Mental Development in the Child and the Race
Chapter 16: Summary: Final Statement of Habit and Accommodation
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§ 1. Summary of Theory of Development [1]
AFTER the foregoing detailed statements of facts and theories, and the solution of certain particular genetic problems, we may come to a general synthesis. What is the least that we can say about an organism's development? Everybody admits that two things must be said: first, it develops by getting habits formed; and second, it develops by getting new adaptations which involve the breaking up or modification of habits -- these latter being called accommodations.
The law of habit may now be stated generally in some such way as this: Habit is the tendency of an organism to continue more and more readily processes which are vitally beneficial.
This principle we have found an axiom in biology and psychology. In psychology great instances of it are readily cited -- instinct, emotional expression, the performance of
(453) movements pictured in the attention, even attention itself. In order to habit, it has become evident, the organism must have contractility -- ability to make a response m movement to a stimulus -- and then it must have some incentive to make and keep making the right kind of movement. The essential thing about habit, then, is this: the maintenance of advantageous stimulations by the organism's own movements. Now what is the incentive to the right kind of movement ? The answer to this question carried us farther.
Three answers are possible. The only incentive may be the actual stimulus, altogether outside the organism, and the right movement may be only a chance selection from many random movements. This is the ordinary biological theory. The stimulus is supposed to 'come along' very often, and, moreover, to be very varied in its kind, locality, etc.; so that by repeating happy chance movements, habits are formed, and by compounding the habits, these habits become complex and varied. So the creature develops. On this view development is entirely an expression of the one principle of nervous Habit.
The second answer says: the incentive is in part, as before, outside the organism, that is, the external stimulus must remain constant; but the organism, after the first reaction to the stimulus, tends to repeat its lucky reactions again. This is the psychological theory. It finds in this tendency to repeat lucky movements the nervous analogue of pleasure, and makes it with the principle of excess discharge, following upon pleasure, the additional thing. There is thus an internal organic 'incentive.' By this the creature 'goes out,' and secures its own repetitions or avoidances, but only in the lines of lucky chance accommodations. This we have designated -- in the principal form in which it has been held -- the Spencer-Bain theory.
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But this latter theory, superior as it is to the more mechanical or 'repetition' view of
the biologists, has had in its statement a radical defect, the intimations of Darwin --
who nowhere, to my knowledge, fully expresses an opinion -- possibly excepted. It has
held, in Spencer and Bain, that the pleasure or pain is from the first secured by lucky
adaptive movement. This, I have argued above in detail, cannot be the case; for
movements themselves reflect pleasure or pain only as they serve as stimuli, reproduce
stimuli, or are associated with stimuli. On the contrary, the stimulias such are
the agents of good or ill, pleasure or pain; and this pleasure or pain process -- index,
as it is, of the fundamental vital processes -- dictates the very first adaptive
movement toward or away from certain kinds of stimulation. This is the third answer
and the correct one. Otherwise the principle of excess -- as in the form of the '
heightened nervous wave' of Spencer -- only serves to confirm in habits the lucky
adaptations already hit upon.
How shall we further conceive the process whereby, from many movements thus generally adated, some are selected as special adaptations, or particular motor functions? This, it is clear, is the question of Accommodation. It occurs by means of excess reactions. It is opposed to habit in two ways: first, it has reference to new movements, -- a prospective reference, -- while habit has reference always to movements more or less old, a retrospective reference, -- and so it runs ahead of habit; and second, it tends, by the selection of new movements, to come into direct conflict with old habitual movements, and so to disintegrate habits. Let us look, then, at accommodation also more closely, gathering up what has gone before in earlier chapters.
In general formula: Accommodation is the principle by which an organism comes to adapt itself to more complex
(455) conditions of stimulation by performing more complex functions. [2]
Various functions have been shown in what precedes to illustrate this principle; all functions which the individual has learned. Learning to act is just accommodation, nothing more nor less. Speech, tracery, handwriting, piano playing, all motor acquisitions, are what accommodation is, i.e. adaptations to more complex conditions. The common thing about them all is evident from the foregoing statement of the requirements of development: the maintenance of stimulus by selection from excessive motor discharges. This is Imitation. In brief, any reaction whatever, no matter how produced, -- by accident, by suggestion, by obedience, by volition, by effort, under stress of pain or excitement of pleasure, -- any reaction by which a useful stimulus is hailed back and enjoyed, or a damaging one fled from and escaped, -- any such is a case of accommodation, and falls under the principle of ' circular reactions' or ' Imitation' now expounded.
