Mental Development in the Child and the Race
Chapter 10: Conscious Imitation (Begun); The Origin of Memory and Imagination
Table of Contents | Next | Previous
§ 1. Certain General Facts and Explanations
WE are now clear of neurological considerations in the main, and may trace the development of consciousness. The place of consciousness in phylogenetic progress has already come up for notice, and we have been able to find in consciousness a higher sphere of organic accommodation. That is, it seemed necessary to assume the analogue of the nervous basis of pleasure and pain very early in the life series, in order to get any complexity of development at all. Assuming, moreover, the truth of our theory of development as now sketched, which bases it, from the start, on the two factors, contractility, and the pleasure and pain analogue found in central 'excess,' we ought now to find the further development of consciousness an illustration of the same processes.
The rest of our discussions, therefore, may turn upon further analyses of conscious states, whose reason for being is evident only when we connect them with the function of consciousness in evolution as a whole. And as it is the essence of our doctrine of accommodation that the imitative reaction is the type of all organic accommodations, our further
(277) interesting task becomes that of tracing and explaining the presence of imitation in the development of consciousness.
We may preface our detailed treatment of this topic with two statements already put in evidence, both of which are the clear outcome of current psychological opinion. I quote them from my earlier work, in which they appear as the natural result of a statement of nervous structure and function in its relation to consciousness, written for purposes of exposition only.
"All the phenomena of consolidation or 'downward growth,' on the one hand, illustrate what is known as the law of Habit; all the phenomena of specialization, or 'upward growth,' illustrate the law of Accommodation.
"As for Habit: Physiologically, habit means readiness for function, produced by previous exercise of the function. Anatomically, it means the arrangement of elements more suitably for a function, in consequence of former modifications of arrangement through that function. Psychologically, it means loss of oversight, diffusion of attention, subsiding consciousness.
"As for Accommodation: Physiologically and anatomically, it means the breaking up of a habit, the widening of the organic for the reception or accommodation of new conditions. Psychologically, it means reviving consciousness, concentration of attention, voluntary control -- the mental state which has its most general expression in what we know as Interest. In habit and interest we find the psychological poles corresponding to the lowest and the highest in the activities of the nervous system." The application of these conclusions, especially those italicized, will be plain as we go on.
The books on psychology which have had the courage to say anything about imitation -- and they are few -- have generally, by what they said, only tended to justify the conser-
(278)-vatism of those which had not the courage. It has been a topic of extraordinary neglect and confusion, [1] One of the latest authors [2] makes certain statements about imitation which may be considered typical of the uncertainty which seems to shield itself behind eclecticism.
He says (p. 218): "Since it only begins to appear about the fourth month, when simple voluntary action directed towards an end is also first recognizable, it is possible that imitation is acquired"; then (2I9), "As a rapid reaction of a sensorimotor form, it has the look of a mechanical process . . . in many cases there seems to be no conscious purpose.... There is much to favour the view that it is purely ideomotor and so sub-volitional"; then (219, note), "It is pointed out by Gurney that imitation plays a conspicuous part in the hypnotic state"; and again (219-220), "Imitation follows on the persistence of motor-ideas having a pleasurable interest.... The child does not imitate all the actions it sees, but only certain ones which specially impress it.... Hence in most, at least, of a child's imitation there is a rudiment of desire. For the rest, the abundant imitative activity of early life illustrates the strength of the playful impulse, of the disposition to indulge in motor activity for the sake of its intrinsic pleasurableness" (italics his). Again (109), he makes imitative sympathy instinctive.
And yet if we examine these separate statements, we find that they rest generally upon fact, and it becomes evident that the need in this topic is a theory of the reaction in question which will cover facts drawn from an area wider than that which individual or analytic psychology is usually called upon to cover. It may therefore be taken as the legitimate task of such a theory as mine, which not only recognizes imitation
(279) but endeavours also to explain it, to set in order the facts cited by psychologists.
FACT I. The late rise of conscious imitation in the child~l: sixth or seventh month. This
fact may be accounted for on the very evident ground of the distinction of congenital
function from the new accommodations of the individual child. The child's early months are
taken up with its vegetative functions. The machinery of heredity is working itself out in
a new individual. Further, accidental imitations struck by him do not give pleasure until
the senses are sharpened to discern them, and until the attention is capable of its
operations of comparison, co-ordination, etc.; before this there is no element of pleasure
in the happy successes of imitations, to lend its influence for the continuance of them.
As soon as these conditions get fulfilled, however, we find not only that the child begins
to show germinal imitations, such as the monotonous repetition of its own vocal
performances (mama-ma-), but also that its nervous connections give it an instinctive
tendency to biological subconscious reactions, distinctly of the imitative type, such as
the walking alternation of the legs. In the main, therefore, there is instinctive tendency
to functions of the imitative type and to some direct organic imitations; but those clear
conscious imitations which represent new accommodations and acquirements are not as such
instinctive, but come later as individual acquirements. [3]
FACT 2. Imitation is often a simple sensori-motor reaction without conscious purpose, i.e. it is involuntary. This is so evident that we have based an important distinction on it in an earlier chapter -- that between 'simple' imitation,
(280) considered as 'suggestion,' and 'persistent' imitation, which turns out to be the first typical exhibition of volition. In hypnotic conditions, imitation is clearly ideo-motor suggestion. This means that, after all, imitation considered as a type of reaction, is organic and inherited. It has its place among race habits. Infants show remarkable differences, for example, in the readiness and facility with which they learn to speak. This does not arise from difference in practice, for practice never overcomes the difference; but it is due to differences in the instinctive tendencies of the infants to a reaction which is, par excellence, imitative in its type and method of development. [4]
On this basis it is possible to admit the truth of the first fact cited, that many imitations are late acquisitions in the child's first year, and are, therefore, phenomena of accommodation, and acquired things involving volition or purpose; and, at the same time, admit reflex imitations and explain them.
