrated that the activity of those centers which stimulate a certain action reduce the excitability of those brain parts which awaken the antagonistic action. As far as the world of actions is concerned, the mechanism of the process of suggestion thus seems not inaccessible to a physiological understanding.

Various ideas of movements to be carried out are struggling for control in the cortex of the brain. That is the normal status which precedes any decision. The channels of motor discharge are open for both possibilities; we may turn to the right or to the left. Then the play of associations begins. A larger and larger circle of ideas surrounds the idea of the one and of the other goal. Those ideas awaken emotions. On the one side may call our duty and on the other side our pleasure. Larger and larger parts of the central content of our consciousness, of our own personality, become involved; our principles and maxims, our memories, our hopes and fears, enter into the battle until deeper strata of the idea of ourselves enter into a firm association with the one side, reënforcing, perhaps, the idea of the goal at the right. This opens wide the channels of discharge for the movement to the right and inhibits thereby the excitability of the center which leads to the opposite action. The channel of discharge to the movement towards the left becomes closed, the idea of that movement fades away and becomes inhibited: we are moving towards the right. The outcome was the product of our total personality.

But this result would have been different, if from the start the channels of discharge had not been equally open for both possible movements, and if thus the relative resistance to the impulse had not been equal on both sides. If, for instance, we had gone from the given point frequently to the left, as a result of the habit and training, the impulse to the left would have found less nervous resistance. The channels would have become widened by the repetition and the opposite channels would have been somewhat closed by the lack of use. Or if instead of such previous habit, we should see at the decisive moment others turning to the left, the impression would have become the starting point for a reaction of mere instinctive imitation. While we might not have followed that imitative impulse at once, yet the channels would have been widened, the discharge in the direction would have been prepared by it, the resistance would have been lowered and the chances for the opposite movement would have been decreased. Those people who moved to the left gave us by their action the same kind of an impulse which they would have furnished if they had begged us with words, or if they had ordered us to follow them with authoritative firmness. In each of these cases, the influence would have amounted to a suggestion. Whether we watched the movements of other people or whether their words made an impression on us, in either case the way became prepared for a certain line of action and therefore the way for the opposite action became blocked. The final outcome was thus no longer an entirely free play of motor ideas, but there was a little inequality in play. The one had from the start a better chance, the other was from the start laboring under difficulties. The suggestion of actions is thus nothing but making use of the antagonistic character in the nervous paths which start from the motor centers. That all such phrases as the opening and the closing, the widening and blocking, of channels of discharge are only metaphors hardly needs special emphasis. Instead of such comparisons, we ought rather to think of chemical processes which offer various degrees of resistance to the propagation of the nervous excitement.

We see from here the direction in which many psychotherapeutic efforts must lie, efforts which are entirely within the limits of the daily normal experience, and belong to the medical practice of every physician, yes, to the helpful influence of every man in practical life. The intemperate man may suffer from his inability to resist his desire for whiskey. The idea of his visit to the saloon finds the channels of discharge open. We argue with him, we tempt him by attractions which lead to other ways, we suggest to him that he spend those evening hours perhaps with friends or with books for which we awaken his interest; we do it as impressively as we can, we appeal to his friendly feeling for us; and if again the hour comes in which the desire for the artificial stimulation sets in with a motor impulse towards the bottle, the channels for discharge have now been blocked. The idea of the opposite action arises, it associates itself with the emotions which we stirred up in his mind, it associates itself with the respect for the adviser, and thus new clusters of thought reënforce that idea of action which we suggested, and this opposite line of action now finds a minimum resistance because our appeal has opened beforehand the gate. The desire for the book works itself out into action while the desire for the cup finds increased resistance.

Just this is the kind of suggestion with which we correct faulty action everywhere in our social circle; and yet small steps lead on from here to the case where perhaps the desire for alcohol has reached that pathological intensity in which the equilibrium is entirely disturbed and cannot be repaired without suggestions of a much more powerful character, given in a state of artificially increased suggestibility--in hypnotism. The principle of opening certain channels of discharge for the purpose of closing the opposite channels remains in the extreme case the same as in the more ordinary cases. The impulse to drink is a positive one, but the principle is not different where the impulse is negative. A friend who comes from the quiet country may feel unable to pass the busy square of the city. The fear of an accident holds back his steps, he cannot give the impulse to walk through the crowded rush of vehicles. Now either by words of advice, by persuasion or by showing the way, we may apply our suggestion, we open the channels of discharge for the necessary movements and thus decrease the excitability of those centers in which nervous fear was playing. And again small steps lead from here to the case of the psychasthenic sufferer whose phobia does not allow him to cross any square and where reënforced suggestion has to break open the ways for the walking movement when the square is reached.

Thus we are not far from a causal understanding of suggestive influences wherever actions are concerned, where movements are to be reënforced or to be suppressed and where antagonism of the motor paths is involved. But that does not seem to lead us nearer to the much larger group of states in which the whole suggestive process concerns apparently the interplay of ideas alone, where not actions but impressions are controlled by suggestion, where not impulses but thoughts are strengthened or inhibited. Here lies the real psychophysical problem which has been by far too much neglected in scientific psychology and has almost been hidden and made to disappear in the wonderful accounts of the hypnotists. But all those mysterious stories as to the achievements of suggestion cannot help so long as we do not understand the working of the process, and we shall have the better chance to understand it the more we keep away from the uncanny and mysterious results which refer to the most complex conditions, and rather seek to analyze the state in its simplest forms and compare it with other simple mental processes. The psychology of suggestion has suffered too much by the fascination which its most complex forms exert on a trivial curiosity.

Yet the problem of suggestion in the field of ideas stands after all not isolated. Instead of connecting it with the weird reports of mystic influence from man to man, let us rather link it with the simple experience of attention. There is no pulse-beat of our life in which attention does not play its little rôle. But does not attention share with suggestion the characteristic feature that some contents of consciousness are reënforced and others are suppressed? This negative, this suppressing character of attention is not a chance by-product, it is most essential. There is no attention without it. If I am studying, I do not hear the conversation around me, and if I listen to the conversation, my studies in hand become inhibited. If I enjoy the play on the stage and give to it my full attention, my memories of the day's work are suppressed; if I think of the happenings of the day, I am not attentive to the play and hardly notice what is going on. The inhibited impression may often disappear entirely. While I am reading I am not at all aware of the tactual and muscular sensations in my legs, and if I am completely absorbed by my book, I may not even notice that the bell rings. In short, we have here as the most characteristic relation, just as in suggestion, the fact that one mental state becomes vivid, and that others are losing ground, become less vivid, are inhibited and perhaps disappear entirely.

Of course, to point to the similarity between suggestion and attention is not a real explanation. It may be answered that attention simply offers the same difficulties once more. How can we explain in the attention process the fact that one idea, the one attended to, becomes vivid and that others evaporate? The difficulty evidently cannot be removed by simply saying that only one sensorial process can be developed in the brain at one time. The popular descriptions of attention easily make it appear as if such were the solution of the problem. If one sensorial brain part is intensely engaged, the remainder of the brain is condemned to a kind of inactivity. Yet such a dogma is hardly better than the old-fashioned one that the soul can have only one idea at a time. We know too well now that the psychophysical system is an extremely complex equilibrium of millions of elements. Thus every change must be explained with reference to this complex manifold. Above all, the facts simply contradict such an over-simple explanation, inasmuch as it is not at all true that only one content of consciousness can become vivid. Our attention does not focus upon one point at all but may illuminate a large field and thus give vividness to various complex groups. If I am thinking about a scientific problem, an abundance of reminiscences of previous reading and imaginative ideas of possible solutions, associative thoughts and conclusions are with equal vividness before my mind and the forthcoming thought may be influenced by this total combination. I have no right whatever to say that the idea of a certain solution excludes there in my mind the consideration of the books which I have read and of the discussions which I have heard. Emotions may be superadded. In short, a world of mental states may be held together by one act of attention. And new and ever new thoughts are shooting in, and all still find place there in the field attended to, while on the other hand my slight headache is inhibited and an appointment is forgotten. At a gay banquet, my attention may be given to the whole hall with all its color effects and its flowers, and to all that the table offers and to the music from the orchestra and to the jokes of my neighbors. It is not true that any one of those parts suppresses the vividness of the others, they seem rather to maintain and to help one another; and yet in the next moment, my neighbor may bring me news which absorbs my mind entirely and leaves no room for the flowers and the music and the meal. How far can psychology do justice to these characteristics of attention?

There seems to be but one way. The attended-to idea does not exclude every other idea, but it does exclude the opposite idea, and opposite to each other is here again that pair of ideas which lead to opposite actions, to opposite psychophysical attitudes. We must remember here the psychomotor character of our brain processes which we so fully discussed. We recognized the fundamental truth that there is no sensorial state which is not at the same time the starting-point for motor reaction. We recognized that the brain is by its whole psychological development a great switchboard which transfers incoming currents into outgoing ones and that its biological meaning lies in the fact that it is the center piece of an arc which leads from the sense organs to the muscles. We cannot conceive of those relations as complex enough; we know, of course, that millions of nerve fibers lead from the periphery to the highest psychophysical apparatus in the cortex of the brain and that millions of fibers bring about the interrelation between these central stations, but we must never forget that millions of fibers also represent the outgoing paths and that they too lead down to lower central motor instruments which are again in numberless corelations. Any impression is thus a starting point for attitudes and reactions and it is an empty abstraction to consider it otherwise. An idea is never, psychophysically considered, the end of the process, it is always also a beginning. No external action may follow, but the mental impulse to such is nevertheless starting in the highest center.

