The Definition of the Psychical
THERE is greater uniformity in the use of the term objectivity than in that of the corresponding term subjectivity. We know what we mean when we assert that we have, an object before us, for the simple reason, if for no other, that we can act with reference to it. Objectivity is the characteristic of a cognitive process which has reached its goal. The success of the cognitive act furnishes the criterion of objectivity, and that without even defining what the nature of the category is. In contrast with the unequivocal character of objectivity stand the various significations attached to subjectivity. Historically it has completely boxed the compass. It meant some centuries ago what objectivity now connotes. The change is one that is parallel with the appearance of the modern individual, with the ascription of logical values to his peculiar consciousness which had belonged to the mundus intelliligibilis.
Today subjectivity may connote that which is not objective in the sense given above, that in whose regard one cannot or may not or should not act. Again, it may rather imply emotional coloring. It may be used with reference to psychical consciousness, and swallow up into itself all consciousness from the standpoint of a subjective idealism. To the dualist of one school it includes all that is conscious, and is contrasted with extended substance whose existence is largely an inference. Again, there is a subjectivity that is ascribed to the teleology of the acts of a person; thus the state of immediate purposeful consciousness would be subjective, while the abstract things of reflective scientific thought would be objects. Here subjectivity connotes immediacy, while objectivity means abstraction. Finally subjectivity may be found among the abstractions, belonging to the peculiar contents of a scientific psychology.
While many roads to objectivity may be taken by different types of thought the goal reached is identical. For practical purposes the object is recognizable, and the philosophical standpoint cannot affect its nature. But there is no such criterion of subjectivity, and its nature varies with the standpoint and system. There is, however, one constant characteristic which is a part of most definitions given it: the subjective is that which is identified with the consciousness of the individual qua individual. But the recognition of this does not locate subjectivity as the value of the object for action fixes objectivity. The process of reflection has ceased when action is reached, and no theory of reflection can change the object; but the peculiarities of individual consciousness lie well within the process of knowledge. Action takes place in a common world into which inference and interpretation have transmuted all that belonged solely to the individual subjectively considered. As subjectivity refers to the consciousness of the individual, and as the phase of consciousness which is peculiar to individual
(78) as such is generally placed within the process of reflection, the definition of subjectivity will depend upon the function which a theory of logic ascribes to the individual consciousness in the formation of the judgment. I can see no escape from this for our modern psychology, recognizing as it does that the subject-matter of its science is abstracted from concrete experience. Only an empiricism that assumes to start from sensations as concrete elements of reality can escape the necessity of accounting for the abstraction by which it obtains its material and of relating that process to the whole cognitive act of which reflection is a part. And yet modern psychology that seeks to free its skirts from metaphysics, assumes that it may take its object as it finds it, and that it is given in the same sense and same general form as the object of the other sciences. While the relation of psychology to the other philosophical disciplines is undetermined, or, what is the same thing, while the peculiar abstraction which gives us the psychical content is not organically related to the other abstractions within the process of reflection, we shall have no certain criterion for recognizing the subject-matter of psychology. By way of illustration of this situation it is worth while to consider certain definitions of the "psychical" which are made the basis of our present psychological analysis.
Wundt [1] states that psychology "investigates the whole content of experience in its relation to the subject and in its attributes directly derived from the subject." "Psychology has as its subject of treatment the total content of experience in its immediate character." [2] "Psychology investigates the contents of experience in their complete and actual form, both the ideas that are referred to objects, and all the subjective processes that cluster around them. Its knowledge is, therefore, immediate and perceptual: perceptual in the broad sense of the term in which not only sense perceptions, but all concrete reality is distinguished from all that is abstract and conceptual in thought." [3] It would, however, be a mistake to assume that this statement implies a psychical content which is not the result of an abstraction. For the author says distinctly that the attitudes of the physical and psychical sciences take "two points of view of the same unitary experience," and it is impossible to look at anything from one point of view rather than another without abstracting from that other. Furthermore, to quote from the Logik:[4] "The reality of the object consists in this, that it can be thought of as abstracted from the psychical experiences of him who presents it . .. ." It is, of course, impossible for the physical sciences to abstract part of the content of consciousness without leaving an abstraction behind. If we examine Wundt's theory of the psychical more narrowly we find that he assumes that naive unreflective consciousness may be considered as both subjective and objective. Subjectivity is represented by the phases of emotion and volition, and objectivity by the presentation (Vorstellung). This subjectivity is as yet, as I understand the author here, not synonymous with the psychical. Reflection starts with the attempt to deal
(79) with the contradictions which appear in our immediate presentations. These contradictions have reference, not to the existence of the object which is given with the same immediacy as the subject, but to the "how" of its appearance. The effect of this attempt to explain the contradictions in the "how" of immediate existence is to withdraw into the subject the object of presentation (Vorstellungsobject), which becomes; then subjective as well as feelings and volition. In the place of the object of presentation appears the mediate or conceptual object and the sensuous presentation which has become subjective is now only a symbol of this concept. " Subjective and mediate knowledge are in this wise correlative ideas, in that, exactly in proportion as certain elements of perception are withdrawn into the subject, the remaining elements are regarded as parts of a mediate knowledge, i. e., a knowledge brought about by a previous logical correction."[5] In this fashion, also, a complete gulf has been placed between these two parts of consciousness, which it has not been possible to bridge. Another expression for the same situation is found in the statement that the object of the mediate sciences -- the physical sciences -- is a concept, whose content is not given but constructed, and whose existence, therefore, is subject to doubt. The object as content of the immediate science -- of that of inner experience, of psychology -- is, on the contrary, given and not constructed. Its existence is never subject to doubt, and the only treatment to which it is subject is that of analysis. Its objects are always particular in their content and universal concepts in psychology have no place except to enable us to review and hold together a mass of instances.[6] Still another statement of the same relation between the two types of experience is found in the analysis of the category of substance. This is defined as " that which everywhere denotes an object, to which the objects of sense-perception refer symbolically, but which can itself be only conceptually determined.''[7] Now this category is a necessary part of the apparatus of the physical sciences on account of their mediacy, while it is not only unnecessary but impossible in psychology because, so far as the content of experience is concerned, there is no reference to something beyond. In psychology substantiality is replaced by actuality, and substance is replaced by the subject that is known only as an activity.[8] The final result of this standpoint is something as follows: In naive consciousness a predicate of subjectivity is given to the contents of emotion and volition, but the division between physical and psychical is not made, since every phase of consciousness can under varying conditions be both subjective and objective. In fact, in immediate consciousness every phase has these two sides. When we are forced to a rational or mediate explanation of our world the elements of presentation or idea which have been predominantly objective are withdrawn into the subject -- the sphere of the emotions and the will which now must become entirely subjective. They are so withdrawal simply because they fail any longer to explain our experience, and this explanation can take place only by the assumption of mediate objects that we can pre-
(80)-sent in conceptual form. These contents of presentation, however, continue to function as symbols, since our thought is both intuitive and discursive at the same time. They have, however, no other function than that of providing the necessary sensuous element which is symbolic of the mediate object -- the concept. For this purpose the memory image is especially adapted, because in it the elements which our apperception selects stand out more distinctly, and the other elements retreat more completely behind them than in the presentations of immediate perceptions.[9] They still, however, serve only the purpose of symbolizing the object of mediate knowledge. There seem to be, then, two types of psychical contents, that which has always been predominantly subjective -- the emotional and volitional phase of consciousness -- and that which is withdrawn into this subjective field because of the necessity of mediate knowledge which is after all forced to use immediate presentations.
