that uniform contractile tissue did not have consciousness before the heightened process which indicates pleasure, and that this heightened process is due in some way to accidental adjustments of movement; then consciousness must have arisen by means of these adjustments.
But we have seen that adjustments of movement can have no meaning for the organism, except as they bring certain vital stimulations. So the rise of consciousness after all would seem to be due to the influence of these vital stimulations. And when we come to ask why these vital stimulations are vital, why they are necessary, that is, we appeal at once to the habits — the very constitution of the life process itself — all of which must have come to the particular organism by heredity. So consciousness becomes, after all, in its actual rise a phylogenetic product.
Looking at it from this phylogenetic point of view, as a variation, we find difficulties and certain advantages. Romanes, it will be remembered, treats the fact of * selec- tive contraction ' as the ' criterion of mind,' the indication of the presence of consciousness ^; and, inasmuch as he also finds this fact of selective contraction in the lowest known living creatures, it would seem in his view to be due either to selection, in case we suppose still earlier a uni- form contractile tissue, or as a part of the * general mystery of life,' in case we do not.
The difficulty, however, which he sees to the ' selection ' view, he states in this way: " The difficulty is that I began by showing it necessary to define mind as the power of exercising Choice [selective reaction], and then proceeded to define the latter as a power belonging only to agents that are able to feel...It seems that my conception of 1 Mental Evolution in Animals^ Chap. I.
The Origin of Consciousness. 2 1 1 what constitutes Choice is in antagonism with my view that the essential element of Choice is found to occur among organisms which cannot properly be supposed to feel. This...contradiction is a real one, though I hold it to be unavoidable. For it arises from the fact that neither Feeling nor Choice appears upon the scene of life suddenly..,. There are two ways of meeting the diffi- culty. One is to draw an arbitrary line, and the other is not to draw any line at all, but to carry the terms down through the whole gradation of the things until we arrive at the terminal or root principles. By the time that we do arrive at these root principles, it is no doubt true that our terms have lost all their original meaning."
The difficulty is, in short, that we have two horns of a dilemma: either (i) Consciousness with feeling of pleasure and pain are co-extensive with life; in which case they existed before the selective reactions which are said to be the criterion of consciousness. For — to put this alterna- tive in terms of my own foregoing explanations — the same stimulations of nutrition, etc., which are now said to explain the increase of the central processes, upon which conscious- ness is based, must have been vital to life before this so- called variation arose. Why then did not the uniform liv- ing protoplasm, which preceded the variation, itself have consciousness } Or, the second horn of the dilemma, (2), Consciousness with feeling of pleasure and pain are quite useless appendages to the theory of adaptation and are in no way accounted for; since the variation which secures the first adaptation, that is, the selective reactions said to be the criterion of mind, are simply variations in processes of nutrition, etc., which must have existed in earlier living matter, if it existed, and may exist in much higher forms 212 The Theory of Development.
of living matter, in which we have no evidence of such a thing as feeling of pleasure or pain.
Romanes thinks it is best to draw no line at all between life without and life with consciousness, but to say that as we descend in the scale terms like feeling, which imply consciousness, are gradually eviscerated of their meaning; and he is probably right. But he does not see that even then there are two remaining alternatives. We may say, to state one of the alternatives first, that life existed before selective reaction; in which case — holding that mind is co-extensive with life — he must give up his criterion of mind. This, I think, he does substantially, adopting, somewhat hesitatingly it is true, the Spencer- Bain view of the origin of adaptations by accidental movements during the lifetime of early creatures. He says: ^ *' How are we to explain the fact that the ana- tomical plan of a nerve centre...comes to be that which is needed to direct the nervous stimuli into the channels required } The answer to this question we found to con- sist in the property which is shown by nervous tissue to grow by use into the directions which are required for farther use. This subject is as yet an obscure one, espe- cially when the earliest stages of such adaptive growth are concerned, but in a general way we can understand that hereditary nsage, combined with natural selection may have been alone sufficient, etc." (italics mine). Furthermore, he presents an argument for the ontogenetic view of the rise of selective reactions in saying: ^ *' It is impossible that heredity can have provided in advance for innova- tions upon or alterations of its own machinery during the 2 Loc. cit., p. 20 f, quoting from his own work on Animal Intelligence.
