During the early stages of experimentation, while the conditions are new and the observers are hesitant, the report of ' same ' usually expresses a negative consciousness, the consciousness of ' no difference.' The observers are disposed to find a difference, and are thrown into doubt and perplexity by the likeness of the stimuli. There may thus be a close resemblance between the attitudes expressed by ' same ' and by ' doubtful '; and we have an objective index of the resemblance in the length of time that elapses, in both instances, before the report is forthcoming. Later, the report of ' same ' becomes positive; the second stimulus is apprehended as identical with the first; the reaction is prompt.
§ 145- Comparison and Discrimination 535 The number and correctness of the identifications are variously conditioned. The report of ' same ' may be due to the stimulus- error, to general knowledge of the conditions of the experiment. It may be due to temperament, to an impulsive as opposed to a deliberative mental constitution. It may be a secondary effect of absolute impression; if the differences presented in the series are generally large, a small difference may find expression as an identity. And, lastly, the number of the reports falls off as the time-interval between stimuli increases, because the observers main- tain more nearly constant bodily conditions during the shorter than during the longer waits; and their accuracy falls off, because there are fewer cases of direct comparison and apprehension.
The observers frequently report a difference, without being able to specify its direction. This form of report, which rarely occurs, in fact, save when there is an actual objective difference between the stimuli, expresses two different modes of the comparative con- sciousness. The first is that which involves a reference to the image; the attention oscillates between the perception of the second stimulus and the image of the first, or between the two images, until the relation of the two becomes confused; the ob- server knows that the one tone is higher than the other, but can- not tell which is which. The second is that in which there is no image, and no overt process of comparison; the second stimulus sets up directly a visual or motor ' shift ' which means difference at large, but not a particular difference. Sometimes a process of comparison supervenes; the image is then recalled, and the indefinite report is changed.
It has been argued, from the occurrence of these reports, that the specific experience of difference is ultimate and irreducible; and some psychologists speak of a sensation of difference, as under similar circumstances they speak of a sensation of movement (§ 100). There is, however, another explanation. We may get the impression of colour, without being able to identify the colour; of movement, without being able to state the direction of move- ment; of difference, without being able to particularise the nature of the difference, simply because the abstract meanings of colour, 536 Thought movement, difference are more readily associated to the given per- ception than the determinate meanings of red, to the right, higher. Concepts naturally stand in multitudinous associative connections, and are therefore especially liable to associative arousal. We have, then, in these abstract reports of difference, the end of a scale of development which begins with the child's tendency to call every man papa and every animal pussy (p. 379). Conversely, when memory fails with advancing age, it is the concrete words which are first forgotten: personal names, particular names of all kinds: while abstract words, concepts, remain longest of all.
We have referred to what is called absolute impression in §§ 86, 112. After long occupation with any range of stimuli, we acquire a composite idea of the class, subject to the limitations of com- posite ideas at large; and the idea is upheld, and later replaced, by a cortical set, a nervous predetermination. It is clear that the conditions of discrimination in the laboratory are especially suited to the formation of such an idea and such a set, and we find, as a matter of fact, that they occur in all departments of work. When- ever, then, the given stimulus departs markedly from the norm, it appeals to us singly, as an exception to a rule, and touches off an immediate verbal response; and since the responses are given under a form of instruction which refers them to the second stimu- lus, we have a report of this second stimulus ready in mind before the stimulus itself has appeared. We are comparing the heaviness of lifted weights; an unusually heavy weight is given, and we at once reply ' lighter,' although we do not yet know what the second weight will be. Translated into logical terms, the comparison lies between the unexpectedly heavy weight and the average weight of the series; psychologically, there is no comparison at all, but a direct reaction upon the absolute impression of the first term of the stimulus pair.
The effect of absolute impression has been noted in work upon the discrimination of visual qualities (greys) and visual distances, of noise intensities and the pitch of musical tones, of cutaneous distances, of lifted weights, and of time-intervals; it has also been traced in certain spheres of memory. It may, as this list shows, § 146. Expectation, Practice, Habituation, Fatigue 537 influence the observer's report in cases of simultaneous as well as of successive comparison. Our understanding of it is still, in most departments, vague and general, and its limits have not been de- fined; it can, at least in some cases, be avoided by a methodical variation of the experiments.
