Total internal reflection

“ It cannot be denied, and should be warningly emphasized that in the analysis of the unconscious, the collective psychology is merged into the personal psychology, with the afore-mentioned unpleasant consequences. ”

“ As an experience sui generis we claim for the representation a special psychic mark, an ‘ideational or representative’ coefficient. The image has its own qualitative character just as the sensation possesses its own. In contrast to the sensation which possesses the coefficient of external reality, the image or representation has the coefficient of internal reality. Both sensation and image have reality, each one has its own kind of reality―the sensation has external objective reality, the image has internal subjective reality. ”

“ In short, at every step of his life, in every relation and association, in every expression of the inner forces that control his being, the normal individual is influenced by his internal secretions. Let us now see how. ”

“ Reality, then, in spite of the sceptic’s objections, is truly known to be a connected and self-consistent, or internally coherent, system; can we with equal confidence say anything of the data of which the system is composed? Reflection should convince us that we can at least say as much as this: all the materials or data of reality consist of experience, experience being provisionally taken to mean psychical matter of fact, what is given in immediate feeling. ”

“ When we attend to what is without us, to what we hear, or see, or smell, or taste, or touch, the process is called observation. When, on the other hand, dismissing for the time all notice of the external world, we turn our thoughts inward, and consider only what is passing in the inner chambers of the mind,—when, for instance, we analyze our motives, or notice the workings of passion, or scan the mysterious and subtle agency of the will, the process is called reflection. This latter species of attention is one much more difficult of development than the former. ”

“ The postulated objective reality acts upon the given individual consciousness and gives rise to mental states which along with the objective representation of that reality has also its own coloring, its own subjective side. ”

“ The reply is, that the immediate correlates of these and other such modes of consciousness, are not to be found in the agencies acting on us externally, but in certain internal agencies. The forces called vital, which we have seen to be correlates of the forces called physical, are the immediate sources of these thoughts and feelings; and are expended in producing them. ”

“ That general perceptive faculty, or perceptive capacity, which is the outcome of years of self-expression on many sides of one's being, has so much in common with the tact of the man of society, that the epithet tactful may perhaps be applied to it. The larger, like the lesser, faculty is compounded, partly of sympathetic insight into latent possibilities, and partly of a delicate sense for nuances of all kinds. But even this formula does less than justice to its complex nature. Generated as it is by a life of many-sided self-expression, it reflects its origin in its internal constitution. ”

“ Just as the causal method finally reaches the general principles of human psychology by the analysis and reduction of individual events, so does the constructive standpoint reach aims that are general by the synthesis of individual tendencies. ”

“ That which is, is for thought, at once the fulfilment and the limit of the thinking process. The thinking process itself is a process whereby at once meanings tend to become determinate, and external objects tend to become internal meanings. Let my process of determining my own internal meaning simply proceed to its own limit, and then I shall face Being. I shall not only imitate my object as another, and correspond to it from without: I shall become one with it, and so internally possess it. ”

“ The uniting principle among our internal perceptions is as unintelligible as that among external objects, and is not known to us any other way than by experience. Now the nature and effects of experience have been already sufficiently examin’d and explain’d. ”

“ For I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity—that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives. ”

“ What experience shows us as to the quantitative aspect of the world is, not that such differences exist wholly apart from our own or anybody’s attention, but that the attentive will to measure does find a successful expression of its purposes in experience, so that a consciousness of small differences in lengths, times, masses, etc., comes to be recognized, where untrained and careless attention had ignored every such difference. ”

“ But since our concept of efficient causality has its origin in our internal experience of our own selves as active agents, as causing some portion of what enters into our experience, the test seems to assume that we have already introduced into this experience a real distinction between the self and what is caused by the self. ”

“ A study of the psychogenesis of a concrete case will on the one hand illustrate these principles and, on the other, the structure and dynamics of normal personality.
Before making such a study, however, we ought to have a working conception of the normal; and this we are entitled, from the point of view of dynamic psychology, to construct on the basis of data supplied by studies of abnormal and normal mental behavior. The older way of considering human personality was to conceive it as an “ego” with various faculties. ”

“ As that Inner Personality becomes more and more firmly established, higher ideals and knowledge of the Reality bud out, and, as these require the clothing of finite expressions before they can become part of our consciousness, so are they clothed by our Physical Ego and become forms of thought ”

“ So that a certain mental co-operation is requisite even for the simplest perception of quality. In fact, psychological analysis shows that even Motion and Quantity, the two objective terms to which subjective Quality is reduced, are themselves Fundamental Signatures of Feeling;205351 so that here, as elsewhere, it is only by analytical artifice that the objective can be divorced from the subjective. Matter is for us the Felt; its Qualities are differences of Feeling. ”

“ By continuing analysis further we incorporate some distinctly impersonal universal basic qualities of humanity with the personal consciousness, which brings about the aforesaid enlargement, and this to some extent may be described as an unpleasant consequence of analysis. ”

“ To accomplish this analysis requires direct psychological study carried to a high pitch of perfection; it being necessary, among other things, to investigate the degree in which mental character is created by circumstances, since no one supposes that cerebral conformation does all, and circumstances nothing. ”

