Part 32

However this may be, the admission or denial that these feelings are emotions does not necessarily affect the question whether or not this is the only origin, of pleasure and pain. As has already been said, those feelings to which no one will deny the name of emotions are not usually, in adult human beings, at least, direct reactions on sensation. If it be true that the start we give at the unexpected slamming of a door is a sort of fright, it is a very rudimentary sort compared with that which one feels when the cry of fire is raised in a crowded theatre. “A burnt child dreads the fire.” It is not the sight of the fire, but the thought of the burning, that arouses the emotion. When a man reads in the newspaper of the death of a friend, or a rise in the value of property in which he is interested, it is not the sight of the black marks on the white paper, but the beliefs which, through a long and intricate series of associations they call up, which move his feelings. If he could not read, he would see the same announcement without any emotion. The usual origin of the emotions _par excellence_ is by way of association.

Suppose that I have taken a nauseous dose, and made a wry face over it. No one, I presume, would question that the disagreeableness lay in the unpleasant taste, and not in the distortion of the countenance. Now, suppose I have to repeat the dose, and my face takes on a similar expression at the anticipation to that which it wore when I took it originally. How does this come about? If I can trust my own consciousness, it is because the vivid reproduction, in memory, of the unpleasant taste is itself unpleasant. I do not see how it can well be otherwise. Professor James says (p. 649) that “the first element of memory is the revival in the mind of an image or copy of the original event.” How can I have a copy in my mind of a pain if it is not painful? Take away the painfulness of it and there would be nothing left. I might remember the circumstances under which it occurred, and judge from them that I must have suffered pain, but I could not, it seems to me, remember the pain itself. Whether that is possible or not, I feel sure that the fact, in my own case, is, that my memory of a pain resembles it in the same way that my memory of the circumstances in which it occurred resembles them. If this be the fact, what can be more natural than that it should excite the same sort of associated movements that were excited by the original sensation? I cannot make it seem any more credible, to return to the example mentioned above, that my repugnance to a repetition of the dose is due to my involuntary movements than that my discomfort in taking it originally was due to the similar movements that occurred then.

Suppose that a child who has eaten and enjoyed an orange is offered another. The sight of it calls up the recollection of the agreeable taste, and the expectation of a repetition of the pleasant experience excites expressions of pleasure. If the fruit is snatched away, the disappointment at the loss of the expected pleasure is distressing, and very probably may result in his weeping. I hardly think that any one who will consult his own consciousness will say that the reason he likes the taste of an orange is that it makes him laugh or smile to get it. He likes it because it tastes good, and is sorry to lose it for the same reason. The laughing or weeping is, I think, unquestionably the result of the pleasure or grief, not of the mere perception of an object in itself indifferent.

It is true that emotions of this sort do not always arise by way of personal association. Young children are apt to be afraid of strangers, of large animals, and of loud noises. I can remember being frightened at my first sight of a locomotive. Here we come upon the questions of inherited experience and natural selection, which can hardly be discussed in an article like this. The objects of which young children are instinctively afraid, as a rule, are either dangerous themselves, or more or less similar to dangerous objects. I see no more difficulty in supposing that mental pleasure and pain, on the sight of special objects, may be a matter of organisation than in the case of the analogous physical sensations.

My view of the matter, then, is that emotion in the sense in which the word is commonly used bears the same relation to perceptions or beliefs that feelings of physical pleasure or pain do to the objective or intellectual quality of sensations. I am inclined to think it proper to class all pleasurable and painful feelings together as emotions. If this view is correct, it would, of course, include those feelings to which Professor James would confine the term. I should not at all hesitate to admit that the emotional state of a person who trembles and turns pale with fear is different from that of one who preserves his self-possession in the presence of a danger that he realises and dreads. I think it is true that the voluntary actions prompted by an emotion have some tendency to intensify it. But, so far as I can analyse my own feelings, the pleasures and pains of memory and imagination seem to me just as real as those of sensation, and not at all to be confounded with them. When I try to subtract all motor reactions and resulting sensations from the feeling of fear, for instance, there remains not merely the intellectual perception that the event dreaded is not desirable, but the perfectly distinct emotional consciousness that I do not desire it.

This view seems to be favored by the analogy between the relations of sensation to reflex movement on the one hand, and of perception to voluntary movement on the other, which will, I think, be found to be very complete. We have reflex acts which are useful, such as breathing, the beating of the heart, swallowing and coughing; and others, like groaning, weeping, and trembling, which seem to be useless. In like manner, emotions of hope or fear may give rise to voluntary acts calculated to enable the subject of the emotion to secure or avoid its object. If I burn my fingers, my hand is involuntarily snatched away. Such would not be the case if the burn caused no pain. If I see that the house is on fire, I try to escape, either by extinguishing the fire or by getting out of the house. It seems to me evident that I should not do so if the thought of being burned were not painful. Such emotions may also occasion useless acts, more or less similar to those mentioned above. A person who saw no way of escape from a burning house might tremble, weep, or groan from fear.