If we look at the landscape, every single spot of color, reaching a nerve fiber in our eye and finally a sensory cell in our brain, is there the starting point for an impulse to make an eye movement in the direction of the seen point. The eye may remain entirely quiet as the impulse to move to the right and to the left, to move up and to move down, may be equally strong, but those thousands of impulses work in the motor paths and only their equilibrium results in the suppression of the outer movement. With such motor scheme, we begin to understand the selective process in attention. An impression may be accompanied by other stimuli and associations, by thoughts and ideas, and thousands of sensory excitements may thus arise in the cortex, but only those have a chance for full vividness of development which coöperate in the motor action already started. Those impressions which would lead to the opposite actions have no chance because their motor paths are blocked and their own full development is dependent upon their possibility of expression. To close the path means to inhibit the idea which demands such action. We can attend to a hundred thoughts together, if they all lead to the same attitude and deed. We can look at the opera, can see every singer and every singer's gown, can listen to every word, can have the whole plot in mind, can hear the thousands of tones which come from the orchestra; and yet combine all that in one act of attention, because it all belongs to the same setting of our reactive apparatus. Whatever the one wants is wanted by the others. But if at the same time our neighbor speaks to us, we do not notice it; his words work as a stimulus which demands an entirely different motor setting as answer. Therefore the words remain unvivid and unnoticed.

To attend means therefore to bring about a motor setting by which the object of attention finds open channels for discharge in action. Which particular action is needed in the state of attention cannot be doubtful. Attention demands those motor responses and those inner steps by which the object of attention shows itself more fully and more clearly. When we give attention to the picture we want to see more details, when we give attention to the problem we want to recognize more of the factors involved, when we give attention to the banquet we want to grasp more of the pleasurable features. This aim of attention involves that, as part of such reactions, the sense organs become adjusted; we fixate the eyeball, we listen, and in consequence the object itself becomes clearer, and through the easy passage into the motor channels the whole impression becomes vivid. At the same time, all those associations must be reënforced and become vivid too which lead to the same action. On the other hand, the opening of the one passageway closes the path to the opposite action and inhibits the impressions which would interfere with our interest. Every act of attention becomes, therefore, a complex distribution in the reënforcement and inhibition of mental states.

Now let us come back to suggestion. It shares, we said, with attention, the power to reënforce and to inhibit. But if we examine what is involved in the suggestion of an idea, we find surely more than a mere turning of the attention towards one idea and turning the attention away from another idea. That which characterizes and constitutes suggestion is a belief in the idea, an acceptance of the idea as real and the dismissal of the opposite idea as unreal. Yes, we may say directly that it is meaningless to speak of suggesting an idea; we suggest either an action or, if no action is concerned, we suggest belief in an idea. If I suggest to the fearful man at twilight that the willow-tree trunk by the wayside is a man with a gun, I do not turn his attention to an abstract idea of a robber nor do I simply awaken the visual impression of one, but I make him believe that such an idea is there realized, that he really sees the person. If I suggest to him that he hears distant bells ringing or that he feels a slight headache, he may not be suggestible enough to accept it, but if he accepts it he is not simply attending to the idea which I propose but he is convinced of its real existence. The same holds true with the negative; if I suggest to him that the slight headache of which he complained has disappeared or that the smell which he noticed has stopped, I do not simply invite him to think of the absence of such sensations. It becomes for him a suggestion only if he becomes convinced that these disturbances have now become unreal. The same holds true for all those suggestions of ideas which belong to our practical life, the suggestions which art imprints on our minds, or which politics and religion impart. As long as we are under the suggestion of the novelist, we really believe in the existence of the heroine; we really believe in the validity of the political party principle; it is not an argument to which we simply give our attention, it becomes a suggestion only when the belief in its objective existence controls our minds. We may say in general that suggestions which are not suggestions of actions are without exception suggestions of belief. Actions and beliefs are the only possible material of any suggestion.

Yet what else is a belief than a preparation for action? I may think of an object without preparing myself for any particular line of behavior. Here in the room I may think of rain or sunshine on the street as a mere idea, but to know that it now really rains or shines means something entirely different. It means a completely new setting in my present attitude, a setting by which I am prepared to act along the one or the other line, to take an umbrella or to take a straw hat, when I am to leave the house. I may think of the door of this room as locked or unlocked without transcending the mere sphere of imagination, but to believe that it is the one or the other means a new setting in my motor adjustments. If it is locked I know that I cannot leave the room without a key. Every belief means the preparation for a definite line of action and a new motor adjustment in the whole system of motor paths, an adjustment by which my actions in future will be switched off at once into particular paths. And there is theoretically no difference whether my belief refers to the proposition that the door is locked or that a God exists in Heaven.

But if every belief is such a new motor setting, then we are evidently brought back to the mechanism which was essential for every suggestion of action on the one side and for every process of attention on the other side, namely, the mechanism of antagonistic movements. To prepare ourselves for one line of action means to close beforehand the channels of discharge for the opposite. The suggestible mind sees the man with a gun on the wayside because he is preparing himself in his expectation for the appropriate action; he is ready for the fight or ready to run away, and every line of the tree trunk is apperceived with reference to this motor setting. The smell, on the other hand, has disappeared under the influence of the suggestion because a new motor adjustment has set in, in which he is prepared to act as if there were no smell.

The difference between suggestion and attention lies thus only in this: the motor response in attention aims towards a fuller clearness of the idea, for instance, by fixating, listening, observing, searching; while the motor response in suggestion aims towards the practical action in which the object of the idea is accepted as real. In attention, we change the object in making it clearer; in suggestion, we change ourselves in adapting ourselves to the new situation in which we believe. If you consider attention as a psychophysical process open to physiological explanation, you have surely no reason to seek anything mysterious in the process of suggestion; and no new principle is involved, if we come from the effect of the smallest suggestive hint to the complex and powerful suggestions which overwhelm the whole personality.

The two great types of suggestion, the suggestion of actions and the suggestion of ideas, have now come nearer together since we have seen that the suggestion of ideas is really a suggestion of the practical acceptance of ideas, and that means, of a preparation towards a certain line of action. In the one case I suggest the idea of a certain action and this motor idea leads to the action itself, and in the other case I suggest a certain preparatory setting for action and that will lead to the appropriate action whenever the time for action comes. Every suggestion is thus ultimately a suggestion of activity. The most effective suggestion for an action results, of course, if both methods are combined, that is, if we suggest not only the will to perform the action, but at the same time the belief that the end of the action will be real. Suggestion reaches us usually from without. Yet there is again no new principle involved, when the new motor setting results from one's own associations and emotions. Then we speak of auto-suggestion. It is the same difference which exists between the attention called forth through an outer impression and the attention directed by our own will. Loud noise demands our attention, and even a whispered word may awaken associations which stir up the attention. In both cases the channels for adjustment become opened without our intention. But if we are expecting something of importance, if we start to watch a certain development and to find something which we seek, we open the channels by our own effort beforehand and produce our own settings thus through a voluntary attention. In this way suggestion too may start from without,--by a spoken word, by a movement, by a hint; or may start within us and may give us our caprices and our prejudices.

We must not neglect one other feature of the suggestion. Not every proposition to action or to belief can be called a suggestion. Essential too remains the other side of it, the overcoming of the resistance. A mere request, "Please hand me the book on the table," or a mere communication, "It rains," may produce and will produce the fit motor response, the movement towards handing over the book or opening of the umbrella, and yet there may be no suggestive element involved. We have a right to speak of suggestion only if a resistance is to be broken down, that is, if the antagonistic impulse, or the motor setting for the antagonistic action is relatively strong. If I say to the boy, "Hand me the book," when he was anxious to hide the book from my eyes and thus had the wish not to hand it to me and the tone of my request overwhelmed his own intention, then to be sure suggestion is at work. The stronger the resistance, the greater the degree of suggestive power which is needed to overcome the motor setting. If I say to the normal man, "It rains," while he sees the blue sky and the dry street, his impression will be stronger than my suggestion; but if he is suggestible and I tell him that it will rain, he may accept it and take an umbrella on his walk, even if no indication makes a change of weather probable. The present impression of the dry street was strong enough to resist the suggestion, the imaginative idea of that which is to be expected in the next hour was too weak, and was overwhelmed by the suggestion of the weather prophecy.

It is clear that the whole suggestive effect, being one of a new motor setting, depends thus entirely on the equilibrium of the personality which receives the suggestion. Every element which reaches the mind through sense organs or through associations must have influence in helping the one or the other side, that is, in opening the channels of action in the suggested direction or in the antagonistic one. The results appear surprising only if we forget how endlessly complex this psychomotor apparatus really is. If we disregard this complexity we may easily have the feeling that one person has an unexplainable influence over another, as if the will of the one could control in a mysterious way the will of the other. But as soon as we see that every action is the result of the coöperation of hundreds of thousands of psychomotor impulses which are in definite relation to antagonistic energies, and that the result depends upon the struggling and balancing of this most complex apparatus, then we understand more easily how outer influences may help the one or the other side to preponderance: as soon as the balance turns to the one side, a completely new adjustment must set in. And we understand especially that there is nowhere a sharp demarcation line between receiving communications and receiving suggestions. By small steps suggestion shades over into the ordinary exchange of ideas, propositions, and impressions, just as attention shades over into a neutral perception.