One cannot but be struck by the functional difference between these two contents of the psychical world. Emotion and volition retain their primitive value and validity. They have lost nothing by the passage from the immediate perception to knowledge. On the other hand, the presentations (Vorstellungen) are but the shattered ranks of a defeated corps that has collapsed in its attempt to explain the objective world. Giving place to the concepts they become but tags and signs of their successors. The justification for treating as identical in nature two series that have appeared as the results of such different processes is to be found presumably in the fact that our mediate knowledge involves, not only abstraction from the preventative phases of consciousness, but also from the feelings and the will. There is, however, this great difference, that when the process of reflection is completed and by means of conceptual knowledge we have attained to an explanation of our world, the emotions and the will in evaluation and apperception enter into their original heritage. The world continues my world and valuable for my ends find my conduct just as it was before the reconstruction became necessary. But the presentation is forever deprived of any but symbolic function. The content of the world can never again be immediate -- colored, sounding, feeling. Before this garden of sensuous content stands the angel with the flaming sword of logical abstraction. We have eaten of the tree of knowledge, mediate and immediate, and though the world remains for feeling and action, it is no longer good for food nor a delight to the eyes. The psychical has two very different functions. In the realm of the feelings and the will it offers a field in which our values and ends may be analyzed and reconstructed so that they may appear again with added reality and content. The other function is that of offering a refuge for former real objects which are now but ghostly symbols of the reality which they once constituted.
Külpe defines subjectivity as the "dependency of facts of experience upon experiencing individuals" and recognizes that the value of the definition depends upon the further definition of the individual. This is identified as the corporeal individual -- the individual known to physical, especially physiological, science. The ground for
(81)this identification is found partly in the fact that there is nothing about this individual, and partly in the recognized dependence of various phenomena which are generally admitted to be psychical upon physiological conditions. Extend this dependence to all so-called psychical experience and assume that every such state has a corresponding physical condition and we have at least great definiteness in the definition. Such a treatment has the advantage of being unquestionably scientific in the accepted sense. It finds certain data with which it deals as simply given. It defines the field within which these data may be found, by perfectly comprehensible criteria, and limits its inquiry to this field. The especial boast of this scientific psychology is that it may be experimental, for confining its data to correspondents of physiological processes the experimental determination of these conditions must have definite bearing upon the parallel psychical events.
Of course, this type of psychologist is little interested in the function which the psychical phase of consciousness has in the whole process of knowledge. But it is permissible to inquire if it does fulfil any function and what this is. One function indicated almost at its birth is that of determining the error of observation. This error of observation implies that the observing and experimenting scientist is an instrument played upon by the physical universe of which he is a part. His observation is the effect which the physical outer event has upon this mechanism. The result of the observation is a further external physical event. Between the two outer events fits the inner process. The peculiarity of this inner process lies in the facts that besides being a part of this larger physical complex it presents certain parallels to the outer so-called stimuli or physical forces acting upon the organism. That is, light and sound and pressure and taste and odor not only arouse certain effects in the mechanism of the animal form, but these effects within the animal form become in turn forces which are in some degree proportionate to these outer forces, and which operate in the nervous system in some sense as these forces operate in the environment of the form. It is the relation of microcosm to the macrocosm in wholly physical terms. This is the first parallelism. To return to the experiment, when the scientist observes a star we note two occurrences. There is the neural occurrence in which the light of the star is represented by retinal and central nervous processes that associate themselves with others which stand for factual, temperature, spatial, and an indefinite number of other events on the outside. Besides this representation of the star light in its connection with other forms of outer energy there is the outer registration by the scientist of the light, its time, its color, its surroundings, etc. Here is a second parallelism dependent upon the first, but both are referred to the first series. This second parallel series serves as a complex of stimuli for the human organism in the place of the original complex of forces. Now the error of observation lies in the inaccuracies of this second complex which should take the place under various circumstances of the original complex. And these inaccuracies are the result of the intermediacy of the first parallel complex between the original and its external representative.
(82)That is, physically we construct a complex of recorded data and description which have the effect of an original physical complex -- have that result upon the physiological mechanism. This construct is what we call scientific material and even science. From this scientific standpoint the animal organism is simply a fearfully and wonderfully complicated piece of apparatus whose numerous mean variations must be determined. When apperception is denominated the inhibitory action of certain frontal tracts in the brain, and feeling is called the reaction of these centers upon the sensational processes, and emotions the fusion of the feelings and the sensations, and the will apperception, and reasoning nothing but a more or less complicated series of reproductions associatively originated, it is evident that we have reduced this mechanism to the level of the apparatus and theoretically can determine not only the accuracy of the observation but also of the scientific reasoning.
This materialistic psycho-physical parallelism is dominated by the methods of the physical sciences not only in its own method but also in its selection of material. Of course this statement has left out the subject-matter of the science -- the psychical series. But the interesting fact is that it can be left out. If we recognize only those psychical states which have physical counterparts we will be more scientific the less we say about anything but the counterparts. Unfortunately we can lay our hands only on the psychical states throughout a large part of the domain of psychology and we are forced to make these do for the corporeal elements. Thus the answer to the question we put above, is that the function fulfilled by the psychical in this type of psychology is that of giving the mean variation of the individual who is (perhaps unfortunately) a necessary part of the scientific machinery. We start from certain data and arrive at certain more or less accurate reproductions of the data from which we start, i.e., the physical universe. If our reproduction of it were quite accurate and adequate we might quite overlook the apparatus by which it was made and there would be no scientific psychology. But unfortunately for science and fortunately for psychology, or perhaps the psychologists, there is the error of observation. The psychical will have no greater functional value in the universe of knowledge than the imperfect photo-chemical processes of the eye have in a given universe of energy. However, they have not even the interest which the eye presents to the scientific observer, for to science it will always be better represented by the corporeal individual and his states. The psychical is nothing but the imperfect or individual statement of the universe and all the import which this imperfection has is better stated in the theoretically given corporeal counterpart. Actually there are two reasons for considering it. In the first place, the corporeal counterpart is only theoretically there for the most part and we must make the best of a bad bargain, using the psychical which is there for the corporeal which isn't, and, in the second place, the generosity of scientific curiosity may be counted upon to interest itself in anything that it meets. And these are precisely the grounds which Münsterberg gives for the existence of psychology as a science.