On the evolutionary hypothesis, it seems easy to understand how the reproduction, by memory or imagination, of certain feelings might bring about movements like those excited by the original feelings. Professor James would have us believe that this reproduction is always, in itself, indifferent, that is, merely intellectual; but that it is, nevertheless, capable of setting up the movements which, in the case of peripheral stimuli, are the results of pleasure and pain, and that the consciousness of these movements is, in such cases, the sole cause of the emotional condition. Such a reversal of relations seems to me highly improbable. Each one must decide for himself which view is more in accordance with the facts of his own consciousness.

W. L. WORCESTER.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] _Two Cases of General Cutaneous and Sensory Anæsthesia, without Marked Psychical Implication._ By Henry J. Berkley, M. D., Baltimore. [Brain, Part IV. 1891.]

PROFESSOR ERNST MACH’S TERM SENSATION.

SUPPLEMENTARY TO HIS CONTROVERSY WITH THE EDITOR.

_The Monist_, Vol. I, No. 3, contains a controversy between Prof. Ernst Mach and myself on some questions of psycho-physics in which Professor Mach, having reference to an editorial article on “Feeling and Motion,” regards sensations as the “elements of reality,” “while motion,” he says, “is a mere mental auxiliary, an artificial expedient.” “Physicists,” we are told, “have accustomed us to regard the motions of atoms as more real than the green of trees. In the latter I see a (sensory) fact, in the former a _Gedankending_, a thing of thought.”

In contradistinction to Professor Mach I maintained that our scientific terms, although abstract concepts and things of thought, or noumena, are after all descriptive of actual facts; they are symbols representing features of reality. Motions, i. e., that which is meant by the term motion, is a reality, and what the chemist calls atoms is a definite quality of certain facts of experience. Atoms are not things in themselves, as the name seems to suggest, but rather proportional relations conveniently so expressed as if they were ultimate units or concrete little bodies of a definite mass or weight. What atoms are, aside from representing the proportions in which elements combine, we do not know. We may define “atom” as the minimal weight in which an element enters into chemical combinations, but such atoms have never been an object of observation. For aught we know, they may as little be discrete bodies as a curve consists of discrete straight lines, which, as such, would be unobservable only because infinitesimally small. The infinitely small straight line into which a curve is analysed by mathematicians is a fiction, wisely devised for calculating the path of the curve. This fiction is as Professor Mach says, an artifice only, not a reality, or as I say, an allegoric expression to characterise not whole concrete realities, but certain features of reality in their abstractness.

Scientific terms are comparable to myths that contain deep religious truths. The fiction of the myth is only the vehicle of its meaning. The naked meaning in its abstract purity may be difficult to grasp. Thus our imagination steps in and completes the picture so as to render it concrete and easily thinkable.

Now, when several months ago I met Professor Mach at Prague, our conversation naturally touched upon the problems which had formed the subject of our discussion. Professor Mach assented to my speaking of scientific terms as abstracts. That, accordingly, must be considered as the point of agreement. But when I proposed that the term sensation also was according to my terminology an abstract term representing one feature of reality only and excluding other features, Professor Mach took exception to it, saying that he understands by sensation reality itself. Very well then, this is the difference; and this difference is after all a difference of terms only. I understand by sensation the psychical feature of the data of experience only, to the exclusion of what may be called its physical aspect. Sensation accordingly, as I use the term, is not the whole of the given reality but only one of its qualities. If, as Professor Mach uses the term, sensation is another name for reality, the main difference between our views appears to be removed.

P. CARUS.

BOOK REVIEWS.

VORLESUNGEN ÜBER DIE MENSCHEN- UND THIERSEELE. By _Wilhelm Wundt_. Zweite umgearbeitete Auflage. Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss. 1892.

The new edition of Wundt’s _Menschen- und Thierseele_ is one of the best existing general introductions to psychology. It preserves nearly the just mean between the purely introspective and abstract treatment and the substitution of physiology for psychology with which recent treatises have familiarised us. The author has completely rewritten the edition of 1863, which he regards as a youthful indiscretion (_Jugendsünde_)—retaining only such chapters as could be brought into harmony with his maturer views and with the developed science of psycho-physics that has taken the place of the _Zukunftsprogramm_ of thirty years ago. He has wisely omitted all the superficial and diffuse chapters on comparative psychology and ethnology which cumbered the original work; has silently ignored the fantastic speculations as to the identity of electricity and nerve-force (one of the worst of the aforesaid youthful sins); and practically abandoned (perhaps as too esoteric for popular exposition) the elaborate reduction of sensations and perceptions to unconscious judgments and inferences.

