Thus we see that the terms and faculties ot the older psychology can be arranged under this doctrine of Apperception without the necessity of thinking of the mind as doing more than the one thing. It simply groups and combines its mate- rial in different ways and in ever higher degrees of complexity.
Apperception, then, is the one principle of mental activity on the side of its reception and treatment of the materials of experience.
There is another term very current in psychol- ogy by which this same process is sometimes in- dicated: the phrase Association of Ideas. This designates the fact that when two things have been perceived or thought of together, they tend to come up together in the mind in the future; and when a thing has been perceived which re- sembles another, or is contrasted with it, they tend to recall each other in the same way. It is plain, however, that this phrase is applied to the single thoughts, sensations, or other mental ma- terials, in their relations or connections among themselves. They are said to be " associated " with one another. This way of speaking of the mental materials, instead of speaking of the mind's activity, is convenient; and it is quite right to do so, since it is no contradiction to say that the thoughts, etc., which the mind " ap- perceives " remain " associated " together. From this explanation it is evident that the Association of Ideas also comes under the mental process 14 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
of Apperception of which we have been speak- ing.
There is, however, another tendency of the mind in the treatment of its material, a tendency which shows us in actual operation the activity with which we have now become familiar. When we come to look at any particular case of apper- ception or association we find that the process must go on from the platform which the mind's attainments have already reached. The passing of the mental states has been likened to a stream which flows on from moment to moment with no breaks. It is so continuous that we can never say: " I will start afresh, forget the past, and be uninfluenced by my history." However we may wish this, we can never do it; for the oncoming current of the stream is just what we speak of as ourselves, and we can not avoid bringing the memories, imaginations, expecta- tions, disappointments, etc., up to the present. So the effect which any new event or experience, happening for the first time, is to have upon us depends upon the way it fits into the current of these onflowing influences. The man I see for the first time may be so neutral to me that I pass him unregarded. But let him return after I have once remarked him, or let him resemble a man whom I know, or let him give me some reason to observe, fear, revere, think of him in any way, then he is a positive factor in my stream. He has been taken up into the flow of my mental life, and he henceforth contributes something to it.
For example, a little child, after learning to draw a man's face, with two eyes, the nose and mouth, and one ear on each side, will afterward, when told to draw a profile, still put in two eyes WHAT OUR MINDS HAVE IN COMMON. 15 and affix an ear to each side. The drift of men- tal habit tells on the new result and he can not escape it.
He will still put in the two eyes and two ears when he has before him a copy showing only one ear and neither eye.
In all such cases the new is said to be Assimi- lated to the old. The customary figure for man in the child's memory assimilates the materials of the new copy set before him.
Now this tendency is universal. The mind must assimilate its new material as much as pos- sible, thus making the old stand for the new. Otherwise there would be no containing the frag- mentary details which we should have to remem- ber and handle. Furthermore, it is through this tendency that we go on to form the great classes of objects — such as man, animal, virtue — into which numbers of similar details are put, and which we call General Notions or Concepts.
We may understand by Assimilation, there- fore, the general tendency of new experiences to be treated by us in the ways which similar ma- terial has been treated before, with the result that the mind proceeds from the particular case to the general class.
Summing up our outcome so far, we find that general psychology has reached three great prin- ciples in its investigation of knowledge. First, we have the combining tendency of the mind, the grouping together and relating of mental states and of things, called Apperception. _Then, second, there are the partiWna^Telcfffros established among the various states, etc., which are com- bined; these are called Associations of Ideas. And, third, there is the tendency of the mind to 3 1 6 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
use its old experiences and habits as general pat- terns or nets for the sorting out and distributing of all the new details of daily life; this is called Assimilation.
II. Let us now turn to the second great aspect of the mind, as general or introspective psychol- ogy considers it, the aspect which presents itself in Action or conduct. The fact that we act is of course as important as the fact that we think or the fact that we feel; and the distinction which separates thought and action should not be made too sharp.
