Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/87

Rh PSYCHOLOGY 75 interest, Butler's cool self-love; but desire as such is blind, without either the present certainty of sense or the assured prevision of reason. Pleasure in the past, no doubt, has usually brought about the association between the representation of the desired object and the movement for its realization; but neither the recollection of this pleasure nor its anticipation is necessary to desire, and even when present they do not determine what urgency it will have. The best proof of this lies in certain habitual desires. Pleasures are diminished by repetition, whilst habits are strengthened by it ; if the intensity of desire, therefore, were proportioned to the "pleasure value" of its gratification, the desire for renewed gratification should diminish as this pleasure grows less ; but, if the present pain of restraint from action determines the intensity of desire, this should increase as the action becomes habitual. And observation seems to show that, unless prudence sug- gest the forcible suppression of belated desires or the active energies themselves fail, desires do in fact become more imperious, although less productive of positive pleasure, as time goes on. In this there is, of course, no exception to the general principle that action is consequent on feeling, a greater pleasure being preferred before a less, a less pain before a greater ; for, though the feeling that follows upon its satisfaction be less or even change entirely, still the pain of the unsatisfied desire increases as the desire hardens into habit. It is also a point in favour of the position here taken that appetites, which may be compared to inherited desires, certainly prompt to action by present pain rather than by prospective pleasure. Intellection. Desire naturally prompts to the search for the means to its satisfaction and frequently to a mental rehearsal of various possible courses of action, their advantages and disadvantages. Thus, by the time the ideational continu- um has become, mainly by the comparatively passive work- ing of association, sufficiently developed to furnish thinking material, motives are forthcoming for thinking to begin. It is obviously impossible to assign any precise time for this advance ; like all others, it is gradual. Fitfully, in strange circumstances and under strong excitement, the lower animals give unmistakable signs that they can under- stand and reason. But thought as a permanent activity may be fairly said to originate in and even to depend upon the acquisition of speech. This indispensable instrument, which more than anything else enables our psychological individual to advance to the distinctly human or rational stage, consists of gestures and vocal utterances, which were originally and indeed are still to a large extent emotional expressions. 1 It is a question of the highest 1 It must here be noted that, though we still retain our psychological standpoint, the higher development of the individual is only possible through intercourse with other individuals, that is to say, through society. Without language we should be mutually exclusive and impenetrable, like so many physical atoms ; with it each several mind may transcend its own limits and share the minds of others. As a herd of individuals mankind would have a natural history as other animals have ; but personality can only emerge out of intercourse with persons, and of such intercourse language is the means. But, important as is this addition of a transparent and responsive world of minds to the dead opaqueness of external things, the development of our psychological individual still remains a purely individual development. The only new point is -and it is of the highest importance to keep it in sight that the materials of this development no longer consist of nothing but presentations elaborated by a single mind in accordance with psychical laws. But that combination of individual experiences that converts subjective idiosyncrasy and isolation into the objectivity and solidarity of Universal Mind only affects the individual in accordance with psychical laws, and we have no need therefore to overstep our proper domain in studying the advance from the non-rational phase to the phase of reason. interest to ascertain the general mode of its elaboration ; but as to this the reader must consult the article PHILOLOGY (vol. xviii. p. 766 sq.}. Our space will only allow us to note in what way language, when it already exists, is instru- mental in the development as distinct from the communi cation of thought. But, first of all, what in general is thinking, of which language is the instrument ? In entering upon this inquiry we are really passing one of the Distinc- hardest and fastest lines of the old psychology, that between sense tion be- and understanding. So long as it was the fashion to assume atween multiplicity of faculties the need was less felt for a clear exposition sense of their connexion. A man had senses and intellect much as he and un- had eyes and ears ; the heterogeneity in the one case was no more derstaud- puzzling than in the other. But for psychologists who do not cut ing. the knot in this fashion it is confessedly a hard matter to explain the relation of the two. The contrast of receptivity and activity hardly avails, for all presentation involves activity and essentially the same activity, that of attention. Nor can we well maintain that the presentations attended to differ in kind, albeit such a view has been held from Plato downwards. Nihil est in intellcctu qicod non fuerit prius in sensu : the blind and deaf are necessarily with- out some concepts that we possess. If pure being is pure nothing, pure thought is equally empty. Thought consists of a certain elaboration of sensory and motor presentations and has no content apart from these. We cannot even say that the forms of this ela- boration are psychologically a priori ; on the contrary, what is epistemologically the most fundamental is the last to be psycho- logically realized. This is not only true as a fact ; it is also true of necessity, in so far as the formation of more concrete concepts is an essential preliminary to the formation of others more abstract, those most abstract, like the Kantian categories, &c., being thus the last of all to be thought out or understood. And though this formative work is substantially voluntary, yet, if we enter upon it, the form at each step is determined by the so-called matter, and not by us; in this respect "the spontaneity of thought" is not really freer than the receptivity of sense. 2 It is sometimes said that thought is synthetic, and this is true ; but imagination is synthetic also ; and the processes which yield the ideational train are the only processes at work in intellectual synthesis. Moreover, it would be arbitrary to say at what point the mere generic image ceases and the true concept begins, so continuous are the two. No wonder, therefore, that English psychology has been prone to regard thought as only a special kind of perception perceiving the agreement or disagreement of ideas and the ideas themselves as mainly the products of association. Yet this is much like con- founding observation with experiment or invention, the act of a cave-man in betaking himself to a drifting tree with that of Noah in building himself an ark. In reverie, and even in understanding the communications of others, we are comparatively passive spec- tators of ideational movements, non-voluntarily determined. But in thinking or "intellection," as it has been conveniently termed, there is always a search for something more or less "vaguely con- ceived, for a clue which will be known when it occurs by seeming to satisfy certain conditions. Thinking may be broadly described as solving a problem, finding an AX that is B. In so doing we start from a comparatively fixed central idea or intuition and work along the several diverging lines of ideas associated with it, hence far the aptest and in fact the oldest description of thought is that it is discursive. Emotional excitement and at the outset the natural man does not think much in cold blood quickens the flow of ideas : what seems relevant is at once contemplated more closely, while what seems irrelevant awakens little interest and receives little attention. At first the control acquired is but very imperfect ; the actual course of thought of even a disciplined mind falls far short of the clearness, distinctness, and coherence of the logician's ideal. Familiar associations hurry attention away from the proper topic, and thought becomes not only discursive but wandering ; in place of concepts of fixed and crystalline completeness, such as logic describes, we may find a congeries of ideas but imperfectly compacted into one generic idea, subject to continual transforma- tion and implicating much that is irrelevant and confusing. Thus, while it is possible for thought to begin without Thought language, just as arts may begin without tools, yet language and lan - enables us to carry the same process enormously farther. In the first place it gives us an increased command of even such comparatively concrete generic images as can be 2 Locke, so often misrepresented, expressed this truth according to his lights in the following : " The earth will not appear painted with flowers nor the fields covered with verdure whenever we have a mind to it. ... Just thus is it with our understanding : all that is voluntary in our knowledge is the employing or withholding any of our faculties from this or that sort of objects and a more or less accurate survey of them" (Essay, iv. 13, 2).