Chapter XIX will see why I do not believe in the 'image' in question

as a distinct psychic fact.

[321] Mental Evolution in Man (1889), chapters iii and iv. See especially pp. 68-80, and later 353, 396.

[322] _Loc. cit._ p. 50.

[323] P. 52.

[324] _Loc. cit._ p. 74.

[325] J. Locke, Essay conc. Hum. Understanding, bk. iv. chap. ii. § 3.

[326] To be sagacious is to be a good observer. J. S. Mill has a passage which is so much in the spirit of the text that I cannot forbear to quote it. "The observer is not he who merely sees the thing which is before his eyes, but he who sees what parts that thing is composed of. To do this well is a rare talent. One person, from inattention, or attending only in the wrong place, overlooks half of what he sees; another sets down much more than he sees, confounding it with what he imagines, or with what he infers; another takes note of the _kind_ of all the circumstances, but being inexpert in estimating their degree, leaves the quantity of each vague and uncertain; another sees indeed the whole, but makes such an awkward division of it into parts, throwing things into one mass which require to be separated, and separating others which might more conveniently be considered as one, that the result is much the same, sometimes even worse, than if no analysis had been attempted at all. It would be possible to point out what qualities of mind, and modes of mental culture, fit a person for being a good observer: that, however, is a question not of Logic, but of the Theory of Education, in the most enlarged sense of the term. There is not properly an Art of Observing. There may be rules for observing. But these, like rules for inventing, are properly instructions for the preparation of one's own mind; for putting it into the state in which it will be most fitted to observe, or most likely to invent. They are, therefore, essentially rules of self-education, which is a different thing from Logic. They do not teach how to do the thing, but how to make ourselves capable of doing it. They are an art of strengthening the limbs, not an art of using them. The extent and minuteness of observation which may be requisite, and the degree of decomposition to which it may be necessary to carry the mental analysis, depend on the particular purpose in view. To ascertain the state of the whole universe at any particular moment is impossible, but would also be useless. In making chemical experiments, we do not think it necessary to note the position of the planets; because experience has shown, as a very superficial experience is sufficient to show, that in such cases that circumstance is not material to the result: and accordingly, in the ages when man believed in the occult influences of the heavenly bodies, it might have been unphilosophical to omit ascertaining the precise condition of those bodies at the moment of the experiment." (Logic, bk. iii. chap. vii. § 1. Cf. also bk. iv. chap. ii.)

[327] Readers brought up on Popular Science may think that the molecular structure of things is their real essence in an absolute sense, and that water is H-O-H more deeply and truly than it is a solvent of sugar or a slaker of thirst. Not a whit! It is _all_ of these things with equal reality, and the only reason why _for the chemist_ it is H-O-H primarily, and only secondarily the other things, is that _for his purpose of deduction and compendious definition_, the H-O-H aspect of it is the more useful one to bear in mind.

[328] "We find that we take for granted irresistibly that each kind [of thing] has some character which distinguishes it from other classes.... What is the foundation of this postulate? What is the ground of this assumption that there must exist a definition which we have never seen, and which perhaps no one has seen in a satisfactory form?... I reply that our conviction that there must needs be characteristic marks by which things can be defined in words is founded upon the assumption of _the necessary possibility of reasoning_." (W. Whewell: Hist. of Scientific Ideas, bk. viii. chap. i, § 9.)

