William James

“ Any natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one feature of it as characteristic, and suppress all merely accidental items which do not harmonise with this.
Ascending still higher we reach the plane of Ethics, where choice reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible. To sustain the arguments for the good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinchingly on the arduous path, these are characteristic ethical energies. ”

“ Thither Science may retreat and hump her strong back against the mockeries and phantasms that people the waste of Being around. Now the essence of the Common-Sense-theory, I take it, is to negate these negations. It obstinately refuses to believe Consciousness irrelevant or unimportant to the rest. It is there for a purpose, it has a meaning But as all meaning, relevancy and purpose are symbolised to our present intelligence in terms of action and reaction and causal efficacy, Common Sense expresses its belief in the worth of Feeling by refusing to conceive of it out of these relations. ”

“ What are our senses themselves but organs of selection? Out of the infinite chaos of movements, of which physics teaches us that the outer world consists, each sense-organ picks out those which fall within certain limits of velocity. ”

“ Of course the materialist may still say that the emphasised attention obeys the strongest vibration and does not cause it, that we will what we do, not do what we will, -- that, in short, interest is passive and at best a sign of strength of nerve-disturbance. But he is immediately confronted by the notorious fact that the strongest tendencies to automatic activity in the nerves often run most counter to the selective pressure of consciousness. Every day of our lives we struggle to escape some tedious tune or odious thought which the momentary disposition of the brain keeps forcing upon us. ”

“ But with all these concessions made, I still believe the Common-Sense-theory to merit our present credence. Fragmentary probabilities supported by the study of details are more worthy of trust than any mere universal conceptions, however tempting their simplicity. Science has won all her credit by the former kind of reasoning, Metaphysics has lose hers by the latter. The impossibility of motion, of knowledge, either subjective or objective, are proved by arguments as good as that which denies causality to feeling, because of its disparity with its effects. ”

“ The Automaton-theory in its present state contents itself with a purely negative deliverance. There is a chasm, it says, between feeling and act. Consciousness is impotent. It exists, to be sure, but all those manners of existence which make it seem relevant to our outward life are mere meaningless coincidences, inexplicable parts of the general and intimate irrationality of this disjointed world. What little continuity and reason there seems to be, it says, lies wholly in the field of molecular physics. ”

“ Thus, then, the words Use, Advantage, Interest, Good, find no application in a world in which no consciousness exists. [p. 7] Things there are neither good nor bad; they simply are or are not. Ideal truth-to exist at all requires that a mind also exist which shall deal with it as a judge deals with the law, really creating that which it professes only to declare. ”

“ In a word, feeling constitutes the "unscientific" half of existence, and any one who enjoys calling himself a "scientist" will be too happy to purchase an untrammeled homogeneity of terms in the studies of his predilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualism which, in the same breath that it allows to mind an independent status of being, banishes it to a limbo of causal inertness, from whence no intrusion or interruption on its part need ever be feared. ”

“ It is as likely to do the crazy as the sane thing at any given moment. a low brain does few things, and in doing them perfectly forfeits all other use. The performances of a high brain are like dice thrown for ever on a table. Unless they be loaded, what chance is there that the highest number will turn up oftener than the lowest? [p. 6]
All this is said of the brain as a physical machine pure and simple. Can consciousness increase its efficiency by loading its dice? ”

“ We may even, by our reasonings, unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in, will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, as the sculptor extracts his statue by simply rejecting the other portions of the stone. ”

“ All the possibilities of representation, all the images are furnished by the brain. Consciousness produces nothing, it only alters the proportions. Even the miraculous action of free will can only consist in the quantitative reinforcement of representations already given qualitatively. ”

“ The consciousness of Mr. Darwin lays it down as axiomatic that self-preservation or survival is the essential or universal good for all living things. The mechanical processes of "spontaneous variation" and "natural selection" bring about this good by their combined action; but being physical processes they can in no sense be said to intend it. It merely floats off here and there accidentally as one of a thousand other physical results. The followers of Darwin rightly scorn those teleologists who claim that the physical process, as such; of evolution follows an ideal of perfection. ”

“ Other minds, other worlds from the same chaos! Goethe's world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. Some such other worlds may exist in the consciousness of ant, crab and cuttle-fish. ”

“ A consciousness which should not only determine its brain to prosperous courses, but also by virtue of that hereditary influence of habit (nowadays so generally believed in by naturalists) should organise from generation to generation a nervous system more and more mechanically incapable of wandering from the lines of interest chosen for it at first, would immensely shorten the time and labour of natural selection. Mr. Darwin regards animated nature as a sort of table on which dice are continually being thrown. ”

“ Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, in a word, of picturesque light and shade. ”

“ They pre-exist and consciousness only discerns them; so that after all Ulrici's definition amounts to little more than saying that consciousness is a faculty of cognition -- a rather barren result. I think we may go farther and add that the powers of cognition, discrimination and comparison which it possesses, exist only for the sake of something beyond themselves, namely, Selection. Whoever studies consciousness, from any point of view whatever, is ultimately brought up against the mystery of interest and selective attention. ”

