If, now, there are non-sensory and non-imaginal components of the higher mental processes, we have before us three distinct pos- sibilities. There may be an independent element of thought, coordinate with sensation. This position has recently been taken, but in the present state of psychology it is indefensible (§ 139). There may, again, be a dependent element of thought, an element- ary process which, like affection (p. 234), cannot stand alone in consciousness, but is nevertheless irreducible to image. We con- sider this question in §140. And there may, thirdly, be a specific form of combination (§ 104), a thought character which is common to all thinking, and without which no complex of images can be- come a thought. In this case thought would still be an element, but an element, so to say, of a higher order than sensation, image and affection. We consider the question in § 141.
§ 139. The Alleged Elementary Process of Thought. — A de- scriptive psychology of thought will tell us, in analytical terms, what we experience when we are thinking. And if the description is to be adequate, the thinking from which it is derived must go on under laboratory conditions. We must make our observers think, really and seriously think; and we must be able to make them think again and again, to vary the circumstances and the modes of their thinking, § 139- Alleged Elementary Process of Thought 5°9 and to rule out disturbing influences. How is this to be done?
It has not yet been satisfactorily done. But a first at- tempt has been made, by way of a greatly modified form of the reaction experiment. The experimenter reads to the observer an epigram, or an aphorism, or a didactic couplet, or puts to him some question suited to his temper and attainments. The question is always answerable by Yes or No, and the epigram is thrown into interrogative form by a preliminary: Is this true? Do you understand this? A stop-watch is started as the stimulus is given, and is arrested as the observer replies; the time that elapses is a rough indication of the difficulty of the problem. When the answer has been returned, the observer undertakes to describe, as accurately as possible, his experiences during the experiment. A single instance must suffice.
" Is this true? ' To give every man his due were to will justice and to achieve chaos.' — Yes. — First of all, a peculiar stage of reflection, with fixation of a surface in front of me. Echo of the words, with special emphasis on the beginning and end of the sentence. Tendency to accept the statement. Then, all of a sudden, Spencer's criticism of altruism occurred to me, with the thought that Spencer mainly emphasises, — the thought that the end of altruism is not attained. Then I said, Yes. No ideas, ex- cept the word Spencer, which I said over to myself. " It is clear that a procedure of this kind, if worked out with skill and understanding, will come within measur- able distance of our definition of an experimental method (p. 20). But its defects are also apparent. In the instance given, we find significant fragments of internal speech, the echo of the stimulus and the single word ' Spencer.' We find as well, however, the report of a peculiar stage of 5 1 o Thought 5 1 o Thought reflection, and of a tendency to agreement. Unless we can introduce stimuli, later on in the experiment, that shall give the observer a chance to examine the reflection and the conscious tendency, we run the risk of passing, as un- analysable, experiences that might, if they were made focal, prove to be complex.
So far, this inherent defect of the method has not been remedied. The introspective reports have simply been col- lated, and the processes which they mention classified, under general headings, as ideas, feelings, attitudes, and processes that are termed sometimes awareness, sometimes know- ledge, sometimes ' the consciousness that...,' most fre- quently thoughts. The inference has therefore been drawn that knowledge, awareness, is a new manifold of modifica- tions of consciousness, covering the variety of thoughts as sensation covers the variety of sensations; and that thoughts may appear in consciousness without any the least demon- strable trace of imaginal groundwork. There is a thought element.
Surely a large inference upon a slender basis of fact! Taking the situation as it stands, we have every right to demand a suspense of judgment. For it cannot be too often repeated that no one is justified in declaring a process unanalysable unless he has failed to analyse it under the conditions most favourable to analysis; and these conditions the method, as so far employed, docs not supply. As a matter of fact, however, we can go further. A subsequent report by one of the observers, himself a trained psycholo- gist, relieves us from suspense of judgment. He writes as follows: " I have followed the course of the investigation, in which I was privileged to take part as observer, with keen interest. And I § 139- The Alleged Elementary Process of Thought 5 1 1 have been led to a rather curious result, which has altogether changed my ideas of the best method for the conduct of experiments on thought. Over and over again, as I was observing, I had the impression, though I was not able at the time to formulate it very clearly, that my report was simply a somewhat modified verbal statement of the thoughts aroused in me by the experimenter, and that this verbal statement could not properly be regarded as a psychological description of the thoughts. What I mean by this antithesis, of verbal expression and psychological description, will perhaps become clearer if I suggest that the layman in psychology would be giving introspective reports, every time that he exchanged thoughts with a friend, unless there were some distinction between verbal expression and psychological description."