The Origin of Consciousness. 213 lifetime of a particular individual." The inference being that if such innovations cannot be provided for by heredity (variation) they must be acquired during the lifetime of the creatures. This argument is worthy of discussion and is taken up again: but it is not necessary to dwell upon it here, inasmuch as it does not conflict with the possible truth of the second alternative which is still open.
This second alternative — really a third one in relation to the horns of the original dilemma presented to the mind of Romanes — is this: we may say that life began with selective reaction as part of its original endowment, and with consciousness withal, that is, with feelings of pleasure and pain.
This position preserves the criterion of mind, making it also the criterion of life, and so assumes an absolute phylogenetic beginning of both life and mind in one. This seems to me to be required not only by the logic of criteria but also by the facts of life.
In what sense we are able to call this a 'variation' is, of course, open to dispute. It is certainly a variation in nature — this tremendous thing, life, made more tre- mendous as being the vehicle of mind. But is it not more simple than the other horn of the dilemma; that which requires the assumption, first, of life without con- sciousness, and then, a little later on, the farther assump- tion of consciousness in connection with life t But more positive advantages come, it is to be hoped, from the foregoing considerations. It has been shown that the theory of biological adaptation cannot dispense with a factor which is, from all accounts,^ — taking biologists like Romanes to witness, — the physiological analogue of pleasure and pain, and that nowhere can a beginning be 2 14 The Theory of Developmcjit, found for this in the life series. When we come further to see that all stages of mental accommodation and development can be construed as further steps in such biological adaptation — a task to which this book is mainly devoted — it would require some temerity of dogmatism or some strong evidence to the contrary to lead one to throw away such an extension of the principle of uni- formity in nature. And yet, with the two great excep- tions, Spencer and Romanes, I know of no biologists approaching the first rank, who have attempted to bring the phenomena of mental development — the class of facts most open to scrutiny and most important every- where in the animal series — and those of organic adap- tation, under the terms of a single concept.
§ 5. Outcome: Habit and Accomniodation.
Returning upon our path we are now able to see that two great truths stand out in all development; two truths both of which are based upon the general fact of con- tractility or reaction, and which, therefore, take us further upon our way.
The organism tends to repeat what it has already done; this all theories of development agree upon, the biologists, the disciples of Spencer, the advocates of the association theory of Bain, the psychologists. The fact of repetition is admitted to be the corner-stone of all theories; and all theories go farther in naming the prin- ciple which such repetitions illustrate, the law of Habit.
The formulation of the principle of habit, however, must depend somewhat upon the sort of notion we enter- tain of contractility, of the way which the organism takes Outcome: Habit and Acconnuodatiou. 215 to get its repetitions. If we hold that habits are distinctly- due to the repetition of motor discharges, — that is, to the second, third, fourth performance of contractions, as the Spencer-Bain theory tells us, — then no habit can be formed as such, or can be begun to be formed until after a first contraction has opened the way for the passage of the contracting energy into the same channels of discharge a second, third, fourth time. The formulation of the prin- ciple of habit on this theory takes on then something of this form — its usual form — i.e., Habit expresses the ten- dency of an organism to repeat its own movements again and again.
I have said enough, I think, already to show what criti- cism ought to be passed on this formulation. It means that the organism starts with nothing equivalent to habit, with no native tendency to any kind of movement, with no teleology in its movements, no ulterior organic ends. It further gives no criterion as to what kind of move- ments it is desirable the organism should get into the habit of performing. It makes the movements necessary to the creature's life on a par precisely with all other movements, while yet admitting that it is only by appro- priate movements that the organism could have got life processes at all. It gives the organism no preferences for its food, its oxygen, the stimulations in the presence of which alone life itself would be possible; for such prefer- ences would have to show themselves as organic tenden- cies to some kind of differential movements.