Further, our theory requires, as a matter of fact, just this state of things. Volition would be impossible without this great class of quite involuntary sensori-motor and ideomotor, as well as purely biological reactions, which fall under the imitative type, and which represent instinctive inherited tendencies to movement. In more undeveloped conscious ness, also, we find that the purely suggestive influence of a 'copy for imitation' may be so strong, as is remarked further below, that reactions follow despite their painful character: a fact which would be impossible on the theory that all voluntary action is acquired under lead of the pleasure-pain association, without such a basis of native tendency. The law of habit, ,which exhibits itself in the congenital motor
(281) tendencies spoken of above, is in these cases too strong for the law of accommodation through pleasure and pain, and works itself out in conduct in opposition to warnings of temporary damage to the organism.
Again, not only is this true of imitation itself considered as a phenomenon. It is true of all motor acquisitions, i.e. that they may become instinctive in some cases, and yet must be acquired in others. [5] I have already pointed this out in the case of many instincts and of emotional expression. The chick is born with full-fledged space instincts; man acquires 'intuitions' of space relations, and in such a finished way that Kant thinks them native. Beasts in many cases seem to inherit their vocal cries; man learns his speech, indeed, but learns it so well that it gets to be reflex, as is seen in certain aboulic patients. And in many cases the original process of learning is seen to be identical with imitation from the fact that many animals do not learn their characteristic cries, as birds their songs, if they do not hear adults of their kind make such sounds, although they apparently never consciously imitate their adults at all. The instinct of imitation is so bound up in all these race acquisitions or habits that its exercise is often necessary to bring them out.
FACT 3. Children are more imitative than animals, with one or two striking exceptions, such as monkeys, the mockingbird, etc. This is due simply to the fact that the child's life, as heredity has laid it out for him, is to be largely one of acquisitions or new adjustments, while the animal's is to be one of repetitions of race habits or old adjustments. In the words of Preyer, [6] "the more kinds of co-ordinated move-
(282) ment an animal brings into the world, the fewer is he able to learn afterwards." The child is par excellence the 'animal that learns; and if imitation is the way to learn, he has 'chosen the better part' in being more imitative than the rest. He is born with a more 'broken up' or mobile nervous organization, because his immediate ancestors have had full consciousness and volition, whose function is to secure new adaptations by choice, memory, etc., in opposition to the old reflex adaptations of animal instinct. The long period of his infancy has come with this mobility and relative helplessness, to give him time to acquire these higher conscious adaptations.
Animal imitativeness is generally understated, however. [7] The most social animals, including man, are the most imitative, as we should expect from what we know about the imitation factor in the social consciousness, and this would seem also to give us an explanation of the strength of the imitative tendency in certain animals which show it strongly marked.
Another reason for the difference is to be found in the fact that we are usually looking for a particular kind of imitation in the cases of animals -- the imitation of acts which they do not normally perform. The animals have so much instinctive endowment that most of their performances are taken as a matter of nature, and only those clear cases of imitation are noted which are novel and rare. Yet it is probable that many of the most 'innate' powers of the animals are brought out, perfected, and constantly kept efficient, by imitation within the group or species. In these cases the presence of imitation can only be detected by the artificial separation of mate from mate, young from young, etc.; but interesting cases of crippled performances in circumstances of such separation are coming
(283) to light, such as the abortive crowing of young cocks, the failure in barking of young dogs' the lo s of the form of nest building in young birds, when the example of their elders is ruled out in these instances respectively. [8]
FACT 4. The tendency to imitate may come into direct conflict with the prudential teachings of pleasure and pain, and yet may be acted upon. A child may do, and keep on doing, imitations which cause him pain.
This may be readily explained when we take the facts simply in hand, and rid ourselves of current doctrines of ethics and theories of conduct. If imitation is anything like the fundamental fact which the foregoing account takes it-to be, -- the means of selection among varied external stimulations, -- it becomes evident in what ways pleasure and pain may be related to such reactions. Pleasure and pain are now seen to be the index of a change brought about by a stimulus or by a reaction itself considered as a new stimulus. The repetition of this stimulus is desirable, and this is secured by further imitation. The pleasure is enhanced by the repetition, which thus aims at securing the continued presence of the 'copy'; that is to say, the pleasure accruing is something additional to the copy or 'object' which the original reaction aims at.
The observation of young children directly and plainly confirms the truth of this position. The child invariably reacts at first upon objects, presentations, things present to it. So in some circumstances, suggestion, serving to urge him on to new accommodations, or simply calling out an old
(284) habit into exercise, works in spite of the pleasure or pain to which it may give rise. I have illustrated this [9] with concrete eases from infant life. Romanes finds it in the animal world. [10] Pathology is full of striking illustration of it.