To be suggestible means thus to be provided with a psychophysical apparatus in which new propositions for actions close easily the channels for antagonistic activity. Such an apparatus carries with it the disadvantage that the personality may too easily be guided contrary to his own knowledge and experience. He will be carried away by every new proposition and will accept beliefs which his own thoughts ought to reject. On the other hand, it has the advantage that he will be open to new ideas, be ready to follow good examples, never stubbornly close his mind to the unaccustomed and the uncomfortable. It is easy to determine the degree of suggestibility. Take this case. I draw on the blackboard of a classroom two circles of an equal size, and write in the one the number fourteen and in the other the number eighty-nine, and ask the children which is the larger circle. The suggestible ones will believe that the circle with the higher number in it is really larger than the other, the unsuggestible children will follow the advice of their senses and call both equal, and there may be a few children with negative suggestibility who would call the circle with the higher number the smaller circle. What happened to the suggestible ones was that the higher number brought about a motor attitude which faced that whole complex as being more imposing and this new motor setting was with them strong enough to overcome the motor adjustment which the circles alone produced. Such experiments of the psychological laboratory can be varied a thousandfold, and it might not be unwise to introduce them into many practical fields. Everybody knows for instance how much may depend upon the suggestibility of the witness in court. The suggestible witness believes himself to have seen and heard what the lawyer suggests. The memory picture which such a witness has in mind offers, of course, much less resistance to the opposite action and attitude and belief than the immediate impression. If I show the witness a colored picture of a room and close the book and ask him whether there were three or four chairs in the picture and whether the curtain was green or red, the suggestible man will decide for one or the other proposition, even if there were only two chairs and a blue curtain. The perception would have resisted the suggestion, the fading memory image cannot resist it. Thus suggestibility is really a practical factor in every walk of life. And it is in the highest interests of psychotherapy that this intimate connection between suggestion and ordinary talk and intercourse, between suggestion and ordinary choice of motives, between suggestion and attention be steadily kept in view and that suggestion is not transformed into a kind of mysterious agency.

To be sure, the importance of suggestion for psychotherapy is not confined to these suggestive processes of daily life. They play a rôle there, as we shall see, and we shall claim that even the mere presence of the physician may have its suggestive power and so may every remedy which he applies. But no doubt many of his suggestive effects depend on a power which far transcends the suggestions of our daily life. Yet the psychologist must insist again that no new principle is involved, that even in the strongest forms of suggestion, in hypnotism, nothing depends upon any special influence emanating from the mind of the hypnotizer or upon any special power flowing over from brain to brain; but that everything results from the change of equilibrium in the psychomotor processes of the hypnotized, and thus upon the interplay of his own mental functions. All that is needed is a higher degree of suggestibility than is found in the normal life. In a more suggestible mind even the direct sense impressions may be overwhelmed by the proposition for an untrue belief and the strongest desires may yield to the new propositions of action. This library may then become a garden where the hypnotized person picks flowers from the floor, and the wise man stands on one leg and repeats the alphabet, if the hypnotizer asks him to do so. Let us consider at first this extreme case. By a few manipulations I have brought a man into a deep hypnotic state. He is now unable to resist any suggestion, either suggestion of impulse or suggestion of belief, and as every one of the hypnotic phenomena can be explained in this way, we may claim that the hypnotic state is in its very nature a state of reënforced suggestibility. Whether I say, "You will not move your arm," or whether I say, "You cannot move your arm," awakening in the one case the impulse to the suppression of the movement, in the other case the belief in the impossibility of the movement, in either case the result is the same; the arm remains stiff and any effort of his to move it is inhibited. I may go to the extreme and tell him that our friend by my side has left the room; he will not see him, he will not even hear a word which the friend speaks. If I take a hat in my hand and put it on the friend's head, the hat appears to hang in the air. Every impression of sound or sight or touch which comes from the friend is entirely inhibited. The direct sense impression of eye and ear is thus completely overwhelmed by the suggestion.

What has happened? Are the manipulations which I applied sufficient to produce the changes by their physical influence? Certainly not; they are of the most different kinds and yet all may have the same effect. Perhaps I may have used the easy method of making the subject stare at a shining button held in front of his forehead. Or I may have used slight tactual impressions, while he was lying with closed eyes, or I may have produced the abnormal state by monotonous noises of falling waterdrops, or I may have simply spoken to him and asked him to think of sleep and to relax and to feel tired, while I held my hand on his forehead or while I held his hand in mine. Or I may have relied upon mild talking without touching him at all; and yet every time the result was reached in the same degree. There is thus certainly no special physical energy which like a magnetic force flows over. It cannot even be said that my will is engaged. I have often hypnotized without even thinking of the subject before me, going through adjusted manipulations while my thoughts were engaged in something else. I have even hypnotized over the telephone; and a written note may be substituted with the same result. I write to the patient that two minutes after receiving this letter by mail, he will fall into hypnotic sleep. The effect sets in; and yet at that time, I may not remember sending the note at all.

It is thus entirely evident that the hypnotic effect results only from the mental conditions of the subject. Whatever may stimulate his mind to the right kind of reaction will produce the desired result. The increased suggestibility thus sets in by his own imagination which may be stirred up by slight visual or tactual or acoustic stimuli or by monotonous words or by feelings of relaxation and especially by words which encourage sleep. But just because it is the play of his own imagination, the most essential factor certainly is the will and expectation of the subject. No one can really be hypnotized against his own will. And to expect strong hypnotic effect from a certain hypnotist is often in itself sufficient to produce hypnotic sleep. Thus there is no special personal power necessary to produce hypnotism. Everybody can hypnotize. And almost with the same sweeping statement it may be said everybody can be hypnotized, provided that he is willing to enter into this play of imagination. The young child or the insane person is therefore unfit.

Of course, not everybody can be hypnotized to the same degree. Just as the normal suggestibility showed itself very different with different persons, the degree of artificial reënforcement varies still more. Practically everybody can be brought to that breakdown of the resistance in which he can no longer open the eyes against the order of the hypnotist, but rather few can be brought to the point of seeing extended hallucinations, or accepting the disappearance of persons who are speaking, or of yielding to the impulse to a dangerous action. The highest reported degree, in which even criminal actions are performed by honest men, exists in my opinion only in the imagination of amateurs; it is certainly not difficult to produce sham crimes for performance sake, with paper daggers and toy pistols, but that is no proof at all that the hypnotized person would commit a crime under conditions under which he has the conviction that he faces a real criminal situation. But if we abstract from real crime, we certainly have to acknowledge that actions can be performed which appear in striking contrast with the habits and character of the normal personality, upset his knowledge, and are based on beliefs which would be immediately rejected under ordinary conditions. These higher degrees of hypnotic state are easily followed by complete loss of memory for all that happened during the abnormal state.

How have we to interpret such a surprising alteration of mind? It lies near to compare it with sleep. The brain seems powerless to produce its normal ideas, the associations do not arise, the normal impulses have disappeared and a general ineffectiveness has set in; in short, the brain cells seem unable to function. Of course, the explanation of sleep itself may offer difficulties. Is it a chemical substance which poisons the brain during the sleep, or are the brain cells contracted so that the excitement cannot run over from the branches of one nerve cell into those of another? Or are the blood-vessels contracted so that an anæmic state makes their normal function impossible? But whatever the physical condition of sleep may be, have we really a right to emphasize the similarity between sleep and hypnosis? After all that we have discussed, we ought rather to recognize that the hypnotic state too comes much nearer to the process of attention than to the process of sleep. We saw that in every act of attention the process of inhibition is essential. All that is not in harmony with the attended idea is suppressed. Yet we should hesitate to say that in attention parts of our brain are asleep.

We should feel reluctance to group such inhibition together with sleep because it would be a sleep which at any moment can pass from one part of the brain to others and which certainly leaves at every moment most of the cell groups unaffected. We saw that attention does not at all focus on one narrow point, but that an abundance of impressions, of ideas and associations, of thoughts and emotions can enter the field of attention, if they all lead to one and the same motor attitude, and that only the one part is inhibited which involves the opposite action. Such a jumping sleep which at every moment selects a special part would be, of course, just the contrary of that which characterizes the sleep state of the fatigued brain. But exactly these characteristics of attention belong to hypnotism too. It is not true that the mind of the hypnotized is asleep and that perhaps only one or the other idea can be pushed into his mind. On the contrary, his mind is open to an abundance of ideas, just as in the normal state. If I tell him that this is a landscape in Switzerland, he sees at once the mountains and the lakes, and his mind provides all the details of his reminiscences, and his imagination furnishes plenty of additions. His whole mind is awake; the feelings and emotions and volitions, the memories and judgments and thoughts are rushing on, and only that is excluded which demands a contrary attitude. This selective process stands decidedly in the center of the hypnotic experience and makes it very doubtful whether we are psychophysically on the right track, if we make much of the slight similarity between hypnosis and sleep.

This has nothing to do with the fact that hypnosis is best brought about by suggesting the idea of sleep, that is, the belief that sleep will set in. This belief is indeed effective in removing all the ideas which are awake in the mind which would interfere with the willingness to submit to the suggestions of the hypnotizer. But the fact that belief in sleep and expectation of sleep bring with them the hypnotic state is not a proof that the hypnotic state itself is sleep. Even the mental experiences which can remain in sleep, the dreams, are characteristically different from the hypnotic experience. Thus the dreams show that unselective awakening of ideas which is to be expected from a general decrease of functioning. The hypnotic variation is characterized just by its selective narrowing of consciousness. For the same reason, hypnotism is strikingly different from such diseases of the mind as dementia. Certainly in dementia too, many associations are cut off, but it is not a selective inhibition, it is a haphazard destruction resulting from the degeneration in the brain.

