James Ward

“ The growing mind, we may suppose, passes beyond simple perception when some striking peculiarity in what is at the moment perceived is a bar to its recognition. The stalking hunter is not instantly recognized as the destroying biped, because he crawls on all fours; or the scarecrow looks like him, and yet not like him, for, though it stands on two legs, it never moves. There is thus no immediate assimilation; recognition under such circumstances is in itself a judgment, involving an analysis more or less explicit. ”

“ How, if action depends in the last resort on a merely quantitative difference, could it ever come about that what we call the higher sources of feeling should supersede the lower? If it is only quantity that turns the scales, where does quality come in, for we cannot say, e.g. that the astronomer experiences a greater thrill of delight when a new planet rewards his search than the hungry savage in finding a clump of pig-nuts? ”

“ It is to presentations in their primary stage, to impressions, that we owe what real difference we find between now and then, whether prospective or retrospective, as it is to them also that we directly owe our sense of the real, of what is and exists as opposed to the non-existent that is not. But the present alone and life in a succession of presents, or, in other words, continuous occupation with impressions, give us no knowledge of the present as present. This we first obtain when our present consciousness consists partly of memories or partly of expectations as well. ”

“ Can it be pretended that it is through the workings of association among our ideas that we first feel a determination which our utmost efforts can scarce resist, or that we feel such determination under no other circumstances? If it be allowed that the natural man is irresistibly determined to imagine an apple when he hears its name or, to expect thunder when he sees lightning, must it not also be allowed that he is irresistibly determined much earlier and in a much more impressive way when overmastered by the elements or by his enemies? ”

“ Impressions then—unlike ideas—have no associates to whose presence their own is accommodated and on whose intensity their own depends. Each bids independently for attention, so that often a state of distraction ensues, such as the train of ideas left to itself never occasions. The better to hear we listen; the better to see we look; to smell better we dilate the nostrils and sniff; and so with all the special senses: each sensory impression sets up nascent movements for its better reception. ”

“ We distinguish between higher and lower forms of life: we might say there is more life in a large oyster than in a small one, other things being equal, but we should regard a crab as possessing not necessarily more life—as measured by waste of tissue—but certainly as manifesting life in a higher form. How, in the evolution of the animal kingdom, do we suppose this advance to have been made? The tendency at any one moment is simply towards more life, simply towards growth; but this process of self-conservation imperceptibly but steadily modifies the self that is conserved. ”

“ Before we became conscious there was no world for us; should our consciousness cease, the world for us ceases too; had we been born blind, the world would for us have had no colour; if deaf, it would have had no sounds; if idiotic, it would have had no meaning. Psychology, then, never transcends the limits of the individual. But now, though this Berkeleyan standpoint is the standpoint of psychology, psychology is not pledged to the method employed by Berkeley and by Locke. Psychology may be individualistic without being confined exclusively to the introspective method. ”

“ We may perceive sound or light without any presentation of that which sounds or shines; but none the less we do not regard such sound or light as merely the object of our attention, as having only immanent existence, but as the quality or change or state of a thing, an object distinct not only from the subject attending but from all presentations whatever to which it attends. Here again the actual separation is impossible, because this factor in perception has been so intertwined throughout our mental development with the other two. ”

“ There is nothing in its first experience to tell the infant that the song of the bird does not inhere in the hawthorn whence the notes proceed, but that the fragrance of the mayflower does. It is only where a group, as a whole, has been found to change its position relatively to other groups, and—apart from casual relations—to be independent of changes of position among them, that such complexes can become distinct unities and yield a world of things. ”

“ Even what is most fundamental of all, that “plasticity” which we have analysed into retentiveness, differentiation and integration, is sometimes described as if it already involved memory-ideas and their association. Ideas, that is to say, are identified with mere “residua” of former “impressions,” and yet at the same time are spoken of as “copies” of these: which is much like saying the evening twilight is a replica of the noonday glare as well as its parting gleam. ”

“ But we should fail to realize the contrast between the motor effects of pleasure and of pain if we merely regarded them as cases of diffusion. The intenser the feeling the intenser the reaction, no doubt, whether it be smiles or tears, jumping for joy, or writhing in agony; but in the movements consequent on pleasure the diffusion is the result of mere exuberance, an overflow of good spirits, as we sometimes say, and these movements, as already remarked, are always comparatively purposeless or playful. ”

“ We are absorbed in the present without being unwillingly confined to it; not only is there no motive for retrospect or expectation, but there is no feeling that the present endures. Each impression lasts as long as it is interesting, but does not continue to monopolize the focus of consciousness till attention to it is fatiguing, because uninteresting. In such facts, then, we seem to have proof that our perception of duration rests ultimately upon quasi-motor acts of varying intensity, the duration of which we do not directly experience as duration at all. ”