But continued accommodation is possible only because the other principle, habit, all the time conserves the past and gives points d'appui in solidified structure for new accommodations. Inasmuch, further, as the copy becomes, by transference from the world to the mind, capable of internal revival, in memory, accommodation takes on a new character -- a conscious, subjective character -- in Volition. Volition arises as a phenomenon of 'persistent imitative suggestion,' as we have argued. That is, volition arises when a copy remembered vibrates with other copies remembered or presented, and when all the connections, in thought and action, of all of them, are together set in motion incipiently. The 'set' of motives together with a certain excess function is what
(456) we call attention; and the final co-ordination of all the motor elements involved is volition. The physical basis of memory, association, thought, is, therefore, that of will also, -- the cerebrum, -- and pathological cases show clearly that aboulia is fundamentally a defect of synthesis in perception and memory, arising from one or more breaks in the copy system whose rise has been sketched in what precedes.
Endnotes
- This section is not intended as a résumé of the entire book, but only of those points
which are needed for the remaining sections of this chapter.
In the foreign editions a section is inserted here on 'Intelligent Direction and Social Progress,' topics treated in English in the work Development and Evolution.
- Compare with these statements of Habit and Accommodation, those given above, Chap. VII., § 7.
§ 2. Interaction of Habit and Accommodation
We have seen -- to proceed farther on our way -- that there is one type of reaction, and only one, in which these two principles have a common application: reactions whose issue tends to reinstate, in whole or part, the very stimulation that started the reaction. Accommodation is there, in such a reaction, since the advantageous stimulation stands a better chance of repetition if the organism tends thus to get it; but since this repeated stimulus again stimulates to action, and action again follows -- there also is habit. So accommodation, by the very reaction which accommodates, hands over its gains immediately to the rule of habit. And this is the universal rule.
How true, as a fact, this form of adaptation is ! A fact often noticed, always admired, never explained -- that organisms move toward the source of light and heat and colour! How can an organism get such a splendid property -- that of being so modified by what is good for it, that it itself responds in a way to get it again, and then, by thus getting it again, makes its future enjoyments of it sure and easy? This the theories given attempt to explain: by the law of 'Excess' with functional selection the stimulus is maintained, and by the law of 'Sensori-motor association' the process is fixed in easy habit.
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The interaction of these two principles, Accommodation and Habit, -- Excess and
Association, -- gives rise to a twofold factor ;n every organic activity of whatever kind.
In organisms of any development -- where a nervous system, say, is present, -- the
environment being a changing one, every structure, with its function, represents a habit
which is being constantly modified by the law of accommodation. But these modifications
themselves, as we have seen, provide again for their own habituation; so there is a
constant erosion, and a constant accretion, to the net attainments of the organism. And
each function can be understood only in the light of both the influences which have
contributed to it. Impulse, for example, is twofold; instinct is twofold; attention is
twofold; emotion is twofold: each illustrates habit, but each has grown by changes due to
accommodation. Is not this a reconciliation in principle of the opposed theories of
these functions, one saying that these great organic functions came only by composition,
and the other that they came only by selection, intelligent or biological.
§ 3. Organic Centralization and Specialization
We have now seen how great habits are formed. ' Natural' and ' organic ' selection fix them, and at the same time render them more prominent, i.e. as instincts, by erasing the evidences of their origin, and abbreviating the phylogenetic process in the growth of the individual. I use the phrase 'organic centralization' to denote this great outcome of development, -- the differentiation of functions in lines of adaptation which run apart, so far as their particular offices and structural products are concerned, but which are yet centralized. For they are centralized when considered together, as constituting, in unity and plan, the common life of the organism. When con-
(458)-sidered each for itself also, as a well-knit whole of many coordinated units, the same centralization is shown about a smaller centre; such as the movements involved in a particular instinct, or the series of movements of the facial muscles in an 'expression.' There would possibly be no need for further exposition of these points, since they are corollaries from the general theory already sketched, were it not that there are certain further applications.