The fundamental principle of the hypnotic state lies in its selective character. Inhibited and cut off are those states which are antagonistic to the beliefs in the suggested ideas, and as their antagonism consists in their connection with opposite actions, the whole is again a question of motor setting. No doubt, such new motor setting can precede the normal sleep too; thus the sleeper may be insensitive to any surrounding noises, but perhaps awake at the slightest call from a patient who is intrusted to his care. In that case, one special feature of hypnotism is superadded to sleep but the sleep itself is not hypnotic. Again sleep may go over into a state which shares many characteristic features with hypnotism, that is, somnambulism, and it may be said with a certain truth that hypnotism is artificial somnambulism. But somnambulism, while arising in sleep, is not at all a feature of sleep.

While sleep is characterized by a decrease of sensitiveness and of selective powers, the selective process of hypnotism rather reënforces sensitiveness and memory in every field which is covered by the suggestive influence. Stimuli may become noticeable which the normal man is unable to perceive, and long-forgotten experiences which seem inaccessible to the search of the waking mind may reproduce themselves and may vividly enter consciousness. Again we have there symptoms which rather characterize the state of over-attention than the state of sleep. We might add further that we know states with all the characteristics of hypnotism in which even the subjective idea of sleep is entirely absent, for instance, all those which are usually called states of fascination. A certain shining light or a glimpse of an uncanny eye may startle and upset the imagination of the subject and throw him into a state of abnormally increased suggestibility. It is well known that whole epidemics of such captivation have occurred and have resulted in hysterias of the masses in which the subjects become the slaves of their impulse, perhaps to imitate what they see or hear, or to realize ideas in which they believe without logical warrant. They surely are not asleep, are not even partially asleep. Every center of their brains would be ready to work, if the captivated attention were not forcing the mind in one direction and selectively suppressing every impulse to opposite actions. The developed hypnotism finally shades off into innumerable states of hypnoid character in which the sleeplike symptoms are entirely in the background.

Thus the increased suggestibility of the hypnotic state will result not from a partial sleeplike decrease of functioning but the decrease of function is a motor inhibition which results from over-attention. In the ordinary attention, our motor setting secures only an increase in clearness and vividness of the attended ideas, but in an abnormal over-attention the new motor setting produces a complete acceptance with all its consequences. Abnormal or heightened attention thus goes directly over into the belief and into the impulse without resistance. There is no hypnotism which does not contain from the first stage this definite relation to certain objects of attention, usually to a particular person. All the manipulations, passes, fixation, monotonous speaking, and so on narrow the contents of consciousness but hold the idea of the hypnotizing person steadily in the center of attention. The awakened expectation of sleep, the associated feeling of tiredness all help to cut off attention from the remainder of the world, but as no real sleep sets in, this cutting off from the remainder reënforces the focusing of attention on the one central idea of the hypnotizing personality. Every word and every movement of this personality become therefore absorbed with that over-attention which leads at once from a mere perceiving and grasping to a complete sinking into the suggested idea with the suppression of all opposites, and thus to a blind acceptance and belief. We saw before that such belief is indeed nothing else but a motor setting in which certain ways of action are prepared. We are to think in accordance with the belief in the suggested idea and the channels for discharge in the opposite direction are closed. Even the ordinary life shows us everywhere that the step from attention to belief is a short one. The effort to grasp the object clearly works as a suggestion to accept that which we are seeking as really existing, and that from which we are to abstract and which we are to rule out through our attention, we believe to be non-existent. The prestidigitator does his tricks in order to sidetrack our attention, but he succeeds in making us believe that we see or do not see whatever he wishes.

That the motor setting alone determines those changes and that a real sleeplike inability of the centers does not set in, can also be demonstrated by the results of later hypnotizations. I ask my hypnotized subject not to perceive the friend in the room; he is indeed unable to see him or to hear him. Yet his visual and acoustic centers are not impaired, the defect is only selective, inasmuch as he sees me, the hypnotizer, and not the friend. But even this selection inhibits only the attitude and not the sensorial excitement. If I hypnotize him again to-morrow and suggest to him now to remember all that the friend did and said during yesterday's meeting, he is able to report correctly the sense impressions which he got, which were inhibited only as long as they contradicted the suggestion, but now rush to consciousness as soon as the suggestion is reversed. As a matter of course, he must therefore have received impressions through eye and ear in his hypnotic sleep of yesterday from all that happened, only he was not aware of it because the channels of the accepting attitude were blocked.

As soon as the over-attention has produced the acceptance of the belief, all further effects are automatic and necessary. If I tell the hypnotized person that he cannot speak and he absorbs this proposition, with that completeness in which he accepts it as a fact, not speaking itself unavoidably results. The motor ideas with which the speech movement has to start are cut off and the subject yields passively to the fate that he cannot intonate his voice. Thus a special influence on the will is in no way involved. If the idea is accepted, and that means, if the preparatory setting for the action has been completed, the ideas of opposite activity must remain ineffective; the suggested idea must discharge itself in action without resistance. As a matter of course the new line of action will then surround itself with its own associations and will thus give to the subject the impression that he is acting from his own motives. As soon as the psychophysical principles are understood, there is indeed no difficulty in going from the simplest experience to those spectacular ones where we may suggest to the profoundly hypnotized person that he is a little child or that he is George Washington. In the one case, he will speak and cry and play and write as in his present imagination a child would behave; in the other case, he will pose in an attitude which he may have seen in a picture of Washington. There is nothing mysterious and his utterances are completely dependent upon his own ideas, which may be very different from the real wisdom of a Washington and the real unwisdom of a child. I may suggest to him to be the Czar, by that he will not become able to speak Russian. In the same way I may suggest changes of the surroundings; he may take my room for the river upon which he paddles his canoe, or for the orchard in which he picks apples from my bookshelves.

Finally there is no new principle involved, if the action which is prepared by any belief has to set in after the awaking from hypnotic sleep, the so-called post-hypnotic suggestion. As a matter of course, just these have an eminent value for psychotherapy. I may suggest to-day that the subject will overcome to-morrow his desire for the morphine injection, or that he will feel to-night the restfulness which will overcome his insomnia. But if the suggestion of an idea means belief, and if belief means a preparation for action, we have indeed no new factor before us if the action for which we prepare the subject is from the start related to a definite time. If we do not link it with the consciousness of a special time or of a special occasion which will occur later, the suggestion soon fades away. That my library is an orchard is forgotten perhaps within ten minutes, if I have not come back to it in the conversation. But if I say that after awaking as soon as I shall knock on my desk three times, you will be in the orchard again, the psychophysical apparatus is prepared, a new setting has set in, the three knocks will bring about the complete transformation. In short the difficulties disappear as soon as we are consistent in interpreting all suggestive influences as changes in the motor setting and as the result of the antagonistic character of all of our motor paths.

We say the difficulties disappear. Of course, that is meant in a relative sense only. It means essentially that we are able to bring the complex state of hypnotism down to the similar state of attention and motor adjustment, but of course we must not forget that we are far from a satisfactory explanation of the process in attention itself. We know that the opening of motor channels in one direction somewhat closes the channels for discharge in the opposite direction, but what mechanism does that work is still very obscure. Whichever principle of hypothetical explanation we might prefer, it certainly leads to difficulties in view of the extreme complexity of attention in states of suggestion and hypnotism. We might think of a mechanism which through the medium of the finest blood-vessels should produce a localized anæmia in those centers which lead to the antagonistic action. Or we might fancy that by extremely subtle machinery the resistance is increased in those tissues which lie between the various neurons, or we might even think of toxic and antitoxic processes in the cerebral regions; and any day may open entirely new ways of explanation. We may add that even if the mechanism of attention were completely explained, we are also still far from understanding the physiological changes which go on in the sphere of the blood-vessels or of the glands and the internal organs. We understand easily that the idea of the subject that he cannot move his arm keeps the arm stiff; but that his idea to blush really dilates the blood-vessels of his cheek is much less open to our causal understanding; still less that in very exceptional cases perhaps a part of the skin becomes inflamed, if we make believe that we touch it with a glowing iron. And yet here too we see that we move in the same direction and that we have to explain these exceptional and bewildering results by comparing them with the simpler and simpler forms, that the process of attention contains all the germs for the whole development.

In claiming that hypnotism depends upon the over-attention to the hypnotizing person, we admit that the increased suggestibility belongs entirely to suggestions which come from without. Only that which at least takes its starting point from the words or the movements of the hypnotizer finds over-sensitive suggestibility. Ideas which arise merely from the associations of the subject himself have no especially favorable chance for acceptance. But surely we also know states in which the suggestibility for certain of one's own ideas is abnormally increased. Great individual differences exist in that respect in normal life. There are normal hypochondriacs who believe that they feel the symptoms of widely different diseases under the influence of their own ideas, and others who are torturing themselves with fears on account of unjustified beliefs. But the abnormal increase of suggestibility parallel to that of hypnotism for suggestions from without exists for suggestions from within, mainly in nervous diseases, especially in neurasthenic, hysteric, and psychasthenic states. Within certain limits, we might almost say that this increase of suggestibility for autosuggestion is the fundamental characteristic of these diseases, just as increase of suggestibility for heterosuggestions characterizes hypnotism.