Further, the transition from this naive suggestibility to the reflective consciousness in which pleasures and pains become considerations or ends, is marked in the life history of the infant. He learns to dally with his bottle, to postpone his enjoyment, to subordinate a present to a distant pleasure, by a gradual process of reflective self-control. He gradually grows out of the quasi-neutrality of habit to be a reflective egotist.
In adult life it is undoubtedly true that we usually do things because we like to do them and stop doing them when they hurt, but even then it is not always so. Just as the little child sometimes acts from mere suggestion, at the same time moved to tears by the anticipation of pain to result from it; so to the man a copy may be presented so strongly for imitation, it may be so moving by its simple suggestiveness, that he acts upon it even though it have a hedonic colouring of pain. The principle of accommodation requires that it be so, for otherwise there could be no development except within the very narrow range afforded by accidental discharges. No new adjustment or adaptation could be effected without risk of pain and damage. If the child never reacted in any way but in pleasurable ways guaranteed already by its inheritance or by its experience, how could it grow ~ So if we sought only what we have already grown to like, how could new appetites be acquired? The ethical
(285) truth that pain is a schoolmaster, that we cannot dispense with its discipline and also grow -- this truth holds as well in a measure for the vital organism and its reactions.
But the question then remains: How is this possible, if the criterion of what is advantageous is pleasure, and if the organism has developed all the way through on that principle ? How can imitation, dictated itself by pleasure and pain, come to conflict with the indications of pleasure and pain ?
The answer to this seeming difficulty is evident when we remember one of the points already made. The accommodation-reaction -- the imitation dictated by pleasure and pain -- is so regular in its kind, giving the circular process, and involves organic elements so much the same, that it has itself become a matter of habit. The tendency to imitate has thus become a congenital thing, given by endowment in the motor organism. The idea of a movement has become, as psychologists so often tell us, itself a tendency to perform that movement; yea, the very beginning of the movement. The child is therefore actuated by all the impetus of race history to imitate, to use his own motor apparatus upon every hint which he gets of a movement, and this tendency takes, of course, no account of exceptions. The pain, therefore, in which a certain new reaction results is, at first, only a partial check upon the reaction. It is, of course, in so far a new accommodation, and works by association, as far as it can do so, to inhibit the movement; but its influence is 'uphill.' It cannot once for all undo the old congenital tendency. And for a time the latter wins the day.
When reflection begins, however, and with it volition, then the case is altered. Volition is not possible until just the breaking up, modifying, snubbing, of inherited habit, which it is the office of new pains and pleasures to bring about, is, to a degree, already accomplished. And volition is no more
(286) than just the ratification of this break-up, and the further accommodation to the conditions which have brought about the 'break-up.' Man then becomes an agent. He reflects upon both the old and the new, and his choice represents the best adjustment into which all the elements and tendencies within him may fall for future reaction or conduct. But then the fight with the dictates of pleasure and pain may become only more open, in the degree in which, in his deliberation, he may discern the permanent adaptations represented by self-denial, social co-operation, etc., as opposed to the temporary ones of pleasure and pain.
Endnotes
- To this Professor Bain's work was an early and admirable exception. The literature of imitation is now full and valuable (1906).
- Sully, The Human Mind.
- The term 'instinctive' used here is in the sense of impulse or disposition rather than of definite instinct in the narrow sense. Cf. the discussions of Groos in The Play of Man, together with the editor's preface to the English translation.
- The same is true of handwriting; cf. Romanes, Mental Evolution in
Animals, p. 194 - This is considered, under the head of 'duplicated functions,' in the discussion of organic selection in Development and Evolution, pp. 72 ff., and 28 ff.
- Physiologie des Embryos, p. 545.
- Cf. the remarkable performances of dogs, cats, birds, etc., in the way of imitation, given by Romanes, Evol. of Mind in Animals, Chap. XIV.
- Professor Lloyd Morgan gives many instructive examples of the influence of these accommodations on evolution, as illustrating the theory of Organic Selection (cf. Development and Evolution, Chaps. V.-VII.). Since the above was written, it has been pretty well established that animal imitations are largely restricted to functions natural to the species in each case.
- Chap. VI., § 3, on 'Deliberative Suggestion.'
- "There is abundant evidence of one individual imitating the habits of another individual, whether the action imitated be beneficial or useless" (Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 220)
§ 2. The Origin of Memory and Association of Ideas
The neurological function already described as 'the physical basis of memory,' [1] and the manner of its rise, will at once suggest the psychological doctrine as well. We have found the organism developing a system of centres and nerve connections for the purpose of being relieved of its dependence upon direct sense-stimulation. By this arrangement the processes corresponding to the memory of these sense experiences are aroused from within, from other centres, or from without indirectly, by associated processes, in lieu of the action of the real original object. Such a process thus started gives to consciousness the picture or image of the object, which we call a 'memory.'