“ This forum is what is known as a consciousness. Even sensations cannot be supposed, simply as such, to be aware of their relations to each other. A succession of feelings is not (as James Mill reiterates) one and the same thing with a feeling of succession, but a wholly different thing. The latter feeling requires a self-transcendency of each item, so that each not only is in relation, but knows its relation, to the other. This self-transcendency of data constitutes the conscious form. Where we suppose it to exist we have mind; where mind exists we have it. ”

“ You may, it is true, ascribe mind to a physical process. You may allow that the atom engaged in some present energy has a dreamlike consciousness of residual powers and a judgment which says, "Those are better than this". You may make the rain-drop flowing downhill posit an impossible ascent as its highest good. ”

“ But Maury in his classic work, Le Sommeil, has conclusively proved the passage of dreams through "hypnagogic hallucinations" into that meteoric shower of images and suggestions, irrelevant to the main line of thought, the continual presence of which every one who has once had his interest awakened in the subject, will without difficulty recognise in himself. Ordinarily these perish in being born, but if one by chance saunters into the mind, which is related to the dominant pursuit of the moment, presto! it is pounced upon and becomes part of the empirical Ego. ”

“ As his body morphologically was the result of lucky chance, so each of his so-called acts of intelligence would be another; and ages might elapse before out of this enormous lottery-game a brain should emerge both complex and secure. But give to consciousness the power of exerting a constant pressure in the direction of survival, and give to the organism the power of growing to the modes in which consciousness has trained it, and the number of stray shots is immensely reduced, and the time proportionally shortened for Evolution. ”

“ Looking back then over this review we see that the mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. ”

“ An organ swayed by slight impressions is an organ whose natural state is one of unstable equilibrium. We may imagine the various lines of discharge in the cerebrum to be almost on a par in point of permeability -- what discharge a given small impression will produce may be called accidental, in the, sense in which we say it is a matter of accident whether a rain-drop falling on a mountain ridge descend the eastern or the western slope. It is in this sense that we may call it a matter of accident whether a woman's first child be a boy or a girl. ”

“ Passing now from traits to things, the utility of selection is obviously created and measured by the interests the man has made his own. If Edward never walks out without finding a four-leafed clover, while Oliver dies of old age without having seen one, this is merely due to the fact that Edward has somehow been led to stake his happiness on that particular branch of discovery, and out of a visual field ,identical with that of Oliver has picked the details that minister to this somewhat arbitrary interest. Granted the interest, we cannot deny the use of the picking-out power. ”

“ If we suppose the presence of a mind, not only taking cognisance of each functional error, but able to exert an efficient pressure to inhibit it if it be a sin of commission, to lend a strengthening-hand if the nerve-defect be a weakness or sin of omission,--nothing seems more natural than that the remaining parts of the brain, assisted in this way, should by virtue of the principle of habit grow back to the old teleological modes of exercise for which they were at first incapacitated. ”

“ For our practical interest in recognising whom we have to deal with outweighs our interest in the shades of sound per se. The selection again of certain attitudes, expressions, &c., in Smith, to stand as characteristic of him so that when others are present we say, "He does not look like himself," and if he is sitting to us for his portrait we spend an hour perhaps in placing him and lighting him so as to bring out with the utmost clearness these selected traits-this selection, I say, is equally explicable by various æsthetic standards, permanency simplicity, harmony, clearness, and the like. ”

“ It is, in fact, hard to see how without an effective superintending ideal the evolution of so unstable an organ as the mammalian cerebrum can have proceeded at all.
That consciousness should only be intense when nerve-processes are retarded or hesitant, and at its minimum when nerve-action is rapid or certain, adds colour to the view that it is efficacious. Rapid, automatic action is action through thoroughly excavated nerve-tracks which have not the defect of uncertain performance. ”

“ The measure of all utility is, as we have seen, some standard posited by Desire. The standard of survival or self-preservation is most potent. But there exist a host of other standards, aesthetic and moral, imperative so long as they do not conflict with this one and sometimes imperative over this one. In the preliminary selection by the senses of certain objective orders of movement, it is difficult to see what standard [p. 19] is subserved. The utility of not having a sense for magnetism when we have one for heat, is not obvious. ”

“ But before directly attacking it, we must pause a moment to make sure that we clearly apprehend the import of such expressions as useful discharge, appropriate direction, right reaction, and the like, which we have been using. They all presuppose some Good, End or Interest to be the animal's. Until this goal of his salvation be posited, we have no criterion by which to estimate the utility of any of his reactions. Now the important thing to notice is that the goal cannot be posited at all so long as we consider the purely physical order of existence. Matter has no ideals. ”

“ Out of all present sensations, we notice mainly such as are significant of absent ones: and out of all the absent associates which these suggest, we again pick: out a very few to be the bearers par excellence of objective reality. We could have no more exquisite example of the mind's selective industry.
That industry goes on to deal with the objects thus given in perception. A man's Empirical Thought depends on the objects [p. 12] and events he has experienced, but what these shall be is to a large extent determined by his habits of attention. ”

“ He breathes, he swallows, he crawls, he turns over from his back, he moves up or down on his support, he swims and stops at a given moment, he croaks, he leaps forward two or three times -- each and all with almost unerring regularity at my word of command, provided I only be an experienced physiologist and know what ganglia to leave and what particular spur will elicit the action I desire. ”