(83)
Münsterberg recognizes an original condition of actuality in which subject and
object are but no reflection and no science. Here reign only the categories of
validity and value; that of existence is not found, being operative only in the
field of reflection. [11] The problem of science is practical. It is the
determination of that which is to be expected. [12]
The method of science is the separation of the object from the subject. In
this way we abstract the processes of the universe from the teleological
construction of actuality, and are able to determine what is likely to happen
irrespective of the end and purposes of the subject. This process is now one
that is not only distinct from the original purposeful act, but one whose
subject is equally abstract and colorless. Instead of being a controlling,
determining agent who fashions a universe of means, it is now but an observer
carefully ignorant of any end which he may have in the future, necessarily so,
lest his wishes may cloud his observation and vitiate his science. This ego
-- das Vorfindende Ich -- is then carefully to be distinguished from the
actual ego --
das actuelle Ich. It is also to be distinguished from the subject or
subjects given in social consciousness -- der vorgefundene Subject.
[13] The aim of science is to find necessary relations among these abstract
objects, or better, necessarily determined systems. We find two of these, that
of the physical sciences and that of the social sciences. The first are causally
and the second teleologically organized. Now in neither of these does the
psychical appear. It does not form a part of the mathematically determined order
of nature nor is that which the social sciences treats psychical. These sciences
treat the whole individual and his methods of conduct. The psychical is simply
what is and must be abstracted by the cognitive processes of the vorfindendes
Ich
in its presentation of the known world of science. It is the error of
observation again. Every theoretically perfect statement of that which is to be
expected will be stated in physical terms. "In order practically to determine
the connection of things [Zusammenhang]
we have abstracted the object from the subject [das aktuelle Ich] and
have divided the object into its related part, the physical, and the unrelated
part, the psychical [belonging to das vorfindende Ich], and in this way
have logically constituted the physical and psychical as such; the psychical as
unrelated (nichtzusammenhängende) does not serve directly the end out of
the logical pursuit of which its existence sprang. After it has once been
conceptually obtained and recognized in its scientific reality, it will become
of course also an object of scientific theory, and must therefore in some way be
described, ordered, simplified, and explained. It arose logically out of the
search for relation, as soon as it is determined it must be scientifically
treated, without reference to the question whether the results serve the
purpose, whose accomplishment was the motive for its original appearance. The
theoretical interest in the unrelated [the psychical] harmonizes entirely with
the fact that it was the treatment of the related [the physical] which brought
the unrelated [the psychical] to light. That every result of this theoretical
work actually serves the practical purpose of making the physical result more
comprehensible
(84) from the psychical side, is for theoretical psychology secondary." [14] As was said before, the interest in psychology is an unmotived scientific curiosity plus the secondary desire to get the psychical links which will replace the physical ones which are missing.
If we turn to another group of thinkers, and select Bradley as the first exponent, we meet the following definition of a "psychical fact." "A psychical fact is anything which is immediately experienced and has duration, quality, intensity; or is any one of these aspects, as a mere distinguishable aspect -- so far, that is, as one aspect is taken as belching to something that possesses the other aspects also; or, again, is any relation existing between any facts as previously defined." [15] This definition needs further elucidation. In the first place, Bradley regards the object of psychology as the "facts immediately experienced in a single organism or soul, and those facts regarded merely as events which happen." [16] He regards the soul as a mere "totality of immediate experience." The point that needs emphasis is that, for the author in question, psychology deals merely with events that happen. He is as eager as the others to get metaphysics out of psychology, though perhaps more for the sake of the metaphysics than for the sake of psychology. "If this can be done in other sciences, it surely can be done in psychology too. In the other sciences the so-called principles that explain the facts are working hypotheses, which are true because they work, but which need not be considered as a categorical account of the nature of things. The physicist, for example, is not obliged to believe that atoms and ether do really exist in a shape which exactly corresponds to his ideas. If these ideas give rational unity to the knowledge which exists, and lead to fresh discoveries, the most exacting demand upon the most exact sciences is fully satisfied. The ideas are verified and the ideas are true, for they hold good of the facts to which they are applied. And to suppose that the metaphysician should come in, and offer to interfere with the proceedings of the physicist, or to criticize his conclusions, is in my judgment to take a wrong view of metaphysics. It is the same with psychology. There is no reason why this science should not use doctrines which, if you take them as actual statements of fact, are quite preposterous. For the psychologist, as such, is not interested in knowing if his principles are true when taken categorically. If they are useful ways of explaining phenomena, if they bring unity into the subject and enable us to deal with the fresh facts which arise, that is really all that, as psychologists, we can be concerned with. Our principles are nothing but working hypotheses: we do not know and we do not care if they turn out to be fictions, when studied critically." [17] As an illustration of this method in psychology take the author's "law of individuation," whose working he defines as follows:
Each element tends (that is, moves unless prevented) by means of fusion and redintegration to give itself a context through identity of content..... The reader may dismiss this statement as mere "transcendentalism;" but until my error is shown me I shall believe that it
(85) is strict empirical psychology, a mere statement the way in which events do happen. We may call it, if we please, the law of individuation, and should find that thought and will are each one case of it, made distinct lay the different fields in which particularization is worked out. But we must remember that our law perhaps to solve extent uses a scientific fiction. It is convenient to speak of the movement of each element, but we must not assert (or deny) that in reality the element can do or be anything -- unless, indeed, we are prepared to make psychology a battlefield for metaphysicians." [18]
There are two "scientific fictions" here -- the elements themselves and their operation by means of "identities of contents." If we return now to our definition we find there these elements and the relations by means of which we can think these elements in the bare happenings. First, in regard to their abstractness, which renders them fictions, they are immediate -- a term which "negatives and excludes phenomena so far as their content is used beyond their existence." [19] That is, as mere immediate experience they are events which cannot in this character ever become knowledge or thought. They may provide the material for thought, the presentations, but as psychical they can never become thought. The characteristics which render them fit material are duration, quality, intensity. Without discussing these categories, it is evident that they are chosen as giving the basis for the relational thought-process. Each psychical fact or element is a content that is undeveloped thought, but as psychical it must remain such, or else its content would inevitably get beyond its existence. Besides providing the material of thought, psychology provides also the machinery. That is, this material must arrange itself and change itself by redintegration and fusion in such a fashion that in its structure it needs only the interpretation of "individuation" to become thought. But these laws or relations can only be introduced into this psychical structure by a scientific fiction. For laws are not facts and relations are not events. Our scientific procedure, however, allows their introduction as a mere statement that the psychical material is organized in such and such a way, or, as the author states it, "the above relations are not facts, save and except so far as they exist between facts as previously defined." [20] The psychical fact is a statement of experience so far as it may be, regarded as a series of events, which have no reference beyond themselves as mere events, and their arrangement may be recognized simply as a resultant fact while it is merely psychical; and we may even talk of the laws of individuation as operating within these limits, if we only remember that we are using scientific fiction. This is my humble interpretation of Bradley's position. The statement may be given in Bradley it's own terms. "To thought realized as thought, its psychical existence is something necessary, but still per accidens .... And as thought cannot make phenomenal, it contents itself without them, and is therefore symbolic and not existential. And, aiming at totality which events never give, it converts their degradation to its ideal uses, while it builds its own world out of them, and lives both in them and apart." [21]