Especially in earlier times, the theory was often proposed that hypnosis is an artificial hysteria. Such a view is untenable to-day; but that hysteria too shows abundant effects of increased suggestibility is correctly indicated by such a theory. The hysteric patient may by any chance pick up the idea that her right arm is paralyzed or is anaesthetic and the idea at once transforms itself into a belief and the belief clings to her like an obsession and produces the effect that she is unable to move the arm or that she does not feel a pinprick on the skin. These autosuggestions may take a firmer hold of the mind than any suggestions from without, but surely such openness to selfimplanted beliefs must be acknowledged as symptomatic of disease, while hypnosis with its impositions can be broken off at any moment and thus should no more be classed among the diseases than are sleep and dreams. The hysteric or psychasthenic autosuggestion resists the mere will of breaking it off. Here, therefore, is the classical ground for strong mental counterinfluences, that is, for psychotherapeutic treatment. Experience shows that the strongest chance for the development of such autosuggestive beliefs exists wherever an emotional disposition is favorable to the arriving belief. But emotion too is after all fundamentally a motor reaction. The whole meaning of emotion in the biological sense is that it focuses the actions of man into one channel, cutting off completely all the other impulses and incipient actions. Emotion is therefore for the expressions of man what attention is for the impressions. An emotional disposition means thus in every case a certain motor setting by which transition to certain actions is facilitated. It is thus only natural that a belief can settle the more easily, the more it is favored by an emotional disposition, as the motor setting for the one must prepare the other. Hypnosis and hysteria thus represent the highest degrees of suggestibility, the one artificial, the other pathological; the one for suggestions from without, the other for suggestions from within. But between these two and the normal state there lie numberless steps of transition. The normal variations themselves may go to a limit where they overlap the abnormal artificial product, that is, the suggestibility of many normal persons may reach a degree in which they accept beliefs hardly acceptable to other persons in mild hypnotic condition. Thus there is no sharp demarcation between suggestions in a waking state and suggestions in a hypnoid state. And the expectation of coming under powerful influence may produce a sufficient change in the motor setting to realize any wonders. Moreover probably every physician who has a long experience in hypnotizing has found that his confidence in the effectiveness of the deep hypnotic states has been slowly diminished, while his belief in the surprising results of slight hypnotization and of hypnoid states has steadily grown and has encouraged him in his psychotherapeutic efforts.

VI

THE SUBCONSCIOUS

The story of the subconscious mind can be told in three words: there is none. But it may need many more words to make clear what that means, and to show where the misunderstanding of those who give to the subconscious almost the chief rôle in the mental performance sets in. The psychology of suggestion, for instance, which we have now fully discussed without even mentioning the word subconscious, figures in most popular books in the treatises of both physicians and ministers as a wonderful dominance of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind alone receives the suggestions and makes them effective, the subconscious mind controls the suggestive processes in consciousness, and the subconscious mind comes into the foreground and takes entire hold of the situation when the hypnotic state sets in.

But we are always assured that there is no need of turning to the mystery of suggestion and hypnotism to find that uncanny subpersonality in us. We try to remember a name, or we think of the solution of a problem; what we are seeking does not come to consciousness and now we turn to other things; and suddenly the name flashes up in our mind or the solution of the problem becomes clear to us. Who can doubt that the subconscious mind has performed the act? While our attention was given over to other questions, the subconscious mind took up the search and troubled itself with the problem and neatly performed what our conscious mind was unable to produce. Moreover in every situation we are performing a thousand useful and well-adapted acts with our body without thinking of the end and aim. What else but the subconscious mind directs our steps, controls our movements, and adjusts our life to its surroundings? And is not every memory picture, every reminiscence of earlier experiences a sufficient proof that the subconscious mind holds its own? The poem which we learned years ago did not remain somewhere lingering in our consciousness, and if we can repeat it today, it must be because our subconscious mind has kept it carefully in its store and is ready to supply us when consciousness has need for it.

Surely if we think how this, our subconscious mind, is able to hold all our memories and all our learning, and how it transacts all the work of controlling our useful actions and of bringing up the right ideas, we may well acknowledge that compared with it our conscious life is rather a small part. It is as with the iceberg in the ocean; we know that only a small part is visible above the surface of the water and a ten times larger mountain swims below the sea. It seems, therefore, only logical to attach this whole subconscious mental life to a special subconscious personality. Then we come to the popular theory of the two minds in us, the upper and the lower, of which we can hardly doubt that the lower one has on the whole the larger part of the business to perform. And we certainly have no right to give to the word lower mind the side-meaning that the activity is of a lower order. The most brilliant thoughts of the genius are not manufactured in his upper consciousness, they spring suddenly into his mind, their whole creation belongs thus to the assiduous work of the subconscious neighbor. There the inventor and discoverer gets his guidance, there the poet gets his inspiration, there the religious mind gets its beliefs. In short, the constitution of the mental state allows on the whole to the upper consciousness a rather decorative part while the real work is left for the lower house.

Yet it must be acknowledged that the scholars somewhat disagree as to the dignity of the lower mind. Considering the usually accepted fact that in hypnotism the lower mind comes entirely over the surface, just these hypnotic events can indeed suggest two different views of the subconscious and this doubleness is reënforced if we still add the entertaining material which comes to light by the automatic writing of mediums in their trance. The hypnotized person is ready to perform any foolishness, is not influenced by any considerations of tact and taste and wisdom and respect, and thus some of the chief believers in the subconscious personality stick to the diagnosis that the lower mind in us which shows up in hypnotism is a rather brutal, stupid, lazy, cowardly, immoral creature which ordinarily rather deserves to be subdued by our noble and wise upper personality. And the automatic writings of the mediums indorse this disrespectful view, for it is difficult to gather more idiotic slang than the emanations of these letters of the planchette. On the other hand, the hypnotized person shows an increase of sensitiveness and hyperæsthesia in which perhaps optical impressions or smells may be noticed which the ordinary man cannot perceive. Moreover the memory of the hypnotized is, as we saw, abnormally sharpened. Entirely forgotten experiences may awake again. The same holds true for the hysteric in whom also, of course, the subconscious takes hold of the inner life. Thus it seems entirely safe to say that the powers of the subconscious personality far surpass those of the upper conscious fellow, and that agrees with all those facts as to the subconscious origin of the work of the genius. Further, has it not been found again and again that the hypnotized and the hysteric cannot only remember long-forgotten parts of the past but have telepathic knowledge for distant events and even mysterious premonitions of the field of occurrences of the future?

Hypnotism is essentially the same as the old mesmerism, and mesmerism was widely acknowledged as clairvoyance, and all that harmonizes again with the experiences of the mediums whose subconscious mind in trance enters into contact with the spirits of the dead. The subconscious personality is thus really a metaphysical power which transcends the limitations of the earthly person altogether and has steady connection with the endless world of spirit and the inner soul of the universe. Most popular books, it is true, do not demand from their readers the choice between the one or the other type of the lower personality, between that brutal, vicious, ignorant creature and that far-seeing, inspired, powerful soul. They simply mix the two and adapt the special faculties of this underground man to the special requirements of the particular chapter, the subconscious being unusually wise or unusually stupid in accordance with the special facts which are just then to be explained. Even that does not always settle all difficulties. They may discover, for instance, that the subconscious mind with which we deal in the hypnotized person has again itself a subconsciousness. If we tell the hypnotized person not to see a certain picture on the wall, this subconscious personality perceives the whole room with the exception of the picture. Yet after all someone sees this picture, because if we hypnotize him the next time and ask him what the picture contained, he now knows its contents. Thus they must have been recognized in a sub-subconsciousness, and we therefore come to a personality which lives on a floor still below the basement. But experiment can demonstrate that even this most hidden personality has still its secrets which are handed downwards. In short, we finally have not merely two but a number of personalities in us.

But now let us leave these fantasies of psychological fiction. Let us turn to the concrete facts, let us see them in the spirit of modern scientific psychology, let us try to explain them in harmony with the principles of psychological explanation, and let us discriminate the various groups of facts which have led to that easy-going hypothesis of the subconscious. Discrimination indeed is needed, as it would be impossible to bring the whole manifold of facts under one formula, but there is certainly no unification reached by simply putting the same label on all the varieties and behaving as if they are all at once explained when they are called the functions of the subconscious. Two large groups may be separated. Facts are referred to the subconscious mind which do not belong to the mind at all, neither to a conscious nor to a subconscious one, but which are simply processes in the physical organism; and secondly, facts are referred to the subconscious mind which go on in the conscious mind but which are abnormally connected. Thus the subconscious mental facts are either not mental but physiological, or mental but not subconscious.

What does the scientific psychologist really mean by consciousness? We must now think back to our discussion of the principles which control the fundamental conceptions of modern psychology. We saw clearly that the psychology which is a descriptive and explanatory science of mental phenomena can by no means have the ambition to be a full interpretation of the inner reality. Our inner life, we saw, is not a series of phenomena, is not a chain of objects which we are aware of and which we therefore can describe, and which finally we can explain. But in its living reality, we saw that it is purposive, has a meaning and aim, is will and intention, and can thus be understood in its true character, not by describing and explaining it but by interpreting it and appreciating it. This is the life attitude towards personalities when we deal man to man. We do not at first consider ourselves or our fellows as mental objects to be explained but always as subjects to be understood in their meaning. If we pass from this primary attitude to the attitude of the scientific psychologist we gain, as we saw, an artificial perspective. We must consider then our inner experience of ourselves with all our states as a series of objects made up of elements connected by law. Instead of the real things which in our real life are objects of will and purpose, tools and means for us, the psychologist knows only objects of awareness, objects which have no meaning, but which simply exist and which are no longer related to a will but are connected with other objects as causes and effects. Now we deal no longer with the chairs and tables before us but from a psychological point of view they become perceptive ideas of chairs and tables, ideas which are not in the room but in our own minds. While these objects of our will and of our personality become mere ideas, our will and personality themselves become, too, a series of phenomena. Our self is now no longer the purposive will but is that group of sensations and ideas which clusters about the perception of our organism and its actions; in short, our self itself becomes an object of awareness.