There are two such applications which are new, I think, and which serve to gather into one point of view conflicting opinions regarding two of the most refractory facts in current psychology. I refer to the question of the existence of special nerves for pleasure and pain, or either; and to the attention.
The question arises: If accommodation is secured by a special form of reaction called 'excess,' what relation does this reaction itself sustain to the principle of habit? Does the excess function itself also become centralized? Does it tend to become a separate co-ordinated function, as other motor discharges do ?
It is to be expected that, in so far as the environment in which an organism lives is constant, any accommodation reaction would, taken for itself, tend to become a habit. So far as the presumption goes, we should expect to find two great kinds of reaction implicated with pleasure and pain. The pain reaction would tend to withdraw the organism from the stimulus which gives pain; and the pleasure reaction would tend to bring the organism into closer relation with the stimulus which gives pleasure. These two kinds of reaction would be possible for any muscular group whatever. All that would then be required would be some sense organ which would distinguish between the conditions of stimulation which regularly give pleasure,
(459) -- reacting to them with the forward moving reaction,C and those which regularly give painCreacting to them with the withdrawing movement. This is probably the case. It is directly confirmed by the views of Meynert, Richet, and Bain, as far as the character of the movements is concerned; and by the results of Dessoir and Goldscheider, as to the differentiation of the sense of pain. It then becomes a matter of scientific discovery whether actual pain nerves exist or not, in connection with any particular function. That depends upon what the race conditions of stimulation have actually been. If the pain stimulus has been regular and peculiar enough, possibly it has got itself a special apparatus; research must decide. But if not, then not. This latter, the negative, is probably the case with pleasure. The stimulus to pleasant function is so general and normal, that pleasure has not become well 'specialized' either in the organism, or, as is very plain, in consciousness. Yet in the special cases in which functions have been perpetual, important, and uniform, there we do find pleasure as acute and definitely localized as pain is, e.g. in the sexual function, as physiologists have noted; it is not at all improbable that this function has a pleasure nerve apparatus. So it is possible and probable that pain is both a sensation, and a quale or 'tone' of other sensations, emotions, etc.; a sensation, -- if it has developed its own apparatus of reacting to definite, well-localized pain-giving stimulations constantly present; a quale, because the organism is never completely balanced in its environment, the stimulations representing misadjustment and pain are not all constant, and there are demands for the more general function, as in the intellectual life. So the accommodation function of pain, in connection with all possible stimulations, must go on just the same whether there be a sensation pain or not; especially in the sphere of thought,
(460) sentiment, and the attentive life, since this is the latest, most complex, and least uniform kind of accommodation.
On the physical side, too, the matter seems clear. The excess process at the basis of pleasure and pain finds channels of outflow which serve over and over again for the reaction required to repeat the pleasure, or stop the pain. The same connection thus serving for many instances, becomes well-worn and habitual; and so a connection is formed -- a circuit -- for pleasure or pain, like the ordinary sensori-motor circuits. If light, for example, considered as constant stimulation, serves to develop, for its different intensities, an organ -- the eye -- and certain nerves, which react only to it, as luminous; why can it not also develop, in connection with certain of its intensities, a further organ and nerve which react only to it as painful ? It is, indeed, inevitable that, under favourable conditions, such a pain-apparatus should be developed and fixed by natural selection.
This recognizes the distinction between 'pleasure and pain' on one side, and 'agreeableness and disagreeableness,' on the other, as developed in recent work. Pain as sensation-content is distinct from pain as quale of other contents. On my view, this is a distinction due to development. Pain, as sensation, is pain become habitual enough, under constancy of stimulation, to have its own apparatus, i.e. it is pain as peripheral function. Pain, on the other hand, as quale of mental content generally, is pain of irregular stimulation, or pain of accommodation, i.e. pain as central function. I do not agree, therefore, with Münsterberg, in finding in the movements of flexion and extension, which my theory requires in common with his, the genetic sources of 'agreeable'or'disagreeable' tone. The whole theory of development, as I have shown above, if it is to move at all, requires that this accommodation pain or pleasure be due, in the first instance, to stimulus, and
(461) that the flexion and extension movements be the organic mode of accommodation to the pleasure or pain-giving stimulus.