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There is but one point in this presentation that is of importance to this discussion; and that is the logical position of the psychical. Wundt, as indicated above, finds in the psychical that which has been withdrawn from the object, when this is subjected to epistemological criticism. The psychical, however, maintains the immediate character of unreflective experience, its reality, or rather its actuality. It is not an event; it is a piece of immediate experience which has been, it is true, condemned, but which has still the quality of actuality. Just as in immediate unreflective experience we distinguish between our volition and much of our emotion, on the one side, and the object, on the other (though from Wundt's standpoint this is a distinction of aspect and not of things), so, after reflection has abstracted the idea or presentation (Vorstellung) from the object and thought has substituted the conceptual object for the object of sensuous experience, we distinguish this subjective phase of consciousness from the object. It is true that this body of remains has another content or function in the formation and mediation of the concept. It provides the image which is, after all, in the most abstract thinking a necessity in the presentation of the most general object. But its constitution is not determined by this function. In Wundt's statement it is because the memory image is peculiarly susceptible to symbolic use that it serves as impulse for the concept. [22] The memory image has not this susceptibility because it serves this function, but it serves the concept in this capacity because it has this susceptibility. In contrast with this conception of the psychical is that which Bradley partly states and partly implies above. The situation is not fundamentally different from that presented by mathematical theory of physics and physics itself. The logical problem of these sciences is the presentation of the experiences of the physical environment in terms of quantitative identity. Physics in accomplishing this end is justified in assuming and constructing any objects which it wishes. If the mathematical theory of vibration demands a molecule which shall be a system of a certain number of elements, there is no reason why physics should not assume such a system. In other words, the method of thinking the physical experience will determine what material and what structure of that material will be presented by the physical sciences. And, as Bradley says metaphysics would be officiously meddlesome if it undertook to pass upon the formal legitimacy of these objects before physics might use them, he claims the same privileges for the theory of knowledge which he grants so openhandedly to the physical theory. Logic may order from the psychological machine shop just such objects as she wants. They are to be, not "Vorstellungen," but "Bestellungen." What Bradley resented in the traditional doctrines of the associationalist was not that his psychical atoms were metaphysical monstrosities, but that they were logical monstrosities. Call them events or aspects of events, and let them fuse and redintegrate as per the law of individuation, and Bradley will be before anyone in showing the door to critical metaphysics as a hypercritical old woman. The psychical from this standpoint is the raw material whose form and structure will depend
(87) upon the theory of thought. The great advantage of this treatment of psychology is that the science is freed from all dependence upon the corporeal individual. All questions as to the where and how of these psychical events are ruled out as not pertinent. Such questions amount to the demand that they prove their reality independent of their legitimacy as working hypotheses. The psychical contents are then the bases for the working hypotheses of logical and ethical theories. One further advantage of the attitude is that it is not even bound to regard the psychical as peculiarly the consciousness of the empirical individual. That is, this type of consciousness is not psychical because it is that of the individual as such, but under certain conditions the particularity of the individual is expressed by the fact that for the time being he identifies his consciousness with these psychical contents. Finally immediacy, being defined as mere deprivation of reference beyond existence, has no function beyond that of stripping the content of experience of all relations that might interfere with perfect freedom in forming hypotheses. To present this same point in a different way, the conflicts and collisions in experience which are responsible for its development cannot be conceived of as taking place in a consciousness which had not reached the stage of reflection. The reflection is essential to the existence in consciousness of the conflict. The, reflection does not arise from the conflict. As Bradley states it, "the image is not a symbol or idea. It is itself a fact, or else the facts eject it." [23] Images as images could not come into conflict with each other, and fuse and redintegrate so as to bring out the identical meaning or content, unless the thought-process were there to control what takes place. "The conclusion I would add is that the intellect would never have appeared upon the scene, if it had not been present and active from the first." [24]
If we turn now to Ward and Stout, we get the following definitions: "The standpoint of psychology, then, is individualistic; by whatever methods, from whatever sources, its facts are ascertained, they must -- to have a psychological import -- be regarded as having a place in, or being a part of, some one's consciousness .... The problem of psychology, in dealing with this complex subject-matter, is, in general, first, to ascertain its constituent elements, and, secondly, to ascertain and explain the laws of their combination and interaction." [25] Psychology investigates the history of individual consciousness, and this coincides with the history of the process through which the world comes to be presented in consciousness. [26] " What is throughout distinctive of psychological method is that it is not concerned with the validity of individual judgment, or with the worth of individual volition, but only with their existence and genesis." [27] " Psychology is the science of the processes whereby an individual becomes aware of a world of objects and adjusts his actions accordingly." [28] In these definitions we have the recognition of the individual as the peculiar habitat of the psychical. From this standpoint we may proceed phenomenally, and simply under-
(88)-take to find our elements, or we may determine these in some sense in advance by making the genesis of knowledge and conduct in the individual out of this type of consciousness the peculiar interest of psychology. This standpoint is open to a criticism which we have indicated earlier, that the individual here considered is an empirical fact which must be determined psychologically as well as any other characteristic of psychical states. The reply is that the individual as subject is always there over against his states of feeling, and psychology must recognize this presence. [29] But this reply does not do away with the ambiguity involved in the use of the term "individual" or "subject" or "self" or ego. Bosanquet says that knowledge is never a development from the subjective to the objective, but a development within the objective [30] and this must be the position of these authors as long as the individual as "subject" is simply an implication of the known object. In so far as states of consciousness are referred to the subject as distinct from the object they cannot be cognitive. The psychological individual then never does attain to knowledge. As long as the states of consciousness may be termed subjective, he does not know, and when they become objective, he is no longer the individual with which psychology deals. Are we dealing, then, with an abstract individual, such as Bradley refers to as simply one mass of elements of feeling? In that case its presence, however universal, is not the criterion for a selection or abstraction that has been made before we find it. We need a psychology to present this individual. He cannot be a presupposition. If it is the real individual of unanalyzed experience, and our psychology deals with the genesis of his knowledge and conduct, there is a passage from the subjective to the objective, and the canons of logic and ethics will have forced their way into psychology, even if metaphysics is not introduced with them. And this cannot be avoided by prefacing that psychology deals with these processes simply as data, not with their validity. [31] For the nature of the steps is going to be determined by the goal toward which they are moving, and no treatment of the steps will be adequate which overlooks this relation. Furthermore, if it is a development, no sharp line can be drawn between the genesis and the result. The phases and the sciences that treat them will shade into each other as do morphology and general biology. These authors slur over a difficulty with which Bradley has dealt with subtlety and acumen.
