summary and analyse

THE SCOPE OF PSYCBOLOGK 3

of an hour ago? Why, again, in old age should its grasp of childhood’s events seem firmest ? Why should illness and exhaustion enfeeble it ? Why should repeating an ex- perience strengthen our recollection of it ? Why should drugs, fevers, asphyxia, and excitement resuscitate things long since forgotten 4 If we content ourselves with merely affirming that the faculty of memory is so peculiarly con- stituted by nature as to exhibit just these oddities, we seem little the better for having invoked it, for our explanation becomes as complicated as that of the crude facts with which we started. Moreover there is something grotesque and irrational in the supposition that the soul is equipped with elementary powers of such an ingeniously intricate sort. Why should our memory cling more easily to the near than the remote ? Why should it lose its grasp of proper sooner than of abstract names ? Such peculiarities seem quite fan- tastic; and might, for aught we can see a priori, be the precise opposites of what they are. Evidently, then, the faculty does not exist absolutely, but w o r b under c o d i t i o n s ; and the quest o f t h e conditions becomes the psychologist’s most interesting task.

However firmly he may hold to the soul and her re- membering faculty, he must acknowledge that she never exerts the latter without a cue, and that something must al- ways precede and remind us of whatever we are to recollect, ‘‘ An adea I” says the associationist, c c an idea associated with the remembered thing ; and this explains also why things repeatedly met with are more easily recollected, for their as- sociates on the various occasions furnish so many distinct avenues of recall.” But this does not explain the effects of fever, exhaustion, hypnotism, old age, and the like. And in general, the pure associationist’s account of our mental life is almost as bewildering as that of the pure spiritualist. This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, yet clinging together, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, like dominoes in ceaseless change, or the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope,-whence do they get their fantastic l a w s of clinging, and why do they cling in just the shapes they do ?

For this the associationist must introduce the order of experieiice in the outer world. The dance of the ideas is

4 PB PCHOLOG P.

B copy, somewhat mutilated and altered, of the order of phenomena. But the slightest reflection shows that phe- nomena have absolutely no power to influence our ideas until they have first impressed our senses and our brain. The bare existence of a past fact is no ground for our re- membering it. Unless we have seen it, or somehow u&- gone it, we shall never know of its having been. The expe- riences of the body are thus on0 of the conditions of the faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small amount of reflection on facts shows that one part of the body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are directly concerned. If the nervous communication be cut off between the brain and other parts, the experiences of those other parts are non-existent for the mind. The eye is blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensible and motionless. And conversely, if the brain be injured, consciousness is abolished or altered, even although every other organ in the body be ready to play its normal part. A blow on the head, a sudden subtraction of blood, the pressure of an apoplectic hemorrhage, may have the first effect; whilst a very few ounces of alcohol or grains of opium or hasheesh, or a whiff of chloroform or nitrous oxide gas, are sure to have the second. The delirium of fever, the altered self of insanity, are all due to foreign matters circulating through the brain, or to pathological changes in that organ’s substance. The fact that the brain is the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is indeed so universally admitted nowadays that I need spend no more time in illustrating it, but will simply postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the book will be more or less of a proof that the postulate was correct.

Bodily experiences, therefore, and more particularly brain-experiences, must take a place amongst those con- ditions of the mentallife of which Psychology need take account. The spi&tualist and the associationist must both be ‘cerebra&?ts,’ to the extent at least of admitting that certain peculiarities in the way of working of their own favorite principles are explicable only by the fact that the brain laws are a codeterminant of the result.

THE BCOPE OF PSYCHOLOQ K 5

Our first conclusion, then, is that a certain amount of brain-physiology must be presupposed or included in Psychology.*

In still another way the pyschologist is forced to be something of a nerve-physiologist. Mental phenomena are not only conditioned a p a l e ante by bodily processes; but they lead to them a p a r t e post. That they lead to m t s is of course the most familiar of truths, but I do not merely mean acts in the sense of voluntary and deliberate muscular performances. Mental states occasion also changes in the calibre of blood-vessels, or alteration in the heart-beats, or processes more subtle still, in glands and viscera. If these are taken into account, as well as acts which follow at some remote period because the mental state was once there, it will be safe to lay down the general law that n~ mental tion ever occurs which is not accoml>anied or f & d by a bodily change. The ideas and feelings, e.g., which these present printed characters excite in the reader’s mindnot only occasion movements of his eyes and nascent movements of articulation in him, but will some day make him speak, 01 take sides i n a discussion, or give advice, or choose a book t o read, differently from what would have been the case had they never impressed his retina. Our psychology must there- fore take account not only of the conditions antecedent to mental states, but of their resultant consequences as well.

But actions originally prompted by conscious intelli- gence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even saying one’s prayers, may be done when the mind is ab- sorbed in other things. The performances of animal instinct seem semi-antomatic, and the r e j e x ads of self- preservation certainly are so. Yet they resemble intelli- gent acts in bringing about the 8a7n.e 4 at which the ani- mals’ consciousness, on other occasions, deliberately aims.