Coming to supply this lack, as I have endeavoured to do in the preceding pages, we find it necessary to consider that the repetition of movement is not at all what the organism is after, nor indeed is it what the principle of habit rests 2i6 The Theory of Development.
upon. It is not true that all movements are * equal before law ' — the law of habit. Movements which cause pain do not tend to be repeated. They are exceptions to the law of habit, as that is usually formulated. Painful move- ments are inhibited, they tend to be reversed, squelched, utterly blotted out; how can this be explained on the fore- going formula for habit.'' It cannot be explained. And yet it is found to be a fact in the lowest living creatures that the biologist knows.
So just as in starting with life we have to start with some process characteristic of life, — say nutrition alone, if you please, — so we have also by the law of dynamogenesis to start with tendencies to movements which are the mani- festations of life, and are, in so far, special. And the object of these movements is the maintenance of life: which is only another expression, as we have found reason to believe, for the maintenance of the stimulations neces- sary to life. So we reach a new formulation of the principle of habit by which it reads something like this: Habit expresses the tendency of an organism to keep in touch, by means of movement, with beneficial stimulations: or if we summarize under a single word the character of the movements toward which all habits of the organism tend, we may say: Habit expresses the tendency of the organism to secure ajid to retain its vital stimzdations.
On this view, a habit begins before the movement which illustrates it actually takes place; the organism is endowed with a habit, if that be not considered a contradiction. Its life process involves just the tendency which habit goes on to confirm and to extend. The process of habit, having as its end the maintenance of a condition of stimulation, is set in train by the initial stimulus. And the discharge Outcojue: Habit and Accoj]imodation. 217 of it in the path which again ' hits ' the stimulus is the function of this stimulus rather than another, and reflects, exactly and alone, the fact that then and there is a stimu- lus whose influence upon the vital processes is good.
Here at the very origin of the things of life, therefore, we find the ' circular process,' what I am going on in the following pages to call the ' imitation ' process. And the law of habit is simply a generalization, all the way through the facts of biology and psychology, from the various appli- cations of this principle.
The other great principle, on which the foregoing discus- sions serve to throw some light, is that of Accommodation as it is best to call it in psychology, adaptation in biology. Let us see how it may be put in contrast to that which is called habit.
We have had occasion to ask in detail how an organism can accommodate itself, and have already discussed various answers in equal detail. Our outcome may be briefly stated, apart from the consideration of habit, somewhat in this way: An organism accommodates itself, or learns new adjustments, simply by exercising the movements which it already has, its habits, in a heightened or excessive way; the accommodation is in each case simply the result and fruit of the habit itself which is exercised.
This is clear when we remember that on our new con- ception of habit every act prompted by habit is an act of attaining a beneficial stimulation or experience: now the result of every attainment of a beneficial experience is to discharge an excessive pleasure wave of movement from which new adjustments are selected by the same criterion; that is, by the enriched stimulations or experiences which they in turn secure. So these later adjustments are 2i8 The Theory of Development, accommodations. Each such accommodation is reached simply in the ordinary routine of habit, and is its out- come.
How simple this view is in the whole range of facts becomes evident in the notice of various of its applications in subsequent chapters. It seems to allow us to make nature move smoothly, instead of being compelled, as we are so often compelled, to consider a new thing, a novelty in nature, an invention, a new adaptation of means to end — to consider each of these as involving a great wrench of nature from the methods of her usual working! Let us say, once for all, that every new thing is an adaptation, and every adaptation arises right out of the bosom of old processes and is filled with old matter. Does not the one kind of ' circular ' reaction in which, as we now see, habit and accommodation meet on common ground, enable us to see how this may be true } Finally, coming once again to the topic of heredity, let us restate the objection made by Romanes to the view that life may begin with a differential reaction, or that such a differential reaction could not be a variation preserved by natural selection. He says, in a passage already quoted in part:^ ''Does the organism learn to make new adjust- ments, or to modify old ones, in accordance with the results of its own individual experience.? If it does so, the fact cannot be due simply to reflex action in the sense above described [i.e., repetitions of old reactions under the law of habit]; for it is impossible that heredity can have provided in advance for innovations upon or alterations in its own machinery during the lifetime of a particular individual."
