Th. Ribot

“ Each moment of our life tends to rivet this association, no experience has ever interrupted it. Under the actual conditions of existence, this association is indissoluble.... Yet we can conceive that, given other conditions of existence, it might be possible to transport ourselves to the limits of space, and that after there receiving impressions of a kind totally unknown to our present state, we might instantly become capable of conceiving the fact and of stating the truth of it. ”

“ We have rapidly sketched this labor of organogenesis, by which language has passed from the amorphous state to the progressive constitution of specialised terms and grammatical functions: an evolution wholly comparable with that which, in living bodies, starts from the fecundated ovule, to attain by division of labor among the higher species to a fixed adjustment of organs and functions. “Languages are natural organisms, which, without being independent of human volition, are born, grow, age, and die, according to determined laws.” ”

“ I. To common sense nothing appears more easy than to explain how the idea of unity is formed. I see a man, a tree, a house; I hear a sound; I touch an object; I smell an odor, and so on: and I distinguish this single state from a plurality of sensations. John Stuart Mill seems to admit that number (at least in its simplest forms) is a quality of things that we perceive, as white, black, roundness, hardness: there is a distinct and special state of consciousness corresponding to one, two, three, etc. ”

“ This procedure where, in point of fact, abstraction and generalisation are only the servants of a particular form of imagination, found its first complete expression in Plato, and the Theory of Ideas. With Plato, the human intellect tasted for the first time the supreme pleasures of playing with the highest abstractions, and believing firmly that the universe can be summed up, constructed and explained by the help of some few entities. ”

“ If empirical law, which is in strict relation with experience, has not been idolised, this distinction and misfortune has frequently befallen the other categories. It has been forgotten that, in the sciences as in the arts, the ideal is only an ideal, although it is here attained by different means, viz., elimination, voluntary omission for the sake of preciseness, a more or less artificial reduction to unity. Consequently many have fallen into the strange illusion of believing that, in manipulating experience by the labor of an ever-growing abstraction, the absolute can be brought out. ”

“ Having thus acquainted ourselves with this new factor—speech—which as an instrument of abstraction becomes steadily more and more important, we can take up our subject from the point at which we left it. In passing from the absence to the presence of the word, from the lower to the intermediate forms of abstraction, we must again insist on our principal aim: viz., to prove that abstraction and generalisation are functions of the completely evolved mind. They exist in embryo in perception, and in the image, and at their extreme limit involve suppression of all concrete representation. ”

“ We have seen that abstraction, in proportion as it ascends and strengthens, separates itself more and more from the image, until finally, at the moment of pure symbolism, the separation becomes antagonism. This is because there is fundamentally, and from the outset, an opposition of nature and procedure between the two. The ideal of the image is an ever-growing complexity, the ideal of abstraction an ever-growing simplification, since the one is formed by addition, the other by subtraction. ”

“ Let us—merely as an illustration to fix our ideas—admit the hypothesis of a primitive nebula. Imagine (which is impossible) an intelligent being, able, at that point in the world’s history, to draw up a scheme of the existing laws. He could discover none but those which govern matter in the gaseous state,—some of which are still extant, others unknown to us, and unknowable—since, their conditions of existence having ceased, they are annihilated. ”

“ Doubtless the earth would continue to turn round its axis, the moon round our planet, the sun to take its course; yet nothing would exist beyond the movements. Just as—if every eye were to disappear—there would be neither light nor color; if every ear failed, there would be neither sounds nor noises, but only the bare potentiality of luminous and auditory sensations if the appropriate organs were to appear again: so, on our hypothesis, there could only be a potentiality of time.
Consciousness is the necessary condition of any notion whatever of the time which appears and disappears with it. ”

“ The psychologist can only take up the position of relativity. To him, general ideas are approximations: they have an objective value, but it is provisional and momentary, dependent on the variability of phenomena and on the state of our knowledge.
On the one hand, the similarities that are the substrata of generalisation are not fictitious. Since, moreover, knowledge of the laws of nature has a practical value, by enabling us to act upon things, and since we fail, in ignorance of them,—we are fain, objections notwithstanding, to attribute to them at least a certain measure of objective value. ”