Nevertheless, so great is organic complexity, when we come to take the principle of association into account, that, after all, in developed organisms, Münsterberg may be right in making the flexion and extension movements themselves the direct basis of the agreeable and disagreeable quale. For we have seen in the case of emotion that movements at first purely purposive, serving utility or accommodation to stimulus, themselves get, by association, to represent the degree of success or failure in accommodation, and so come themselves to give body to the emotion. In like manner, these flexion and extension movements may have passed, from being expressive or utility movements, to be the forerunners of the condition which they at first served only to express. And it may well be that they are thus an intermediate link between quale pleasure-pain, and sensation pleasure-pain. This is supported by the evidence -- so far as it goes -- which locates the nerve apparatus of sensation pleasure-pain in the muscles. On this view, it is for reporting flexion and extension movements that this nervous apparatus has developed; these flexion and extension movements standing in place of the pleasure- and pain-giving stimuli to which the organism has become accommodated.
Possibly the most important question which remains over, and upon which the distinction now made between original and derived pain reactions seems to throw some light, is that which concerns the relations of so-called ' systemic' to 'single-organ' pains. Theories divide on the question whether pains relate to the welfare of the system as a whole or to the welfare -- nourishment, vitality, etc. -- of particular organs. And on account of the conflicting evidence some throw over the 'welfare' theory of pleasure and pain altogether. The
(462)principles which we have seen to be operative in development' show us, however, that we are able to reconcile the contradiction, at least in some degree. If sensational pain be a specialized function with its own motor reaction, then in it we have the single-organ position confirmed, and are able to account for the conflicts which sometimes arise -- as so many waters, from Mill to the present, have pointed out -- between the welfare of the organism as a whole and that of the particular organ or part. On the other hand, the existence of the non-sensational or quale pain still remains as an index of central and deep-seated vital conditions, and makes its own claim to being the original derivation-form of the pain consciousness. Genetically, we cannot begin life history with single-organ pains; for apart from the impossible assumption, then, of differentiated organs, such separate and special pain reactions would not take the place of the general form of hedonic reaction which we have found in organic development. On the other hand, the existence of special sensation pains in connection with functions of particular organs, and the probable existence of pain nerves, testify to the difference, in highly developed organisms, of the two sorts of pain. Moreover, the fact that pleasure is not so evidently dualistic, -- not clearly sensational at all, -- this is an additional evidence that the distinction between systemic and single-organ function is, with respect to its hedonic aspect, as it is also, of course, in respect to its very existence at all, a matter of evolution.
And another application may be made of the principle of specialization. One of the objections most current to the view that the original pain reaction took the form of diminished vitality, suppressions of movement, contractions, and flexions, is that the facts show that often pain reactions are very violent. The struggles of an animal to escape painful
(463) conditions, to rid itself of its annoyance, to defeat its enemy by aggressive and offensive action, all this Is notorious. How, it is asked, can this be if the function of pain, in its relation to movement, is essentially inhibitory? The facts again are indisputable on both sides. We have seen some of the facts in the foregoing pages. In considering special emotional reactions and attitudes, we saw the variety and intensity of those accompanying fear, anger, etc., emotions of a painful character. [1] But, on the other hand, we have also seen that the child and the little animal learn movements by withdrawing and suppressing those actions which issue in pain. How can this contradiction be reconciled ? There are two influences at work, I think, -- both already spoken of, -- to which the seeming contradiction is due.
First, there is the principle of antagonism which Darwin used under the name 'antithesis' and which we have seen in an earlier chapter to show itself in the special form of muscular antagonism with the corresponding series of antithetic motor attitudes. Much of the violent reaction under pain is the positive use of the muscular combinations antagonistic to those through which the actual pain stimulation would discharge. When in pain from a movement, or from a mere condition without movement, we do not violently stimulate the same movement which brought the pain, nor the movements appropriate to continue the unpleasant condition. These are suppressed by the law of inhibition end withdrawal. But we do throw into violent activity certain antagonistic or associated muscular combinations whose action brings relief. The real 'excess' does not attach therefore to the pain reaction as such, but to the benefit-bringing actions which are the proved resources of the organism when in conditions of pain.