James treats the consciousness with which psychology deals as efficacious, as a selective agency that actually operates in the control of the physical system. [32] He also regards it as conditioned in a causal sense by the physical, more especially the nervous system. He finds the simplest method of stating this to be the soul-theory:
If there be such entities as souls in the universe, they may possibly be affected by the manifold occurrences that go on in the nervous centers. To the state of the entire brain at a given moment they may respond by inward modifications of their own. These changes of state may be pulses of consciousness, cognitive of objects few or many, simple or complex. The soul
(89) would be thus a medium upon (to use our earlier phraseology) the manifold brain-processes combine their effects. Not needing to consider it as the " inner aspect " of any archmolecule or brain-cell, we escape that physiological improbability; and as its pulses of consciousness are unitary and integral affairs from the outset, we escape the absurdity of supposing feelings which exist separately and then "fuse together" by themselves. The separateness is in the brain-world, on this theory, and the unity in the soul-world; and the only trouble that remains to haunt us is the metaphysical one of understanding how one sort of world or existent thing can affect or influence another at all. This trouble, however, since it exists inside both worlds, and involves neither physical improbability nor logical contradiction, is relatively small. I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brains-states and responding to them by conscious affections of its own seems to me the line of least logical resistance so far as we have yet attained. [33]
I have quoted the passage because it shows admirably how much ease and gratifying elbow-room introspective psychology of the present time finds in the statement. If one only pushes aside for the moment the militant phenomenalism of the day and abandons the exacting formulae of an external scientific method into which our expressions are so painfully drilled, how much more readily we can express very much that the psychologist has to express by talking freely of the soul and nervous system, as interacting agents! But there is something more in evidence than the ease which comes with abandoned full-dress uniform and court etiquette; there is a clear intimation of James's "pluralism" -- what may be almost called a working-pluralism. If ease and fulness of description and resuscitation of psychical states can be obtained by the assumption of a soul, of a nervous system and soul existing in relations of mutual causal influence, in the assumption of a process of knowledge that is simply there for recognition, not for explanation, there is no reason for the psychologist's not assuming them. But whether they do assume them or not depends, of course, on what the psychologist is trying to do. The background and environment of thought into which the psychology of Wundt, of Kulpe, of Ward, of Bradley, must fit is in each case almost sui generis. I am not referring simply to those individual differences which are characteristic of any thinker, and which distinguish his work from that of another in the same field, though the results are for all purposes of scientific use of the same sort. It is still true in psychology that these individual differences have a further value, which reaches deeper than the personal equation and interest and style of, say, two astronomers. For example, the discussion over the psychological category of activity which raged in Mind some years back has reference to the recognition or denial of recognition of an element in the material of the science. As long as the discussion deals with the interpretation only of the material, the different scientists stand upon the same ground and may safely and profitably discuss their respective plans of the structure to be raised there. But Mr. Bradley is perhaps not going too far when he intimates that this discussion is a scandal in contemporary psychology, since it has to do with the question of the reality of the very ground upon which the science is supposed to be built.
(90)
To return to the position taken at the opening of the paper, the attitude of the psychologist determines his definition of the psychical, and with that the very material with which his science is to deal. It is an old maxim that one can find only what he is looking for. If the introspecting psychologist is looking only for a psychical state while can be correlated with nervous currents, and indeed only with the incoming nervous currents, he will see but elements of presentation. If the psychical image serves only the purpose of functioning for conceptual objects through emphasis upon their distinguishable phases, and then is lost in the limbo of cast-off abstraction, then he will see only abstractions that stand and wait outside the constructive process of knowledge although he may usher in above a constructive principle of apperception. If his theory of knowledge relegates the psychical to the dumpheap in mining for the universal and the necessary, he will find only scraps of consciousness, interesting as indicating that from which they have been or should be wrested, but especially because their very lack of meaning leaves the elementary psychologist the happiest freedom to produce elements by the hundreds of thousands. We may say that any point of view in the theory will have in a certain sense its own psychical content. It is this fact that lends peculiar interest to the generous welcome which James extends to so many points of view. It is certainly much easier to conceive the unity of consciousness from the standpoint of a soul. The category of personality enters much more readily, and the references of such states as those of pleasure and pain are more readily made to a soul. In the meantime the soul is not used except when needed. Otherwise the phenomenalistic point of view is maintained with the advantage of the actuality of psychical experiences. Thus, while other psychologists are compelled to get the psychical by stripping it off from experience by logical criticism, or to define it by its correlation with certain physical states, James's view is as broad in its sweep as that of the psychologist of the old Scottish school. All consciousness as mind comes within his scope. The position is on all fours with his theory of cognition; that "the psychologist's attitude toward cognition .... is a thoroughgoing dualism. It supposes two elements, mind knowing and thing known, and treats them as irreducible." [34] From this standpoint the whole content of consciousness is given in psychical form. It is not that the whole furniture of earth and hierarchy of heaven [35] may be psychical, but that it is so regarded, that is the result of this attitude. Of course, this attitude is not a metaphysical one, but a working hypothesis; but its effects for the psychologist are identical, so far as the content is concerned with which he deals, and is vastly superior to a metaphysical position in that the epistemological problem is shoved to one side. Thus the relations, presenting so many difficulties to the psychologists, become simply other irreducible feelings. "If there be such things as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum natura so surely do feelings exist to which these relations are known..... If we speak objectively it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by
(91) an inward coloring of its own."[36] In fact, the whole magnificent chapter on "The Stream of Thought" is a monument of the success of the method. For James everything that could be conceived of as a state of a soul, did such a soul exist, is psychical. But while this is a brand by reference to which the psychical herd may be rounded up, it is no description of their peculiar quality, and could not be such unless it became a metaphysical term.