“ On the other hand, there are those who assert that nature has general and fixed characteristics; in discovering them, we penetrate into the essence of things. Events and individuals have but a borrowed existence; under their fleeting appearances, we must seek the enduring; and thus, the greater the generalisation, the higher we rise in reality and in dignity. ”

“ It is needless to enter into the details of this long evolution, as it is generally admitted to have been. Enough to remember that the matter whence abstraction deduces laws and species has varied, and may vary again in the course of ages. If, on the other hand, we consider the slow progress of human knowledge, and the incessant corrections imposed by experience and reasoning from century to century, we find ourselves confronted with two variable factors, one objective, the other subjective. No permanence can result from their union. ”

“ In point of fact, the contention of the transformists is different. They do not refuse to recognise the grouping of living beings, according to their degrees of similarity, into varieties and species; but they grant to species only a momentary fixedness in time and space. It does not exist, it is not a natural type, it is transitionally a stable variation; the individual is the reality. From our point of view, this signifies that the specific characters isolated by abstraction are of value only as practical means of simplification in no way helping us to penetrate into the nature of things. ”

“ Abstract thought is a cadaver. It would be more just, though less picturesque, to say a skeleton; for scientific abstraction is the bony framework of phenomena.
The antagonism between the image and the idea is thus fundamentally that of the whole and the part. It is impossible to be at the same time an abstract thinker and an imaginative thinker, because one cannot simultaneously think the whole and the part, the group and the fraction ”

“ The sense of identity, the power of apprehending resemblances, is, as has justly been said, “the keel and backbone of our thinking”; without it we should be lost in the incessant stream of things. [6] Are there in nature any complete resemblances, any absolutely similar events? It is extremely doubtful. It might be supposed that a person who reads a sentence several times in succession, who listens several times to the same air, who tastes all the four quarters of the same fruit, would experience in each case an identical perception. ”

“ It is wasted labor to repeat for time what has already been said for space, and is applicable to both concepts. Time, like space and number, can be conceived as illimitable; but here again the infinity is only in our mental operation. We can add century to century, million upon million of years. ”

“ But the successive points of this differentiation, which creates grammatical forms, and parts of discourse, are under an objective form the history of the development of intelligence, inasmuch as it abstracts, generalises, analyses, and tends towards an ever-growing precision. The completely developed languages—and we are speaking only of such—bear throughout the print of the unconscious labor that has fashioned them for centuries: they are a petrified psychology. ”

“ Still, we must admit that the present has the privilege of appearing in consciousness as the typical duration, the standard, the measure to which everything must be referred. Nor can this be otherwise, seeing that (as is too often forgotten) we live only in the present; that the past and the future have no existence for us, are only known to us under the condition of becoming present, of occupying actual consciousness. The present is the only psychical element, which, consciously or unconsciously, gives a content and reality to duration. ”

“ Before we embark on the study of the principal concepts, it is incumbent upon us (in order to determine for each of these, separately, the conditions of their genesis and development—as was shown for abstraction in general) to throw as much light as possible upon the very vexed question of the psychological nature of the concepts of pure symbolism, where the word appears as the sole element that exists in consciousness. Is it true that we can think effectually and usefully with words and nothing but words, as has been sustained to satiety? ”

“ It merely aims at showing by facts, (1) how a hierarchy of concepts is constituted, and in the travail of centuries passes from the period of generic images to the ideal of embryological unity, common to all beings; (2) how the work of dissociation and analysis has always gone on, and multiplied, in quest of similarities more and more difficult to discover—often indeed fragile or dubious—to stop at unity only, the supreme abstraction. ”

“ Many men and races never get beyond this stage of concrete representation, which corresponds with the first moment of evolution in the individual and in the species. The first step towards the concept of space (concrete-abstract period) consists in representing it to oneself as the place, the receptacle of all bodies. This is the direct result of primitive reflexion: image rather than concept, to which the mind attributes an illusive reality. ”