If, now, to keep within consciousness, the original sensation-content, -- the stimulus which it is the business of the reaction to confirm by repeating, or to banish by failing to repeat, thus illustrating imitation, -- if this be considered as respects the reaction which it arouses, then we may have
(287) the same function in kind ascribed to the memory copy as to it. But the reaction will then have another office; its province will be to enable the organism to anticipate experiences, the consequences of which it has once suffered or enjoyed. It thus performs its life-preserving reaction before the real stimulus comes, and so secures benefit, or avoids damage. The child the flame and the pain, and withdraws before the fire touches him. He remembers the apple, and the pleasure, and secures the fruit for himself by reaching.
Further, we have seen how, on the neurological side, the processes ring one another up, so that one may release the reaction which originally belonged by right of imitation only to another. The question on the side of consciousness, as to how the different 'copies' get to ring one another up, in such a system, is the question of association.
They can at first act together, it is plain, only as far as the original external things are together. For example, you speak a word; I at once write it. I can do this because I heard the word sound when I saw the written word and learned to trace it. To-morrow, by reason of a brain lesion, I am unable to write the word when I hear you speak it, but I can still copy the word when you set it before me. The lesion has simply deprived me of the use of the internal visual copy which I imitated in writing, by cutting the writing-reaction apparatus off from its connection with the auditory seat from which this visual copy was accustomed to be 'rung up.' But the simpler imitation of the external visual copy remains possible. A step further: I see a man, and at once write his name. Here the visual image of the man rings up the auditory image of the name-word, this rings up the visual copy-image of the written word, and this I imitate by writing. But all of these images were once real
(288) external things to me and existed together, in my learning, by various twos and threes. Yet if any one had asked me why I wrote the man's name, I should have said: 'Because I remember it.' Each one of these images is itself a 'copy for imitation,' when needed for its own appropriate reaction, and only by such associations does its typical character become obscured. A young child, on seeing the man, would say 'Man,' i.e. would imitate the auditory copy which the sight of the man rang up. And a certain child of mine would probably hasten to ask for a pencil in order to draw the man, thus imitating the schematic outline man fixed in her memory by earlier efforts to imitate the shape of the real thing. In all these cases the reaction follows either directly upon an external stimulus or upon a memory image which represents another external thing existing at some time alongside the first.
In other words, association by contiguity is simply the progress from external togetherness into internal togetherness, from fact to memory. Your spoken word brings up my written word copy. Why? Because sound and written copy existed together when I learned to write, and so on with all the instances.
But suppose a perfectly new external copy rings up another copy which is only internal: why is this? Thus a new man seen brings up an old name written. Why? Evidently because there are some other elements of copy either external or internal which have been together with each; this is association by resemblance or contrast. 'Man seen' and 'name heard' were present together when I made the old acquaintance, and afterwards 'name heard' and 'name written' were associated by contiguity. So when I hear the same name, when in conversation with a new face, I think of the written name. The sound name, therefore, has been
(289) common to both associations, and by it the written name arises when I see the new acquaintance.
I have used this last example, rather than the usual ones of the text-books drawn from direct resemblance (a photograph suggesting a man [2]), because it is evident that such association by resemblance is only a special and very open case of what is elsewhere called the principle of 'lapsed links.' In this case, the auditory sound image is just as truly a link between the new acquaintance's face and the written name of the old one, or between my images of the two faces, on~ in memory and one in perception, as actual similarity of feature would be. In such ordinary feature-resemblance both copies are in the same sense -- the two faces are both seen. But similarity, so called, is really a much wider thing. Another centre -- the auditory, in the case supposed -- may come between, as a link.
Then this link lapses. I tend to behave toward the new man as I would toward the old; even speaking the same name to him is behaviour, of course. The new copy comes to usurp, so far as it may, the reaction belonging to the old, leaving out the link of association altogether.
Take another case: a musician plays by reading printed notes, and forgets that in reaming the meaning of the notes he imitated the movements and sounds which his instructor made; for the intermediate copies have so fallen away that his performance seems to offer no surface imitation at all, and pathological cases show that even the intervening brain processes become unnecessary, a 'short-cut' being established between sight and movement. His hearing copy-system persists to the end only to guide or control his muscular reactions. But a musician of the visual type may go farther. He may
(290) play from memory of the printed notes; that is, he may play from a transformed visual copy of notes which themselves are but shorthand, or substitute, expressions of earlier sound and muscular copies; and finally the name alone of a familiar selection may be sufficient to start a performance guided only by a subconscious muscular copy series. So also in the case of the patient who can move a limb only when he sees it; we have to suppose that his properly imitative action on the basis of movement memories is now performed through the substitution of visual images for these.
Reflection convinces us that we have now reached a principle -- when due weight is also given to the explanations earlier made on the neurological side [3] -- of wide-reaching application in mental development. We see how it is possible for reactions which were originally simple imitative suggestions to lose all appearance of their true origin. Copy-links at first distinctly present as external things, and afterwards present with almost equal distinctness as internal memories, may become quite lost in the rapid progress of consciousness. New connections get established in the network of association, and motor discharges get stimulated thus which were possible at first only by imitation and owed their formation to it.