This difficulty, as we saw, led Romanes to throw over OuicoJic: Habit and Acconiuiodation.
his own criterion of mind, and to hold that all adaptations, including those selective reactions which he had made characteristic of mind, were reached in the lifetime of individuals. Further, this position, if true, would lead inevitably to a Lamarckian theory of heredity, which in- deed Romanes held; for if no hereditary variation can pro- vide for future adaptations, then no past adaptations can have been provided for by variations to which they were future, and so all actual adaptations must have arisen by use, heredity being solely the bridge of transmission from father to son.
But we are now able to see, from the results we have reached, not only that there is a third alternative, but also that this statement of Romanes is not true. The third alternative is that life began with a habit, the very method of which does include a process which provides for the continual modification of its own results.
If we accept this alternative, then I have shown how new adaptations can be secured inside of this habit. But if we do not accept it, preferring to believe with Spencer in a form of earlier life which showed quite formless and diffused contractions, we are able still to see how such a pseudo-habit may have come about as a variation. The only necessary feature of this variation would be that nutrition increase expansive and varied movements; that is all. The result would be that the stimulations afford- ing nutrition would be hit upon and gained oftener by these organisms than by others, and so a habit of get- ting greater variety and richness of such stimulations in this way would be secured, and new accommodations made which would break up the habits transmitted by heredity. Would not this be just the state of things which Romanes 2 20 The Theory of Development.
declares impossible? — heredity providing for the modifi- cation of its own machinery? Heredity not only leaves the future free for modifications, it also provides a method of life in the operation of which modifications are bound to come, and further, — and this is the most remarkable fact in the whole case — it provides that these modifica- tions shall take form in the great twofold accommodation of movements corresponding to pleasure and pain, thus making the very fact of accommodation itself the great deep-seated habit of organic life.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Origin of Motor Attitudes and Expressions. § I. General View.
In ordinary usage, the word ' expression ' stands for a passibly definite thing. We mean, when we use it, to say that the signs, which we see in face, attitude, deport- ment, etc., of a man or beast, mean something; and that this meaning is what the mental process or state of the individual or creature under observation really is, or what he really intends to have us take his state to be. He expresses something to me when I gather from certain signs about his body, such as those I have mentioned, certain facts to be true about his mind or consciousness. The phrases, 'facial expression,' 'verbal and rhetorical expression,' 'emotional expression,' etc., all have this com- mon idea at bottom.
Just as soon as we have come to ask how expression is possible, how it comes that these external signs can be trusted to convey the truth about the mind which lies within, we see that a whole philosophy of development is required to give us an answer; a philosophy of the devel- opment, that is, of mind and body together. It will not do to give an explanation simply of one mental state, like grief, expressing itself in one group of signs, like weeping; that might be solved by saying that the body had been 222 Motor Attitudes and Expire ssioiis.
created for just this use by the mind. But when we come to see that all possible mental states have their appropriate signs, all in a system, and that each animal consciousness has a system of signs, and all the same system, then we have to account not merely for the single cases, but for the system, as a system. And this is a very different matter.
Let us take, for example, the facts of suggestion as they have been set forth above. Suggestion we found to involve a gradual series of changes, transitions, stages, in the action, behaviour, attitudes of the child, according as he experiences changes, transitions, stages of treatment and stimulation from his surroundings. All his signs or expressions are very gradually formed out of previous signs. And no one of them can be understood except when considered in relation to those which went before. They all, in short, constitute a developing system and represent the mind also, as it is also considered as a developing system.
And, again, if we did not know beforehand how a par- ticular experience would manifest itself in the system of signs, the signs simply as such would have no meaning whatever to us; they would not be signs of anything. Suppose I observe the movements of a complicated ma- chine, going on in a series, — a machine which I do not understand. Its movements are not signs or expressions to me of anything. They really are signs, however, expressions of the plan of action of the machine, stages in the idea or state of consciousness of the designer, which the machine embodies. And as soon as I understand the machine, which means as soon as I have the same state of consciousness or idea that he had, then the movements in their series or system do become signs, real expressions The Theory of ' Ejnotional Expression! 223 to me. I must be then actually introduced into the same system as the idea and the machine, in order to find what the expressions mean.