These two facts, the needlessness of the image and the effect of absolute impression, illustrate in somewhat different ways the re- lation of experimental to popular psychology. The absolute im- pression is familiar in everyday life; but it can be traced and quantified only under the conditions of the laboratory. The image, which popular psychology had assumed, was placed by ex- periment in its right perspective. At the same time, the rigorous instruction to compare under the four categories of greater, less, same, doubtful, lays an artificial restriction upon the discriminative consciousness, and thus prevents our passing straight from the laboratory to the comparisons and discriminations of ordinary ex- perience.
§ 146. Expectation, Practice, Habituation, Fatigue. — The observer, in experiments of the sort described in the fore- going Section, is given special instructions as to the task before him. But in planning the method and recording the results, the experimenter takes account of the ob- server's general attitude and predisposition: of degree of attention, of trend of expectation, of stage of practice, of habituation and fatigue. Expectation, for instance, may make for or against discrimination, according as the observer is predisposed for change or for constancy of stimulus. Practice is favourable, habituation and fatigue are unfa- vourable to discrimination.
Attention we have discussed. Expectation, practice, habituation and fatigue have a twofold claim upon psychol- ogy. In so far as the terms designate nervous dispositions, they have an explanatory value; in so far as they designate # 538 Thought consciousnesses, or conscious attitudes, they must be ex- amined for their own sake. All four are, in reality, general names, like perception, or like thought itself, cover- ing a great variety of particular sets and experiences.
Expectation is usually described as an anticipatory attention, and the expectant consciousness is said to be dominated by an anticipatory image of the expected event. Experiments have shown, however, that the image of expectation must join the image of recognition and the image of comparison; it may be present, but it is not an essential or characteristic feature. Expectation is initiated by a suggestion, given in perceptive form, and consists of kinaesthetic and other organic sensations, sometimes accompanied by verbal ideas, occasionally by the image. These sensational elements are the conscious aspect of the perceptive determination; they are the vehicle of the meaning ' so and so is going to happen.' They derive in part from the bodily attitude of attention: tense muscles, inhibited breathing, accommodation of the sense-organs. Nevertheless, the consciousness can hardly be termed attentive; the kinaesthetic sensations are, truly, at the focus, but not in their own right; like the ' sensations of intended movement,' these ' sensations of future occurrence ' are given rather as context, as meaning, than as independent processes. An observer expressed the facts in pictorial form by saying that the consciousness of ex- pectation seemed to him to be " a ring of kinaesthesis with a hole in the middle." — In course of time, and with repetition, the ex- pectant consciousness drops away; the suggestion which is incor- porated in the initial perception then sets the organism, uncon- sciously, for the imminent situation.
Practice is an integrative, as distinguished from a discursive con- sciousness (pp. 414, 422); the focal processes are few in number, extremely clear, and protected by the negative effect of the de- termination against interference from casual associations. The effects of practice, if we take that phrase in its widest sense, are manifold. Thus, it was found in experiments upon the discrimina- tion of lifted weights that the influence of practice shows itself in § 146. Expectation, Practice, Habituation, Fatigue 539 no less than five different ways. It makes the observers physically stronger, — and change of physical strength may, in this case, mean a change in the absolute impression of the stimuli; it makes the lifting more uniform; it raises the level of attention; it in- creases the likelihood of judgment by absolute impression; and it may shift the observer's standard of comparison, so that a differ- ence of stimuli which finds expression in ' heavier ' or ' lighter ' at one stage of the experiment may be recorded in the words ' much heavier,' ' clearly lighter ' at a later stage. All these effects are closely related; but their number and variety prove that the gen- eral statement of the text — ' practice favours discrimination ' — covers a large number of cooperating factors.