* q. Geo. T. Ladd: Elements of Physiological Psychology (1887), pt 111. chap. III, §§9, 12.

5 PSYCHOLOQ P:

Shall the study of such machine-like yet purposive acts ~ L I these be included in Psychology ?

The boundary-line of the mental is certainly vague. It is better not to be pedantic, but to let the science be as vague as its subject, and include such phenomena as these if by so doing we can throw any light on the main business in hand. It will ere long be seen, I trust, that we can ; and that we gain much more by a broad than by a narrow conception of our subject. At a certain stage in the devel- opment of every science a degree of vagueness is what best consists with fertility. On the whole, few recent for- mulas have done more real service of a rough sort in psy- chology than the Spencerian one that the essence of mental life and of bodily life are one, namely, ' the adjustment of inner to outer relations.' Such a formula is vagueness incarnate; but because it takes into account the fact that minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn react; because, in short, it takes mind in the midst of all its concrete relations, it is immensely more fertile than the old-fashioned ' rational psychology,' which treated the soul a s a detached existent, sufficient unto itself, and assumed to consider only its nature and properties. I shall therefore feel free to make any sallies into zoology or into pure nerve-physiology which may seem instructive for our purposes, but otherwise shall leave those sciences to the physiologists.

Can we state more distinctly still the manner in which the mental life seems to intervene between impressions made from without upon the body, and reactions of the body upon the outer world again? Let us look at a few facts.

If some iron filings be sprinkled on a table and a mag- net brought near them, they will fly through the air for a certain distance and stick to its surface. A savage see- ing the phenomenon explains it as the result of an attrac- lion or love between the magnet and the filings. B u t let a card cover the poles of the magnet, and the filings will press forever against its surface without its ever oc- curring to them to pass around its sides and thus come into

T H E SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY. 7

more direct contact with the object of their love. Blow bubbles through a tube into the bottom of a pail of water, they will rise to the surface and mingle with the air. Their action may again be poetically interpreted as due to a longing to reccmbine with the mother-atmosphere above the surface. But if you invert a jar full of water over the pail, they will rise and remain lodged beneath its bottom, shut in from the outer air, although a slight deflection from their course at the outset, or a re-descent towards the rim of the jar when they found their upward course im- peded, would easily have set them free.

If now we pass from such actions as these to those of living things, we notice a striking difference. Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet’s lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

Suppose a living frog in the position in which we placed our bubbles of air, namely, at the bottom of a jar of water. The want >f breath will soon make him also long to rejoin the mother-atmosphere, and he will take the shortest path to his end by swimming straight upwards. But if a jar full of water be inverted over him, he will not, like the bubbles, perpetually press his nose against its unyieldiiig roof, but will restlessly explore the neighborhood until by re-descending again he has discovered a path round its brim to the goal of his desires. Again the fixed end, the varying means!

Such contrasts between living and inanimate perform- ances end by leading men to deny that in the physical world final purposes exist at all. Loves and desires are to-day no longer imputed to particles of iron or of air. No one supposes now that the end of any activity which they may display is an ideal purpose presiding over the

8 PBYCHOLOG X

actiyity from its outset and soliciting or drawing it into being by a sort of vis a fronte. The end, on the contrary, is deemed a mere passive result, pushed into being a tergo, having had, so to speak, no voice in its own production. Alter the pre-existing conditions, and with inorganio ma- terials you bring forth each time a different apparent end. But with intelligent agents, altering the conditions changes the activity displayed, but not the end reached ; for here the idea of the yet unrealized end co-operates with the con- ditions to determine what the activities shall be.

The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means fm ticeir attainment are thus the mark and criterion of thepresencc of mentality in a phenomenon. We all use this test to dis- criminate between an intelligent and a mechanical per- formance. Wo impute no mentality to sticks and stones, because they never seem to move for the sake of anything, but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no sign of choice.

J u s t so we form our decision upon the deepest of all philosophic problems: Is the Kosmos an expression of intelligence rational in its inward nature, or a brute ex- ternal fact pure and simple? If we find ourselves, in con- templating it, unable to banish the impression that it is a realm of final purposes, that it exists for the sake of some- thing, we place intelligence at the heart of it and have a religion. If, on the contrary, in surveying its irremediable flux, we can think of the present only as so much mere mechanical sprouting from the past, occurring with no reference to the future, we are atheists and materialists.

In the lengthy discussions which psychologists have carried on about the amount of intelligence displayed by lower mammals, or the amount of consciousness involved in the functions of the nerve-centres of reptiles, the same test has always been applied : Is the character of the actions such that we must believe them to be performed for the sake of their result ? The result in question, as we shall here- after abundantly see, is as a rule a useful one,-the animal is, on the whole, safer under the circumstances for bringing it forth. So far the action has a teleological character;

So we unhesitatingly call them senseless.