James gives five characters of thought, i. e., the psychical: [37]
1. Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.
2. Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing.
3. Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous.
4. It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.
5. It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others,
and welcomes or rejects -- chooses from among them, in a word -- all the
while.
The standpoint here is entirely phenomenalistic. The data are assumed as given, and there is no interest save in the description of them as they appear to the dispassionate observer. All of these characteristics mark the thought as distinct from the object which it may know. Its personality, incessant change, sensible continuity, invariable reference to an object, and selective interest in its object, characterize the subject side of the conscious process. An object is impersonal, may be persistently identical in its content, may be discontinuous and discrete, may be known, but has no necessary reference to a subject -- at least not from the standpoint of James's psychology -- and does not change its structure and nature in answer to our shifting interest. This contrast, however, is all with reference to the thing which exists outside, not to the reproduction of it which the mind makes, and necessarily makes, in its process of cognition. The object in this sense is nothing but the entire meaning of the thought or cognitive state of consciousness. [38] The object is constructed, and what it is to be is entirely dependent upon the selective interest of thought. [39] If we take this description of the mind which presents outer reality and does so much more, building up by comparisons what is certainly not to be found in a world simply of things that are independent of such processes as comparisons, we have by all odds the richest statement of the psychical consciousness that philosophic literature has yet presented, though it would be difficult to maintain all the characteristics of the psychical suggested in the chapter on "The Stream of Thought" for these inner reproductions and amplifications of outer reality. Certainly in these amplifications through processes that give us the pure sciences we reach the height of impersonality and objects which exist for our thought sub specie aeternitatis. It is true, on the other hand, that we have but to retrace the steps of the pages that lie behind to see how in the stream of thought they have again the characteristics that James has endowed them with. It is certainly true that, as James presents them, all the furniture of earth and the hierarchy of heaven are psychical, and
(92) yet that much becomes not only more than psychical, but quite the opposite of psychical, without losing, its habitat in the human mind.
In these presentations of current doctrines of the psychical, which are not intended to be fully adequate to their authors, but simply to indicate how profoundly their methodological presuppositions affect their conception of the subject-matter of the science, I trust the assertion that psychology is bound to determine the functional value of its abstraction in the process of reflection has been strengthened.
The problem may be now stated in the following form: Shall we assume, with Wundt, that the psychical elements arise from the analysis of reflection and that the result of that reflection is to substitute for the original object, first, a conceptual physical object which never may be actual -- may never be presented -- and, second, a still actual psychical content which has been withdrawn from the object (Münsterberg's position here is methodologically the same); or, shall we say with Külpe, that in a unitary experience reflection reveals a mechanical and an associative order, of which the mechanical or physical statement is methodologically the determining side, by relation to whose elements all the associative or psychical elements must be determined as correspondents, recognizing further that reflection reveals -- does not create -- this distinction, since "images," feelings, and volitions have always been necessarily subjective;[40] or with Bradley and Bosanquet, shall we consider the psychical merely the phenomenal appearance of the material which, to be cognized or rationally used in conduct, must cease to be psychical and become universal," and maintain therefore that reflection does not create or reveal the psychical, but ceaselessly transforms it, and that the psychical is an abstraction which can never appear in its own form in a cognitive consciousness, but must remain simply a presupposition of the theory of the attainment of knowledge by the individual; or with Ward, shall we assert that the subject of psychical experience and of objective experience are the same, that the transcendental ego, who has masqueraded in ethereal clothes in a world all his own, is nothing but the everyday ego of psychology; above all, that he is to be unquestioningly accepted as one phase of the subject-object form of experience, although he is neither the empirical self of psychology which can be an object, nor yet a mere "function of unity and although, further, this pious refusal ever to put asunder subjectivity and objectivity is in crying opposition to the fact that half the time subjectivity signifies the denial of objectivity, and although it is not possible consistently to define the psychical by its reference to the subject end of a polarized experience when the subject is hardly more shall an assertion which perpetually dodges definition; or, with James, shall we take up again with the soul and a dualistic theory of knowledge, in order that the psychical may mirror the whole possibly known reality, and when we have
(93) entered into this rich heritage, shall we promptly send the soul to another and a metaphysical world and politely dismiss the dualistic theory of knowledge as a great mystery, while we dally with plural selves and spend our psychical substance in phenomenalistic analyses and teleologically constructed objects; or shall we attempt some other definition of the psychical which will orient it with reference to immediate experience, to reflection, and the objects and conduct that arise out of reflection, and which will vindicate the relation of the psychical to the individual and that of the individual to reflection? I think this would involve the recognition of a cognitive value in the individual qua individual over and above the "function of unity" and that function implied in the mere ascription of activities (identified in one way or another with attention) to the subject. Is it possible to regard the psychical, not as a permanent phase, nor even a permanent possible aspect of consciousness, but as a "moment" of consciousness or in a conscious process, and which has therefore cognitive value for that process? It is this suggestion that I wish to consider and discuss.
A variety of assumptions as to the existence of the psychical, some of which have been discussed, suggest themselves at once. We may assume that our consciousness is always psychical in content -- that we can always reveal by analysis the psychical constituents, that the mind either adds meaning to these, and so makes knowledge out of them, or that this meaning arises simply through the fusing and assimilating of different states of consciousness by each other; or we may assume that the unitary character of consciousness involves the presence of both the subjective and objective as in some sense parallel, though our analysis reveals these as separate phases whose distinction appears only in the analysis. The difference between these points of view does not turn upon the question of the presence in psychical form of contents, but upon the question as to the way in which they appear -- the question of elements, for example, and as to the fashion in which this psychical content becomes knowledge and the assumption of other processes of thought. Or a point of view may be taken which assumes that the psychical is a result of the analysis, not a discovery of it. And then the question may still further arise as to the destiny of this psychical content; does it disappear or does it persist as a necessary part of the more complex character of the analytical consciousness ? Another aspect of this latter question would involve the theory of reflection itself. May this persist as an ultimate phase of consciousness, i. e., one that carries its own satisfaction within it; or does it necessarily lead up to a consciousness which is not reflective; or may it do either under different circumstances ? The same question might be put in the form: Can reflection be conduct, or is it necessarily a phase in the preparatory stage of conduct? And having met the question as to the value of the psychical for knowledge, we could go on indefinitely asking questions. It is not my purpose to answer any of these questions dogmatically, but to take a point of view which seems to me to be involved in that of a number of thinkers, nod which seems also to be peculiarly promising.