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Second, there is no reason that the pain reactions them selves -- the reactions of
withdrawal, retraction, flexion -- should not be at times intense. We have seen that by
the principle of centralization, reactions of the imitative type, whether they be painful
or pleasurable, become habits. This tendency to habit, we now also see, has in the case of
pain taken on a positive form in pain as sensation, with probably a nerve apparatus of its
own. When this has once happened the response to pain condition would, by the law of
dynamogenesis, be intense when the stimulation is itself intense. This would mean that in
the growth of the organism it has been advantageous to respond vigorously to stimulations
which were damaging and so to get rid of them. That does not disprove the contention that
the normal response to pain is a lessened one. It is as if a man put more money into a
losing venture as the most effective way to turn it into a gaining venture; and it simply
means that in business, as in development, it is only at a higher stage that certain
complex conditions realize themselves at all.
Putting these explanations together there does not remain, I think, much evidence, apart from those convulsive semipathological chaotic writhings and twistings into which violent physical pain may throw the organism, that pain reactions as such are ever expansive and aggressive.[2] They may be intense,
(465) they may be associated with all sorts of utility reactions, and they may represent nothing but sheer mechanical revolt, as Darwin long ago showed.
Now the same effect of 'centralization' is seen in the attention, as may be gathered from the positions already taken. Attention has been defined as genetically the reverberation of the 'excess' process as it has become fixed in habit. By the law of 'sensori-motor association,' this backward wave gets connected with all the sensory processes. Now just in as far as this wave is the same for different sensations, just in so far it tends to be 'centralized,' in a constant function -- integrated into a habit -- involving a regular set of motor phenomena, such as the wrinkling of the brows, setting of the glottis, etc., always found in acts of attention. The organism thus acquires a habit of accommodation, on a higher level. This is attention. When memory and imagination appear, this new form of response enables the organism to throw itself into attitudes favourable to the best reception and assimilation of material of all kinds.
Yet as with pain, so here. This attention-habit, this centralized function, is not all that the attention is. The original excess function must be kept in view. No preliminary setting of attention is an adequate accommodation to an intellectual stimulus, an idea still to be received; it is adequate only to hold stimuli by which it has been before excited. Each new accommodation to idea carries a motor excess discharge of its own, and this also enters into the sense of attention, making each act of attention, and each sense-type of attention, different, as was said above.
The terms of interaction of the two principles, finally,
(466) require that the reaction maintain its stimulus, and that this stimulus again
repeat the reaction. The one type of reaction,
therefore, which an organism must have, is a 'circular' or stimulus-repeating one. We have
found it best to name this type of reaction, for purposes of psycho-physical definition,
IMITATION and to call it, as a typical neurological function, 'circular reaction.' This is
the UNIT, therefore, the essential fact, of all motor-development; and this shows the
simplicity of the whole theory.
The place of imitation has now been made out in a tentative way throughout the development of the active life. It seems to be everywhere. But it is, of course, a matter of natural history that this type of action is of such extraordinary and unlooked-for importance. If we grant a phylogenetic development of mind, reaction of the imitative type, as defined above, may be considered the mode and the only mode of the progressive adaptation of the organism to its environment. The further philosophical questions as to the nature of mind, its worth and its dignity, remain under adjudication. We have learned too much in modern philosophy to argue from the natural history of a thing to its ultimate constitution and meaning -- and we commend this consideration to the biologists. As far as there is a more general lesson to be learned from the considerations advanced, it is that we should avoid just this danger, i.e. of interpreting one kind of existence for itself, in an isolated way, without due regard to the other kinds of existence with which its manifestations are mixed up.
The antithesis, for example, between the self and the world is not a finished antithesis psychologically considered. The self is realized by taking in 'copies' from the world, and the world is enabled to set higher copies only through the constant
(467) reactions of the individual self upon it. Morally I am as much a part of society as physically I am a part of the world's fauna; and as my body gets its best explanation from the point of view of its place in a zoological scale, so morally I occupy a place in the social order; and an important factor in the understanding of me is the understanding of it.
The great question, which is writ above all natural history records, is, -- when put in the phraseology of imitation, -- What is the final World-copy, and how did it get itself set?