THE SCOPE OF PS PCHOLOB X 9

but such mere outward teleology as this might still be the blind result of w i s a tergo. The growth and movements of plants, the processes of development, digestion, secretion, etc., in animals, supply innumerable instances of per- formances useful to the individual which may nevertheless be, and by most of us are supposod to be, produced by automatic mechanism. The physi ,logist does not con- fidently assert conscious intelligence in the frog’s spinal cord until he has shown that the useful result which the nervous machinery brings forth under a given irritation remains the same when the machinery i s altered. If, to take the stock instance, the right knee of a headless frog be irri- tated with acid, the right foot will wipe it off. When, how- ever, this foot is amputated, the animal will often raise the Z$? foot to the spot and wipe the offending material away.

Pfliiger and Lewes reason from such facts in the follow- ing way : If the first reaction were the result of mere machin- ery, they say ; i f that irritated portion of the skin discharged the right leg as a trigger discharges its own barrel of a shot- gun ; then amputating the right foot would indeed frustrate the wiping, but would not make the kft leg move. It would simply result in the right stump moving through the empty air (which is in fact the phenomenon sometimes observed), The right trigger makes no effort to discharge the left barrel if the right one be unloaded; nor does an electrical ma- chine ever get restless because it can only emit sparks, and not hem pillow-cases like a sewing-machine.

If, on the contrary, the right leg originally moved for the purpose of wiping the acid, then nothing is more natural than that, when the easiest means of effecting that purpose prove fruitless, other means should be tried. Every failure must keep the animal in a state of disappointment which will lead to all sorts of new trials and devices; and tran- quillity will not ensue till one of these, by a happy stroke, achieves the wished-for end.

I n a similar way Goltz ascribes intelligence to the frog’s optic lobes and cerebellum. We alluded above to the manner in which a sound frog imprisoned in water will dis- cover an outlet to the atmosphere. Goltz found that frogs deprived of their cerebral hemispheres would often exhibit

10 PS PCHOLO6r P.

a like ingenuity. Such a frog, after rising from the bottom and finding his farther upward progress checked by the glass bell which has been inverted over him, will not per- sist in butting his nose against the obstacle until dead of suffocation, but will often re-descend and emerge from under its rim as if, not a definite mechanical propulsion upwards, but rather a conscious desire to reach the air by hook or crook were the main-spring of his activity. Goltz con- eluded from this that the hemispheres are not the sole seat of intellect in frogs. He made the same inference from observing that a brainless frog will turn over from his back to his belly when one of his legs is sewed up, although the movements required are then very different from those excited under normal circumstances by the same annoying position. They seem determined, consequently, not merely by the antecedent irritant, but by the final end,-though the irritant of course is what makes the end desired.

Another brilliant German author, Liebmann," argues against the brain's mechanism accounting for mental action, by very similar considerations. A machine as such, he says, will bring forth right results when it is in good order, and wrong results if out of repair. But both kinds of result flow with equally fatal necessity from their conditions. We cannot suppose the clock-work whose structure fatally determines it to a certain rate of speed, noticing that this speed is too slow or too fast and vainly trying to correct it. Its conscience, if it have any, should be as good as that of the best chronometer, for both dike obey equally well the same eternal mechanical laws-laws from behind. But if the brain be out of order and the man says " Twice four are two," instead of "Twice four are eight,"' or else (' I must go to the coal to buy the wharf," instead of G c I must go to the wharf to buy the coal," instantly there arises a conscious- ness of error. The wrong performance, though it obey the same mechanical law as the right, is nevertheless con- demned,--condemned as contradicting the inner law-the law from in front, the purpose or ideal for which the brain e h d d act, whether it do so or not.

Zur Analyein der Wirklichkeit, p. 489.

THE SCOPE OF PSPCHOLOQY. 11

We need not discuss h6re whether these writers in draw- ing their conclusion have done justice to all the premises involved in the cases they treat of. We quote their argu- ments only to show how they appeal to the principle that no actions but such as are done f o r an end, and show a c h o h 4 means, can be & ind&tabk exprem&ms of Mind.

I shall then adopt this as the criterion by which to cir- cumscribe the subject-matter of this work so far as action enters into it. Many nervous performances will therefore be unmentioned, as being purely physiological. Nor will the anatomy of the nervous system and organs of sense be described anew. The reader will find in H. N. Martin’s ‘Human Body,’ in G. T. Ladd‘s ‘Physiological Psychol- ogy,’ snd in all the other standard Anatomies and Physi- ologies, a mass of information which we must regard as pro. l i m i n q and take for granted in the present work.* Of the functions of the cerebral hemispheres, however, since they directly subserve consciousness, it will be well to give some little account.

* Nothing is easier than to familiarize one’s self with the mammttliun brain. Qet a sheep’s head, a small saw, chisel, scalpel and forceps (all three can best be had from a surgical-instrument maker), and unravel its parts either by the aid of a human dissecting book,such a8 Holden’s ‘Manual of Anatomy,’ or by the specific directions ad hoe given in such books as Foster and Langley’s ‘Practical Physiology ’ (Macmillan) or Morrell’e ‘Comparative Anatomy and Dissection of Mammalia’ (Longmans).