Edward Bradford Titchener

“ But as time goes by this erstwhile beginner comes to see that knowledge is, after all, a matter of time itself. If he keeps on working, knowledge is added unto him; and not only knowledge, but also what is just as valuable as knowledge, the power of expert assimilation; so that presently, when some special point is in debate, he is not ashamed of the plea of ignorance. He has learned that one man cannot compass the full range of a science, and he is assured that so-many hours of expert attention will make him master of the new matter. ”

“ We shall come to psychology presently. Meantime you should try to realise how well this doctrine of association works for practical purposes, and how strong is the appeal it makes to the practical side of our nature. It explains the appearance of every single idea that has ever occurred to anybody; it offers to take us to the very heart of psychology without need of training or preparation; it flatters us into the belief that we have all our lives been talking and thinking psychology without knowing it; it covers up the gap that separates common sense from science. ”

“ We can observe some part of this struggle; our mind wanders, our eye is caught by some chance movement and we lose the thread of our work, we surprise ourselves thinking of something else, we look at our watch to see how the hour is going; in a word, the focal processes are instable; now one and now another perception or idea becomes more vivid than the rest; and the continual shift of vividness is proof of the conflict of the underlying nerve-forces. ”

“ A recently acquired connection may even be abolished, as most of us know to our cost, by interruption of the train of thought; you have just got to your point, to the insight, the phrasing, the argument, that will clinch things; you are distracted by some irrelevant matter; and when you come back to your work, the point has gone. So nicely balanced and so easily disturbed are the associative tendencies, that you may never recover it; no wonder that the constructive worker, in literature, in science, in affairs, ‘hates to be interrupted’! ”

“ It is probably as impossible to unravel the psychology of thought, in every detail and to its first beginnings, as it is to unravel the psychology of perception. For our thinking is subject, not only to the inherited tendencies of the nervous system, but also to the stereotyped thought of our social surroundings; we are bred up in an atmosphere of meaning, and we hear words before we can speak them. ”

“ Notice one other point: that if you sit down to describe, there is simply no escape from analysis. To begin a description is to be analysing. Well-meaning people sometimes shake their heads at scientific psychology; all this dissecting work, they say, misses the real issue; it kills mind; it destroys the living, breathing reality of experience, and offers in its place a catalogue of dead facts. The mannikin again! Of course, if mind is a little man inside you, you must kill him to dissect him,—though he nevertheless crops up again, alive and well, after the autopsy. ”

“ In qualitative perceptions, such as the perception of a musical note, there is a blend or fusion of qualities; we can, to be sure, analyse the compound tone, after practice, into fundamental and overtones; yet it still comes to us as unitary, as a single impression; it stands only at one remove, so to speak, from the simplicity of sensation itself. The tastes of coffee and lemonade, with their blending of taste and smell, of touch and temperature; the organic feels of hunger and thirst and nausea; the kinæsthesis aroused by grasping and pulling, by lifting the arm and swinging the foot ”

“ Science aims at truth; it deals with facts, with the nature of things given, not with values or meanings or uses; and it deals with these materials impersonally and disinterestedly. The student of science who fails to grasp the scientific point of view will fail also to get the perspective of a scientific text-book; he will not see the wood for the trees; and he will be disappointed with what science has to offer him; he will want to know the use of all this knowledge, while science has no regard for use. ”

“ In our everyday life, as you will readily see, the tinge of sense-feeling may be overlaid by the heavier colours of some positive emotion; we may recognise an acquaintance with whom we are heartily angry, or whose conduct has brought us sorrow; primitive man himself recognised his enemies! But in the laboratory, where these disturbing influences are ruled out, the nature of the feeling of familiarity comes clearly to light; intrinsically, recognition is always an agreeable and relaxing experience. ”

“ Take the occasions as they come; plenty of good astronomical work has been done with a pair of opera glasses!—and if you cannot, later on, experiment for yourself in a laboratory, at least you have gained a new outlook and a new competence; it is as if you had gained access to a whole literature by the mastery of some foreign language.
Realise, thirdly, that a system of science, whether the science be psychology or any other, is built up of nothing else than facts and logic. The facts of observation are the essential things; without them there is no science possible ”

“ Imagination cannot, of course, give us new qualities of experience; we cannot imagine a new colour, different from all known colours, or a new sensation—say, a specific sensation of electricity—different from the known sensations of skin and underlying tissues. Imagination does, however, give us novel connections; and experiment shows that an idea comes to us as imagined only if it comes as unfamiliar, with the feeling of novelty or strangeness upon it. ”

“ So also are the recurrent images, those troublesome and haunting images to which most of us are subject at times: the tunes that run in our head and that we cannot get rid of, the rows of figures that obsess us after a long morning of calculation, the bright disc that keeps cropping up after we have spent several hours at the microscope. So, again, are the images that serve to complete and round out an imperfect perception. A favourite device of modern advertising is to outline the human figure only in part and to leave the remainder to the imagination ”

“ We may perceive ourself, as when we consult the glass to make sure that we look all right; we may have an idea of ourself, in memory or imagination; we may have a feeling of self, when we are lonely or vexed or ill at ease; we may have a concept of self, as when we say emphatically in conversation ‘I can’t conceive of so-and-so’; we may have all sorts of self-attitudes, intellectual and emotive. Any form of mental connection may appear under a determination, or in a context, that gives it the meaning of self ”