“ The perception of an object and the proper adjustments to it depend not so much on what is directly present in the focus of consciousness, but on the wealth of accumulated material lying outside the moment focus. In reading a book, for instance, the handling of it, the motor adjustments in keeping it, the perception of the letters, of the words, of the phrases lie outside the focus of consciousness, and still it is this mass of perceptions that forms the matter of the controlling moment. ”

“ The collective natural propensities and primary forms of idea and feeling which analysis of the unconscious has shown to be effective are an acquisition for the conscious personality which cannot be admitted unreservedly without prejudicial results. ”

“ By being the first, it unifies any and every manifold of sense-effects; by being the second, it re-presents the product—throws it out; by being the third, it apprehends the externalisation, and a percept is born. Apperception, or full consciousness, is the same self-activity, self-reflex, self-sight, transformed into "understanding." Thus, mind is essentially a triad as well as a unit. But, if so, it must reflect itself to conception as a "Quantity"—a sum of its own phases; and in these phases, it is a "Unity," a "Plurality," and a "Totality." ”

“ By exclusive reduction to causes, the primitive trends of a personality are reinforced; this is only helpful when at the same time these primitive tendencies are balanced by recognition of their symbolic value. ”

“ These three basic factors in reflective thinking may be unified and co-ordinated in personality development, or they may become disproportionate and virtually unrelated in their respective functions. But when they become unified, they produce a strong character consisting in the correlation of a factual science, a moral philosophy, and a genuine religious experience. And it is these three cosmic intuitions that give objective validity, reality, to man's experience in and with things, meanings, and values. ”

“ Inasmuch as the collective psyche ranks even above the personality, because it is the mother foundation upon which all personal differentiations are based, and because it is the common mental function of the sum total of the individual, therefore its incorporation in the personality may evoke inflation of self-confidence, an inflation which is then compensated by an extraordinary sense of inferiority in the unconscious. ”

“ The next point to note is that our conscious experiences and activities themselves have not only their intrinsic value, as they pass, but an extrinsic value, as means toward future intrinsic values. Each phase of experience has its own worth, while it lasts, and also has its results in determining future phases with their varying degrees of worth. ”

“ It is on this distinction that the introspective psychologist bases the attempt to give a psychological analysis and description of the contents of experience. To analyze and describe the facts of consciousness is to bring the marginal constituents of experience into the white light of attention. Analysis and description are possible just because experience is so largely a welter of elements that disguise their identity and character. ”

“ A pressure on self is experienced. Here there must be a sense impression which produces a consciousness, a discrimination, a choice, a recollection, and a consciousness of a concept out of which arises a judgment of simple sensation. Then we consider the cause as a form, and judgment of it is a perception. Then we consider it as a force in a process, and it is a judgment of apprehension. Thus a judgment of apprehension is one of a series of judgments, the first of sensation, the second of perception, and the third of apprehension. ”

“ With the progressive intensification of these conditions the personal, uncritical consciousness gets more and more dissociated from the impersonal, automatic, reflex subconscious, and becomes subject to all sorts of absurd suggestions. ”

“ We may point out here an important aspect of the percept, an aspect which has been neglected by the older psychologists, but which is now being more and more emphasized by the younger psychologists who lay more stress on the functional and biological side of mental life. Like the life of all organized beings, the life existence of the psychic state is for some reaction, for some adjustments to the conditions of the external environment. ”

“ It has been suggested in recent years that such flashes of intelligence are due to the secondary personality or the subliminal self or the other self, and it is often added that it is the development of our knowledge of these phases of psychology that represents modern progress in the science of mind. ”

“ But the species of mental equilibration to be more especially noted, is that shown in the establishment of a correspondence between relations among our states of consciousness and relations in the external world. Each outer connection of phenomena which we are capable of perceiving, generates, through accumulated experiences, an inner connection of mental states ”

“ I still defend, and, in the fourth lecture of this volume I expound afresh, the thesis that the contrast between our “descriptive” knowledge of the physical world and our “appreciative” knowledge of the facts of finite life, is determined precisely by this difference between our social consciousness of what is “valid for all individuals” and our personal consciousness of what is valid for the Self. ”

“ The ordinary psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing the marginal outline, has nevertheless taken for granted, first, that all the consciousness the person now has, be the same focal or marginal, inattentive or attentive, is there in the “field” of the moment, all dim and impossible to assign as the latter's outline may be; and, second, that what is absolutely extra-marginal is absolutely non-existent, and cannot be a fact of consciousness at all. ”

“ The consideration of these two senses, sight and hearing, with their appropriate objects, light and sound, sufficiently explains and illustrates our point. For what holds good with regard to them, holds equally good with regard to all our other perceptions. The moment the objective part of any one of them is thought, we are immediately constrained by a law of our nature which we cannot transgress, to conceive as one with it the subjective part of the perception. We think objective weight only by thinking the feeling of weight. ”

“ It must be admitted that this conclusion considerably weakens the reliance which can be placed upon introspective data. They must be accepted simply on account of the fact that we seem to perceive them, not on account of their supposed necessity for explaining the data of external observation.
This, at any rate, is the conclusion to which. we are forced, so long as, with the behaviourists, we accept common-sense views of the physical world. ”