Spontaneity

“ The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual. ”

“ Besides the conclusions which the mind draws from the data of sense, or reaches through reflection, there are other modes of conviction whose distinguishing mark is their apparent immediacy and spontaneity. ”

“ An act of the mind, of which we are conscious as such, is called freedom. An act, without consciousness of action, is called spontaneity. Remember that I by no means demand of thee an immediate consciousness of the act as such, but only that on subsequent reflection thou shouldst discover that there must have been an act. The higher question, what it is that prevents any such state of indecision, or any consciousness of our act, will undoubtedly be afterwards solved. ”

“ When we have said that images, their association and dissociation, reflection, and emotion are the constituent elements of the creative imagination, it will be found that we have omitted an irreducible factor, the principal element, the proprium quid of this mental operation, that which gives the first impulse, which is the cause of creative work, and constitutes its unity. This x, which, for want of a better term, we may call spontaneity, is of the nature of an instinct. It is a craving to create, equivalent, in the intellectual order, to the generative craving in the physiological order. ”

“ I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable degree.
Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or walk abroad in the morning after meditating the matter before sleep on the previous night. Our thinking is a pious reception. ”

“ This we must admit: the relation of quantity is generic and occurs in many categories of consciousness, whilst the other relations we have considered are specific and occur in space alone. When our attention passes from a shorter line to a longer, from a smaller spot to a larger, from a feebler light to a stronger, from a paler blue to a richer, from a march tune to a galop, the transition is accompanied in the synthetic field of consciousness by a peculiar feeling of difference which is what we call the sensation of more,—more length, more expanse, more light, more blue, more motion. ”

“ But, to be plain, though also monotonous, the uncaused cause or the effect that is only a part of the whole, or the cause or the effect that refuses to share in the other's nature, or finally the causation that is now so individual and so manifold and so effective, and that was once so single and so complete, is something that must give any thinker pause. Can a moving body move an immobile body? Can some things in the universe be mobile; others not? Can the moving body and the moved body belong to different moments of time? Can motion lead to rest or rest to motion? ”

“ If on the other hand a train of imagination or of voluntary ideas are excited with great energy, and passing on with great vivacity, and become dissevered by some violent stimulus, as the discharge of a pistol near one's ear, another circumstance takes place, which is termed SURPRISE; which by exciting violent irritation, and violent sensation, employs for a time the whole sensorial energy, and thus dissevers the passing trains of ideas, before the power of volition has time to compare them with the usual phenomena of nature. ”

“ The real substratum of my Presentment is a part of the energetic Universe, which is constantly undergoing transmutations. Wherever such Energy is united, in an organism, with consciousness these transmutations, as affecting and perceived by such consciousness, constitute its Presentment or sense-experience; and aided by the constructive activity of thought expand, as it were, subjectively into a whole world of experience, as the electric current vibrating darkly along the narrow confines of the wire suddenly expands at the carbon point into the luminous undulations which light a city. ”

“ To speak again in most general terms, the motion in the outer world, which is the fundamental stimulus of all 'consciousness, both physically, that is, literally, and figuratively, is more than merely an outer stimulus; something there is within the nature of the subject which answers to it with perfect sympathy and makes it equally an inner motive. Forsooth, could any stimulus ever produce a response without its being in accord with an existing motive? Life, then, is a game, and the game of life, doubts and all, is a real interest as well as a necessity. ”

“ But the experience leaves its 'unimaginable touch' on the matter of the convolutions, and the next impression which a sense-organ transmits produces a cerebral reaction in which the awakened vestige of the last impression plays its part. Another sort of feeling and a higher grade of cognition are the consequence. 'Ideas' about the object mingle with the awareness of its mere sensible presence, we name it, class it, compare it, utter propositions concerning it, and the complication of the possible consciousness which an incoming current may arouse, goes on increasing to the end of life. ”

“ Very near indeed it looked, any such possibility! that consciousness, too, had taken its turn by the time she was ready; all the vibration, all the emotion of this present passage being, precisely, in the very sweetness of their lapse back into the conditions of the simpler time, into a queer resemblance between the aspect and the feeling of the moment and those of numberless other moments that were sufficiently far away. ”

“ In my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly had in mind our motor habits,—habits of external conduct. But our thinking and feeling processes are also largely subject to the law of habit, and one result of this is a phenomenon which you all know under the name of 'the association of ideas.' To that phenomenon I ask you now to turn.
You remember that consciousness is an ever-flowing stream of objects, feelings, and impulsive tendencies. ”

“ A subordinate part with crystalline excess of pattern or with foggy confusion weakens the rhythm. ‘Thus every great rhythm presupposes lesser rhythms without which it could not be. No rhythm can be founded upon mere confusion or mere sameness.
64.8 An event, considered as gaining its unity from the continuity of extension and its unique novelty from its inherent character of ‘passage,’ contributes one factor to life; and the pattern exhibited within the event, which as self-identical should be a rigid recurrence, contributes the other factor to life. ”

“ How this metamorphosis takes place—how a force existing as motion, heat, or light, can become a mode of consciousness—how it is possible for aerial vibrations to generate the sensation we call sound, or for the forces liberated by chemical changes in the brain to give rise to emotion—these are mysteries which it is impossible to fathom. But they are not profounder mysteries than the transformations of the physical forces into each other. ”