It is assumed, then, that the psychical does not appear until critical reflection in
(94) the process of knowledge analyzes our world. Up to this point the volition and emotions are not psychical, nor subjective in the sense of psychical. I do not mean that they are not recognized as such, but that their nature is not subjective in a psychical sense. With Wundt this position recognizes that the entire content of consciousness is subjective and objective at once in this unreflective stage. The world and the individual stand upon the same basis of reality. The distinction is one that is made within the universe of reality, not with a view to interpreting reflectively this reality. The analysis of this consciousness would not reveal a psychical, any more than it would reveal a conceptual atom or molecule. It does not seem to me that Wundt has consistently maintained this position, for he says that the presentation is withdrawn to the subjective phase of consciousness as a result of analysis, and that it -- the presentation -- continues to exist with the same immediacy that it had before, though without its objective reference, thus implying what he has explicitly denied, shalt the volitional and emotional phase is subjective in the sense that it is not also objective. We have already seen that this Wundtian analysis leaves us with elements which have only symbolic value in the statement of the reality of experience. On the other hand, he has emphasized the constructive phases of psychology over against certain parallelists, insisting that psychology must recognize in perception and conception a result which is qualitatively different from the mere mass of elements which an analysis shows to have entered into the constructs of cognition. But though we seem to have our hands upon immediate psychical experience here, we find that it is only by a method of residues that he reaches this conclusion, comparing, the elements of the analysis with the object which was dissected, and this is after all only an indirect analysis. His voluntaristic psychology suffers from the impossibility of getting anything more than the results of apperception into psychical consciousness. Before advancing to the consideration of Dewey's position, we must see whether his voluntaristic psychology introduces immediacy into the statement of the psychical.
There is a contradiction here between Wundt's theory, noted above, that the volitions and emotion have retained the original immediacy of unanalyzed experience, and the actual treatment in terms of presentation they have received at his hands. If these states of consciousness have been psychical from the start, if our logical criticism has simply withdrawn the presentation (Vorstellung) into a field of unquestioned subjectivity, it is strange that psychology has extended such a tardy recognition to this field. Why is it that the will has remained so long in the gall of metaphysics and the bonds of ontology, while the ideas have been psychologically studied for centuries? The fact of the case is that, historically considered, instead of the presentation becoming psychical by being withdrawn into the field of the unquestioned subjectivity of the will and the emotions, the will and the emotions have received psychological treatment in so far as they have been drawn or withdrawn into the field of the presentations. But even the treatment of attention in terms of results, and the description of the will in terms of the sensations of muscular contractions and joint movements, and of
(95) the emotions in terms of the feel of characteristic attitudes and visceral disturbances, are not immediate presentations of these phases of consciousness, but a reference to elements that answer to the conditions under which the feelings arise; and as the complete tale of these conditions includes a number of groups, some selection must be made. The most tempting group is that of the physiological organism and its physical environment. But the psychologist is as clearly justified in selecting another group, such as that which determines the appearance of the judgment. It is just as true that all our experience can be presented in the form of the judgment, as it is that it can be stated in the shiftings of the strains and stresses of the physical system made up of the animal and his surroundings. If the sociologist succeeds in analyzing the social objective content of experience into elements which he can show are conditions for social conduct, he will be at liberty to indicate the psychical correspondents of these elements and have his own parallelistic system of psychology for strictly private consumption.
In all these methods we start with the analysis of given experiences and obtain a statement of elements that must answer to the conditions of the experience. To obtain a psychology of the process the method is very simple. Find in each case the psychical element that corresponds to the objective condition, and there arises a complete psychological theory of the experience. It should be added, to show the perfection of the method, that the psychologist recognizes the psychical element by simply noting and picking up what he has stripped off from the original object in his scientific analysis, as unessential because purely individual. For instance, take emotion presented as an object in conduct. Secure a clever and accommodating actor, whose business it is to present this emotion. Analyze his conduct into its essential elements, which will then be the conditions for the appearance of the emotion as a part of social experience. These conditions will be a series and combination of characteristic attitudes and much less definitely determined vaso-motor upheavals. The states assumed to correspond to these are the psychical elements of the emotion. Finally, what is it that you have neglected in order to recognize that you have shaken your fist in the most terrifying manner of the profession? Obviously the feel of the emotion. In like manner attention as an object means the perception of certain things in some particular relation and the ignoring of other things. The objective analysis gives these certain things clear and distinct, and the rest vague, and certain connections or relations between these clear and distinct things in the events of experience. This may be translated into terms of the tensions of sense-organs and the postures of the body that make the sensing possible and of the functioning of the association fibers of the central nervous system. Even the recognition, that psychical elements corresponding to these elements are something less than the actual experience, and that there is an activity implied in the feelings of activity, does not bring this something more into the field of the psychical with which the science is occupied. The assertion that the subject to which these activities are referred along
(96) with other states is there because it must be there, or because the subject-object relation can't be got rid of, does not enable us to materialize anything more than corresponding elements. In a word, if the volitional and emotional phases of experience can be presented by the psychologist only in certain effects, we are forced to deal with these effects, after the fashion of the consistent parallelist, as elements corresponding to the conditions under which they arise. In general, the attempt to seize a psychical content which is only a by-product of an analysis undertaken in the search for an objective reality, results necessarily in a parallelistic statement -- a statement in terms of the reality sought. This is as true of the older associationist and the modern logical school as of the physiological psychologists. One can see only that which he is looking for, and what else comes within the field of vision must be seen in terms of this. Sensations and other presentations rejected in the hunt for the reality of sensuous experience are no more positive psychical contents than the detected misstatements in a historical document are positive accounts of the process of consciousness by which they were introduced. If we have no direct knowledge of their appearance in the documents, we are helpless in our attempt to interpret them. It has been the acquaintance with the history, with the growth and decay, of the religious and political institutions of the Greek and Hebrew peoples that has made positive data out of the products of destructive higher criticism. Nor are the emotional and volitional rejects more direct and immediate material, as long as we deal with them in terms of that which does and does not make up the object of knowledge. This whole type of psychology can do no more than state the objective conditions under which the criticised act of cognition with its content of feel, emotion, and effort took place. That these psychologists have not confined themselves to this is undoubtedly true, but their scientific method can only assume psychical elements that correspond to definite conditions of objective experience.