[329] I may quote a passage from an article entitled 'The Sentiment of Rationality,' published in vol. iv of Mind, 1879: "What is a _conception_? It is a _teleological instrument_. It is a partial aspect of a thing which _for our purpose_ we regard as its essential aspect, as the representative of the entire thing. In comparison with this aspect, whatever other properties and qualities the thing may have are unimportant accidents which we may without blame ignore. But the essence, the ground of conception, varies with the end we have in view. A substance like oil has as many different essences as it has uses to different individuals. One man conceives it as a combustible, another as a lubricator, another as a food; the chemist thinks of it as a hydrocarbon; the furniture-maker as a darkener of wood; the speculator as a commodity whose market-price to-day is this and to-morrow that. The soap-boiler, the physicist, the clothes-scourer severally ascribe to it other essences in relation to their needs. Ueberweg's doctrine that the essential quality of a thing is the quality of most _worth_ is strictly true; but Ueberweg has failed to note that the worth is wholly relative to the temporary interests of the conceiver. And, even, when his interest is distinctly defined in his own mind, the discrimination of the quality in the object which has the closest connection with it is a thing which no rules can teach. The only _a priori_ advice that can be given to a man embarking on life with a certain purpose is the somewhat barren counsel: Be sure that in the circumstances that meet you, you attend to the _right_ ones for your purpose. To pick out the right ones is the measure of the man. 'Millions,' says Hartmann, 'stare at the phenomenon before a _genialer Kopf_ pounces on the concept.' The genius is simply he to whom, when he opens his eyes upon the world, the 'right' characters are the prominent ones. The fool is he who, with the same purposes as the genius, infallibly gets his attention tangled amid the accidents."

[330] Only if one of our purposes were itself truer than another, could one of our conceptions become the truer conception. To be a truer purpose, however, our purpose must conform more to some absolute standard of purpose in things to which our purposes ought to conform. This shows that the whole doctrine of essential characters is intimately bound up with a teleological view of the world. Materialism becomes self-contradictory when it denies teleology, and yet in the same breath calls atoms, etc., the _essential_ facts. The world contains consciousness as well as atoms--and the one must be written down as just as essential as the other, in the absence of any declared purpose regarding them on the creator's part, or in the absence of any creator. As far as we ourselves go, the atoms are worth more for purposes of deduction, the consciousness for purposes of inspiration. We may fairly write the Universe in either way, thus: ATOMS-producing-consciousness; or CONSCIOUSNESS-produced-by-atoms. Atoms alone, or consciousness alone, are precisely equal mutilations of the truth. If, without believing in a God, I still continue to talk of what the world 'essentially is,' I am just as much entitled to define it as a place in which my nose itches, or as a place where at a certain corner I can get a mess of oysters for twenty cents, as to call it an evolving nebula differentiating and integrating itself. It is hard to say which of the three abstractions is the more rotten or miserable substitute for the world's concrete fulness. To conceive it merely as 'God's work' would be a similar mutilation of it, so long as we said not what God, or what kind of work. The only real truth about the world, apart from particular purposes, is the _total_ truth.

[331] Compare Lotze, Metaphysik, §§ 58, 67, for some instructive remarks on ways in which the world's constitution might differ from what it actually is. Compare also Chapter XXVIII.

[332] Sometimes, it must be confessed, the conceiver's purpose falls short of reasoning and the only conclusion he cares to reach is the bare naming of the datum. "What is that?" is our first question relative to any unknown thing. And the ease with which our curiosity is quenched as soon as we are supplied with any sort of a name to call the object by, is ridiculous enough. To quote from an unpublished essay by a former student of mine, Mr. R. W. Black: "The simplest end which a thing's predicate can serve is the satisfaction of the desire for unity itself, the mere desire that the thing shall be the same with _something_ else. Why, the other day, when I mistook a portrait of Shakespeare for one of Hawthorne, was I not, on psychological principles, as right as if I had correctly named it?--the two pictures had a common essence, bald forehead, mustache, flowing hair. Simply because the only end that could possibly be served by naming it Hawthorne was my desire to have it so. With reference to any other end that classification of it would not serve. And every unity, every identity, every classification is rightly called fanciful unless it serves some other end than the mere satisfaction, emotion, or inspiration caught by momentarily believing in it."

[333] See above, p. 8.

[334] See his Study of Character, chap. xv; also Senses and Intellect, 'Intellect,' chap. ii, the latter half.