The first thirteen or fourteen chapters offer a very clear and interesting résumé of the chief doctrines of the _Physiologische Psychologie_ in regard to sensations generally, their measurements and qualities, Weber’s and Fechner’s laws, the special sensations of color, hearing, and the muscular sense, and the problem of space perception. Following the plan of the original work in these chapters, the author aims less at completeness of statement than to present clearly the distinctive doctrines of modern psychology. In the treatment of certain themes, e. g. Fechner’s law, and the perception of space, he neglects, for the sake of clearness, qualifications of detail which the special student must look for in the larger work. The last sixteen chapters deal with the feelings, the will, consciousness, attention, association and apperception, conception, abnormal and animal psychology and instinct, concluding with two notable lectures on the “Freedom of the Will” and the “Immortality of the Soul.” It is to these chapters that we must look for Wundt’s general psychological and philosophical system. Profiting by recent criticisms he has here set forth his characteristic doctrines in so clear and definite a final statement that further misconception of them is hardly permissible. The remainder of this notice will be devoted to what is perhaps the most interesting question thus suggested: Wundt’s relation to the associationist psychology of Spencer on the one side, and to the younger German school of experimental psychologists on the other. Wundt ignores the Spencerian form of the associationist psychology, and the young psychologists do injustice to Wundt, neither side apparently condescending to read with attention the writings of the other. The debate, so far as it is not merely verbal, springs from two real differences of method: (1) Wundt in his psychological analysis habitually takes account of the problems of the theory of knowledge (_Erkenntnisstheorie_), or ultimate metaphysics, which the young psychologists endeavor (not always with success) systematically to exclude. (2) Wundt, gifted with superior powers of introspection, is more aware than the young psychologists of the infinite complexity and subtlety of mental states. He prefers, therefore, to a schematic simplification of the phenomena a terminology and descriptive analysis that reflect in some measure their manifold diversity. And thus while Wundt finds the pure associationist psychology barren and tautologous, the young psychologists see in Wundt’s complicated terminology only a shamefaced reversion to the discarded psychology of a substantial soul endowed with autonomous “faculties.” But the analysis of our mental states which Wundt gives by means of this terminology is really only a subtler restatement of the analysis of Mill, Spencer, and Taine, to which the new psychology has not been able to add anything of moment. It is true that he proclaims the inadequacy of association, even when translated into the diagrams of a hypothetical cerebral anatomy, to “explain” fully our conscious active mental life. But in this he is at one with Spencer (ultimate scientific ideas), J. S. Mill (Examination of Hamilton), and Schopenhauer (_Epiphilosophie_). It is gross injustice to stigmatise as an abandonment of the scientific attitude of mind this occasional passing recognition of the seeming ultimate inexplicability of things. In no single concrete instance can it be shown that Wundt now sacrifices the recognised methods and postulates of modern scientific investigation to the psychological hypostisations which his opponents detect in his terminology.

In confirmation of these statements I will give a brief summary of Wundt’s doctrine of association and apperception with an occasional indication of its relation to the psychology of Spencer. Wundt distinguishes the totality of mental states which are perceived from the presentation at the focus of consciousness which is apperceived. In this way (substituting everywhere _dunkel bewusst_ for _unbewusst_) he avoids the metaphysics of the unconscious, while getting the benefit of the entire analysis of its advocates. I do not think the ultimate difficulty can be evaded in this way, but will not stop to argue the point. A further advantage of this distinction is that it makes possible a dynamic treatment of mental states as “events” in place of the crude psychology that deals with the conditions of any mental state as so many ready-made parts externally dovetailed into the completed product. The active side of consciousness is taken into account from the outset. The mental state at any moment is described by indicating the presentation which is then at the focus of consciousness (apperceived) and the accompanying faintly conscious presentations that qualify its tone and total effect. The given mental state is “explained” by tracing out the dynamic readjustments that brought this particular presentation to the focus, and grouped the faintly conscious presentations about it. Now the bringing of a presentation to the focus of conscious attention is the primitive psychical activity, the elementary act of will,[58] and since Wundt places this at the beginning he rejects all evolution of will or instinct from reflex action, and thus, it will be said, here at least puts himself in distinct opposition to advanced scientific thought. Let us distinguish. So far as we are dealing with the developed minds we know, Wundt’s distinction is merely the expression of an observed psychological fact. External volition does go back to internal voluntary attention and this to a focussing of consciousness for which apperception is as good a term as another. Such focussing of the attention is for us now the primary reaction of the “self” on its received impressions. Out of a given group of presentations I apperceive by preference one and you another, because at the time my “self,” my mind, differs from yours. This self may be only a convenient shorthand expression for a passive product of external forces. The feeling of the reaction of the self may be an illusion, and its activity may be merely the mechanical action of a relatively coherent group of presentations when a new presentation is introduced among them, and the whole process may be explicable in terms of associations. But the feeling exists, and Wundt has described and analysed it better than any of his critics.