Yet there is a distinction. To understand action we must again go to introspection. This comes out as soon as we ask how we reach our knowledge of the actions of others. Of course, we say at once that we see them. And that is true; we do see them, while as to their thoughts we only infer them from what we see of their action. But, on the other hand, we may ask: How do we come to infer this or that thought from this or that action of another? The only reply is: Because when we act in the same way this is the way we feel. So we get back in any case to our own consciousness and must ask how is this action related to this thought in our own mind.
To this question psychology has now a gen- eral answer: Our action is always the result of our thought, of the elements of knowledge which are at the time present in the mind. Of course, there are actions which we do from purely nerv- ous reasons. These are the Instincts, which come up again when we consider the animals. But these we may neglect so long as we are investi- gating actions which we consider our own. Apart • ft WHAT OUR MINDS HAVE IN COMMON. 17 from the Instincts, the principle holds that behind every action which our conduct shows there must be something thought of, some sensation or knowledge then in mind, some feeling swelling within our breast, which prompts to the action.
This general principle is Motor Suggestion. It simply means that we are unable to have any thought or feeling whatever, whether it comes from the senses, from memory, from the words, conduct, or command of others, which does not have a direct influence upon our conduct. We are quite unable to avoid the influence of our own thoughts upon our conduct, and often the most trivial occurrences of our daily lives act as sug- gestions to deeds of very great importance to our- selves and others. For example, the influence of the newspaper reports of crime stimulate other individuals to perform the same crimes by this principle of suggestion; for the fact is that the reading of the report causes us to entertain the thoughts, and these thoughts tend to arouse in us their corresponding trains of suggested action.
The most interesting and striking sphere of operation of the principle of Suggestion (of other sorts as well as motor) is what is commonly known simply as Hypnotism. To that, as well as to further illustrations of Suggestion, we will return later on.
We are able, however, to see a little more in detail how the law of Motor Suggestion works by asking what sort of action is prompted in each case of thought or feeling, at the different levels of the mind's activity which have been distin- guished above as all illustrating Apperception — e. g., the stages known as Perception, Imagina- tion, Reasoning, etc.
1 8 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
We act, of course, on our perceptions constant- ly; most of our routine life is made up of such ac- tion on the perceptions of objects which lie about us. The positions of things in the house, in the streets, in the office, in the store, are so well known that we carry out a series of actions with reference to these objects without much super- vision from our consciousness. Here the law of Motor Suggestion works along under the guidance of Perception, Memory, and the Association of Ideas. Then we find also, in much of our action, an element due to the exercise of the Imagination. We fill in the gaps in the world of perception by imagining appropriate connections; and we then act as if we knew that these imaginations were realities. This is especially true in our inter- course with our fellow-men. We never really know what they will do from time to time. Their action is still future and uncertain; but from our familiarity with their character, we surmise or imagine what they expect or think, and we then act so as to make our conduct fit into theirs. Here is suggestion of a personal kind which de- pends upon our ability, in a sense, to reconstruct the character of others, leading us out into appro- priate action. This is the sphere of the most important affairs of our lives. It appears especially so when we consider its connection with the next great sort of action from suggestion.
This next and highest sphere is action from the general or abstract thoughts which we have been able to work up by the apperceiving activity of the mind. In this sphere we have a special name for those thoughts which influence us directly and lead us to action: we call such thoughts Motives. We also have a special name for the WHAT OUR MINDS HAVE IN COMMON. 19 sort of action which is prompted by clearly- thought-out motives: Will. But in spite of this emphasis given to certain actions of ours as spring- ing from what is called Will, we must be careful to see that Will is not a new faculty, or capacity, added to mind, and which is different from the ways of action which the mind had before the Will arose. Will is only a name for the action upon suggestions of conduct which are so clear in our minds that we are able to deliberate upon them, acting only after some reflection, and so having a sense that the action springs from our own choice. The real reasons for action, how- ever, are thoughts, in this case, just as in the earlier cases they were. In this case we call them Motives; but we are dependent upon these Mo- tives, these Suggestions; we can not act without Motives, nor can we fail to act on those Motives which we have; just as, in the earlier cases, we could not act without some sort of Perceptions or Imaginations or Memories, and we could not fail to act on the Perceptions or other mental states which we had. Voluntary action or Will is therefore only a complex and very highly con- scious case of the general law of Motor Sugges- tion; it is the form which suggested action takes on when Apperception is at its highest level.