“ The laws of psychology may be put to very many uses, in business, in education, in legal procedure, in medicine, in the ministrations of [5] religion; but such uses are, from the psychologist’s point of view, by-products of his science; just as the nautical almanac is a by-product of astronomy, or the safety-match a by-product of chemistry, or the stamping-out of malaria a by-product of biology. These practical results may be immensely important for everyday life; but science, in its impersonal and disinterested search for facts, makes no difference between one fact and another. ”

“ Small wonder that Hume compared the law of association in psychology with the law of gravitation in physics! All the great names in British psychology (and the fact throws a good deal of light on the psychology of the nation itself) are connected with the doctrine of association; a whole science has taken its national colour from a single principle of explanation. Association has also played its part, though less dominantly, in France and Germany. ”

“ The Analysis of Perception and Idea.—Sensations and simple images can hardly occur, by themselves alone, in our everyday experience. The practised psychologist may be able to focalise a sensation, to make it so vivid that it stands out almost as it would under the experimental control of the laboratory; but his is an exceptional case. The units of our daily experience are rather such things as the sound of the piano in the next room, the sight of the tree budding just outside the window, the memory of last winter’s snow-piles, the forecast of to-night’s Pathetic Symphony ”

“ Or again, our ‘sentiment’ of beauty in pictorial art may once have been a real sentiment; we may have laboriously studied art-canons, have studiously dissected art-forms by secondary attention, have steeped ourselves in appreciation and criticism. Now, after all this labour, we have nothing but an attitude to a new picture; we ‘instinctively’ approve or disapprove of a work of art, without making any positive effort to analyse it. To talk, in these cases, about a moral or an æsthetic sentiment would be psychologically wrong; we experience simply two feeling-attitudes. ”

“ Here, then, is the main difference between thought and constructive imagination: that imagination proceeds to the exhibition of a single something, a statue or a picture or a poem; whereas thought proceeds to the exhibition of two somethings in relation, and ends with what the logicians call a judgement.
The tendency to dual division is so natural to us, and is impressed so deeply in our nervous make-up, that we can hardly hope to go behind it. We can hardly even describe a situation which calls for thought without presupposing the very tendency which is characteristic of thought. ”

“ Psychology is the science of mind, not the source of mental comfort or improvement. A sick soul would not go, for that matter, to a text-book of theology; it would go to some proved and trusted friend, or to some wise and tender book written by one who had himself suffered. So a sick body would betake itself, not to the physiological laboratory, but to a physician’s consulting room or to a hospital.
We live, again, in a world whose centre is ourself. This does not necessarily mean that we are all selfish; a life may be very unselfish. ”

“ Again, however, objection may be raised; for as adaptation advances, the sensation grows fainter and fainter; and the attention is thus continually spurred to hold it; the observer is not attending to an unchanging process, but is sharpening his attention to something that becomes more and more difficult to fix. Here we are, for the present, at a standstill. There is no doubt that attention fluctuates; the bare fact is plain enough in our everyday experience ”

“ Hence, in describing and identifying the sentiments, we must be constantly on guard against confusing them with attitudes based on ready-made judgements, and with attitudes based upon what were once true judgements but are now matters of habitual acceptance. Our ‘sentiment’ of honour, for example, may never have cost us a moment’s attention. A definition of honour has come to us, by tradition and precept, and we have accepted it without thought; situations which involve honour take possession of us, as emotive situations do, and we reply by the feeling-attitude. ”

“ You will notice, first of all, that as the world of sounds divides into tones and noises, so does the world of looks divide into what we have just called colours and lights. The colourless looks or lights may be arranged in a single straight line that passes from purest white through the greys to deepest black; they are, as sensations, older [57] than colours, just as noise is older than tone. Colours are more varied. Consider, to begin with, the character of colour proper or hue, that is, the differences of colour that show in the rainbow. ”

“ The same thing seems to hold of recognition. We do not, in strictness, ‘recognise’ the clothes that we put on every morning, or the desk at which we are accustomed to write; we apprehend them, directly, as our clothes and our desk; we take them for granted. The feeling of familiarity, the feeling of being at home with our own things, changes first to something that is still a feeling, though weaker and more nebulous; to something that we may describe as an ‘of-course’ feeling, which is still some distance away from sheer indifference. ”

“ Why is it that beginners in science are so often disjointed in their thinking, so often superficial, unable to correlate what they know, logically all at sea? There is no doubt that they are, whether they study physics or chemistry, biology or psychology. I think the main reason is that they have never got the scientific point of view; they are taught Physics or Biology, but not Science. Hence I have, in this book, written an inordinately long introduction, and have kept continually harping on the difference between fact and meaning. ”

“ Men of science honour Darwin, because they are human beings and live, like everyone else, in a world of values; but these same men of science are ready at any moment to test and criticise Darwin’s work with the utmost rigour; while any parts of the work that are solidly established pass without name into the structure of the science to which they belong. ”

“ So much of consciousness: what, now, shall we say of the subconscious? The term is fashionable; and though we have nowhere used it, we can hardly pass it by without mention. The subconscious may be defined as an extension of the conscious beyond the limits of observation. As an extension of the conscious, it tends always to be an extension of meaning beyond the meaning of the conscious; we do not hear of a ‘submental.’ As an extension of the conscious, it is always a matter of inference; what we cannot observe, we must infer. ”

“ Language is older than science, and has developed under pressure of practical needs. Hence the phrases that come most naturally to your lips may embody a view of the world, or an attitude toward experience, that is totally foreign to the scientific context. If a visitor from Mars heard us all talking about the sunset, what would he think of our knowledge of the heavenly bodies? Yet we cannot escape from language; and if Newton could express his ideas in Latin, we ought to be able to express ours in English. ”