different k&'nds. In general, they seem to be of three principal sorts: visual, auilitory-kinaesthetic (verbal), and kinaesthetic. In minds of a certain type, all tactual perceptions are visually supple- mented: a touch upon the skin calls up a mental picture of the part stimulated (§ 88), or — as when we bump against something in the dark — a visual picture of the stimulating object. Silent reading, again, is almost invariably accompanied by internal speech; very few persons, and these only after special practice, can read by eye alone, without arousing a train of auditory- kinaesthetic word-ideas. General kinaesthetic supplements, derived from our experiences of handling objects, are also exceed- ingly common: things look heavy or light, sound heavy or light, precisely as they look or sound here or there, near or far (§ 91). The Doctrine of Apperception. — The two points to which we have called attention in this Section, the selective grouping of the sensory constituents of perception, and the supplementing of the sense-group by images, are the cardinal points of the doctrine of apperception in the systems of Wundt and Herbart.1 According to Wundt, " the state which accompanies the clear grasp of any psychical content, and is characterised by a special feeling [the feeling of activity, a compound of tendon and excitement (§72)], we call attention. The process through which any content is brought to clear comprehension we call apperception."2 Accordingto Herbart, "as soon as any considerable number of.ideas, connected in various ways, is present to the mind, every new perception must act as a stimulus, by which some of the existing ideas are checked, others heightened and reinforced, and some trains of ideas are disturbed, others set in motion. But the new perception itself, as soon as its initial stimulation has worked, is assimilated, in a passive way, to the older ideas, since these, in virtue of their interconnections, are much stronger than the single intruder ":s the incoming percep- 1 See especially Ebbinghaus, Grundzuge der PsyJiologie, ii., 1908, 29 ff.
2 W. Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, tr. 1907, 233. The student should read the whole of § 15, on Consciousness and Attention. The chapter is by no means easy, but should be intelligible in the light cf our own discussion.
3 J. F. Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie [1816, 1834, reprinted in the Sammtliche Werke\ % 39. The translation has been somewhat condensed. — tion is apperceived by the preexisting ideas, the apperceiving masses. The doctrine of apperception, in some form more or less closely resembling that of VVundt or Herbart, figures in many psychologies. It is a question, however, whether there is any real gain in the introduction of the term.
§ 103. Meaning. — Perceptions are selected groups of sensations, in which images are incorporated as an integral part of the whole process. But that is not all: the essen- tial thing about them has still to be named: and it is this, — that perceptions have meaning. No sensation means; a sensation sim ply rgol^jon^ in various attributive ways, intensively, clearly, spatially, and so forth. All perceptions mean; they go on, also, in various attributive ways; but they go on meaningly. What then, psychologically, is meaning?
Meaning, psychologically, is always context; one mental process is the meaning of another mental process if it is that other's context. And context, in this sense, is simply the mental process which accrues to the given process through the situation in which the organism finds itself. Originally, the_situation Js physical, external; and, origi- nally, meaning is kinaesthesis; the organism faces the situation by some bodily attitude, and the characteristic sensations which the attitude arouses give meaning to the process which stands at the conscious focus, are psycho- logically the meaning of that process. For ourselves, the situation may be either external or internal, either physical or mental, either a group of adequate stimuli or a constel- lation of ideas; image has now supervened upon sensation, and fmearnn^^arr-be carried in imaginal terms. For us, A popular account of the Herbartian psychology is given by J. Adams, The Herbartian Psychology applied to Education, 1898, ch. iii.
368 The Psyclwlogy of Perception therefore, meaning may be mainly a matter of sensations of the special senses, or of images, or of kinaesthetic or other organic sensations, as the nature of the situation demands.
Of all its possible forms, however, two appear to be of especial importance: kinaesthesis and verbal images. We are locomotor organisms, and change of bodily attitude is of constant occurrence in our experience; so that typical . kinaesthetic patterns become, so to say, ingrained in our consciousness. And words themselves, let us remember, were at first bodily attitudes, gestures, kinaesthetic con- texts: complicated, of course, by sound, but still essentially akin to the gross bodily attitudes of which we. have been speaking. The fact that words are thus originally con- textual, and the fact that they nevertheless as sound, and later as sight, possess and acquire a content-character, — these facts render language preeminently available as the vehicle of meaning. The words that we read are both perception and context of perception; the auditory- kinaesthetic idea is the meaning of the visual symbols. And it is obvious that all sorts of sensory and imaginal complexes receive their meaning from some mode of verbal representation: we understand a thing, place a thing, as soon as we have named it.