Habituation has been defined as " a tendency, taking shape in the course of a series of similar observations, to experience and describe perceptions of similar character." The processes of the habituated consciousness are meagre, uniformly indistinct, and definitely directed by determination; the generic likeness of their description is, therefore, due rather to lack of clearness than to qualitative resemblance. The habitual tendencies may be classi- fied, in order of persistence and of influence on consciousness, under five headings: weakest are those that depend solely upon recency of occurrence; next are those due to situations of great insistence; stronger are those arising from the professional or other routine activities of adult life, and therefore referable both to recency and to repetition; stronger, again, are those originating in training during childhood, and therefore referable to insistence and repetition; and strongest of all are the innate tendencies which may be regarded as the resultant of all the factors of habituation in some way racially summated.
Fatigue lowers the level and lessens the duration of attention, and consequently, like habituation, is unfavourable to discrimina- tion; unlike habituation, it tends also to inhibit expression, and thus renders the observer's report hesitating and uncertain. It has been suggested that fatigue is essentially a muscular, as practice is essentially a nervous, phenomenon; and many at- tempts have been made, in the interests both of theory and of 540 Thought practice, to discover a measure of the two dispositions. The fatigued consciousness is characterised, like that of expectation, by a special organic complex, consisting of general lassitude and local strain or pain. There is no correlation between degree of fatigue, as experienced under the ordinary working conditions of everyday life, and the physiological capacity of the organism for further work; biology, therefore, can no more help us to a psychol- ogy of fatigue than it helps us to a psychology of feeling (p. 263).
§ 147. Judgment. — The characteristic process of thought is said, in the text-books of logic, to be the judgment. The psychological nature of judgment is still in dispute; indeed, some writers deny it a place in the psychological system. We must be content here to give a provisional and tentative description.
According to Wundt, the process of judgment may be typified by the utterance of a complicated sentence. We must know beforehand, in a general way, what it is that we are going to say; otherwise we could not carry the sen- tence to its conclusion. Tudgment, then, presupposes what Wundt calls an aggregate idea, an idea that repje- sents our grasp of a total situation. The aggregate idea is not uniform and stable; now one phase of it and now another become clear in consciousness (secondary atten- tion); and within these abstracted phases the same process of differentiation is continued. The idea is thus subject to a discursive division. And as the effect of attention is always to emphasise some particular feature of the complex, or some limited group of features, which then stands in re- lation to the whole from which it was abstracted, the judgment.shows a correspondhig_cliialitv of subject and predicate. The same duality appears, indeed, in all the logical forms of thought, in the grammatical distinctions of substantive and adjective, verb and object, vejj^and_adverb There can be no doubt that Wundt's description holds for certain modes of the thought consciousness; and there can be no doubt, in the author's opinion, that the duality of judgment is satisfactorily explained by reference to at- tention. But there are also instances in which the aggre- gate idea is replaced by a conscious attitude, or an unconscious determination. Moreover, the relation of predicate to subject must, if it is conscious, be analysed and described.
Let us consider some of the more recent definitions of judg- ment, formulated on the basis of experimental studies of the thought processes. According to one writer, a judgment is ' a sequence of experiences whose procession from its first term has been determined by a conscious suggestion. As conscious ex- perience, the suggestion is itself past and gone, but it still persists as an appreciable influence.' This definition would classify all directed associations as judgments; it would also include under judgment all the forms of voluntary action. Indeed, it would al- most seem to make judgment coextensive with ideation; for in the freest play of imagination, even in day-dreaming and reverie, the course of ideas is not wholly undirected, but turns in this direction and that at the instance of suggestion.
According to another writer, who derives his definition of judgment from work upon the associative reaction, it is essential to judgment that " a relation between stimulus-idea and idea of response, a relation that is more particularly characterised as a re- lation of predication, shall be willed, intended, or at any rate accepted." Unfortunately, the criterion of the predicative relation, which the author took over from logic, had been included in the instructions given to the observers; they were told, beforehand, to "understand by judgment that process of thought which finds its complete linguistic expression in a predicative proposition"; so that the experimenter, in this investigation, got out of his results very much what he put in. The relation itself appeared, in intro- spection, as an extension, a widening of the sphere of meaning, 542 TJwugJit 542 TJwugJit while the attributive relation appeared as a narrowing and restrict- ing of that sphere; however, there was no sharp line of division, and the analysis was not carried farther. The attitudes of will and of acceptance have been mentioned in previous Sections. — In criticism, we may say, first, that the characterisation of judgment was not spontaneous, but was itself suggested to the observers; and secondly that, if we abstract from the suggestion, there is nothing in the definition to distinguish judgment from voluntary action.