“ We are thrown, for our conclusions, upon our instinctive sense of the dramatic probabilities of nature. My own dramatic sense tends instinctively to picture the situation as an interaction between slumbering faculties in the automatist's mind and a cosmic environment of other consciousness of some sort which is able to work upon them. ”

“ THE STREAM OF THOUGHT.
We now begin our study of the mind from within. Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree. ”

“ For every stimulus which produces in consciousness a definite content of sensation is also a definite degree of disturbance, and therefore makes a call upon the forces of the nerves; and the sum of these little changes, which in their character as disturbances are not so diverse as the contents of consciousness they give rise to, produce the general feeling which, added to the inability to distinguish, deludes us into the belief in an actual absence of diversity in our sensations. ”

“ By the fact of its continual reaction upon sensation, it keeps itself alive. Hence the two concepts coincide, so to speak; sensation is to life what divisibility is to matter. We express with these words more than a similitude, since all sensation is based upon motion, is, indeed, motion, and every motion may be reduced to a division or differentiation in the broadest sense of the word. ”

“ In principle we have the same transition, the same becoming, the same growth from less to more, the same activity of continuous reconstruction. Conscious life, we find, is a continuous adjustment; each of its moments is a "transitive state." The more evenly flowing experiences are likewise endowed with a focus and margin, not in the form of static elements, but as a dynamic relationship of what is with what is to be.
Such an interpretation of experience, moreover, opens the way for a proper valuation of the psychologist's procedure. The concept of sensation is methodology pure and simple. ”

“ We have declared in our manifesto that what must be rendered is the dynamic sensation, that is to say, the particular rhythm of each object, its inclination, its movement, or, to put it more exactly, its interior force.
“It is usual to consider the human being in its different aspects of motion or stillness, of joyous excitement or grave melancholy. ”

“ We shall find that all the facts of rivalry and substitution that have so struck us, all the shiftings and expansions and contractions of the sphere of what shall be considered me and mine, are but results of the fact that certain things appeal to primitive and instinctive impulses of our nature, and that we follow their destinies with an excitement that owes nothing to a reflective source. These objects our consciousness treats as the primordial constituents of its Me. ”

“ And all this rhythm and recurrence, borne in upon the brain—itself rhythmic—through intermittent senses, is converted into motion, and the mind, yielding utterly to its environment, knows the happiness of faith, the ecstasy of compliance, the rapture of congruity. ”

“ Those modes of the Unknowable which we call motion, heat, light, chemical affinity, &c., are alike transformable into each other, and into those modes of the Unknowable which we distinguish as sensation, emotion, thought: these, in their turns, being directly or indirectly re-transformable into the original shapes. That no idea or feeling arises, save as a result of some physical force expended in producing it, is fast becoming a common place of science ”

“ Any portion of the field of consciousness that has more potentialities of emotional excitement than another may thus be roused to predominant activity; and the shifting play of interest now in one portion, now in another, deflects the currents in all sorts of zigzag ways, the mental activity running hither and thither as the sparks run in burnt-up paper. ”

“ All these things, which are so numerous and complicated in that one movement, and which constitute the whole of the mechanism, are purely automatic, being not in the least dependent upon the mental part—the volition—although wholly dependent upon that organic activity of which the volition is a symbol in consciousness. ”

“ In consciousness, such phenomena as the noon whistle of a neighboring factory, the sound of a man shoveling coal, a bicycle-bell, a piano across the street, the rattle of a wagon, may follow one after another. All sorts of sensations are continually starting up in consciousness in the most chaotic fashion. ”

“ Excitement of peculiar tracts, or peculiar modes of general excitement in the brain, leave a sort of tenderness or exalted sensibility behind them which takes days to die away. As long as it lasts, those tracts or those modes are liable to have their activities awakened by causes which at other times might leave them in repose. Hence, recency in experience is a prime factor in determining revival in thought. [482]
Vividness in an original experience may also have the same effect as habit or recency in bringing about likelihood of revival. ”

“ Hence the phenomenon becomes double, it splits into inside and outside, into force and its manifestation, into cause and effect. Once more we find the inside or the force identified with the universal and permanent: not this or that flash of lightning, this or that plant—but that which continues the same in them all. The sensible appearance is individual and evanescent: the permanent in it is discovered by. reflection. Nature shows us a countless number of individual forms and phenomena. ”

“ The accidents are this medium; they are the transitory forms it puts on. How can we know the existence of bodies, except by sensations? The object of sensation is not substance in its inner nature, but only its qualities as affecting us. ”

“ Naturalists are aware of and openly acknowledge this mysterious polarity of phenomena, this double subsistence—one in reality and at the same time also in ideality. To the former mode of existence they give the name of motion, the latter they call sensation—motion being the generalized fact of outwardness, of objectivity; sensation being the generalized fact of inwardness, of subjectivity. ”

“ Besides Feelings, we have Sensations of reaction; as when a person blindfold suddenly runs against a post, when we make a muscular effort, or when any feeling gives way to a new feeling. Suppose I had nothing in my mind but a feeling of blue, which were suddenly to give place to a feeling of red; then, at the instant of transition there would be a shock, a sense of reaction, my blue life being transmuted into red life. ”