“ It is thus by means of movements that we are more than the creatures of circumstances and that we can with propriety talk of subjective selection. The representation of what interests us comes then to be associated with the representation of such movements as will secure its realization, so that—although no concentration of attention will secure the requisite intensity to a pleasurable object present only in idea—we can by what is strangely like a concentration of attention convert the idea of a movement into the fact, and by means of the movement attain the coveted reality. ”

“ Attention does not move by hops from one definite spot to another, but, as Wundt himself allows, by alternate diffusion and concentration, like the foot of a snail, which never leaves the surface it is traversing. We have a clear presentation discerned as A or B when attention is gathered up; and, when attention spreads out, we have confused presentations not admitting of recognition. ”

“ We have thus to recognize the existence of a difference between sensations, although there is no so-called “sensation of difference.” But if this much continuity must be admitted we can hardly fail to admit more. If differences of presentation exist within the field of consciousness beyond the outermost verge of the “threshold of difference,” we cannot consistently deny the existence of any presentations at all beyond the threshold of consciousness. ”

“ So, while we are all along preferring a more pleasurable state of consciousness before a less, the content of our consciousness is continually changing; the greater pleasure still outweighs the less, but the pleasures to be weighed are either wholly different, or at least are the same for us no more. What we require then, is not that the higher pleasures shall always afford greater pleasure than the lower did, but that to advance to the level of life on which pleasure is derived from higher objects shall on the whole be more pleasurable and less painful than to remain behind. ”

“ Thus no sooner do we resolve any given action into an effectuation, by analytically distinguishing within the original agent an agent and a patient, than a new action appears. Action is thus a simpler notion than causation and inexplicable by means of it. It is certainly no easy problem in philosophy to determine where the resolution of the complex is to cease, at what point we must stop, because in the presence of an individual thing and a simple activity. At any rate, we reach such a point psychologically in the conscious subject, and that energy in consciousness we call attention. ”

“ But when all is said and done a certain repugnance is apt to arise against any association of the differences between the higher and lower feelings with differences of quantity. Yet such repugnance is but another outcome of the common mistake of supposing that the real is obtained by pulling to pieces rather than by building up. No logical analysis—nay, further, no logical synthesis—is adequate to the fullness of things. ”

“ As one hand washes the other, may not different members of the series of feelings be subject and object in turn? Compare, for example, the state of mind of a man succumbing to temptation (as he pictures himself enjoying the coveted good and impatiently repudiates scruples of conscience or dictates of prudence) with his state when, filled with remorse, he sides with conscience and condemns this “former self”—the “better self” having meanwhile become supreme. ”

“ And so generally within certain limits of error, indirectly ascertained, we can identify intensities, each for itself, neither referring to a common standard nor to one that varies from time to time—to any intensity, that is to say, that chances to be simultaneously presented; just as an enlisting sergeant will recognize a man fit for the Guards without a yard measure and whether the man’s comrades are tall or short. ”

“ We cannot imagine the beginning of life but only life begun. The simplest picture, then, which we can form of a concrete state of mind is not one in which there are movements before there are any sensations or sensations before there are any movements, but one in which change of sensation is followed by change of movement, the link between the two being a change of feeling. ”

“ At first it might seem, therefore, that in this principle there is nothing fresh that is relevant to our present inquiry, since a pleasure that is only due to association at once carries back the question to its sources; so that in asking why the spring, for example, is pleasant we should be returning to old ground. But this is not altogether true; aesthetic effects call up not merely ideas but ideals. A great work of art improves upon the real in two respects: it intensifies and it transfigures. ”

“ We reach the limit of our experience in reflection, or at most in deliberate introspection, just as in space of three dimensions we reach the limit of our experience in another respect. But there is no absurdity in supposing a consciousness more evolved and explicit than our self-consciousness, and advancing on it as it advances on that of the unreflecting brutes. ”

“ Ideas are not only in a continual fiux, but even when we attempt forcibly to detain one it varies continually in clearness and completeness, reminding one of nothing so much as of the illuminated devices made of gas jets, common at fêtes, when the wind sweeps across them, momentarily obliterating one part and at the same time intensifying another. There is not this perpetual flow and flicker in what we perceive. The impressions entering consciousness at any one moment are psychologically independent of each other ”

“ None the less it would be hasty to conclude that colours or any given sensations are simple. We are often struck by the likeness of complex wholes—two faces, say—long before we can discern the exact points of resemblance. Still, so long as there is no perceptible complexity in the individual presentations there can be no analysis of them, and, therefore, neither abstraction nor comparison based upon it. Can we find elsewhere the complexity that generalization and comparison invariably imply? ”