Hence, in minds of a certain constitution, it may well be that all conscious meaning is carried by total kinaesthetic attitude or bywords. As a matter of fact, however, men- tal constitution is widely varied, and meaning is carried by all sorts_of sensory and imaginal processes.
The gist of this account is that it takes at least two sensations to make a meaning. If an animal has a sensation of light, and nothing more, there is no meaning in consciousness. If the sen- sation of light is accompanied by a strain, it becomes forthwith a 1 meaning; it is now ' that bright some- thing '; and it owes the ' that something ' to its strain-context.
perception of light, with meaning; it is now 'that bright some-j^ At/^ Simple enough! — only be clear that the account is not genetic, but analytic. We have no reason to believe that mind began with meaningless sensations, and progressed to meaningful perceptions. On the contrary, we must suppose that mind was meaningful from the very outset. We find, by our analysis (§ 96), that sensation does not mean; and we find, in synthesis, that the context which accrues from the situation, however simple or however complex ;* the context may be, makes it mean, is its meaning. ' X$v tK What, then, precisely, is a situation? The physical or external situation is the whole external world as an organism, at any given moment, takes it; it consists of those stimuli to which the organ- ism, by virtue of its inherited organisation and its present disposition, is responsive, — which it_ selects, unifies, fqcalises,, wyj- supplements. and, if need_be, acts upon. The mental or internal i+r situation is, in like manner, some imaginative or memorial com- plex which is fitted, under jhe conditions obtaining in the nervous vj? system, to dominate consciousness, to maintain itself in the focus of attention, to serve as the starting-point for further ideas or for action. To put the definition in a word, a situation is the mean- ingful experience of a conscious present.
But is meaning always conscious meaning? Surely not: • meaning may be carried in purely physiological terms. In rapid reading, the skimming of pages in quick succession; in the rendering of a musical composition, without hesita- tion or reflection, in a particular key; in shifting from one language to another as you turn to your right- or left-hand neighbour at a dinner-table: in these and similar cases meaning has, time and time again, no discoverable repre- sentation in consciousness. The course and connection of ideas may be determined beforehand and from without; a word, an expression of face, an inflection of the voice, a bodily attitude, presses the nervous button, and conscious- 2B > 3/0 The Psychology of Perception ness is switched, automatically, into new channels. We find here an illustration of an universal law of mind, of which we shall have more to say when we come to deal with Action: the law that all conscious formations, as the life of the organism proceeds, show like phenomena of rise and fall, increase and decrease in complexity, expansion and reduction; so that, in the extreme case, what was originally a focal experience may presently lapse altogether. We learned our French and German with pains and labour; the conscious context' that gave meaning to words and sentences was elaborate; but now all this context has dis- appeared, and a certain set of the nervous system, itself not accompanied by consciousness, gives the sounds that fall upon our ears a French-meaning, or changes us into German-speakers.
This predetermination of consciousness by influences that, during the course of consciousness, are not themselves conscious, is a fact of extreme psychological importance, and the reader should verify it from his own experience. It has a threefold bearing upon the psychological system. First, it reminds us that consciousness is a temporal affair, to be studied in longitudinal as well as in transverse section. It is part of the direct business of psychology to trace the fate of meaning from its full and complete conscious represen- tation, through all the stages of its degeneration, to its final disap- pearance. Secondly, our psychology is to be explanatory, and our explanations are to be pliylToTogTcal (§ 9). Toexplairrthe way in which consciousness runs, the definite line that it takes, we must have recourse to physiological organisation; and the tracing of the stages of mental decay helps us to follow and understand the or- ganising process. Thirdly, if we lose sight of nervous predisposi- tion, we shall make grave mistakes in our psychological analysis: we shall read into mental processes characters that, in fact, they do not possess. Turn back to the simple instance given on pp. 274 f. Here we must either say that the meaning of the experi- § 1 04. The Form of Combination 371 ment, after the week's work, is carried for the observer in purely physiological, non-conscious terms; or we must say that his obser- vation is untrustworthy, that there is a mental context which he has overlooked. But if we take this latter alternative, we shall be constructing mind as the naturalist in the story constructed the camel; we shall be inventing, not describing.