The nature of this distinction is plain enough. What we do, when we exchange ideas in ordinary conversation, is to indicate the object of the ideas, to show what we are think- ing about; we refer, and are understood to refer, to the weather, or to politics, or to the cost of living; we have not the least desire or occasion to go behind the topic of thought to the psychological vehicle of that topic, to discover whether our friend is thinking in internal speech, or in visual images, or in conscious attitudes. But this question, of the mental stuff of which thought is made, is precisely the question that a descriptive psychology of thought has to answer.
So, then, the observers in the investigation that we are reviewing took the only course open to them. They were in honour bound to mention any process that appeared. Thoughts appeared, and were mentioned; but they came and passed far too quickly for thorough scrutiny, and were accordingly noted as ' thoughts of ' and ' consciousnesses that.' Not only is there no proof that these thoughts were elemental; there is positive evidence that they were not.
5 1 2 Thought 5 1 2 Thought § 140. The Alleged Elementary Process of Relation. — In a well-known passage of his Psychology, James urges that " we ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.": In response to this suggestion, an attempt has recently been made to bring the relational consciousness under experimental control. The experiments took the form of problems in the ' rule of three,' extended to other than numerical relations. Most impor- tant for our present purpose, on account of the accompa- nying introspections, are those in which the stimuli were presented in verbal form. The observer was asked, for in- stance, ' London is to England as Paris is to? ' or: ' Eyes are to face as a lake is to? ' He was required to answer these questions, in the sense of the relation obtain- ing between the first pair of terms, and then, afterwards, to give an introspective account of the whole experience. The results were of three kinds. The blank may be filled up, under pressure of the instruction, without any conscious- ness of relation; the transferred relation may be carried in visual images, or in internal speech; and, lastly, the relation may be present in consciousness, without any imaginal component, simply as an ' imageless thought.' From these results the conclusion is drawn that " the feel- ings of relation are of the same order as feelings of sensory qualities; each feeling of relation is a simple quality." 2 The experiments have been repeated and extended, in the author's laboratory, with a different outcome. By far 1 W. James, Princ. of Psychol., i., 1890, 245 f. The word 'feeling,' as we have previously noted, here means any mental process.
2 R. S. Woodworth, The Consciousness of Relation, in Essays Philosophical a>ui Psychological in Honour of William James, by his colleagues at Columbia § 140. The Alleged Elementary Process of Relation 513 the larger part of the answers were accompanied by a con sciousness of relation in terms of sensory or verbal images The remainder were cases of verbal association, directed by the instruction; the fourth member of the group was supplied as if automatically, inevitably, without any con- sciousness of relation. There is no trace in the reports of an imageless ' feeling of relation.' As these experiments are more numerous and more varied than those quoted in support of the relational element, the author feels justified in saying that the negative outweighs the positive evidence.
The experiments just referred to do not stand alone. It has been shown that the meaning of prepositions, taken out of all con- text and presented by themselves, is carried by " a certain tension or motor impulse, which has no purpose, significance, affective tone, nor feeling of will or agency." With the word in, e.g., " there seems to be a bare huddle, without any purpose in view "; "I am vaguely conscious of crouching in regard to something, although I have no idea of what." The same thing holds of out, with, of, etc.; every word has its characteristic kinaestheticset.1 Here are James' feelings of relation, shown in isolation and at full strength; but they turn out to be kinaesthetic complexes, and not elementary processes.
As regards genesis, it has been suggested that our human feelings of relation " are remnants of remotely ancestral motor attitudes. Take the ' feeling of but,' for example: the sense of the contradiction between two ideas. If we trace this back, what can it have been originally but the experience of primitive organ- isms called upon by simultaneous stimuli to make two incom- patible reactions at once, and what can that experience have been but a certain suspended, baffled motor attitude? Similarly with the 'feeling of if; the primitive representative of this must have been the experience of an animal called upon to suspend all 1 E. H. Rowland, The Psychological Experiences connected with the Differ^ ent Parts of Speech, 1907, 24 ff. (Psychol. Review, Mon. Suppl., 32).
2h 514 Thought reaction until a definite added stimulus was given." 1 If we accept this account as, in principle, correct, then the apparent simplicity of a feeling of relation would be a vestigial, not a primal sim- plicity,— a matter of reduction and degeneration, and not of elementariness.