On the other hand, if the question is of the hypothetical origin of mind, we are at once brought face to face with an ultimate metaphysical problem which the new psychology impatiently ignores, which Spencer grudgingly acknowledges, but which Wundt and Kantians like Riehl find confronting them at every stage of their analysis. Conscious mind cannot conceive of its own origin, and therefore all psychological theories of development must postulate in some form the elements of consciousness and will. Nothing that I could add to the dialectics of this question would influence those who feel no difficulty here. They require a long course of Kantian criticism or its equivalent. At any rate it is not fair polemic to class a thinker as unscientific merely because he recognises this difficulty and gives it expression in his psychology, instead of contemptuously relegating it to metaphysics.

After thus laying the foundations in the doctrine of apperception for the psychology both of cognition and of the will, Wundt proceeds to restate the associationist analysis of Mill and Spencer in a more elaborate terminology but in substantial agreement with Spencer till he reaches the “concept,” when the introduction of apperception gives rise to a seeming difference. Spencer distinguishes simultaneous from successive association as carefully as Wundt. What Wundt, after Herbart calls “complications,” namely the joint reference to one object of a number of disparate presentations of sense, is clearly described by Spencer (“Principles of Psychology,” §§ 315-355); and Wundt’s “assimilations” do not differ appreciably from Spencer’s “still less conscious” processes of “organic classification” (“Principles of Psychology,” § 320). Into the metaphysics of the ultimate relations of contiguity and similarity as laws of association I cannot enter here. Similarity will always be recognised as ultimate by those who, like Spencer, approach the problem first from the psychical side, while a purely materialistic treatment in terms of nervous currents, such as we find in James, will endeavor to do away altogether with similarity, which simply cannot be expressed in terms of nerve-structure without reasoning in a circle. Wundt retains similarity but endeavors to coördinate it with contiguity. The problem is really identical with the final question of the relations of “mind” and “body,” and cannot be profitably discussed apart from that question.

Coming now to the concept and the judgment, we find Wundt affirming that the different forms of simultaneous and successive association (as he has defined them) are not an exhaustive classification of mental processes—that they do not include the concept. Well, he is at liberty to define his own terms, and before we accuse him of hypostasising a new faculty to account for the concept, let us scrutinise his meaning. We shall find that he merely repeats, in a subtler terminology of his own, the analysis of Berkeley, Mill, Taine, Spencer, and Romanes. These writers treat the concept as a complicated associational group held together by the word. Now Wundt, while conceding the theoretic admissibility of this form of statement, holds that such groups present so many distinct characteristics that all delicacy of psychological discrimination is sacrificed by confounding them under one denomination with other associational complexes. He does not, like Professor James, bid introspective psychology “throw up the sponge” here, but wishes to carry his analysis into recesses which the instruments of the associationists are too clumsy to explore. In the interests of this analysis he limits the term association to combinations mediated by a limited number of elements. The (apperceived) concept, on the other hand, is the product of the reaction of the total mind. This distinction (whatever we may think of its absolute validity) expresses a finely observed psychological truth. The distinctive quality of a concept consists, Wundt says, “_in dem begleitenden Bewusstsein, dass die einzelne Vorstellung einen bloss stellvertretenden Werth besitze_.” This feeling he calls the _Begriffsgefühl_, meaning thereby exactly what Professor James means when he says that “the thoughts by which we know that we mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed from each other,” and that “a polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of ‘Hollo! thingumbob again!’ ever flitted through its mind.” Only, instead of “throwing up the sponge,” Wundt goes on to give a very interesting account of this feeling in its various degrees of clearness between the conceptual polyp and the conceiving man. Apperception is invoked only to name and emphasise the feeling of activity of the self that enters into the _Begriffsgefühl_, distinguishing it as a reaction of the total consciousness from the relatively passive associations of what Romanes would call “recepts.” Psychologists, however, will continue their fruitless debates on questions of terminology and will still imagine that Wundt is a belated reactionist.

PAUL SHOREY.

BEITRÄGE ZUR EXPERIMENTELLEN PSYCHOLOGIE. By _Hugo Münsterberg_. Heft 4. Freiburg i. B. 1892.