Our whole inner experience thus becomes a manifold of objects. Our self and the actions of our self are thus alike for the psychologist mere phenomena, mere objects which are perceived. Will and emotion, memory idea and thought--they all are now passing appearances like the sunshine and rain, the flowers and waves. By this transformation the immediate will character of real life is given up, but instead of it a system of objects is gained, that allows description and explanation. If we are to deal at all with inner life not from a purposive but from a causal point of view, we are obliged to admit this reconstruction. Without it we cannot have any science of the mind, without it we can understand the intentions of our neighbor and appreciate the truth and morality of his meanings but we cannot causally explain his experiences or determine which effects are to be expected. It is thus not an arbitrary substitution but a procedure just as necessary and logically obligatory as the work of the chemist who substitutes trillions of invisible atoms for the glass of water which he drinks. The possibility of causal explanation of the successive facts demands this remolding of the outer and of the inner world. We have discussed that before and now only have to draw the consequences.

Thus for the psychologist the mental world is a system of mental objects. To be an object means of course to be object of some subject which is aware of it. What else could it mean to exist at all as object if not that it is given to some possible subject? But the world of objects is twofold; we have not only the mental objects of the psychologist but also the physical objects of the naturalist. Science must characterize the difference between those two and we pointed once before to the only fundamental difference. Physical objects are those which are possible objects of awareness for every subject; psychical objects are those which are possible objects of awareness for one subject only. The tree which I see is as physical tree object for every man, it is the same tree which you and I see; my psychical perception of the tree is object for one subject only. My perception can never be your perception. Our perceptions may agree but each has his own. As to the physical objects, we can entirely abstract from such reference to the subjects. We say simply: the tree exists or is part of nature; and only the philosopher is aware that we silently mean by it that it exists for every subject and that it is therefore not necessary to refer to any particular subject. But the perception of the tree which is either your idea or my idea evidently gets its existence only if it is referred and attached to a particular subject which is aware of it. Such subject of awareness is that which the psychologist calls consciousness and all the ideas and volitions and emotions and sensations and images which make up the mental life are then contents of the consciousness or objects of the consciousness. To have psychical existence at all means thus to be object of awareness for a consciousness. Something psychical which simply exists but is not object of consciousness is therefore an inner contradiction. Consciousness is the presupposition for the existence of the psychical objects. Psychical objects which enjoy their existence below consciousness are thus as impossible as a wooden piece of iron.

If consciousness is nothing but the subject of awareness for the individual objects, we see at once certain consequences which are too often forgotten in the popular, haphazard psychology. In the scientific system of psychology, consciousness has for instance nothing whatever to perform, that is, consciousness itself is in no way active. The active personality of real life has been left behind and has itself been transformed into that self which is merely content of consciousness. The person who acts and performs the deeds of our life is then only a central content of our consciousness which is crystallized about the idea of our organism. It has thus become one of the contents of which consciousness itself is passively aware. Consciousness is an inactive spectator for the procession of the contents. Thus consciousness itself cannot change anything in the content nor can it connect the contents. No other function is left to consciousness but merely that of awareness. Every change and every fusion and every process must be explained through the relations of the various contents to one another. Consciousness has, therefore, not the power to prefer the one idea or to reject the other, to reënforce the one sensation and to inhibit the other. From a psychological point of view, we have seen before that even attention does not mean an activity of consciousness but a change in the content of consciousness. Certain sensations become more impressive, more clear, and more vivid, and others fade away, become indistinct and disappear, but all that goes on in the content of consciousness and the spectator, consciousness itself, simply becomes aware of those changes. Consciousness has also in itself no special span, ideas appear or disappear not because consciousness expands or narrows itself but because the causal conditions awaken or suppress the various contents.

Consciousness has in itself no limit; all organization belongs to the content. Whatever psychical states are attributed to one organism belong thus to its consciousness but all the connections are entirely connections of the content. We, therefore, have not even the right to say that consciousness, as such, has unity. Unity too belongs to the organization of the content. One part of the content hangs together with the other parts but consciousness is only the constant condition for their existence. Where there is no unity, there it cannot have any meaning to speak of the double or triple existence. There may be a disconnection in the various parts of the content and a dissociation by which the normal ties between the various contents may be broken but consciousness itself cannot fall asunder. Thus consciousness cannot have any different degrees. The same consciousness experiences the distinct clear content and the vague fading confused content. Thus also consciousness can never be aware of itself and the word self-consciousness is easily misleading. In psychology, it can never mean that the consciousness which is a subject of all experience is at the same time object of any experience. Its whole meaning lies in its being the passive spectator. That of which consciousness becomes aware in self-consciousness is the idea of the personality, which is certainly a content. The personality, the actor of our actions, is thus never anything but an object in psychology, and consciousness never anything but a subject. Consciousness itself is thus in no way altered when the idea of the personality is changing. Only if all this is carelessly confused, if consciousness is sometimes treated as meaning subject of consciousness, and at another time as meaning the content of consciousness, and again at another time the unified organization of the content, and at still another time the connection of the content with the personality, and if finally all that is confused with the purposive reality of the immediate personal life--only then, do we find the way open to those tempting theories of the subconscious personality.

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If, instead, we stick to the scientific view, we find the following facts. First, we have everywhere with us the fact that the earlier experiences may again enter into consciousness as memory images or as imaginative ideas, that is, in the order in which they are experienced a long time before or in a new order, either with a feeling of acquaintance or without it. Certainly at no time is the millionth part of what we may be able to reproduce present in our consciousness. Where are those words of the language, those faces of our friends, those landscapes, and those thoughts; where have they lingered in the time of their seclusion? Scientific psychology has no right to propose any other theory as explanation but that no mental states at all remain and that all which remained was the disposition of physiological centers. When I coupled the impression of a man with the sound of his name, a certain excitement of my visual centers occurred together with the excitement of my acoustical centers; the connecting paths became paths of least resistance, and any subsequent excitement of the one cell group now flows over into the other. It is the duty of physiology to elaborate such a clumsy scheme and to make us understand in detail how those processes in the neurons can occur and it is not the duty of psychology to develop detailed physiological hypotheses. Psychology has to be satisfied with the fact that all the requirements of the case can be furnished by principle through physiological explanation. Least of all ought we to be discouraged by the mere complexity of the process. If a simple sound and a simple color sensation, or a simple taste and simple smell sensation, can associate themselves through mere nervous conditions of the brain, then there is nothing changed by going over to more and more complex contents of consciousness. We may substitute a whole landscape for a color patch or the memory of a book for a word, but we do not reach by that a point where the physiological principle of explanation, once admitted, begins to lose its value. Complexity is certainly in good harmony with the bewildering manifoldness of those thousands of millions of possible connections between the brain cells.

Every experience leaves the brain altered. The nerve fibers and the cells have gone into new stages of disposition for certain excitements. This disposition may be slowly lost. In that case the earlier experience cannot be reproduced; we have forgotten it. But as long as the disposition lasts--it is quite indifferent whether we conceive it more in terms of chemical changes or physical variations, as processes in the nerve cells or between the nerve cells--the physiological change alone is responsible for the awakening of the memory idea under favoring associative conditions. Of course, someone might reply: can we not fancy that there remains on the psychical side also a disposition? Each idea which we have experienced may have left a psychical trace which alone may make it possible that the idea may come back to us again. But what is really meant and what is gained by such a hypothesis?

First, do not let us forget that such a proposition could only have one possible end in view, namely, the explanation of the reappearance of memories. But when we discussed the basis of physiological psychology, we convinced ourselves that mental facts as such are not causally connected anyhow. Our real inner life has its internal connections, connections of will and purpose, but as soon as we have taken that great psychological step and look on inner life as merely psychological objects, then the material is connected only through the underlying physiological processes and we can never explain causally the appearance of an idea through the preceding existence of another idea. We may expect one after the other, but we have no insight into the mechanism which makes the second follow after the first. Such insight into necessary connection we find only on the physical side, and we saw that just here lies the starting point for the modern view of physiological psychology. If that holds true for the connections between idea and idea, of course it holds true in the same way for the connection between mental disposition and the corresponding memory. We can understand causally that a chemical disposition in the nerve fibers brings about a chemical excitement in those neurons, but how a mental disposition is to create mental experience we could not understand; and to explain it casually, we should need again a reference to the underlying physiological processes. The hypothesis of mental dispositions would thus be an entirely superfluous addition by which we transcend the real experience without gaining anything for the explanation.