A third writer describes judgment as " an experience that is connected with the consciousness of validity or with a state of assurance"; this state is "a something which, though not itself a consciousness of validity, is of such a nature that it brings an af- firmative answer to the question: Was the experience valid? " We have already had instances of similar states, in the incorporated consciousnesses discussed on p. 5 19. The consciousness of validity appears when, in a course of ideation that proceeds from a sugges- tion, certain mental processes stand out insistently, force themselves upon the attention; it consists, apparently, of the organic context of these insistent processes.
Wundt's account of judgment may, perhaps, be amended as follows. A judgment is a complex ideational experience, m arked by the dual division of attention, which takes shape under the influence of a foregone suggestion; the sugges- tion, however, may be present not only as aggregate idea, but also as verbal imagery or as attitude, and it need not be consciously present at all, but may be effective as a cortical set. The attention implied in judgment is always second- ary or active attention. Judgment belongs to the same psychological genus as voluntary action; it may even be termed an internal voluntary action; the principal difference between the two experiences is that theTuggesfTorTto action involves a reference to bodily movement, and that the action consciousness closes with kinaesthesis. In detail^ the conscious attitudes in judgment, emotive and intellectual, are of various kinds: we may be aware of the predicative re- lation, of the validity of our judgment, of its necessity; we may be satisfied, or relieved, or dj^a^rjoinled, or perplexed. Whether one or more of these special attitudes are essential to the judgment consciousness, and whether there are spe- cific attitudinal differences between this and the conscious- ness of voluntary action, cannot at present be determined. The only point in this description that calls for comment is the statement that judgment implies secondary attention. If we make judgment depend simply upon suggestion,1 then it is clear that phrases like ' the grass is green,' ' mantis mortal' are true judgments. Yet these phrases are put together by the automatic action of the associative tenden- cies, and have nothing but their linguistic duality of form to stamp them as judgments; they are, indeed, as truly associative as the phrases ' green grass,' ' badly hurt,' in which the same duality appears in different guise. It seems best, then, to reserve the name of judgment for in- tellectual processes in which the conditions of attention are equivocal (p. 272), and to deny it to those simplified processes that correspond, in thought, to the secondary reflexes of the psychology of action.
Reasoning. — If we accept the above account of judgment, rea- soning will consist in a succession of judgments, which exhausts the possibilities of dual division of the given subject-matter under the given suggestion or predetermination. There are, however, two modes of conscious complication that call for a word of men- tion. In the first place, the judgments are related; and their re- lation comes to consciousness as an awareness of the sphere within which the argument is confined, and of direction within that sphere. The awareness may be carried in words, but is more often repre- 1 As in the first of the definitions quoted above, p. 541.
544 Thought sented by a conscious attitude. Sometimes there is an awareness of active relating; this, according to the observers' reports, is carried by the kinaesthetic sensations resulting from the sets and adjust- ments of active attention, which themselves vary with the nf.ture of the suggestion. Secondly, the principle of dual division, v/hich underlies the whole structure of thought, may be masked \jy the intercurrence of associations. Subject or predicate or both may be so extensively supplemented by associated ideas that the dual di- vision seems, at first glance, to have been replaced by multiple subdivision. A careful examination of consciousness will show that the ideas in question do not derive directly from the suggestive situation, but depend upon the secondary arousal of associative tendencies.