If this principle should be proved to be of universal application, we would then be able to say that every intelligent action is stimulated by imitative copies whose presence the action in question tends to maintain, suppress, or modify. [4]
A further confirmation of the fact is seen in the process of learning to name objects. The child gets the required word by direct imitation of the sound heard by him. The application of the word to the object keeps his interest and
(291) stimulates his effort, but it is no part of his learning. But after he has learned to use the term easily, he speaks it directly at the object. He no longer needs to keep the sound copy before him, and it lapses so completely that-if we had not been with him when he learned, we should never suspect that the association between name and thing was of imitative origin. He can name the thing only because he has imitated a sound, and then by association the visual image of the thing has usurped the reaction created by this imitation. Pathological cases show that this concealment of imitative origin may go so far that patients may be able to name objects seen when they can no longer imitate the same sounds when they hear them. [5] It is as if the son of a washerwoman refuse to recognize his mother when he takes the social position of his wife, even though the wife is spending the money which the humble mother has earned.
The very great importance of this principle, apart from the question of fact, is seen in its genetic applications. It exhibits the higher mental functions as a great stride in accommodation. Memory and association do exactly the same thing for the organism, later, that perception, sensation, contractility, do earlier. Association enables us to react to facts which are distant from present facts but allied to them. Memory enables us to react to the facts of the future as if they were present, thus conserving the lessons of the past. Perception enables us to set present facts in their proper setting, and thus to react upon them with full reference to their significance. Sensation enables us to react upon facts according to their immediate worth to the organism. Contractility, exhibiting itself in 'organic imitation,' is the original form of the adaptive reaction which works through the whole precess of development.
(292)
And with these higher reaches of accommodation, we now see' the method of it remains the
same. Pleasure and pain, mixed up with the reactions of emotion, lead to the 'excess'
discharge which is consolidated in the attention, and selection by attention gets its
highest fruition in the explicit selective function of consciousness, volition. [6]
The actual dynamogenic parallel between simple sensation, on one hand, and memory, on the other, appears in the different classes of 'suggestions,' known as sensori-motor and ideo-motor, illustrated in detail in an earlier place. The facts of suggestion should be constantly borne in mind, since they show the transitions in behaviour between reflexes and volitions, and bridge what has often been considered a chasm of discontinuity.
Endnotes
- Above, Chap. IX., § 3.
- See my Handbook, Sense and Intellect, Chap. XI.
- Above, Chap. IX., § 3.
- See Appendix C, 1.
- See Bastian, Brain as Organ of Mind, p. 623.
- See Chaps. XIII and XIV for the discussion of the Genesis of Volition and Attention.
§ 3. Assimilation, Recognition
There are several aspects of presentation and representation which seem more reasonable when brought into connection with our present topic. The principle of assimilation, made much of in recent discussions, clearly illustrates not only that a copy-image may be so strong and habitual in consciousness as to assimilate new experiences to its form and colour, but also that this assimilation is the very mode and method of the mind's digestion of what it feeds upon. Consciousness constantly tends to neglect the unfit, the mal apropos, the incongruous, and to show itself receptive to that which in any way conforms to its present stock. A child after learning to draw a full face -- circle with spots for the two eyes, nose, and mouth, and projections on the sides for ears -- will persist, when copying a face in profile, in drawing its circle, with two eyes, and two ears, and fail to see its error, al-
(293)-though only one ear is visible and no eyes.[1] My child H., having been told that her shadow was herself, called all shadows 'ittle Henen' (little Helen). The external pattern is assimilated to the memory copy, or to the word or other symbol which comes to stand for it. The child has a motor reaction for imitating the latter; why should not that answer for the other as well? As everybody admits, in one way or another, such assimilation is at the bottom of recognition, and of illusions which are but mistaken recognitions.
Let us look at each of these facts -- assimilation and recognition -- more closely, from the genetic point of view.
In what has been said of the principle of association, we find ground for the reduction of its particular forms to the one law of assimilation. This matter has been ably discussed by Wundt. [2] In assimilation -- and in the 'apperception' of the Herbartians -- we have the general statement of all the forms, nets, modes of grouping, which old elements of mental content bring to impose upon the new. In the light of their motor effects, we are able to construe all these elements of content under the general principle of habit, and say that the assimilation of any one element to another, or the assimilation of any two or more such elements to a third, is due to the unifying of their motor discharges in the single larger discharge which stands for the apperceived result. The old discharge may itself be modified -- it cannot remain exactly as it was when it stood for a less complex content. So this larger discharge represents the habit of the organism in so far as both the earlier tendencies to discharge belonging to these elements of content are represented in it; but it also represents accommodation -- i.e. if the assimilation, appercep
(294)- tion, synthesis, is smoothly accomplished -- since it stands for a richer objective content. Presentations are associated by contiguity because they unite in a single motor discharge; by similarity, because both of them, through their association with a third, have come to unite in a common discharge. The energy of the new presentation process finds itself drawn off in the channels of the discharge of the old one which it resembles; the motor associations, therefore, and with them all the organic and revived mental elements stirred up by them, come to identify or unite the new content with the old. Among these revised elements the attention strains are of the first importance; they constitute largely the sense of activity in mental synthesis or apperception everywhere.