Looking at the child's expressions again, we see that they are expressions to us only because we are in the same system, — the human, the life system, — with the child. I have gone through the same systematic evolu- tion of signs that he is going through. So the question of the origin of expression again widens itself out mag- nificently. It stands for an answer thus: not only why do the child's expressions — mind and body together — develop on such a system, but also why do all of us who understand the signs, — man, child, beast, — find our- selves in the same system of signs intelligible and usable by us all. How can we account for a great organic mind system in the world, and with it how account for its organic embodiment in the system of signs which we call expression } This, it is evident, makes expression a function of organic evolution, and really identifies the science of expression with the great branch of biological science called Morphology. For signs of functions are always shapes of organs, temporary or permanent, and a system of shapes is always a system of permanent signs.
We must accordingly appeal to the theory of develop- ment to explain all expressions whatever.
§ 2. The Theory of * Eviotioiial Expression!
Recent discussion has brought out certain great facts about the psycho-physics of emotion.
The outcome of discussion takes form about two or three 2 24 Motor Attitudes and Expressions.
general principles which I am now aiming to state in their general bearing upon the origin of 'expression' generally. It is evident that the word ' emotion ' may be used in two very distinct senses. Emotion may mean a phenomenon of instinct purely, the ' emotions ' which a baby a year old has already got, such as fear, anger, jealousy, sympa- thy, etc.; or 'emotion' may designate a phenomenon of ideas — something that the baby has yet to get, such as the emotions, or sentiments, which involve thought about things, contemplation, the more or less adequate under- standing of the meanings of things in relation to the per- son who is affected. A child, for example, starts at a loud noise, and shows all the signs of the emotion of fear; but the adult fears a loud noise only when he has some reason to think that it means danger to him.
If this distinction be true, — and no one denies the dis- tinction in fact, apart from the terms which have often hopelessly obscured it, — it becomes evident that the ques- tion as to what the components of emotional 'expression' are, is really a genetic question. All the elements of the problem of the genesis of 'expressions' generally — that is, of the laws of motor development — must be recognized and woven into an adequate theory.
And when we come to do this, two very important facts come before us, of which it is our duty to give some ac- count. We have first to ask why each so-called emotion has the particular channels of 'expression,' or motor dis- charges, which it has; and second, how it comes that the same system of discharges or expressions answer for the two kinds of emotion which I have distinguished as, in one case, a phenomenon of instinct and, in the other case, a phenomenon of ideas. How is it that what I fear because The Theory of ' Einotional Expression! 225 I have some reasonable L;roiind for fearing it, the child also fears by instinct, and that I make the same contractions, etc., in my state of fear that he does in his?
The first of these questions may be called the ' psycho- physical ' question of emotion. It asks how the mental state which we psychologists call emotion is actually related, in any particular case, to the movements, contrac- tions, vaso-motor changes, etc., which the body shows when it is 'expressing' this emotion. Does the mental state, the true emotion, come first, and itself cause the bodily expression, as we ordinarily seem to think } Or is the emotion itself the consciousness that these violent bodily changes are already taking place } This is the problem which men are now discussing, and it is this which I wish to take up in the light of the principles of development which have been already laid out in the earlier pages. And we can ask ourselves the question in somewhat the following form, namely: How could what we know as emotion, together with what we know as emotional expression, have arisen in the course of devel- opment, and what does development teach us of the rela- tion of these two things to each other } When, then, we come to take a broad survey of motor development, in the race no less than in the child, we are able to signalize certain great principles which we cannot do without: principles which stand out in biology and in psychology as essential to any theory of development. The whole range of facts fairly available for the genetic theory of emotion reactions should be brought under our three principles: Habit, used broadly to include the effects of repetition and heredity, as the postulate of ' race experi- ence ' makes use of it; Accommodation, the law of adapta- Q 226 Motor Attitudes and Expressions.
tion in all progressive evolution, no matter how adaptation is secured; and, earliest and most fundamental. Dynamo- genesis, expressing the fact simply of regular connection between the sensory and motor sides of all living reactions, as to amount of process. These principles have already been given some notice. Let us see, therefore, how, if we assume that these three principles are all the ' rules of procedure' which the organism has to work under, — how, then, emotion and its expression can have come to be.