Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/384

 ASSOCIATION AND THOUGHT. 371 come spasmodically and at intervals, with lapses between them, before it grows into a normal attitude of mind. The perception of the relation as such I will deal with lower down, when I touch upon discrimination in general. But what calls it forth is the practical collision between the feeling and a non-feeling group. After experienced satisfac- tion the object is approached with an expansion and excite- ment caused by ideal suggestion. If it resists and causes pain, there is a violent collision between the sensations, due (directly and through movement) to redintegration, and the discrepant outer group. And when both persist, the alternate expansion and driving in, of first one group and then the other, with the strong pleasures and pains which mark the struggle, tears in half, 1 so to speak, the mere unity of feeling which formed the battle-ground. What we have called the feeling-core has had to identify itself at once with its own contraction and expansion in regard to the outer group, and the task is impossible. Before experience and association had brought up and fixed expansion on the presence of the object, the task did not exist, because the self was driven in and there was an end of it. Now it must go at once two ways which are divergent, and from this effort supervenes, not the cessation of the struggle, but the first perception of it. I do not mean that consciousness could have been predicted as a result apart from specific experience. I mean that, feeling sure it has emerged, we can to some extent see how that emergence must have happened. We can feel the problem that pressed hard upon the struggling mind and understand how the result has partly solved it. 2 I will, in passing, glance here at the origin of our ideas of activity and resistance ; and as the latter at all events implies the former, I will keep to activity. The general idea, I presume, is that of an alteration of A not taken as belonging to anything outside, but as a change of something beyond A which realises something which in A was ideal. This may be quite indefensible, but it is, I think, what we mean 1 It does not, of course, really tear it, or we should get two selves in- different to each other. 2 I do not intend to consider here the influence of society and the collision with other selves, nor to date the origin of that perception. The discrepancy of the symptoms of pain and pleasure in another body with the feelings in mine no doubt operates strongly as soon as it does operate. It is, however, possible to exaggerate the importance of the social environ- ment. To say, Without other selves no self at all, is surely going too far. It would be, perhaps, as true to say, If other selves did not exist, we should certainly invent them. But it is not necessary, and I think not permis- sible, in psychology to make either assertion.