It is commonly held that assimilation stands midway between absolute identity of presentations, on the one hand, and such difference of presentations, on the other hand, as is found in the relative independence of associated ideas, such as, for example, the association 'stable -- horse.' But this is not the true view of assimilation, for there is no such thing as absolute identity of presentation, or of mental content of any kind. Assimilation is always present. It is the necessary basis of the earliest association. For association is, as we have seen, on the organic side and at the start, only another statement for the consolidating of the different reactions which arise when the stimulations are multiple or not simple. These reactions are reduced to orderly habitual discharges -- this is association by assimilation, more or less adequate to give the sense of synthesis, or unity, or identity. Association has, accordingly, a motor foundation from the first. The elements hold together in memory because they are used together in action. And as the action becomes one, but yet complex, so the mental content tends to become one, but yet complex also.
(295)
This becomes more evident when we call to mind that the 'objects' of the external world
are very complex mental constructions. They are for the most part made by
association. Objects have some very general aspects in common, such as colour, resistance,
odour, etc. But these bare qualities, taken alone, might go to constitute one object about
as well as another; and really would constitute none. What kind of an object such or such
a bare stimulus shall turn out to be -- this is largely a matter of association and
suggestion. Hence if the mind has to construct anyhow, in each case, and to depend largely
upon memory of earlier instances for its material, then it falls back at once upon those
habitual reactions by which groups of associated elements are reinstated together and as
one content. These old groups thus usurp the new elements by assimilation, if it be within
the range of organic possibility.
Put generally, therefore, we may say that assimilation is due to the tendency of a new sensory process to be drawn off into preformed motor reactions; these preformed reactions in their turn tending to reinstate, by the principle of imitation, the old stimulations or memories which led to their preformation, with all the associations of these memories. These memories, therefore, tend to take the place of, or stand for, or include the new stimulations which are being thus assimilated.
All perception is accordingly a case of assimilation. The motor contribution to each presented object is just beginning to be recognized in cases of disease called by the general term 'apraxia,' i.e. loss of the sense of the use, function, utility, of objects. A knife is no longer recognized by these patients as a knife, because the patient does not know how to use it, or what its purpose is. The complex system of elements is still there to the eye, all together: the knife is a
(296) thing that looks, feels, etc., so and so. This is accomplished by the simple contiguous association of these elements, which have become hardened into the ' thing.' But the central link by which the object is made complete, by which, that is, these different elements were originally reproduced together by being imitated together in a single act, -- this has fallen away. So the apperception, the synthesis which made the whole complex content a thing for recognition and for use, this is gone.
The great importance of this fact of assimilation becomes more evident also when we take note more in detail of the nature of the motor processes by which it takes place. When we say that a new element is assimilated to old contents by exciting the motor associates, and with them all the other entrained associates of the old, we lay ourselves open to the task of showing what the motor processes are which are thus established by habit in any particular case.
We have shown that in a developed organism the 'excess' discharge which secures accommodation, by reinstating a stimulus, takes on two great forms by the law of habit. First, we have the gross general activities of the muscles and glands, reflexes, reactions of emotion, etc., already established; and with these, second, the constant modifications of them made in getting new acquisitions of skill, etc. These represent respectively biological habit and accommodation. But then we find also the more special kind of reaction upon mental content found in attention. This has still to be described as a more or less consolidated motor reaction fixed by natural selection. We shall also see, in considering the attention, how it is that every mental content tends to call out the attention, and how, in turn, the attention modifies the content which it calls out. There is, therefore, just so far as this reaction of attention upon content is a constant generalized
(297) thing, a general demand for the assimilation of all contents in certain great nets or categories representing forms of action; and, in particular, these mental categories are due to felt movements of the attention. This may be deferred for later discussion. But this is not all of the attention. We find that there is a balance of attention process -- reflex motor influence, muscular strains here and there -- peculiar to each great quality of content, as being from eye, or ear, etc., and inside of this, again, a balance peculiar to each particular individual content experienced. We not only have a common attention, involving the brow-muscles, etc., but various special attentions, such as visual, auditory, etc., and further, different successive attentions for each experience of the same quality, i.e. let us say three successive repetitions of the same sight. If A be the gross movements of attention, a, a', a", a"' may stand for the peculiar attentions to sight, sound, etc., and <math>&alpha</math>a, <math>&alpha</math>', <math>&alpha</math>", <math>&alpha</math>"' for the successive acts of the attention given under one of the latter, say under a.
This means that the sense of assimilation in each successive experience of the same objective content varies with the different motor shadings of attention, just as it also varies for the different sense contents or qualities by reason of the different motor strains, etc., involved in accommodating by the different senses.
Now let us see what the different cases are which will arise in successive presentation of the same external object. Let p be a new object, a peach. A + a + <math>&alpha</math>, then, by what precedes, stands for attention to it; in which A gives the sensations of gross contraction, a gives the sensations of special sense contractions, such as rolling of the eyes, etc., and <math>&alpha</math> gives the sensations of contraction peculiar to this particular object only, -- say the visual exploration of its figure. Now all this works changes in the content p; as we have seen, by the law
(298) of assimilation, p gets a lot of associates attached to it by which it is brought into harmony or connection with earlier p's. It is put into the category P, the Peach.