The converse of Suggestion is also true — that we can not perform an action without having in the mind at the time the appropriate thought, or image, or memory to suggest the action. This dependence of action upon the thought which the mind has at the time is conclusively shown in certain patients having partial paralysis. These patients find that when the eyes are bandaged they can not use their limbs, and it is simply be- 20 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
cause they can not realize without seeing the limb how it would feel to move it; but open the eyes and let them see the limb — then they move it freely. A patient can not speak when the cor- tex of the brain is injured in the particular spot which is used in remembering how the words feel or sound when articulated. Many such cases lead to the general position that for each of our inten- tional actions we must have some way of thinking about the action, of remembering how it feels, looks, etc.; we must have something in mind equivalent to the experience of the movement. This is called the principle of Kinaesthetic Equiv- alents, an expression which loses its formidable sound when we remember that " kinaesthetic " means having the feeling of movement; so the principle expresses the truth that we must in every case have some thought or mental picture in mind which is equivalent to the feeling of the movement we desire to make; if not, we can not succeed in making it.
What we mean by the "freedom" of the will is not ability to do anything without thinking, but ability to think all the alternatives together and to act on this larger thought. Free action is the fullest expression of thought and of the Self which thinks it.
It is interesting to observe the child getting his Equivalents day by day. He can not perform a new movement simply by wishing to do so; he has no Equivalents in his mind to proceed upon. But as he learns the action, gradually striking the proper movements one by one — oftenest by imitation, as we will see later on — he stores the necessary Equivalents up in his memory, and after- ward only needs to think how the movements WHAT OUR MINDS HAVE IN COMMON. 21 feel or look, or how words sound, to be able to make the movements or speak the words forth- with.
III. Introspection finds another great class of conditions in experience, again on the receptive side — conditions which convert the mind from the mere theatre of indifferent changes into the vital- ly interested, warmly intimate thing which our mental life is to each of us. This is the sphere of Feeling. We may see without more ado that while we are receiving sensations and thoughts and suggestions, and acting upon them in the va- riety of ways already pointed out, we ourselves are not indifferent spectators of this play, this come-and-go of processes. We are directly impli- cated; indeed, the very sense of a self, an ego, a me-ai;d-mine, in each consciousness, arises from the fact that all this come-and-go is a personal growth. The mind is not a mere machine doing what the laws of its action prescribe. We find thai; nothing happens which does not affect the mind itself for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, for pleasure or for pain; and there spring up a series of attitudes of the mind itself, according as it is experiencing or expecting to experience what to it is good or bad. This is, then, the great meaning of Feeling: it is the sense in the mind that it is itself in some way influ- enced for good or for ill by what goes on within it. It stands midway between thought and ac- tion. We feel with reference to what we think, and we act because we feel. All action is guided by feeling.
Feelingshowstwo well-marked characters: first, the Excitement of taking a positive attitude; and, second, the Pleasure or Pain that goes with it.
22 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
Here, again, it may suffice to distinguish the stages which arise as we go from the higher to the lower, from the life of Sensation and Perception up to that of Thought. This was our method in both of the other phases of the mental life — Knowledge and Action. Doing this, therefore, in the case of Feeling also, we find different terms applied to the different phases of feeling. In the lowest sort of mental life, as we may sup- pose the helpless newborn child to have it, and as we also think it exists in certain low forms of animal life, feeling is not much more than Pleasures and Pains depending largely upon the physical conditions under which life proceeds. It is likely that there are both Pleasures and Pains which are actually sensations with special nerve apparatus of their own; and there are also states of the Comfortable and the Uncomfortable, or of pleasant and unpleasant feeling, due to the way the mind is immediately affected. These are conditions of. Excitement added to the Sensations of Pleasure and Pain.