In the author's experience, the feelings of relation are never simple. They are ordinarily matters of motor empathy; the re- lation is acted out, though in imaginal rather than in sensory terms. Sometimes the kinaesthetic images are accompanied by a visual image, itself usually symbolic; sometimes they are strongly coloured by pleasantness-unpleasantness. Whenever the rela- tion is conscious, it is indubitably a complex of the familiar elements. But the path of habit leads, here as elsewhere, from the conscious to the unconscious; a relational word may switch one's ideas into a new direction, without any traceable represen- tation of the relation within consciousness. It is, then, conceivable that the imageless relations of the text mark a half-way stage between kinaesthetic set and unconsciousness; that, in certain individuals, a faint glow of consciousness still plays about excita- tory processes which, in other individuals, are altogether uncon- scious. It is more probable that a systematically controlled introspection will, in all cases of consciousness, reveal the imag- inal character of the feeling of relation.
Reality and Unreality. — The feeling of relation may be con- sidered as typical of the alleged elementary processes which, like affection, cannot stand alone in consciousness. Other such pro- cesses are the feelings of reality and unreality, which are brought out, e.g., by the comparison of memory-images with images of imagination (§ 118). The image of imagination may appear unreal because, as the observers say, there is nothing to do about it; it is there, clear and substantial, but it does not provoke any kinaesthetic response. The meaning of unreality is carried, in consciousness, by a kinaesthetic heaviness or inertness, which somewhat resembles fatigue, but is more like the experience of 1 M. F. Washburn, The Term ' Feeling,' in Journal of Philosophy, Psychol- ogy and Scientific Methods, iii., 1906, 63. The quotation has been somewhat condensed.
§ 141. The Analysis of Conscious Attitude 515 losing one's head, or going to pieces, in some minor emergency. On the other hand, the same image of imagination may be re- ported as more real than reality, as possessing a detached or independent reality. This meaning is carried in consciousness by the kinaesthetic feel of contemplative vision (steady fixation, movement of the eyes over the image, general muscular relaxa- tion) together with the inertness just mentioned: the image is real, with a perceptive reality, because it can be scrutinised; it is independently real, because one can do nothing with it.1 The reality of the memory-image is of a different kind; it is the reality of actual occurrence in past experience. The observers identify it with the recognitive feeling, in connection with the conscious concomitants of movements, and more especially of imitative and supplementary movements, — movements that rehearse the orig- inal experience, and that amplify the details of the image. These movements are surprisingly numerous and varied.
§ 141. The Analysis of Conscious Attitude. — It is plainly impossible to give an analysis of all the conscious attitudes. Their number is legion. And so long as a single attitude re- mains unanalysed, so long will there be a rallying point for the champions of imageless thought. We must therefore be satisfied to present the case for analysis, in summary form, and to leave the reader to render his own verdict.
It should be noted, first, that the doctrine of the elemen tariness of conscious attitudes is, in large measure, an his- torical accident. We pointed out, in § 138, that the original report of ' unanalysed ' has gradually changed to the infer- ence of ' unanalysable.' The word ' unanalysed ' contained a strong suggestion, and the suggestion worked. No doubt, the suggestion was reinforced by facts of observation; it often happened, in the course of an experimental enquiry, 1 It is, presumably, the feeling of perceptive reality that attaches to the hallucination, and gives it its hallucinatory character. For no visual image, however clear and insistent, is intrinsically an hallucination.
5 i 6 Thought that an attitude could not be analysed. But here, too, suggestion has been effective; it banished from the mind of the experimenter the qualifying 'under these circum- stances'; and, if we are weighing evidence, that qualification is necessary. For sometimes, in the very studies that pro- nounce the attitude unanalysable, introspective records are printed which already contain a partial analysis, and which show that the observers, under more favourable conditions, could have pushed their analysis farther.
Secondly, a few of the commoner attitudes have been subjected, in the author's laboratory, to a detailed investiga- tion, and a large number of occasional attitudes have been pounced upon as they occurred, made focal, and examined as carefully as the circumstances allowed. All the reports show the same features: visual images, pictorial or symbolic; internal speech; kinaesthetic sensations, general or local, and kinaesthetic images; organic sensations. Nowhere a sign of the imageless component!