“ In my opinion, a large measure of the obscurities and dissensions which prevail as to the nature of concepts, arises from the fact that the rôle of unconscious activity has for centuries been misunderstood or forgotten,—psychology having confined itself exclusively [133] to consciousness: and while its action is universally admitted to-day for all other manifestations of mental life—instincts, percepts, feelings, volition, etc.—it is still excluded from the domain of concepts. ”

“ The idea of cause has for centuries been the subject of so many speculations, that our first care must be to confine ourselves scrupulously to our subject, i. e., to retrace its evolution simply, marking the principal phases of its development in the individual and the species, while as far as possible eliminating whatever lies outside this one question. ”

“ Let us pass from theory to practice. This antagonism is of current observation, almost a banality, whenever men of imagination are confronted with abstract thinkers. We must of course exclude those who by a rare gift of nature (Goethe) , or by the artifice of education, are capable of handling the image and concept alternately.
Let us take the artists as type of the imaginative thinker: the novelist, poet, sculptor, painter, musician, etc. Each dreams of an organic, living work, a complex. ”

“ The hierarchy of concepts formed by superposition of abstractions and generalisations only facilitates the task. The sole incontestable value that can be assigned to any notion of species, and still more to genus, and other still more general concepts, is that of utility. ”

“ This conception of infinite time is however quite subjective, and in itself reveals nothing as to the nature of things: we do but add one state of consciousness to another; it is an inexhaustible possibility of progression and retrogression; and it is nothing more.
It is a common illusion to transform this conceived infinity into a real infinity; we forget that the mind is only working upon the abstract, i. e., upon a fiction, useful no doubt, but created by ourselves alone, according to our intellectual nature. ”

“ Substitution is valid in consciousness, but not for the total operation. To sum up in a word: the psychology of abstraction and generalisation, is in a great measure the psychology of the unconscious.
We have merely studied general ideas in so far as they have an assignable origin in experience, and do not transcend its limits. Are there, as some maintain, notions anterior to any sensory intuition—that can by no means nor effort be derived from empirical data? ”

“ Music again, which from its nature seems a thing apart, is an architecture of sounds of amazing complexity, often exciting contradictory states of mind.
Among abstract thinkers (theorists, scientists) the tendency is always towards unity, law, generalities—towards simplification: by what is fundamental and essential, if the man be genuine; by shifting and accidental features, if he is a charlatan. The mathematician and the pure metaphysician have usually a distaste for facts, for multiplicity of detail. ”

“ Whenever—during a development of centuries—the work of abstraction has succeeded, [215] we have seen it pass through successive phases:—generic ideas, intermediate forms, higher forms—but not by any constant process. Sometimes it has rapidly attained the period of complete simplification, as in mathematics; sometimes it is long arrested in its progress, as in the natural sciences: sometimes, again, as in the less established sciences, it is incapable even to the present day of transcending the lowest stages. ”

“ Words are for them no more than a kind of vehicle, a social instrument of mutual comprehension. When a sequence of general or abstract terms passes through their minds, what really passes is a succession of concretes, save for the very abstract words which “evoke nothing.” ”

“ There is no need to admit at the outset any reflected and fully conscious abstraction: a happy instinct, guided by the needs of life, is sufficient at the commencement. Races that are poorly gifted in this respect, or little apt at imitating their betters, have never got beyond a low level. In effect, abstraction and generalisation are the nerve of all knowledge that transcends sensation. Is this mode of cognition useful? ”

“ Is there—along with mechanical causality and rigorous determinism—room for any other mode of causality, proper to psychology, to linguistics, to history, in short to the positive sciences of the mind, as is maintained by Wundt and others? The secret remains for the future.
The natural tendency of the mind (which is but one aspect of the instinct of conservation) to seek and investigate in face of the unknown and unexpected, its clear or confused need of explanation for better or worse, at the outset concluded for an acting entity. ”