[335] Whether the dog has the notion of your being angry or of your property being valuable in any such abstract way as _we_ have these notions is more than doubtful. The conduct is more likely an impulsive result of a conspiracy of outward stimuli; the beast _feels like_ acting so when these stimuli are present, though conscious of no definite reason why. The distinction of recept and concept is useful here. Some breeds of dogs, e.g. collies, seem instinctively to defend their master's property. The case is similar to that of a dog's barking at people after dark, at whom he would not bark in daylight. I have heard this quoted as evidence of the dog's reasoning power. It is only, as Chapter III has shown us, the impulsive result of a summation of stimuli, and has no connection with reasoning.

In certain stages of the hypnotic trance the subject seems to lapse into the non-analytic state. If a sheet of ruled foolscap paper, or a paper with a fine monotonous ornamental pattern printed on it, be shown to the subject, and _one_ of the ruled lines or elements of the pattern be pointed to for an instant, and the paper immediately removed, he will then almost always, when after a short interval the paper is presented to him again, pick out the indicated line or element with infallible correctness. The operator, meanwhile, has either to keep his eye fixed upon it, or to make sure of its position by counting, in order not to lose its place. Just so we may remember a friend's house in a street by the single character of its number rather than by its general look. The trance-subject would seem, in these instances, to surrender himself to the general look. He disperses his attention impartially over the sheet. The place of the particular line touched is part of a 'total effect' which he gets in its entirety, and which would be distorted if another line were touched instead. This total effect is lost upon the normal looker-on, bent as he is on concentration, analysis, and emphasis. What wonder, then, that, under these experimental conditions, the trance-subject excels him in touching the right line again? If he has time given him to count the line, he will excel the trance-subject; but if the time be too short to count, he will best succeed by following the trance-method, abstaining from analysis, and being guided by the 'general look' of the line's place on the sheet. One is surprised at one's success in this the moment one gives up one's habitually analytic state of mind.

Is it too much to say that we have in this dispersion of the attention and subjection to the 'general effect' something like a relapse into the state of mind of brutes? The trance-subject never gives any other reason for his optical discriminations, save that 'it looks so.' So a man, on a road once traversed inattentively before, takes a certain turn for no reason except that _he feels_ as if it must be right. He is guided by a sum of impressions, not one of which is emphatic or distinguished from the rest, not one of which is essential, not one of which is _conceived_, but all of which together drive him to a conclusion to which nothing but _that_ sum-total leads. Are not some of the wonderful discriminations of animals explicable in the same way? The cow finds her own stanchions in the long stable, the horse stops at the house he has once stopped at in the monotonous street, because no other stanchions, no other house, yield impartially _all_ the impressions of the previous experience. The man, however, by seeking to make some one impression characteristic and essential, prevents the rest from having their effect. So that, if the (for him) essential feature be forgotten or changed, he is too apt to be thrown off altogether, and then the brute or the trance-subject may seem to outstrip him in sagacity.

Dr. Romanes's already quoted distinction between 'receptual' and 'conceptual' thought (published since the body of my text and my note were written) connotes conveniently the difference which I seek to point out. See also his Mental Evolution in Man, p. 197 ff., for proofs of the fact that in a receptual way brutes cognize the mental states of other brutes and men.

[336] This matter of confusion is important and interesting. Since confusion is mistaking the wrong part of the phenomenon for the whole, whilst reasoning is, according to our definition, based on the substitution of the right part for the whole, it might be said that confusion and reasoning are generically the same process. I believe that they are so, and that the only difference between a muddle-head and a genius is that between extracting wrong characters and right ones. In other words, a muddle-headed person is a genius spoiled in the making. I think it will be admitted that all _eminently_ muddle-headed persons have the temperament of genius. They are constantly breaking away from the usual consecutions of concretes. A common associator by contiguity is too closely tied to routine to get muddle-headed.

[337] The horse is a densely stupid animal, as far as everything goes except contiguous association. We reckon him intelligent, partly because he looks so handsome, partly because he has such a wonderful faculty of contiguous association and can be so quickly moulded into a mass of set habits. Had he anything of reasoning intelligence, he would be a less faithful slave than he is.