§ 104. The Form of Combination. — Our account of the psychology of perception is now, in the author's view, complete. It has embraced four principal points. First, under the general laws of attention and the special laws of sensory connection, sensations are welded together, con- solidated, incorporated into a group. Secondly, this group of sensations is supplemented by images. Thirdly, the supplemented group has a fringe, a background, a con- text; and this context is the psychological equivalent of its logical meaning. Fourthly, meaning may lapse from consciousness, and conscious context may be replaced by a non-conscious nervous set. If we translate this account into genetic terms, we have, as the earliest form of percep- tion, some sensory complex in a kinaesthetic setting. Then comes the invasion of consciousness by images, which mod- ify both complex and setting, and may, in course of time, largely replace the sensory elements of the one and actu- ally displace the other. The images themselves are very far from stable; they shrink and decay; they tend, more especially, to reduce to a common denominator, to verbal ideas; a sort of symbolic shorthand supersedes the earlier picture-writing of mind. Finally, the central complex may appear as a mere skeleton of its former self, a mere indica- tion of its primal complexity, and the setting may not appear at all; meaning may be carried in terms of physio- logical organisation.
37 2 The Psychology of Perception There are, however, some psychologists who would not regard the account as complete. A square, they say, is more than four linear extensions, sensibly of the same length, and occupying certain relative positions in the vis- ual field; a square is square; and squareness is a new character, common to all squares, but not to be explained by attention, or by the laws of sensory connection, or by those of imaginal supplementing. A melody, again, is more than rhythm and consonance and scale; a melody is melodic; we recognise its melodic nature as such; the melodic character is something new and unique, common to all melodies, but not found elsewhere. Hence they find it necessary to postulate " a form of combination as a dis- tinct mental element." "The presentation of a form of synthesis," they argue, "is as distinct from the presenta- tion of the elements combined, considered apart from their union, as the presentation of red is distinct from the pres- entation of green." x In the author's judgment, this attitude betrays a confu- sion of the analytic and the genetic points of view. We cannot generate the square from lines, or the melody from rhythm and scale; but neither is that what we try to do. The square and the melody are given, as perceptions. Our psychological task is to analyse these given perceptions, to discover their elements, and to formulate the laws under which the elementary processes combine. That done, we can write, for ' square ' and ' melody,' 'these and these ele- ments connected in these and these uniform ways,' and we can go on to search for physiological conditions (§ 9). We have solved our problem in analytical terms; we have not first defined the terms, and then put them together to 1 G. F. Stout, Analytic Psychology, ii., 1909, 48. Cf. i., 1896, ch. iii.
References for Further Reading 373 produce something that was not contained in the definition. — The author cannot, in his own introspection, identify the form of combination as a distinct mental element. It is, however, only right to say that the belief in a new mental content, or new mental character, peculiar to perception, is shared by many psychologists of standing.
References for Further Reading §§ 102-104. On the general topic, see W. James, Principles of Psychology, i., 1890, ch. xiii.; ii., chs. xvii., xix.; H. Ebbinghaus, Psy- chologies ii., 1908, § 70. On the psychology of meaning, see the author's Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-processes, 1 909, Lect. v. On the form of combination, see I. M. Bentley, The Psy- chology of Mental Arrangement, in American Journal of Psychology, ASSOCIATION § 105. The Doctrine of Association. — It often happens that we wish to recall something that we are sure we know, but that at the moment escapes us. Aristotle, in his tract On Memory and Reminiscence, suggests a mode of proce- dure for such cases: we should start out from something that is similar to the idea we want, or that is its opposite, or that has been contiguous with it in space or time.1 Aristotle writes as if these ways of arousing memory were entirely familiar to his readers; and so, no doubt, they were; popular psychology is full of just such maxims (p. 286). Nevertheless, the Aristotelian rules proved to be immensely important for the future history of psychology. They were gradually transformed into laws of the associ- ation of ideas; and the association of ideas itself came to be the guiding principle of the British school of empirical psychology. So well did it work, as an in- strument of psychological analysis and interpretation, that Hume compared it to the law of gravitation in physics: " here," he said, " is a kind of attraction which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to show itself in as many and as various forms."2 All the great names in British psychology, from Hobbes down to Bain, are connected with this doctrine of the association of ideas.3 2 D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, [1739] bk. i., pt. i., §4.