§ 148. The Self. — The word ' self,' as a psychological rubric, means the particular combination of talent, tempera- ment and character — of intellectual, emotive and active mental constitution — that makes up an individual mind. Self, as a conscious experience, is any complex of mental processes that means some temporary phase of this com- bination; and a self-consciousness is a consciousness in which the self, as a conscious experience, is focal. The self-experience may be as varied as are the objective rela- tions which the organism sustains to its personal and imper- sonal environment. It has, however, certain fairly constant constituents: organic sensations, a visual perception or idea of the body, and the verbal ideas of ' I ' and ' my.'
It is often said, in the psychological text-books, that a conscious self forms the permanent background of consciousness, and that we have but to direct our attention to this background, to bring the self to full realisation. The statement is made so frequently and so dogmatically that the author inclines to suspect the existence of indi- vidual differences. It may be that some minds are cast, so to say, in a personal mould, and that others are relatively impersonal. In the author's experience, the conscious self, while it can always be constructed by a voluntary effort, is of comparatively rare occurrence. It is certainly lacking in the series of consciousnesses that correspond to the daily routine. It is as certainly absent from the conscious- nesses of concentrated thought; the views and theories that a popular psychology describes as personal are altogether selfless in their conscious elaboration and formulation. It is also absent in situations that are supposed to give rise to self-consciousness in the sense of ' feeling that you are under observation '; there may be all the evidences of strong emotion — parched throat, burning cheeks, gasping breath, strained and broken voice, moist and trembling hands, uncertainty of all coordinated movements * — and yet not a trace of conscious selfhood. In a word, the mental life, as the author has lived it, is very intermittently personal (p. 17). The conscious self appears as a casual visitant in various contexts; oftenest, perhaps, in connection with the feeling of loneliness; but this feeling is itself, in the experience of the civilised adult, no more than occasional.
There is, no doubt, an instinctive tendency to personalisation. Mankind, as we saw in § 5, grew early into the belief that there are two permanent substances, matter and mind; the one served to arrest the flux of natural processes, the other to ensure the continuity of individual experience. We owe to the former our instinctive tendency to take the world of perception as a world of real things (p. 464), and we owe to the latter an instinctively per- sonal attitude, of which we have had an illustration in the tendency to overestimate the stability of our affective life (p. 496). Instinctive tendencies may or may not be accompanied by consciousness: here is the opportunity for individual differences. We have, how- ever, an admirable instance of the unconsciousness of the tendency to personalisation, in the forms of language. Conversation bristles with I and me and my, and yet there need not be the least trace of the self in the consciousnesses that the words express. It is im- possible to avoid the words, and indeed there is no reason for their avoidance; the author can explain his lack of self-consciousness to the reader far more easily by saying ' I am not self-conscious' than 1 Cf. the account of a first appearance before an audience given by A. Mosso, 2N 546 Thought he can by translating the word ' I ' into some impersonal phrase. Our everyday speech embodies a personal metaphysics, as it embodies also the metaphysical view of interaction between mind and body (p. 13). So we all of us talk as if we accepted these theories; but when it comes to technical discussion, we make clear, in the same theory-ridden terms, whether we do or do not.
The tendency to personalisation is social in origin, and the idea of self is sustained by social experience. The individual in a primitive society is too closely connected with his family or clans- men to form any clear idea of his individual self. But he is, and he is looked upon as, an independent centre or source of action. He boasts of his prowess, and his fellows praise him; the tribe wants food, and he has his own place in the tribal hunt or raid; he is skilled in some special handicraft, and the rest resort to him to supply them with its products. Last, but not least, he is named; he has, perhaps, a title descriptive of his courage or skill, or de- rived from some striking incident in his life, a nickname, in addi- tion to his tribal name. All these incidents are, as mental experi- ences, strongly impressive. They furnish the materials for the formation of a professional or social self-idea; and it is only a matter of time for this to be refined to the idea of the individual self. We, of the later generations, are born with the personalising tendencies stamped upon our nervous system; but we, too, ob- tain the idea of our self, in the first instance, from parents, teachers and companions. From the time when we begin to understand the words spoken in our hearing, we are familiar with the use of personal names or pronouns to denote different individuals. Selfhood thus comes to us from our social experience; the author cannot believe that it would come, save perhaps in exceptional cases, from in- trospective examination of the background of consciousness.