Secondly, if we really needed a mental disposition for each memory picture, in addition to the physiological disposition of the brain cells, can we overlook that exactly the same thing would then be necessary for every perception also? The outer impression produces, perhaps through eye or ear or skin, an excitement of the brain cell and this excitement is accompanied by a sensation; and no one fancies that the appearance of this sensation is dependent upon a special disposition for it on the mental side. No one fancies it, because it is evident that such a hypothesis again would be entirely useless. If every new perception needed such a special mental disposition, we should have to presuppose dispositions for everything which possibly can come into our surroundings. Every smell, every word, every face which comes anew to us would need its special ready-made disposition. In other words, our mind would contain the disposition for every possible idea and that would mean that these dispositions would be in no way helps for explanation. If the disposition exists for everything, no one particular thing can be explained by the existence of that disposition. Again we should have to rely entirely upon the physiological brain excitement for explaining that this word or that word is perceived by our mind. But if the brain excitement alone is sufficient to explain the new perception in the mind, then no reason can be found why the renewed brain excitement would not be sufficient to renew the mental experience. Thus there is nowhere room for mental dispositions below the level of consciousness.

Thirdly, what could we really mean by such mental dispositions? A physiological disposition for a physiological action is certainly not the action itself. The finger movement in piano playing finds only a disposition in my brain centers, in case I am trained; the movement itself does not last. But the disposition is at least itself a change in the physical world. The molecules are somehow differently placed, the disposition has thus as much objective existence as the resulting movement. Nothing at all similar can be imagined in the sphere of psychical contents. Such mental dispositions would have to exist entirely outside the world of concrete mental experiences and, if we scrutinize carefully, we soon discover that such theories are only lingering reminiscences of the purposive view of life, and do not fit at all into the causal one. If we take the purposive attitude, then every idea and every will contains indeed all that its meaning involves and everything which we can logically develop out of it is by intention contained in it. All mathematical calculations are then contained in the thought of figures and forms, but they are contained there only by intention, they are logically inclosed; psychologically the consciousness of the figures and forms does not contain any disposition for the development of mathematical systems. We indeed have no right to throw into a psychological subconsciousness all that which is not present but involved by intention in the ideas and volitions of our purposive life.

If thus the memory idea is linked with the past experience entirely by the lasting physiological change in the brain, we have no reason to alter the principle, when we meet the memory processes of the hypnotized person or the hysteric. It is true their memory may bring to light earlier experiences which are entirely forgotten by the conscious personality, but that ought to mean, of course, only that nerve paths have become accessible in which the propagation of the excitement was blocked up before. That does not bring us nearer to the demand for a subconscious mental memory. The threshold of excitability changes under most various conditions. Cells which respond easily in certain states may need the strongest stimulation in others. The brain cells which are too easily excited perhaps in maniacal exultation would respond too slowly in a melancholic depression. Hypnotism, too, by closing the opposite channels and opening wide the channels for the suggested discharge, may stir up excitements for which the disposition may have lingered since the days of childhood and yet which would not have been excited by the normal play of the neurons. Quite secondary remains the question of how these reproduced images finally appear in consciousness, that is, whether they appear with reference to earlier happenings and are thus felt as remembrances, or whether they enter as independent imaginations, or whether they finally, under special conditions, take the character of real, new perceptions. The latter case is well-known in crystal-gazing, where long-forgotten memory ideas project themselves into the visual field like hallucinations. But for the theory of the subconscious, even these uncanny crystal visions do not mean more than the simplest awakening of the experience of a landscape image of yesterday.

We turn to a second group of facts and again we have no fault to find with the observation of the facts, even of the most surprising and exceptional ones. Our objection refers to the interpretation of them. This second group contains the active results of such physiological nervous dispositions. In the first group, the dispositions come in question only as conditions for a new excitement which was accompanied by mental experience. In this second group, the dispositions are causes for other physiological processes which either lead to actions or to influences on other mental processes. The dispositions are here working like the setting of switches which turn the nervous process into special tracks. In the simple cases, of course no one doubts that a purely physiological basis is involved. The decapitated frog rubs its skin where it is touched with a drop of muriatic acid in a way which is ordinarily referred to the trained apparatus of his spinal cord, as no brain is left, and the usefulness of the action and its adjustment is very well understood as the result of the connecting paths in the nervous system.

From such simple adjustment of reactions of the spinal cord, we come step by step to the more complex activities of the subcortical brain centers, and finally to those which are evidently only short-cuts of the higher brain processes. That we react at every change of position with the right movements to keep our bodily balance, that we walk without thinking of our steps, that we speak without giving conscious impulse for the various speech movements, that we write without being aware of the motor activity which we had to learn slowly, that we play the piano without thinking of the special impulses of the hands, that we select the words of a hasty speech, if we have its aim in mind, without consciously selecting the appropriate words--all that is by continuous transitions connected with those simplest automatic reactions. And from here again, we are led over gradually perhaps to the automatic writings of the hysteric who writes complex messages without having any idea of their content in consciousness. It is in such cases certainly a symptom of disease that the activity of these lower brain centers can go over into the motor impulse of writing without producing secondary effects in the highest conscious brain centers; it is hysterical. But that the message of the pencil can be brought about by such operation of lower brain centers, or at least with imperfect coöperation of the higher brain centers, is certainly entirely within the limits of the same physiological explanation.

On the other hand, nothing is changed in the theoretic principles of the case if the effect of these automatic processes in the nervous system is not an external muscle action at first, but an influence on other brain centers which may furnish the consciousness with new contents. We try to remember a name, that is, a large number of neuron processes are setting in which normally lead to the excitement of that particular process which furnishes us the memory image of the name. But those brain cells may not respond, the channels may be blocked somehow or the excitability of those cells may be lowered. Now new excitements engage our psychophysical system. We are thinking of other problems. In the meantime, by the new equilibrium in the brain the blockade in these first paths may slowly disappear or the threshold of excitability may be changed. The physiological excitement may now be carried effectively into those tracts. The cell response sets in and suddenly the name comes to our mind. This purely physiological operation in our brain paths must thus have exactly the same result which it would have had, if more parts of the process had been accompanied by conscious experience. And again from mere remembering a forgotten name, we come by slow steps to the solution of a problem, to the invention, and finally to the creation of the genius.

Superficiality of thought is easily inclined to object to such a physiological interpretation and perhaps to denounce it pathetically as a crude materialism which lowers the dignity of mental work. Nothing shows more clearly the confusion between a purposive and causal view of the mind. In the purposive view of our real life, only our will and our personality have a meaning and can be related to the ideas and higher aims. Nature is there nothing but the dead material which is the tool of our will and which has to be mastered by the personality. In that world alone lie our duty and our morality. But as soon as we have gone over to the causal aspect of our life and have taken the point of view of the psychologist, making our inner life a series of contents of consciousness, of psychical phenomena, we have transformed our inner experience in such a way that it has become itself nothing but nature.

It is mental nature, nature of psychical stuff, but each part of it is nothing but a mental element, a mental atom without any meaning and without any value; nothing but a link in the chain, nothing but a factor in the explanation of the whole, nothing to which any ethical or æsthetic or logical or religious significance can any longer be attached. The psychical sensations and the physical atoms are equally material for naturalistic explanation. To understand causally a certain effect, for instance the creation of a work of art, of a discovery or a thought or a deed as the product of psychical processes, is thus in no way more dignified or more valuable than to understand it as the product of physiological brain processes. The one is not more dignified than the other because both alike have nothing whatever to do with dignity. Both alike are the necessary results of the foregoing processes, and to attach a kind of sentimental preference to the explanation through conscious factors is nothing but a confused reminiscence again of the entirely different purposive view of life. And surely nothing is gained for the higher values of life if this confusion sets in, because if the popular mind becomes unable to discriminate between the secondary, causal, artificial aspect of science and the primary, purposive aspect of life, the opposite effect lies still nearer: the values of the real life suffer and are crowded out by the knowledge of the scientific facts. Man's moral freedom is then wrongly brought in question, as soon as it is learned that every action is the product of brain processes. Life and science alike will gain the more, the more clearly the purposive and the causal point of view are separated and the more it is understood that this causal aspect itself is demanded by certain purposes of life. The oratory of those who denounce the physiological theories as lacking idealism in reality undermines true moral philosophy. There is no idealism which can really flourish merely by ignoring the progress of science and confusing the issues. The true values of the higher life cannot be safely protected by that thoughtless idealism which draws its life from vagueness and which therefore has to be afraid of every new discovery in scientific psychology. Our real ideals do not lie at all in the sphere in which the problem of causally explaining the psychological phenomena arises.

Our conscious experiences are thus indeed not only here and there, but usually the products of chains of processes which go on entirely on the physiological side. We have no reason at all to seek for those preceding actions any mental accompaniment outside of consciousness, that means, any subconscious mental states. Then, of course, this physiological explanation also covers entirely those after-effects of earlier experiences, especially emotional experiences, which the physician nowadays likes to call subconscious "complexes." We shall see what an important rôle belongs to these facts, especially in the treatment of hysteria and psychasthenia, but the interpretation again ought to avoid all playing with the conception of the subconscious. Emotional experiences may produce there some strong stable dispositions in the brain system which become mischievous in reënforcing or inhibiting certain thoughts and actions without awakening directly conscious experiences. The whole psychological switch system may have been brought into disorder by such abnormal setting of certain parts, but the connection of each resulting accident with the primary emotional disturbances does not contradict the fact that all the causes lie entirely in disturbances of the central paths. It is a change in the neurons and their connections. To discover it we may have to go back to early conscious experiences, but in the process itself there is no mental factor, and therefore no subconscious emotion is responsible for the mischief carried out.