Coming up to the life of Memory and Imagina- tion, we find many great classes of Emotions tes- tifying to the attitudes which the mind takes toward its experiences. They are remarkably rich and varied, these emotions. Hope gives place to its opposite despair, joy to sorrow, and regret succeeds expectation. No one can enumer- ate the actual phases of the emotional life. The differences which are most pronounced — as be- tween hope and fear, joy and sorrow, anger and love — have special names, and their stimulating causes are so constant that they have also cer- tain fixed ways of showing themselves in the body, the so-called emotional Expressions. It is WHAT OUR MINDS HAVE IN COMMON. 23 by these that we see and sympathize with the emotional states of other persons. The most that we have room here to say is that there is a con- stant ebb and flow, and that we rarely attain a state of relative freedom from the influence of emotion.
The fixed bodily Expressions of emotion are largely hereditary and common to man and the animals. It is highly probable' that they first arose as attitudes useful in the animal's environ- ments for defence, flight, seizure, embrace, etc., and have descended to man as survivals, so be- coming indications of states of the mind.
The final and highest manifestation of the life of feeling is what we call Sentiment. Senti- ment is aroused in response to certain so-called ideal states of thought. The trend of mental growth toward constantly greater adequacy in its knowledge leads it to anticipate conditions when its attainments will be made complete. There are certain sorts of reality whose completeness, thus imagined, arouses in us emotional states of the greatest power and value. The thought of God gives rise to the Religious sentiment, that of the good to the Ethical or Moral sentiment, that of the beautiful to the ^Esthetic sentiment. These sentiments represent the most refined and noble fruitage of the life of feeling, as the thoughts which they accompany refer to the most elevated and ideal objects. And it is equally true that the conduct which is performed under the inspiration of Sentiment is the noblest and most useful in which man can engage.
24 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
CHAPTER III.
THE MIND OF THE ANIMAL — COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY.
IT has already been pointed out that the ani- mal has a very important share of the endowment which we call mind. Only recently has he been getting his due. He was formerly looked upon, under the teachings of a dualistic philosophy and of a jealous humanity, as a soulless machine, a mere automaton which was moved by the starting of certain springs to run on until the machine ran down. There are two reasons that this view has been given up, each possibly important enough to have accomplished the revolution and to have given rise to Animal Psychology.
First, there is the rise of the evolution theory, which teaches that there is no absolute break be- tween man and the higher animals in the matter of mental endowment, and that what difference there is must itself be the result of the laws of mental growth; and the second reason is that the more adequate the science of the human mind has become the more evident has it also become that man himself is more of a machine than had been supposed. Man grows by certain laws; his progress is conditioned by the environment, both physical and social, in which he lives; his mind is a part of the natural system of things. So with the animal. The animal fulfils, as far as he can, the same sort of function; he has his environ- ment, both physical and social; he works under the same laws of grofvth which man also«obeys; his mind exhibits substantially the same phenofn- THE MIND OF THE ANIMAL. 25 ena which the human mind exhibits in its early stages in the child. All this means that the ani- mal has as good right to recognition, as a mind- bearing creature, so to speak, as the child; and if we exclude him we should also exclude the child. Further, this also means — what is more important for the science of psychology — that the develop- ment of the mind in its early stages and in certain of its directions of progress is revealed most ade- quately in the animals.
