Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/95

Rh PSYCHOLOGY 83 (ject- ity of taught. alL It is not a case of sequence between two separable impressions ; for we cannot really make the indefinite regress that such logical distinctions as that between the conscious subject and its acts im- plies. Moreover, our activity as such is not directly presented at all : we are, being active ; and further than this psychological analysis will not go. There are, as we have seen, two ways in which this activity is manifested, the receptive or passive and the motor or active in the stricter sense (comp. p. 44) and our experience of these we project in predicating the causal relation. But two halves do not make a whole ; so we have no complete experience of effectua- tion, for the simple reason that we cannot be two things at once. We are guided in piecing it together by the temporal and spatial relations of the things concerned. Hence, perhaps, some of the antinomies that beset this conception. In its earliest form, then, the so-called necessary connexion of cause and effect is perhaps nothing more than that of physical constraint. To this, no doubt, is added the strength of expectation as Hume supposed when the same effect has been found invariably to follow the same cause. Finally, when upon a basis of associated uniformities of sequence a definite intellectual elaboration of such material ensues, the logical necessity of reason and consequent finds a place, and so far as deduc- tion is applicable cause and reason become interchangeable ideas. 1 The mention of logical necessity brings up a topic already inci- dentally noticed, viz., the objectivity of thought and cognition gen- erally (comp. pp. 55, 77). The psychological treatment of this topic is tantamount to an inquiry into the characteristics of the states of mind we call certainty, doubt, belief all of which centre round the one fact of evidence. Between the certainty that a proposition is true and the certainty that it is not there may intervene continu- ous grades of uncertainty. We may know that A is sometimes B, or sometimes not ; or that some at least of the conditions of B are present or absent ; or the presentation of A may be too confused for distinct analysis. This is the region of probability, possibility, more or less obscurity. Leaving this aside, it will be enough to notice those cases in which certainty may be complete. With that certainty which is absolutely objective, i.e., with knowledge, psycho- logy has no direct concern ; it is for logic to furnish the criteria by which knowledge is ascertained. Emotion and desire are frequent indirect causes of subjective certainty, in so far as they determine the constituents and the grouping of the field of consciousness at the moment "pack the jury" or "suborn the witnesses," as it were. But the ground of certainty is in all cases some quality or some relation of these pre- sentations inter se. In a sense, therefore, the ground of all certainty is objective in the sense, that is, of being something at least directly and immediately determined for the subject and not by it. But, though objective, this ground is not itself at least is not ultimately an object or presentation. Where certainty is mediate, one judg- ment is often spoken of as the ground of another ; but a syllogism is still psychologically a single, though not a simple, judgment, and the certainty of it as a whole is immediate. Between the judgment A is B and the question Is A B ? the difference is not one of content nor scarcely one of form : it is a difference which depends upon the effect of the proposition on the subject judging, (i.) We have this effect before us most clearly if we consider what is by common con- sent regarded as the type of certainty and evidence, the certainty of present sense-impressions whence it is said, "Seeing is believing." The evident is here the actual, and the "feeling or consciousness " of certainty is in this case nothing but the sense of being taken fast hold of and forced to apprehend what is there, (ii. ) The like is true of memory and expectation : in these also there is a sense of being tied down to what is given, whereas in mere imagination, however lively, this non-voluntary determination is absent (comp. p. 63). Hume saw this at times clearly enough, as, e.g., when he says, "An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea that the fancy alone presents to us. " But unfortunately he not only made this difference a mere difference of intensity, but spoke of belief itself as "an operation of the mind" or "manner of conception that bestowed on our ideas this additional force or vivacity." 2 In short, Hume confounded one of the indirect causes of belief with the ground of it, and again, in describing this ground committed the irvrepov Trp&repov of making the mind determine the ideas instead of the ideas determine the mind. (iii. ) In speaking of intellection he is clearer: "The answer is easy with regard to propositions that are prov'd by intuition or demonstration. In that case, the person who assents not only conceives the ideas according to the proposition, but is necessarily determin'd to con- ceive them in that particular manner" (op. cit., p. 395). It has been often urged as by J. S. Mill, for example that belief is something "ultimate and primordial." No doubt it is ; but so is the distinc- tion between activity and passivity, and it is not here maintained that certainty can be analysed into something simpler, but only that it is identical with what is of the nature of passivity 1 Comp. Wuiidt, Logik " Das Causal-Gesetz und Satz vom Grunde," vol. i. p. 544. 