“ Without language we should be mutually exclusive and impenetrable, like so many physical atoms; with it each several mind may transcend its own limits and share the minds of others. As a herd of individuals mankind would have a natural history as other animals have; but personality can only emerge out of intercourse with persons, and of such intercourse language is the means. But important as is this addition of a transparent and responsive world of minds to the dead opaqueness of external things, the development of our psychological individual still remains a purely individual development. ”

“ So far as natural selection worked, we should have, not the individual subject making a series of tries and perfecting itself by practice, as in learning to dance or swim, but we should have those individuals whose structure happened to vary for the better surviving, increasing and displacing the rest. How much natural selection, apparently unaided, can accomplish in the way of complicated adjustment we see in the adaptation of the form and colour of plants and animals to their environment. ”

“ We smile at the savage who thinks a magnet must need food or the child who is puzzled that the horses in a picture remain for ever still; but few consider that underlying all common-sense thinking there lurks the same natural precipitancy. We attribute to extended things a unity which we know only as the unity of an unextended subject; we attribute to changes among these extended things what we know only when we act and suffer ourselves ”

“ It is sometimes said that thought is synthetic, and this is true; but imagination is synthetic also; and the processes which yield the ideational train are the only processes at work in intellectual synthesis. Moreover, it would be arbitrary to say at what point the mere generic image ceases and the true concept begins—so continuous are the two. No wonder, therefore, that English psychology has been prone to regard thought as only a special kind of perception—perceiving the agreement or disagreement of ideas—and the ideas themselves as mainly the products of association. ”

“ Comparing higher minds or stages of mental development with lower—by what means such comparison is possible we need not now consider—we find in the higher conspicuous differences between presentations which in the lower are indistinguishable or absent altogether. The worm is aware only of the difference between light and dark. The steel-worker sees half a dozen tints where others see only a uniform glow. To the child, it is said, all faces are alike; and throughout life we are apt to note the general, the points of resemblance, before the special, the points of difference. ”

“ But what is this true self more than our ideal? Or perhaps we prefer to say that we were free and could have acted otherwise; and no doubt we might, if the place of the purely formal and abstract concept of self had been occupied by some other phase of that empirical self which is continuously but at no one moment completely, presented. It must then be admitted that psychological analysis in this case is not only actually imperfect, but must always remain so—so long, at any rate, as all that we discern by reflection is less than all we are. ”

“ We begin, therefore, with self simply as an object, and end with the concept of that object as the subject or “myself” that knows itself. The self has, first of all (a) a unique interest and (b) a certain inwardness, (c) it is an individual that (d) persists, (e) is active, and finally (f) knows itself. These several characteristics of self are intimately involved; so far as they appear at all they advance in definiteness from the lowest level of mere sentience to those moments of highest self-consciousness in which conscience approves or condemns volition. ”

“ This truism—or paradox—that all we know of succession is but an interpretation of what is really simultaneous or coexistent, we may then concisely express by saying that we are aware of time only through time-perspective, and experience shows that it is a long step from a succession of presentations to such presentation of succession. ”

“ So long as it was the fashion to assume a multiplicity of faculties the need was less felt for a clear exposition of their connexion. A man had senses and intellect much as he had eyes and ears; the heterogeneity in the one case was no more puzzling than in the other. But for psychologists who do not cut the knot in this fashion it is confessedly a hard matter to explain the relation of the two. The contrast of receptivity and activity hardly avails, for all presentation involves activity and essentially the same activity, that of attention. ”

“ Beginners in psychology, and some who are not beginners, are apt to be led astray by expositions which set out from the sensations of the special senses, as if these furnished us with the type of an elementary presentation. The fact is we never experience a mere sensation of colour, sound, touch, and the like; and what the young student mistakes for such is really a perception, a sensory presentation combined with various sensory and motor presentations and with representations—and having thus a definiteness and completeness only possible to complex presentations. ”

“ Of the very beginning of this continuum we can say nothing; absolute beginnings are beyond the pale of science. Experience advances as this continuum is differentiated, every differentiation being a change of presentation. Hence the commonplace of psychologists—We are only conscious as we are conscious of change. ”

“ Even the individual thing, as our analysis of perception has attempted to show, is not a mere sum of properties which can be taken to pieces and distributed like type, but a whole combined of parts very variously related. To understand intellection we must look at its actual development under the impetus of practical needs, rather than to logical ideals of what it ought to be. Like other forms of purposive activity, thinking is primarily undertaken as a means to an end, and especially the end of economy. It is often easier and always quicker to manipulate ideas than to manipulate real things ”