Animal Instinct. — Turning to the animals, the first thing to strike us is the remarkable series of so-called animal Instincts. Everybody knows what animal instincts are like; it is only necessary to go to a zoological garden to see them in oper- ation on a large scale. Take the house cat and follow her through the life of a single day, observ- ing her actions. She washes her face and makes her toilet in the morning by instinct. She has her peculiar instinctive ways of catching the mouse* for breakfast. She whets her appetite by hold- ing back her meal possibly for an hour, in the meantime playing most cruelly with the pitiful mouse, letting it run and catching it again, and doing this over and over. If she has children she attends to their training in the details of cat etiquette and custom with the utmost care, all by instinct; and the kittens instinctively respond to her attentions. She conducts herself during the day with remarkable cleanliness of life, making arrangements which civilized man follows with admiration. She shows just the right abhorrence of water for a creature that is not able to swim. She knows just what enemies to fly from and when to turn and fight, using with inborn dexterity her formidable claws. She prefers nocturnal excur- 26 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
sions and sociabilities, having eyes which make it safe to be venturesome in the dark. She has cer- tain vocal expressions of her emotions, which man in vain attempts to eradicate with all the agencies of domestication. She has special arts to attract her mate, and he in turn is able to charm her with songs which charm nobody else. And so on, al- most ad infinitum.
Observe the dog, the birds of different species, the monkeys, the hares, and you find wonderful differences of habit, each adapting the animal differently, but with equal effectiveness, to the life which he in particular is called upon to lead. The ants and bees are notoriously expert in the matter of instinct. They have colonies in which some of the latest principles of social organization seem to find analogues: slavery, sexual regulations, division of labour, centralization of resources, government distribution of food, capital punish- ment, etc.
All this — not to stop upon details which the books on animal life give in great abundance — has furnished grounds for speculation for centu- ries, and it is only in the last generation that the outlines of a theory of instinct have been filled in with substantial knowledge. A rapid sketch of this theory may be drawn in the following pages.
i. In instinct in general there is a basis of in- herited nervous tendency toward the performance of just the sort of action which the instinct ex- hibits. This nervous tendency shows itself inde- pendently of learning by the individual in a great many cases, as in the instinct of sucking by young animals, pecking for food by young fowls, the mi- grating actions of adult mammals and birds, the courting movements of many varieties of animal THE MIND OF THE ANIMAL. 27 species. In all this we have what is called the "perfect" instinct. To be perfect, an instinct must be carried out successfully by the animal when his organism is ready, without any instruc- tion, any model to imitate, any experience to go upon. The "perfect" instincts are entirely con- genital or inborn; the nervous apparatus only needs to reach the proper stage of maturity or growth, and forthwith the instinctive action is performed as soon as the external conditions of life are such as to make its performance appro- priate and useful.
2. On the other hand, many instincts — indeed, probably the greater number — are not perfect, but " imperfect." Imperfect instincts are those which do not fully equip the animal with the function in question, but only take him part way to the goal. He has a spontaneous tendency to do certain things, such as building a nest, singing, etc.; but he is not able to do these things ade- quately or perfectly if left to himself from birth. This sort of endowment with imperfect instincts has been the field of some of the most interesting research in animal psychology, and has led to a new view of the relation of instinct to intelligence.
3. It has been found that young animals, birds, etc., depend upon the example and instruction of adults for the first performance of many actions that seem to be instinctive. This dependence may exist even in cases in which there is yet a congeni- tal tendency to perform the action. Many birds, for example, have a general instinct to build a nest; but in many cases, if put in artificial cir- cumstances, they build imperfect nests. Birds also have an instinct to make vocal calls; but if kept from birth out of hearing of the peculiar notes of 28 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
their species, they come to make cries of a differ- ent sort, or learn to make the notes of some other species with which they are thrown.
4. The principal agency for the learning of the animals, and for the supplementing of their in- stincts, is Imitation. The sight of certain move- ments on the part of the adult animals, or the hearing of their cries, calls, notes, etc., leads the young to fall into an imitation of these movements or vocal performances. The endowment which such a young animal has in the direction of mak- ing movements and cries similar to those of his species aids him, of course, in imitating these in preference to others. So the endowment and the tendency to imitate directly aid each other in all such functions, and hurry the little creature on in his acquisition of the habits of his species. We find young animals clinging even in their imi- tations pretty closely to their own proper fathers and mothers, who are thus enabled to bring them up comme il faut.