Now suppose that instead of being an absolutely new p, this p has been seen once before and so has become p'. Then we have again the formula for attention, A + a + <math>&alpha</math>', where <math>&alpha</math>' differs from the former <math>&alpha</math>. What is this difference ? In consciousness I submit the difference is just this, that we recognize p'. Analyzed out as it has now been, we are able to see what this peculiar sense of recognition rests on. For <math>&alpha</math>' differs from <math>&alpha</math> in two respects: first, in the greater ease with which the movements of the eye, etc., for which a stands, are made in tracing out the figure of p' (or whatever other contractions constitute one attention different from another inside the same sense-quality -- what we may call the 'motor associates' of p'), and, second, in the presence of the images belonging to the earlier experience now brought up in regular association. As to the first of these elements, it is the so-called ' subjective aspect' of recognition to be mentioned below. As to the latter element, it is evident that all the old images will be associated directly with p'. But among them will now be the image of memory left by the earlier experience of p. With this the new p' is assimilated, to such a degree that the two are not held apart at all, but the result is one object under the category P, with a group of associated elements. We say, then, that p' is recognized.
Recognition, therefore, generally involves elements of content brought together by the process of assimilation, and so rests upon attention considered as a phenomenon of motor habit, that is, upon the more habitual ingredients in the attention symbolized by the A +a part of the whole attention formula. The objective presented elements are of course most evident and important. Their presence is in so far
(299) only the familiar fact of association, which seems easy to understand because it is so familiar. But association is itself a case of looser and less effective assimilation. Every two elements whatever, connected in consciousness, are so only because they have motor effects in common. In association they have less in common. In recognition they have so much more in common that they are presented as one, and the other elements of content associated with each of them in similar ways through common motor interests, cluster around the final outcome as the evident signs of the sameness of the new and the old. This is the fact of recognition by Nebenvorstellungen signalized by Wundt, under which falls Lehmann's Benennungsassociation. It is what may be called recognition by an I (Höffding's Bekanntheitsqualität), or in current phrase, 'relative recognition.'
I have before gathered up this side of recognition, based both upon mental analysis and objective experiment, in a formula which holds that the sense of familiarity with an object is due to the reinstatement of the apperceptive or relational process of the earlier presentation. [3] According to this formula, taken alone, single unrelated homogeneous images such as bell-stroke, pure colour, etc., would not be recognized, single complex images such as human faces would be recognized somewhat in the degree in which the complexity had impressed itself in the first perception, and clear recognition would arise only when the relations attentively discerned were clearly brought out in the reproduced state. A further result would be that images, when reproduced, would largely depend upon and reinforce each other in producing the feeling of familiarity.
I once had an opportunity to test a little child six months
(300) and a half old, with these points in view, and the result was quite instructive. Her nurse, who had been with her continuously for five months, was absent for a period of three weeks, and on her return was instructed first to appear to the child simply in her usual dress, but to remain silent; then to withdraw from sight, but to speak as she had been accustomed to; and finally to appear and sing a nursery rhyme which by special care the little girl had not been allowed to hear during the nurse's absence. The first result was, that the child gazed in a questioning way upon the face, but showed no positive sign of a recognition; yet the absence of positive fear and antipathy shown at first toward the substitute nurse indicated that the visual image was not entirely strange. Second, the tones of the nurse's voice were not at all recognized, as far as passive indications even of familiarity were concerned, -- a result we would expect from the greater purity and simplicity of the auditory images. The third experiment was attended by complete and demonstrative recognition. The visual face and auditory rhyme images must have reinforced one another, giving again the old established complex apperception of the nurse.
This case also shows, as far as any individual case can, that images from different senses vary greatly in intensity and in motor effect, especially in calling out influence upon the attention, in early child-life, that they are not well differentiated from one another, and that even at the very early age of six months special memories are becoming sufficiently permanent to fix general attitudes and habits of action in the child.
Observations are largely lacking as to what elements in the particular experiences of early childhood are most influential in recognition. Close observations of the periods when children recognize pictures of familiar objects would throw
(301) some light upon the point. E. recognized pictures of a clock and a cat early in her twelfth month' and called them 'ti-ti' (tick-tick) and 'ps-ps' (puss-puss). [4]
But it is clear that the other element in the attention-complex is also present. There is a change in the a factor itself with successive appearances of the same p content. This is not itself presented as part of the content, for it only appears in the relative ease, facility, of attention itself. It seems to attach to the subject, to the agent, to the ego who attends, not to the object or content. [5] We have in the recognition of an object not only the identification of it as objectively the same, but also a feeling of 'warmth,' ownership, self-reference. We do not recognize a thing simply for itself; we recognize it for ourselves. It has become in a sense ours by having been present to us before. This is accounted for by the fact that just this motor element it is that carries along with it the habitual attention strains, and these attention strains are in large part the stable, 'identical' element in the sense of self. So self becomes implicated in all recognition just to the extent in which the attention is easily stimulated.
Now, although we have found the objective aspect of recognition in the represented complexity of content just spoken of, -- the apperceptive or associative meaning of the thing, -- so it still remained to find the more uniform element of subjective reference common, in a measure, to different recog-
(302)-nitions. This I find in the varying readiness or ease of attention in the reinstatement of the content by assimilation to its old image and escort; that is, in the motor sensations of adjustment, which indicate in a series the varying degrees of strain or effort of the attention.