Thirdly, the attitudes thin out, if we may so phrase it, with repetition. The visual images drop away; the verbal images either disappear entirely or become fragmentary; what was at first an explicitly imaginal consciousness may lapse into a mere flicker of kinaesthesis. The change is very far from continuous; and it sometimes happens, in minds of the imaginal type, that the final stage is complicated by associations, so that consciousness regains its former complexity. Nevertheless, the change has been followed; and the new imaginal processes are recognised as irrelevant, as concomitants and not constituents of the attitude.
Lastly, the general behaviour of the attitude, in conscious- ness, seems to consign it to the sphere of ideas. For it may be affectively toned, and it may be indifferent; it may § 141. The Analysis of Conscious Attitude 517 be touched off, associatively, by a present idea, and it may form part of an ordinary associative complex; it may be attended to, and it may be forgotten. In a word, it behaves just as ideas behave.
We gave in § 103 an analysis of perceptive meaning. The following account, written by an observer of pronounced kinaesthetic type (§ 114), will serve both to illustrate that analysis and to fortify the second argument of the text. " Such a sentence as this comes to the mind, ' Infinity broods over all things.' Immediately with the words themselves come into consciousness the speech-motor processes and further a general background of kinaesthetic sym- bolism. The kinaesthetic symbol for infinity is found in the ten- dency to prolong the word, this prolongation being accompanied by the distinct impression of projecting it from the mouth and then following this projected word by definite bodily movements. There is an image or sensation of a forcible and continued ejection by the speech-motor apparatus and of a bending forward and tension of the whole body, setting itself as if for flight. There is no visual symbol here, as, for example, of extended space, or the limitless vault of the heavens on a starlit night. The whole comes in motor adjustments. The word broods brings an entirely different sug- gestion. Here the ideation centres in a distinct picture (kinaesthetic, rot visual) of outstretched hands, and body bending forward and downward. All is symbolised by a sensation or image of round- ness in the oral cavity, and by an extensive gesture (not actually executed, but merely represented) of an inclusive movement with both hands sweeping around and joining in front of the body. The symbol for things is the mental representation of a direct and sudden gesture with hand extended and index finger pointing out and downward." x The details will, of course, vary with individual type. When the author, in reading the article from which this quotation is taken, came to the sentence ' Infinity broods over all things,' he closed the book, and tried to analyse his own conscious attitude. The most prominent thing in consciousness was a blue-black, dense, 1 S. S. Colvin, A Marked Case of Mimetic Ideation, in Psychological Review, 5 l S Thought arched sky, which palpitated, as if with immense wings, over a solid convex surface, — evidently the surface of the globe. Infinity was thus given as the spatial extent of the sky; broods as the wing- like movement; over as the visual relation of sky to earth; and all things as the earth itself. The attitude contained, further, a notice- able breathlessness, and a certain organic sinking; these experi- ences, taken together with the darkness of the visual picture and with unpleasantness, made up a feeling of shrinking dislike.
iLis not necessary to dwell upon the process of reduction, to which we have several times referred in previous Sections, though the possibility of individual differences should, perhaps, again be pointed out. It is conceivable that the last shimmer of conscious- ness may, in some cases, be so faint and confused as to resist analysis.
There remains the possibility that every attitude has its peculiar form of combination, which would come to con- sciousness as non-sensory and non-imaginal. The question of a perceptive form of combination was discussed, with negative result, in § 104. In the present connection, two further arguments may be urged against it. The first is that the form of combination would attach, not, as in the case of perception, to contents arranged always on the same pattern, but to contents of very various patterns. And the second is that in extreme imageless thinking the form would appear without any contents, the grin without the cat. Indeed, those psychologists who ascribe a form of combination to the conscious attitudes seem to the author to fall into the besetting sin of a reflective psychol- ogy; they translate a logical requirement into a psycholog- ical fact; because the meaning of the attitudes is stable, they suppose that the vehicle of meaning must be always the same. Reflection of this sort will build up a system of psychology, but can never give us a description of mind.
§ 141. The Analysis of Conscious Attitude 519 The symbolic fragments of imagery that carry the conscious attitudes have many points of psychological interest. It may happen, e.g., that an image which is integral to the attitude be- comes conventionalised into a sort of picture writing, and can be deciphered only by conjecture. Thus the author sees ' meaning ' as the blue-grey tip of a kind of scoop, which has a bit of yellow above it (presumably a part of the handle), and which is just dig- ging into a dark mass of what appears to be plastic material. In all probability, meaning was first understood as something to be dug out of a subject; but there is no hint of this in the image it- self. It may happen, again, that the images, while still integral to the attitude, are more or less incongruous with it, just as we speak of going for a sail when we mean to take a steamer. Most important of all: the observers are clear that certain images are constitutive of the attitude, and that certain other images are secondary and irrelevant. The author himself has frequently had this experience, but rarely in explicit form. The relevancy or ir- relevancy of the images is, so to say, incorporated in the total consciousness; you do not distinguish the two classes, at the time, but you can say afterwards that these were a part of the attitude, and those merely casual associates.