3 Let the roll be called! Thomas Hobbes, John Locke (who introduced the phrase 'association of ideas'), George Berkeley, David Hume, David Hartley (the founder of modern associationism), Thomas Brown, James Mill § 105. The Doctrine of Association 375 There are, then, four traditional laws of association. An idea calls up or suggests another idea by similarity, by contrast, by temporal or spatial contiguity. " A picture naturally leads our thoughts to the original" (Hume): here is association by similar- ity. " The palace and the cottage, the cradle and the grave, the extremes of indigence and of luxurious splendour, arise, in ready succession, to the observer of either " (Brown): here is association by contrast. " From St. Andrew the mind runneth to St. Peter, because their names are read together; from St. Peter to a stone, for the same cause; from stone to foundation, because we see them together" (Hobbes): here is association by spatial and temporal coexistence. " A musician used to any tune will find that, let it but once begin in his head, the ideas of the several notes of it will follow one another orderly in his understanding" (Locke): here is association by temporal succession.
The tendency has been, however, to reduce these four laws to two, or even to one. The law of contrast, especially, has been merged in that of similarity; if things contrast, it is argued, they must be similar, at least to the extent that they belong to the same general class; black calls up white and not sour; sour calls up sweet and not black; so that association by contrast is really associ- ation by similarity. To this reduction there are two objections. First, the argument is logical and not psychological; the interven- tion of the class-idea is not attested by introspection. And, secondly, the contrast referred to in the one law is not on a par with the similarity referred to in the other; the contrast is, as we have already seen (pp. 232 f.), an affective opposition, whereas the similarity is ideational. Nevertheless, we can do away with the law of contrast. The cases that fall under it are simply cases in which the extremes of our experience meet, cases of contiguity. Such cases are very common: letters are printed black on white, (the typical representative of the school), John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer (these three no longer pure associationists). References will be found in the arts. Association (of ideas') and Associationism, in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, i., 1901, 78, 80. All these men are worthy of study; only let the student beware of the fatal error that, because they read easily, they are easy reading.
376 Association the most brilliant lights give the deepest shadows, we are hungry and we eat, we feel cold and we make haste to get warm, we come to the palace through streets of mean houses, and so on. There is no need of a special law of contrast.
Again, coexistence in space means coexistence in time. Hence there is no need, either, of a special law of association by spatial contiguity; temporal contiguity, simultaneous or successive, covers all the cases. The four laws thus become two, those of similarity and of temporal contiguity. Efforts have been made to carry the reduction still further; we return to the point in § 107.
§ 106. The Idea. — According to the teaching of this book, an idea differs from a perception only by the fact. that it is made up wholly of images (p. 48). Look across the room, and you perceive the table; shut your eyes, and you ideate the table. The psychology of ideas is, therefore, so far as this difference allows, the counterpart of the psychology of perceptions. Ideas are simple or composite; they are subject to the law of growth and decay; they get their meaning from their context, and the context may consist of other ideas, or may be carried in physiological terms.
Now it needs but little reflection to see that these ideas are not at all the same thing as the ideas of the preceding Section. The ideas which we ourselves are defining are fluid, changeable processes, which derive their meaning from conscious context or from cortical set. The ideas which are associated, in the traditional doctrine of the association of ideas, are already meanings: the idea of the painting's original is the idea which means that original, the idea of St. Peter is the idea that means St. Peter: or rather, if one may put it clumsily for the sake of clearness, the former idea is just the man-painted-meaning, and the latter idea is the St.-Peter-mz&nmg. Meaning here is not the context of the idea, nor is it an external predetermina- tion of the consciousness in which the idea occurs; mean- ing is idea, idea is meaning. And since meaning is stable and permanent, since the man-painted is always the same man, and St. Peter is always that identical St. Peter, the psychologists of association naturally treated the ideas also as stable and permanent; the ideas were bits of meaning, separate and impenetrable as physical atoms. It is hardly a caricature if we say that ideas were like beads, strung on the thread of association, or like steel blocks, held in certain arrangements by the magnetic force of association.