2 Treatise of Human Nature, Green and Grose's ed., i. p. 396. objective determination. As Dr Bain puts it, " The leading fact in belief ... is our primitive credulity. We begin by believing everything : whatever is is true " (Emotions and Will, 3d ed., p. 511). But the point is that in this primitive state there is no act answering to " believe " distinct from the non-voluntary attention answering to "perceive," and no reflexion such as a modal terra like "true" implies. With eyes open in the broad day no man says, " I am certain there is light " : he simply sees. He may by and by come absolutely to disbelieve much that he sees e.g., that things are nearer when viewed through a telescope just as he will come to disbelieve his dreams, though while they last he is certain in these too. The limits of this article forbid any attempt to deal specially with the intellectual aspects of such conflicts of presenta- tions (comp. p. 62) or with their resolution and what is meant by saying that reason turns out superior to sense. The consistency we find it possible to establish among certain of our ideas becomes an ideal, to which we expect to find all our experience conform. Still the intuitive evidence of logical and mathematical axioms is psychologically but a new form of the actual ; we are only certain that two and two make four and we are not less certain that we see things nearer through a telescope. 3 Presentation of Self, Self -Consciousness, and Conduct. The conception of self we have just seen underlying and to a great extent shaping the rest of our intellectual furni- ture ; on this account it is at once desirable and difficult to analyse it and ascertain the conditions of its develop- ment. 4 In attempting this we must carefully distinguish between the bare presentation of self and that reference of other presentations to it which is often called specially self-consciousness, "inner sense," or internal perception. Concerning all presentations whatever that of self no less than the rest it is possible to reflect, " This presentation is mine ; it is my object ; I am the subject attending to it." Self, then, is one presentation among others, the result, like them, of the differentiation of the original continuum. But it is obvious that this presentation must be in existence first before other presentations can be re- lated to it. On the other hand, it is only in and by means of such relations that the conception of self is completed. We begin, therefore, with self simply as an object, and end with the conception of that object as the subject or " myself " that knows itself. Self has, in contradistinction from all other presentations, first of all (a) a unique in- terest and (b} a certain inwardness ; (c) it is an individual that (tZ) persists, (e) is active, and finally (/) knows itself. These several characteristics of self are intimately involved ; so far as they appear at all they advance in definiteness from the lowest level of mere sentience to those moments of highest self-consciousness in which conscience approves or condemns volition. The earliest and to the last the most important element in self Self and what we might perhaps term its root or material element is that the body, variously styled the organic sensations, vital sense, ccena;sthesis, or somatic consciousness. This largely determines the tone of the 3 See BELIEF, vol. iii. p. 532. 4 A large, though certainly diminishing, school of thinkers would entirely demur to such a proposal. "This personality," says one, " like all other simple and immediate presentations, is indefinable. . . it can be analysed into no simpler elements ; for it is revealed to us in all the clearness of an original intuition " (Mansel, Metaphysics, p. 182). Such an objection arises from that confusion between psycho- logy and epistemology which we have met already several times before (as, e.g., in the case of space, p. 53, and of unity, p. 79). The fact is that a conception that is logically " simple and immediate," in such wise as to be underivable from others, and therefore indefinable, may be we might almost say will be psychologically the result of a long process of development ; for the more abstract a concept is, i.e., the more fundamental in epistemological structure, the more thinking there has been to elaborate it. The most complex integrations of experience are needed to furnish the ideas of its ultimate elements. Such ideas when reached have intellectually all the clearness of an original intuition, no doubt ; but they are not therefore to be con- founded with what is psychologically a simple and immediate presenta- tion. It was in this last sense that idealists like Berkeley and Kant denied any presentation of self as much as sceptics like Hume. Self is psychologically a product of thought, not a datum of sense ; hence, while Berkeley called it a "notion" and Kant an "idea of the reason, " Hume treated it as a philosophical fiction.