[338] Th. Schumann: Journal Daheim, No. 19, 1878. Quoted by Strümpell: Die Geisteskräfte der Menschen verglicken mit denen der Thiere (Leipzig, 1878), p. 39. Cats are notorious for the skill with which they will open latches, locks, etc. Their feats are usually ascribed to their reasoning powers. But Dr. Romanes well remarks (Mental Evolution, etc., p. 351, note) that we ought first to be sure that the actions are not due to mere association. A cat is constantly playing with things with her paws; a trick accidentally hit upon may be retained. Romanes notes the fact that the animals most skilled in this way need not be the most generally intelligent, but those which have the best corporeal members for handling things, cat's paws, horse's lips, elephant's trunk, cow's horns. The monkey has both the corporeal and the intellectual superiority. And my deprecatory remarks on animal reasoning in the text apply far less to the quadrumana than to quadrupeds.--On the possible fallacies in interpreting animals' minds, compare C. L. Morgan in Mind, xi. 174 (1886).

[339] There are two other conditions of language in the human being, additional to association by similarity, that assist its action, or rather pave the way for it. These are: first, the great natural loquacity; and, second, the great imitativeness of man. The first produces the original reflex interjectional sign; the second (as Bleek has well shown) fixes it, stamps it, and ends by multiplying the number of determinate specific signs which are a requisite preliminary to the general conscious purpose of sign-making, which I have called the characteristic human element in language. The way in which imitativeness fixes the meaning of signs is this: When a primeval man has a given emotion, he utters his natural interjection; or when (to avoid supposing that the reflex sounds are exceedingly determinate by nature) a group of such men experience a common emotion, and one takes the lead in the cry, the others cry like him from sympathy or imitativeness. Now, let one of the group hear another, who is in presence of the experience, utter the cry; he, even without the experience, will repeat the cry from pure imitativeness. But, as he repeats the sign, he will be reminded by it of his own former experience. Thus, first, he has the sign with the emotion; then, without it; then, with it again. It is "dissociated by change of concomitants"; he feels it as a separate entity and yet as having a connection with the emotion. Immediately it becomes possible for him to couple it deliberately with the emotion, in cases where the latter would either have provoked no interjectional cry or not the same one. In a word, his mental procedure tends to _fix_ this cry on _that_ emotion; and when this occurs, in many instances, he is provided with a stock of signs, like the yelp, beg, rat of the dog, each of which suggests a determinate image. On this stock, then, similarity works in the way above explained.

[340] See the 'Evolution of Self-consciousness' in 'Philosophical Discussions,' by Chauncey Wright (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1877). Dr. Romanes, in the book from which I have already quoted, seeks to show that the 'consciousness of truth as truth' and the deliberate intention to predicate (which are the characteristics of higher human reasoning) presuppose a consciousness of ideas as such, as things distinct from their objects; and that this consciousness depends on our having made signs for them by language. My text seems to me to include Dr. Romanes's facts, and formulates them in what to me is a more elementary way, though the reader who wishes to understand the matter better should go to his clear and patient exposition also.

[341] Study of Character, p. 317.

[342] Translated by my colleague, Professor G. H. Palmer.

[343] Quoted by Renouvier, Critique Philosophique, October 19, 1879.

[344] Social and domestic circumstances, that is, not material ones. Perceptions of social relations seem very keen in persons whose dealings with the material world are confined to knowing a few useful objects, principally animals, plants, and weapons. Savages and boors are often as tactful and astute socially as trained diplomatists. In general, it is probable that the consciousness of how one stands with other people occupies a relatively larger and larger part of the mind, the lower one goes in the scale of culture. Woman's intuitions, so fine in the sphere of personal relations, are seldom first-rate in the way of mechanics. All boys teach themselves how a clock goes: few girls. Hence Dr. Whately's jest, "Woman is the unreasoning animal, and pokes the fire from on top."