We have already come across the fact of incorporation in con- nection with the will attitude (§127). It appears also in the familiar attitudes of understanding, of solving a problem, of draw- ing a conclusion. If you are asked: Did you understand that passage? Did you integrate correctly? Did you draw the right inference from the premises? you are ready, perhaps even with an offended surprise at the question, to answer, Yes; and yet the ' consciousness of being right ' was not explicit when you finished the work. The key to all these observations may perhaps be found in the double nature, negative as well as positive, of the determin- ing tendencies (p. 461). The conscious attitude, directed by the tendencies, is exclusive as well as inclusive; irrelevant processes are automatically set aside, relevant processes are run together. The being-run-together then means acquiescence, or relevance, or correctness, and may — under the right conditions — find expres- 5 20 TJiougJit sion as I agree: That was relevant: Certainly, I was right. Un- less these conditions are present, in the shape of a question, the meaning does not become explicit, but lies latent in the directed processes.
This account is wholly tentative; the attitudes have only just begun to receive serious study. The author has felt bound to call attention to the fact of incorporation, since the latent meaning is the nearest thing he has found to a form of combination. That form itself, as an imageless but conscious process, he has invari- ably failed to discover.
If we put together the results of the foregoing discus- sions, we may conclude that the conscious attitudes are always made up of the three elementary processes, sensa- tion, image and affection, but that the sensory and imaginal processes are given under conditions very unfavourable to analysis. The attitudes presuppose all manner of complex synergy in the cortex; the active tendencies are the result- ant, or the residue, of a long course of change. Neverthe- less, analysis is possible; a process that is experienced can also be observed; and our present partial knowledge is a promise of full knowledge if work is continued in the future.
The principal objections brought against this ' theory of con- densation ' are, first, that the attitudes do not possess the sensory attributes of quality and intensity; and, secondly, that our memory of thoughts does not depend upon the law of temporal contiguity. Intensive differences are, however, recognised by several writers upon attitude, and appear in the introspective reports of observers. And if we cannot discriminate the qualities contained in an attitude, we can at any rate refer them to a particular sense-department; while we know that it is not always easy to pick out the constituent qualities even in a tonal or organic fusion, which stands, so to say, only next door to the simplicity of sensation. Moreover, in view of the immense complexity of the physiological substrate, it is not to be expected that mere temporal contiguity should be as effec- tive, for the memory of thoughts, as the reinstatement or redinte- gration of the habitual pattern of the cortical excitations. So far, indeed, is this lack of influence from telling against the theory, that it might have been predicted from the theory. It seems, therefore, that the objections may be easily met.
The character of the underlying physiological processes is, of course, hypothetical. It is natural to suppose that the attitudes of meaning and of relation depend, in their most extreme forms, the one mainly upon the associative, and the other mainly upon the determining tendencies, while the ordinary cases of awareness require the cooperation, in varying measure and in various com- plication with other psychophysical factors, of both sets of tenden- cies. It is possible, also, that the process of reduction (cf. § 118) is itself of a twofold character: the complex of tendencies may thin out, fine down, simplify by loss of original constituents; or there may be substitution, reduction to a common denominator, the replacement of a heterogeneous group of excitatory processes by the homogeneous correlates of verbal ideas or of kinaesthetic set. All this is guesswork and plausibility, and must be taken for what it is worth. It has been further suggested that the residual glow or shimmer of consciousness, mentioned as conceivable on pp. 514, 518, is conditioned upon the subarousal, the partial ex- citation, of a field of tendencies; the summation of a number of weak excitations would then give rise to a diffuse and undifferen- tiable consciousness.
§ 142. Language. — There is a long-standing controversy, in psychology, on the question whether thought is possible without language. And it hinges, like many other con- troversies, upon the ambiguity of the question itself. If we take the human adult, as he is, and appeal to his intro- spection, the answer comes plain and definite: thought and reasoning, define them as stringently as we may, can go on in terms of internal speech, in terms of conscious attitudes, the "wordless summary glimpses of relation and 522 Thought