The motor associates of each sensory intensity are, therefore, looked at broadly, the A + a + <math>&alpha</math> factors in attention, and each such reaction of the attention, when taken in a particular case, has also in it a certain degree of readiness or ease of the [alpha] factor. This has more proof in later chapters which deal with 'Attention ' (Chap. XV.) and the 'Mechanism of Revival' (Chap. XIV.). When a presentation comes a second time into consciousness, it is adjusted to more easily because its apperception in attention proceeds upon a basis of ready formed association of both these kinds. The relative ease of adjustment is felt as the subjective aspect of recognition, and the consequent assimilation going on in the content itself is the objective aspect.
Cases are now well known and discussed of so-called 'absolute' recognition, in which, i.e., there are no evident presented associations to mediate the recognition. The vital question is raised: How do such recognitions proceed ? The two clear cases known are the recognition of simple tones, and that of simple colours. In both these cases, as is now evident, the recognition is due to the variable factor which is described above -- the relative ease of attention in adjusting itself to such a tone or colour a second time.
Endnotes
- Passy, Revue Philos., 1891, II., p. 614.
- Philos. Studien, VII., Heft 3, pp. 345 ff. Wundt, however, confines the term 'assimilation' to " associations between the elements of like compounds " (Outlines of Psychol., p. 228).
- Handbook of Psychology, Senses and Intellect, 2d ea., pp. 176-178, where the experiment given in the next paragraph is also mentioned.
- See also the case given in Chap. XI., § 3, beginning.
- Ward (Mind, July, 1893, p. 353) has pointed out the analogy between the feeling of 'facility' which we have when we perform a movement a second or third time, and the feeling of familiarity with an object. In my view, they are exactly the same thing, except that in the former case the subjective, i.e. motor, sense is nearly or quite the whole of the feeling. In object recognition the objective content is still objective, but in the sense of motor facility the process of voluntary attention is identified directly with the movement, and finds in it its own appropriate outlet. The reader should also consult Ward's second article (Mind, October, 1894).
§ 4. Phylogenetic Value of Memory and Recognition
It need hardly be said that memory is a function of extreme value in race development. Creatures which have in them the faculty of anticipating experiences, both pleasurable and
(303) painful, by the recall of memory pictures in something of the original setting, and which can, in consequence, anticipate the actual experiences to secure or avoid them by an adapted reaction, are most fit for natural selection. Of course they survive. This has always been seen by those writers who have found in memory a product of the organic accommodation of the creature to its environment. But a further word is necessary to point out the proper value for selection of the added fact of recognition. For a creature might well reproduce its experiences as memory pictures and react upon them well, and still not recognize them, just as pathology shows is the case in certain anaesthetic hysterics. These patients respond in writing to questions which they do not understand, or describe in writing persons whom they do not recognize. The whole group of facts of 'physiological' or organic suggestions described in the earlier pages [1] show the kind of 'organic memory' which enables the organism to act upon an experience as if it recognized it, when the actual recognition does not take place in consciousness. What is absent in these cases is, as we now know, the finer motor, synthetic, adjustments of the attention which by their variations constitute recognition.
The adaptations of most of the organisms below mammalian life, and some mammals, possibly, take place, no doubt, by such 'organic memory.' They have consciousness and also memory in the sense of 'vestiges' of past experience; but they do not recognize these images with that peculiarly 'warm' sense of ownership which we have when we greet the familiar. The attention has not grown to be the medium of a sense of self, nor has its development gone far enough to give differentiated reactions to many contents. They have what may be called first stage associations with
(304) what they remember, i.e. associations of pleasure and pain, and of direct adjusted movement.
The additional fact of recognition, therefore, must have a farther value than that of simple memory. And it has, as may be readily pointed out.
By the recognition of an object a creature gets full possession of all the benefits both of immediate and of remote association, i.e. second stage association, let us say. Recognition follows to reinforce or inhibit the reaction of simple memory, for it is constituted by the set-back wave of motor associates already described as necessary for the assimilation of the new to the old. It means, therefore, that the creature that recognizes takes a certain attitude, a motor state of contraction, expansion, etc., a condition of readiness for the protective or defensive action for which the motor habits of the organism have grown to provide. But these may be different from the reactions dictated by simple memory. Recognition is a sense of meaning as opposed to that of bare appearance, and its reaction is often the violent checking even of the impulses due to mere organic sensibility, or to its revival. Creatures which consciously recognize, therefore, have an evident shield from the ills of the world and a mortgage upon its benefits. The dog which sees the whip only for the first time gets the flogging; but the next time he sees the whip, he recognizes it with the immediate impulse to startled attention, fear, and flight. The motor elements which underlie are, on the theory now developed, what, in his consciousness, is, in part, the sense of recognition. I need not add that the escape of this dog from his cruel master is the survival of the creature that is fit to survive.
Phylogenetically, the difference in value between memory and recognition is one of degree, just as the motor adjustments and the escort of associates of all kinds represented in the
(305) two cases differ only in degree of co-ordination and complexity. Memory of the organic type? without recognition? is present when there is a first-degree association between two sense areas, or between a sense and a movement area. The reaction represents a first-degree accommodation. But in recognition we have the motor organization represented by attention and complex central development in the cortex. Its reactions therefore represent all the accommodations of skill and art, and all the adjustments of will to the demands of the life of conduct.
Endnotes
- Above, Chap. VI., § 2.
