Wilhelm Max Wundt

“ If we take an unprejudiced view of the processes of consciousness, free from all the so-called association rules and theories, we see at once that an idea is no more an even relatively constant thing than is a feeling or emotion or volitional process. ”

“ One row of beats clearly shows in each of its separate elements the most varying degrees of clearness and distinctness. They all in a regular manner bear upon the beat that is affecting consciousness at the moment. This beat is the one that is most clear and most distinct. The ones immediately preceding are most like this one, whereas those that lie further back lose more and more in clearness. If the beat furthest away lies so far back that the impression has absolutely disappeared, then we speak in a picturesque way of a sinking beneath the threshold of consciousness. ”

“ Just as all our objective measures of time, from the course of the sun to the vibrations of a tuning-fork used to measure time, depend upon regular periodic movements, so also is our subjective time-consciousness absolutely dependent upon rhythmical ideas. These arise first of all from our movements of locomotion, and then in a much richer and finer form are transmitted to us by our sense of hearing. In all these cases, however, the resulting idea of time can be divided up into a substratum of sensation and into an affective process of strain and relaxation, of expectation and realisation. ”

“ When we take the longest row of beats that can be grasped together as one whole in consciousness under the given conditions and call this the scope of consciousness, it is of course obvious that we do not mean by this expression the total content of consciousness that is present at one given moment. We mean only to denote the maximum scope of one single complex whole. Let us picture consciousness for a moment as a plane surface of a limited extension. Then our scope of consciousness is one diameter of this surface, and not the whole extent. ”

“ A complicated tone-structure may produce the greatest ecstasy in a musician, whereas it may leave an unmusical person absolutely cold. The latter, on the other hand, may perhaps find a very simple melody agreeable, and this same melody may appear trivial to the musician and therefore disagreeable. In all these cases we see that the feeling of pleasure, which is bound to certain sensations and ideas, is purely subjective. It is an element that is not only dependent upon the impression itself, but also and always and most of all dependent upon the subject receiving the impression. ”

“ Our own body, to which touch and organic sensations relate, forms in contradistinction to our consciousness a part of this outer world. It is the nearest to us, but still a mere part of the outer world. The question immediately arises: Do these objective elements and complexes form the only content of consciousness? Or in other words, are the only psychical elements such as we project outwards? Or are there in our consciousness, besides this picture of the outer world, other elements, which we do not apprehend as objects or their qualities that stand in contradistinction to ourselves? ”

“ What do these processes, which we so often meet, although not always in such regular change as in a rhythmical row of beats, consist of? It is obvious at a glance that expectation and realisation are both elements that are not bound to the objective impression itself. These processes can vary subjectively just as much as the agreeable feeling that arises from a rhythmical row of beats or from a melody. It is now pretty generally agreed that these peculiar elements of consciousness arise within us and not without us. ”

“ Now for every piece of knowledge two factors are necessary—the subject who knows and the object thought about, independent of this subject. The investigation of the subject in his characteristics, as revealed to us in human consciousness, forms therefore not only a necessary supplement to the investigations of natural science, but it also attains to a more universal importance, since all mental values and their development arise from immediately experienced processes of consciousness, and therefore can alone be understood by means of these processes. ”

“ Certainly all psychical phenomena is a continual coming and going, a producing and being produced. But no supersensuous substance, standing in contradistinction to these phenomena, can help us to understand the latter in their separate parts, or even in the connection of these parts into a whole. Sense-perception is a product of elements of pure sensation, an emotion is the course of directly experienced feelings, a thought-process is a combination of its elements established by itself. ”

“ It sought at least to account for that unity of life, which popular dualism must regard as a wonder, if it does not suppose the psychical to be a confused image of the physical, or reversely suppose this latter to be a mere subjective idea without its own reality. And yet this old vitalistic idea of a soul is for us no longer possible. For it tries to explain the unity of life only by postulating an all-embracing idea of purpose or use in place of a causal explanation of phenomena such as is now demanded. ”

“ An act of knowledge may possibly follow a process of pure associative assimilation, if we afterwards try to account for the motives of the same. But the processes themselves, as they continually occur and make up an important part of our sense-experience, are pure associations. To place in them any acts of judgment or of reflection, as is customary in the scholastic psychology of ancient and modern times, can only serve to disguise the real psychological character of these processes. ”

“ It is obvious now that the centre of gravity of the affective process lies every time at the end of a row, where the superimposed rhythmical feelings run together into one unity. For it is unmistakably this feeling that allows us directly to apprehend the succeeding rows as identical with the preceding ones in a succession of similar rows. What we apperceive is not the preceding row itself. The greater number of its elements lie already in the darker field of consciousness. ”

“ An action arising from a given motive produces not only the ends latent in the motive, but also other, not directly purposed, influences. When these latter enter into consciousness and stir up feelings and impulses, they themselves become new motives, which either make the original act of volition more complicated, or they change it or substitute some other act for it. We may call this modification of the law of resultants, in accordance with the principal form in which it appears, "the principle of the heterogony of ends." ”