Both groups of facts which we have studied so far, have dealt with processes which were indeed not conscious but which we had no right to call subconscious inasmuch as they contained no mental process at all but only physiological dispositions and actions. We turn finally to the other smaller and more abnormal group of so-called subconscious facts in which the facts are mental indeed and not only physiological, but not at all outside of consciousness and thus again not subconscious. A conscious fact may easily suggest the appeal to subconscious theories to those who have accepted such theories for other reasons. There are, for instance, plenty of mental experiences which we do not notice or which we do not recognize. Yet if we find later that they must have influenced our mind, we are easily inclined to refer them to subconscious activity. But it is evident that to be content of consciousness means not at all necessarily to be object of attention or object of recognition. Awareness does not involve interest. If I hear a musical sound, I may not recognize at all the overtones which are contained in it. As soon as I take resonators and by them reënforce the loudness of those overtones, they become vivid for me and I can now notice them well even when the resonators are removed. I surely was aware of them, that is, had them in consciousness all the time but there were no contrast feelings and no associations in consciousness which gave them sufficient clearness to attract attention.

In this way I may be again led by gradual stages to more and more complex experiences. I may overlook and yet include within my content of consciousness most various parts of my surroundings; and yet the neglected is not less in consciousness itself than the attended. Much that figures in literature as subconscious means indeed nothing else but the unattended. But it belongs to the elements of psychological analysis to recognize that the full content of consciousness is always larger than the narrow field of attention. This narrow field on the other hand has certainly no sharp demarcation line. There is a steady shading off from the most vivid to the least vivid. We cannot grasp those least vivid contents of consciousness, we cannot fixate them as such, because as soon as we try to hold them, they move from the periphery of the content into its center and become themselves vivid and clear. But as we are surely aware of different degrees of clearness and vividness in our central mass of contents, we have no difficulty in acknowledging the existence of still lower degrees of vividness in those elements which are blending and fusing into a general background of conscious experiences. Nothing stands out there, nothing can be discriminated in its detail. That background is not even made up of whole ideas and whole memories and whole emotions and feelings and judgments and volitions, but of loose fragments; half ideas and quarter ideas, atoms of feelings and incipient impulses and bits of memory images are always mixed in that half-dark background. And yet it is by principle not less in consciousness, and consciousness itself is not different for these contents. It is not half-clear consciousness, not a lower degree of awareness, only the objects of awareness are crumbled and fading.

Whether these background objects really exist can only be made out by studying carefully the changes which result under different conditions, the influences which those loose parts have on the structure of the whole, and the effect of their complete disappearance. I may never really notice a little thing in my room and yet may be aware that it has been taken away. The visual image of it was an element of my mental background, when I was sitting at my desk, but it never before moved to the center of my conscious content. But this center itself is also constantly changing. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other idea may enter into it, but in this alternation that which is not in the focus either remains in consciousness unattended or when it disappears from it it loses its mental character altogether. If I attend a tiresome lecture while my mind is engaged with a practical problem of my own life, there may be a steady rivalry between the words which come with the force of outer stimulus to my brain and make me listen and my inner difficulties which claim my attention. I listen for a while, and then suddenly, without noticing it, my own thoughts may have taken the center of the stage and again without sudden interruption a word may catch my attention. While I was thinking of my own problem the sounds of the lecturer were really outside of my field of attention, yet some remark now pushes itself again into the center. That does not mean that a subconscious mind is listening while my lucid mind was thinking, but it does mean that those words were unattended and remained in the periphery of the field of consciousness. But when some of the sentences stirred up in that peripheral field some important associations, they were strong enough to produce a new motor reaction by which the mental equilibrium became changed again and by which the lecturer overwhelmed my private thoughts. Yet even this state of mind, without any break, can go over into an absolutely physiological process. I may for a while really inhibit the lecturer's voice completely and remain in the thoughts of my own imagination. After a minute or two, the resistance against the acoustical stimulus will certainly be broken and the sound will again enter into my consciousness, but in that interval there was no subconscious and not even any unattended mental function; there was no mental process at all. The sound reached my brain but as the motor setting was adverse, the sounds did not bring about that highest act of physiological transmission which is accompanied by mental contents. Thus it became entirely physiological. Yet of course every word reached my brain and left traces there. If I were hypnotized after the lecture and thus the threshold for the real awakening of brain excitements lowered, it might not be impossible that some of the thoughts of the lecturer which did not enter my consciousness at all, are now afterwards in the hypnotic state stirred up in me. Yet even that would not indicate that they had become mental and thus subconscious at the time of the lecture.

The so-called subconscious, which in reality is fully in consciousness but only unnoticed, easily shades over into that unconscious which is also in consciousness but dissociated from the idea of the own personality and thus somewhat split off from the interconnected mass of conscious contents. Wherever we meet such phenomena, we are in the field of the abnormal. The normal mental life is characterized by the connectedness of the contents. Yet even that holds true, of course, only if we think of those mental states which exist at one and the same instant in consciousness. As soon as we consider the succession of mental events, we cannot doubt that even normal experience shows breaks, lapses, and complete annihilation of that which a moment before was a real content in our consciousness. We may have looked at our watch and certainly had in glancing at the dial a conscious impression, but in the next moment we no longer know how late it is. The impression did not connect itself with our continuous personal experience, that is, with that chief group of our conscious contents which we associate with the perception of our personality. Under abnormal conditions of the brain, larger and larger parts of the completely conscious experience may thus be cut off from the continuity of conscious life. But to be in consciousness, and therefore to be not-subconscious, does not mean to be through memory ties connected with the idea of our own personality.

The somnanbulist, for instance, may get up at night time and write a letter, then go to bed again and not know anything of the event when he awakes in the morning. We have no reason to claim that he had no knowledge of the letter in his consciousness when he wrote it. It is exactly the same consciousness from a psychological standpoint as the one with which he wakes up. Only that special content has in an abnormal way entirely disappeared, has not left a possibility of awakening a memory image, and the action of the personality in writing has thus become separated and cut off from the connected experiences of the man. But while the nocturnal episode may be entirely forgotten, it was not less in consciousness for the time being, than if a normal man should leave his bed hastily to write a letter. Moreover under abnormal conditions, as for instance in severe hysteric cases, those dissociated contents may form large clusters of mental experiences in the midst of which a new idea of the own personality may develop. Considering that through such disconnection many channels of discharge are blocked, while others are abnormally opened, it seems only natural that the idea of the own acting personality becomes greatly changed. Thus we have in such an episode a new second personality which may be strikingly different in its behavior and in its power, in its memories and in its desires, from the continuous normal one, and this secondary personality may now develop its own continuity and may arise under special conditions in attacks which are connected among one another by their own memory bonds.

The two personalities may even alternate from day to day and the normal one may itself become pathologically altered. In that case the two alternating personalities would both be different from the original one. But again we have even in such most complex and exceptional cases only an alternation in the contents, not an alternation in the consciousness itself. Different ideas of the own personality with different associations and impulses follow each other in consciousness and the abnormality of the situation lies in the lack of memory connections and of mutual influences, but consciousness remains the same throughout. It remains the same, just as we do not change consciousness if we feel ourselves in one hour as members of our family, in the next hour as professional workers in our office, again later as social personalities at a party or as citizens at a political meeting or as æsthetic subjects at the theater. Each time we are to a high degree a different personality, the idea of our self is each time determined by different groups of associations, memories, emotions, and impulses. The differentiation is to be considered as normal only because broad memory bridges lead over from one to the other. The connection of the various contents with the various ideas of the own personality constitutes thus in no way a break of consciousness itself and relegates no one content into a subconscious sphere.

Finally the same holds true, if the idea of the personality as content of consciousness in the patient is split into two simultaneous groups, of which each one is furnished with its own associations. Yet the interpretation here becomes extremely difficult and arbitrary. Take the case that a patient in severe hysteria at our request writes down the history of her life. We should not hesitate to say that she is doing it consciously but now we begin to talk with her and slowly the conversation takes her attention while her pencil is continuing to write down the connected story of her youth. Again the conversation by itself gives the impression of completely conscious behavior. As both functions go on at the same time, the person who converses does not know what the person who writes is writing, and the writer is uninfluenced by the conversation. Various interpretations are possible. Indeed we might think that by such double setting in the pathological brain two independent groups in the content of consciousness are formed, each one fully in consciousness and yet both without any mutual influence and thus without mutual knowledge. In the light of such interpretation, it has been correctly proposed to speak of coconscious processes, rather than subconscious. Or we may interpret it more in harmony with the ordinary automatic writing or with other merely physiological reactions. Then we should suppose that as soon as the conversation sets in, the brain centers which control the writing movement work through channels in which no mental factors are involved. One of the two characteristic reaction systems would then be merely physiological. We saw before that the complexity of the process is no argument against the strictly physiological character of the event. That various activities can coexist in such a way that one of them may at any time slide down from the conscious centers to the merely physical ones, we all know by daily experience. We may go home through the streets of the busy town engaged with our thoughts. For a while the idea of our way and of the sidewalk is in our consciousness, when suddenly we reach our house and notice that for a long while we have no longer had any thought at all of the way. We were absorbed by our problems, and the motor activity of walking towards our goal was going on entirely in the physiological sphere. But whether we prefer the physiological account or insist on the coconscious phenomena, in either case is there any chance for the subconscious to slip in? That a content of consciousness is to a high degree dissociated or that the idea of the personality is split off is certainly a symptom of pathological disturbance, but it has nothing to do with the constituting of two different kinds of consciousness or with breaking the continuous sameness of consciousness itself. The most exceptional and most uncanny occurrences of the hospital teach after all the same which our daily experience ought to teach us: there is no subconsciousness.