Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/53

Rh PSYCHOLOGY 41 without any clearly differentiated organs at all. But there is no ground for supposing even the amoeba itself to be affected in all respects the same whether by changes of temperature or of pressure or by changes in its internal fluids, albeit all of these changes will further or hinder its life and so presumably be in some sort pleasurable or pain- ful. On the whole, then, there are grounds for saying that the endeavour to represent all the various facts of consciousness as evolved out of feeling is due to a hasty striving after simplicity, and has been favoured by the ambiguity of the term feeling itself. If by feeling we mean a certain subjective state varying continuously in intensity and passing from time to time from its positive phase (pleasure) to its negative phase (pain), then this purely pathic state implies an agreeing or disagreeing something which psychologically determines it. If, on the other hand, we let feeling stand for both this state and the cause of it, then, perhaps, a succession of such " feelings " may make up a consciousness ; but then we are including two of our elementary facts under the name of one of them. The simplest form of psychical life, therefore, involves not only a subject feeling but a subject having qualitatively distinguish- able presentations which are the occasion of its feeling. senta- We may now try to ascertain what is meant by cogni- tion as an essential element in this life, or, more exactly, what we are to understand by the term presentation. It was an important step onwards for psychology when Locke introduced that " new way of ideas " which Stillingfleet found alternately so amusing and so dangerous. By idea Locke tells us he meant true appearances in men's minds, or " whatsoever is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding " ; and it was so far a retro- grade step when Hume restricted the term to certain only of these appearances or objects, or rather to these appear- ances or objects in a certain state, viz., as reproduced ideas or images. And, indeed, the history of psychology seems to show that its most important advances have been made by those who have kept closely to this way of ideas ; the establishment of the laws of association and their many fruitful applications and the whole Herbartian psychology may suffice as instances (see HERBART). The truth is that the use of such a term is itself a mark of an important generalization, one which helps to free us from the mytho- logy and verbiage of the "faculty -psychologists." All that variety of mental facts which we speak of as sensa- tions, perceptions, images, intuitions, concepts, notions, have two characteristics in common: (1) they admit of being more or less attended to, and (2) can be reproduced and associated together. It is here proposed to use the term presentation to connote such a mental fact, and as the best English equivalent for what Locke meant by idea and what Kant and Herbart called a Vorstellung. A presentation has then a twofold relation, first, directly to the subject, and secondly, to other presenta- tions. By the first is meant the fact that the presentation is attended to, that the subject is more or less conscious of it : it is " in his mind " or presented. As presented to a subject a presentation might with advantage be called an object, or perhaps a psychical object, to distinguish it from what are called objects apart from presentation, i.e., con- ceived as independent of any particular subject. Locke, as we have seen, did so call it ; still, to avoid possible con- fusion, it may turn out best to dispense with the frequent use of object in this sense. But on one account, at least, it is desirable not to lose sight altogether of this which is after all the stricter as well as the older signification of object, namely, because it enables us to express definitely, without implicating any ontological theory, what we have so far seen reason to think is the fundamental fact in psychology. Instead of depending mainly on that vague and treacherous word "consciousness," or committing our- selves to the position that ideas are modifications of a certain mental substance and identical with the subject to which they are presented, we may leave all this on one side, and say that ideas are objects, and the relation of objects to subjects that whereby the one is object and the other subject is presentation. And it is because only objects sustain this relation that they may be spoken of simply as presentations. It will be convenient here to digress for a moment to take account Sensa- of an objection that is sure to be urged, viz. , that sensations at all tions not events ought not to be called objects, that they are "states of the psycho- subject" and that this is a deliverance of common sense, if anything logically is. Now if by this be meant (i. ) that sensations are metaphysically subject- subjective modifications in an idealistic sense, there is no need at ive. this stage either to assert or deny that. But if the meaning be (ii.) that sensations are presented as modes of the subject, such a position is due to a confusion between the subject proper or pure Ego and that complex presentation or object, the empirical, or as we might call it the biotic, Ego. A self-conscious subject may not only have a sensation but may recognize it as its own, recognize a certain con- nexion, that is to say, between the sensation and that presentation of the empirical self which self- consciousness implies. But such reference only renders more obvious the objective nature of a sensa- tion, in the psychological sense of the term objective. Or, again, the meaning may be (iii. ) that a subject whose presentations were all sensations would know nothing of the difference between subject and object. In this objection there is a lurking confusion between the standpoint of a given experience and the standpoint of its exposition. The true way, surely, to represent the bare fact of sensation is not to attempt to reproduce an experience as yet con- fined to sensations, but to describe such experience as a scientific psychologist would do if we could imagine him a spectator of it. The infant who is delighted by a bright colour does not of course conceive himself as face to face with an object ; but neither does he conceive the colour as a subjective affection. We are bound to describe his state of mind truthfully, but that is no reason for abandoning terms which have no counterpart in his consciousness, when these terms are only used to depict that consciousness to us. As to the objection (iv.) that, when all is said and done, sensations are conceived' by common sense as modifications of self, whether so presented or not, it may be granted that it appears so at first blush, but not when common sense is more closely examined. The fact is we are here upon what has been called "the margin of psycho- logy," where our ordinary thinking brings into one view what science has to be at great pains to keep distinct. Though it is scientifically a long way round from a fact of mind to the corre- sponding fact of body, yet it is only on careful reflexion that we can distinguish the two in those cases in which our practical interests have closely associated them. Such a case is that of sensation. The ordinary conception of a sensation coincides, no doubt, with the definition given by Hamilton and Mansel : "Sensation proper is the consciousness of certain affections of our body as an animated organism " ; and it is because in ordinary thinking we reckon the body as part of self that we come to think of sensations as subjective modifications. But, when considerations of method compel us to eliminate physiological implications from the ordinary conception of a sensation, we are able here to dis- tinguish the conscious subject and the "affections" of which it is conscious as clearly as we can distinguish subject and object in other cases of presentation. On the whole, then, we may conclude that there is nothing either in the facts or in our necessary concep- tions of them to prevent us from representing whatever admits of psychical reproduction and association, no matter how simple it be, as an object presented to a subject. As to the subjective relation of objects, the relation of Atten- presentation itself, we have merely to note that on the ti n ' side of the subject it implies what, for want of a better word, may be called attention, extending the denotation of this term so as to include even what we ordinarily call inattention. Attention so used will thus cover part of what is meant by consciousness, so much of it, that is, as answers to being mentally active, active enough at least to "receive impressions." Attention on the side of the subject implies intensity on the side of the object : we might indeed almost call intensity the matter of a pre- sentation, without which it is a nonentity. 1 As to the connexion between these two, subjective attention and 1 Compare Kant's Principle of the Anticipations of Perception : " In all phenomena the real which is the object of sensation has in- tensive magnitude." XX. 6