“ At that Lime philosophy could take the liberty of building up reality out of abstract ideas, such as substance and causality. At the present day metaphysics, if it wishes to make any claim to respect, must build upon the real facts and not upon those ideas used from purely logical, dialectical motives. Even from this point of view there remains a "principle of psychological parallelism" in the sense that there is no psychical process, from the simplest sensation and affective elements to the most complex thought-processes, which does not run parallel with a physical process. ”

“ We can compare warmth and mechanical work, because the one can be transformed into the other according to a strict law of equivalence. But we cannot compare a tone with a sensation of light, or a visual idea with a chord, because a transformation of the one of these practical contents into the other is unthinkable. Now physical values are subject to the principle of the conservation of energy because of the unlimited capacity for transformation of physical energies according to equivalent relations. ”

“ Who has not had the experience of being for hours at a time oppressed with the feeling that he has forgotten something, or missed something, or done something wrong, without being able to explain what it is that oppresses him in this manner? ”

“ If we apprehend an impression which is given to us without our assistance, the attention seems in a sense to be compelled to turn to this impression, following this single motive. We can express this by saying we apprehend it passively. The feeling of activity always follows such an impression. If on the other hand we turn to an expected impression, then these feelings of strain and excitation clearly precede the impression. We are aware that our apperception is active. ”

“ But feelings of pleasure are not the only ones that we observe in our rhythm experiments. If we call to mind the exact state of consciousness between two beats of a rhythmical row, we notice that the apprehension of the identity of two intervals arises by means of a subjective process. This process takes place in the same manner within each of the two compared intervals, and thereby gives rise to the impression that they coincide. In ordinary life we generally speak of the phenomena, that are observed in such cases, as a change from "expectation" to "realisation." ”

“ Hence the creations of art are no less thought-compounds than those of science. They follow in the general laws of their construction exactly the same laws of apperception, which we observed in the productions of thought contained in speech. The thought is as a whole in our consciousness, and at first only works upon the apperception by means of the resulting total feeling, and then develops into its separate component parts by successive acts of apperception. ”

“ The metaphysical psychology of the present day, that has developed out of Descartes' theory of two substances absolutely different and yet externally joined together, this psychology seems unquestionably to be further away from the reality of the mental life than the theories of the ancient metaphysicians were. The old idea saw in the soul the principle of all life, or, according to Aristotle, the energy working towards an end, out of which the whole of the phenomena of life, physical and psychical, sprang. ”

“ We therefore say that the clang of a string, or of any other musical source, does not only consist of the one tone according to which we determine its pitch, but also of a series of overtones, which give it its timbre or clang-colour. This expression itself points to the fact that in hearing a clang there takes place psychologically an association, which is of a specially intimate kind. The above-described experiment of comparing a clang with some of its overtones teaches us that these latter really exist in sensation, and that we can perceive them with very intense attention. ”

“ This combination of creative growth and strict regularity, which marks our mental life, is shown above all in the fact that, especially with the more complicated processes and the more extensive forms of progress of psychical phenomena, the future resultants can never be determined in advance; but that on the other hand it is possible, starting with the given resultants, to achieve, under favourable conditions, an exact deduction into the components. The psychologist, like the psychological historian, is a prophet with his eyes turned towards the past. ”

“ Our ideas seem in comparison with it to be something external, upon which our will reacts according to its feelings. And so at bottom our will coincides with our "ego." Now this ego is neither an idea, nor a specific feeling, but it consists of those elementary volitional processes of apperception which accompany the processes of consciousness. They are always changing but they are always present, and in this way form the lasting substratum of our self-consciousness. ”

“ In investigating them, just as in the investigation of natural phenomena outside our own body, we must abstract from the subjective processes of consciousness, to which they are bound, if we wish to understand them in their objective natural connection. On the other hand our ideas, inasmuch as they are subjective, our feelings and our emotions are immediate experiences, which psychology tries to understand exactly in the way in which they arise, continue, and enter into relations with each other in consciousness. ”

“ The indisputable affirmation, that there exist no processes of consciousness that are not in some manner or other connected with physical processes, is changed by this materialistic hypothesis into the dogma that the processes of consciousness themselves are in their real essence physical processes. Now this is an assertion that directly contradicts our immediate experience, which teaches us that a human being, or any other similar living creature, is a psycho-physical and not only a physical unity. ”

“ Now because of the complex nature of all phenomena in general each process stands under the influence of many laws, and so it happens that just the most universal natural laws can never in experience be demonstrated in their full power. There is no law of dynamics which has a more universal validity than the so-called "law of inertia" or Newton's first law of motion. It can be formulated as follows: "A body in motion, and not acted on by any external force, will continue to move indefinitely in a straight line and with uniform velocity." ”

“ Thus ordered thinking arises out of the ordered course of nature in which man finds himself, and this thinking is from the beginning nothing more than the subjective reproduction of the regularity according to law of natural phenomena. ”

“ An important characteristic of feelings consists lastly in the fact that they combine themselves into an affective process, which as a rule is joined to an ideational process. A temporal process of this kind with an affective and ideational content, that changes but is nevertheless joined together, we call an emotion, or with less intensity and a more lasting nature of the feelings, a disposition. Joy, delight, merriness, hope are emotions in which the predominant feeling is pleasure; anger, grief, sorrow, and fear are emotions in which displeasure predominates. ”