There are, in fact, two uses of the term ' association,' which are both confused and confusing in the writers of the associationist school. On the one hand, association is the gentle force of attraction inherent in an idea, the affinity of idea for idea, the tendency of one idea to suggest another; the steel blocks are magnetised from the outset. On the other hand, association is the principle of connection among ideas, is that which ties, binds, conjoins, links, couples idea with idea; and this something may be found either in the nature of the mind (the magnet) or in the nature of the brain (the string for the beads). The last concep- tion comes very near our own; * but mark the difference! Per- ception is, for us, primarily, a group of sensations, — or, better, perception is such and so-many sensations found uniformly to- gether in such-and-such ways. Association, then, will also be, for us, a group of ideas, — or, better, association will be such and so- many ideas found uniformly together in such-and-such ways. The explanation of association, like that of perception, must be 1 It is because many of the conceptions of associationism are very like those of modern psychology, because the terminology is largely the same, because the writers' attitude is oftentimes, as if in despite of their associa- tionism, the attitude of modern psychology itself, and because, nevertheless, the taint of logical construction pervades the whole of their work, — it is for these reasons that the student must read warily, with all his psychological wits about him.
378 Association sought in the nervous system. But the underlying nervous processes do not cement or string the ideas together; the ideas are found together, and the conditions under which they are found together are nervous. This is the difference.
We shall have much to say, in what follows, of the na- ture and behaviour of the idea. It is sufficient, just now, to have indicated its general character as a mental process, and to have shown how it differs from the idea of asso- ciationism.
§ 107. The Law of Association. — The traditional laws of the association of ideas are, after all, not descriptive formulas, as scientific laws must always be (p. 5), but attempts at explanation. If we say that the idea of Julius Caesar calls up the idea of 'Alexander the Great by simi- larity, we are offering the similarity of the ideas as an explanation of their concurrence in consciousness; and that road leads nowhere (p. 39). Let us try, however, to get a descriptive formula for the facts which the doctrine of association aims to explain. We then find this: that, whenever a sensory or imaginal process occurs in con- sciousness, there are likely to appear with it (of course, in imaginal terms) all those sensory and imaginal processes which occurred together with it in any earlier conscious present. This we may term the law of association.
That is the text: now follows the commentary. Note, first, that we have confined the sphere of the law to sensory and imaginal processes, to perceptions and ideas. Some psychologists believe that it should be extended to include the affective processes. There is, truly, no question that feelings (in the widest sense, p. 228) play a large part in the associative consciousness; only, in the author's opinion, they play this part by virtue of their sensory and imaginal components, and not in their affective character. How- § 107. The Law of Association 379 ever, so little is known about the psychology of feeling that the reader will do best to suspend judgment.
Secondly, the law has said nothing about attention. In the author's opinion, association always implies a high degree of clear- ness; the processes that were together in the conscious present must have been attentively together, if the law is to hold. But, again, the point is disputed, and the experimental evidence is not conclusive.
Thirdly, the law must be amplified in the following way. It is not necessary, for the reinstatement of a previous consciousness, that one of its terms should literally be repeated, in the sense of p. 19; it is enough that a process appear which is like one or other of its terms. If I meet my friend to-day, I am at once reminded of the conversation that we had at our last meeting, a month ago. But if some one shows me to-day a recent portrait of my friend, the same thing happens: ' A good picture,' I say; ' I saw him a month ago, and we had a very interesting talk.' This extension of the law of association, from psychological identity to psychological similarity, is clearly seen in young children, who call all the men of their acquaintance ' papa,' and call every animal — live animal, toy, or picture — by the first animal-name that they have learned. It must be accounted for on the hypothesis that the nervous conditions of similar ideas are in part the same, and that, the more alike the ideas, the more nearly identical are their conditions.
This mention of similarity brings us back to the discussion of § 105. Efforts have been made, we said, to reduce the two laws of contiguity and similarity to one. Now the law of contiguity can, with a little forcing, be translated into our own general law of association. Let the translation be made, and the law stands. What, then, of the law of similarity? This, be it remembered, is very different from our own amplified or extended law of associa- tion. We say that ideas may be started on the same track from similar beginnings; the old law of similarity says that the course of ideas ends with similars, that mental like attracts like. No doubt this statements holds, in the rough, of a great many instances of association: the idea of Julius Caesar does bring in its train the idea of Alexander the Great; and we have noted congruity with 380 Association