The principal reason that one can be led astray in this matter is found in the fact that the statement of the logical analysis is not made in terms of an immediate experience. We transfer ourselves bag and baggage to the world of conceptual objects, recognizing the sensuous object only as something abstracted from. And yet we know that controlled sensuous experience is the essential basis of all our science. Even the most abstract speculation must have some point of sensuous contact with the world to render it real. We criticise various sensuous experiences in their representative character, and substitute for them the atoms and molecules of exact science. This is done, however, upon the basis of experiences in the laboratory, which are as sensuous as the experiences which we criticise. To be sure, we generalize our criticism and so bring the experiences in the experiment under the same statement, and this subsumption as a later act is theoretically correct. What is not legitimate is to assume that in the immediate experiment, the unquestioned data of the senses occupy logically the same position as those which we have criticized. In all our modern inductive science we deal with certain objects which are not analyzed in our analysis of other
(97) objects. The ex post facto legislation by which we transfer this analysis back to the objects, whose immediacy was a precondition to it, is certainly out of place in a science which is supposed to deal with immediate experience. That is, it is not justifiable to demand of psychology that it regard all sensuous contents as psychical because analysis has shown certain of them not to be objective, while in the same experience other sensuous contents are necessarily regarded as objective. It would not be profitable here to enter into the logical question of the relation of the subject to the predicate, but it may be assumed that any theory of the judgment will imply the reality of some element of sensuous experience which is the contact point of the subject with the world. The reality of the sensuous "this" and "now" in any judgment, in any analysis, makes it impossible to present any immediate experience, however abstract, in which the sensuous content is entirely stripped off and relegated to the objectively unreal. Psychology cannot, then, pretend to be both a theory of perception by sensuous contents that can be only representative of the outer real object, themselves confined to the consciousness of the individual qua individual, and at the same time a theory of immediate experience. It is certainly curious that, while the long struggle of modern reflection has brought the world of knowledge into the experience of the self, the theory of the peculiar experience of that self should have no place in the doctrine of reflection. But how can one dodge this conclusion if his psychology deals only in rejects? For it cannot get its material till the reflection is complete, and an attempt to restate the process of reflection in the psychological terms which the reflection has furnished must presuppose the reflection itself. If we start our psychology with rejects, there is no stopping-point short of the dumpheap. And an immediacy which is left over from all original immediate situation is a contradiction, since it has been confessedly obtained by a process of mediation.
For purposes of definition here "immediacy" implies the coincidence of presence and meaning, and "mediacy" means reference to something beyond. If the psychical is then to be immediate, it must be a part of the consciousness of the moment to which belongs the unitary act. It cannot be later discovered to have been a part of that moment, nor arise as a product in a reproduction of that unitary act or state. The individual must be conscious directly of all the predicates by which the psychical is defined before it can exist as such in his consciousness. Merely to demonstrate that there must be a psychical content is to take one's stand within the fallacy of the Cretan who affirmed the mendacity of all Cretans. Hence, if the psychical in this sense exist at all, there must be states of consciousness in which what is peculiar to the individual and a moment of his existence finds its meaning in these very peculiarities -- not simply as contents which can be investigated because they happen to be there -- but as contents whose very limitations make them organic phases in the cognitive act. They must be deprived of their reference to anything beyond, else they would not be peculiar to the individual and the moment; for if the momentary refer to that which transcends it, its presence is no longer coincident with its meaning. A
(98) reject has no meaning, even if we admit that it is present; or, if meaning is given to it -- as that of the image providing content for the concept, or serving as representative of a neurological element which cannot yet be found -- its meaning goes entirely beyond itself, and it ceases to be psychical at all. Unless we can show that the psychical as such is normally functional, we certainly can never produce it in the very peculiarities by which we must define it.
This is the position taken by Dewey in the article on "The Reflex Arc Concept." [42] He approaches the position from the discussion of the reflex-arc concept, but his quarrel with the psychologists he criticises is in the end the same as that which I have endeavored to present as inevitable -- the quarrel with the doctrine that sensation is an isolated content analyzed out through its correspondence to an outside element.
The result is that the reflex-arc idea leaves us with a disjointed
psychology, . . . Failing to see the unity of activity, no matter how much it
may prate of unity, it still leaves us with sensation or peripheral stimulus;
idea or central process (the equivalent of attention); and motor response, or
act, as three disconnected existences, having somehow to be adjusted to each
other, whether through the intervention of an extra-experimental soul, or by
mechanical push and pull. [43]
And his proof of the futility of this psychology is that no such psychical elements answering to physical counterparts exist. Instead of a psychical state which is dependent upon a physical excitation, investigation shows in every case an activity which in advance must determine where attention is directed and give the psychical state the very content which is used in identifying it. In the simplest cases it is the direction of the sense-organs and their co-ordination in larger acts that is responsible for the actual contents of color, sound, odor, etc., which the psychologist treats as dependent only upon external physical conditions. To a reply that the psychologist assembles a complex co-ordinated nervous mechanism, with its inherited adaptations, over against which the outer physical stimulus is the only variable that needs to be taken into account, Dewey responds that either the physical mechanism must be taken as a bare system of motions, whose procedure is nothing but a shifting of stresses, in which case there is no such thing as stimulus and response at all, or else we must make our statement of the physiological system in terms of the same activity as those demanded for the psychological process. In the end what we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell depends upon what we are doing, and not the reverse. In our purposively organized life we inevitably come back upon previous conduct as the determining condition of what we sense at any one moment, and the so-called external stimulus is the occasion for this and not its cause. If we ask now for the results which such a disjointed psychology is actually able to present, the answer is that, just as the physical stimulus is reduced to nothing but a system of masses in motion in which the stimulus as such completely disappears, so the so-called psychical elements reduce to nothing but a series of sensations in which the character of response is as effectually destroyed
(99) as was that stimulus in the abstract physical world. We have sensations of motions as well as of colors, and nothing but sensations. Putting, then, the two parts of the argument together, in the first place, this disjointed psychology gives us nothing but sensations which cannot even be got into a sensory-motor arc, but are doomed to remain forever in their own abstract world of registration; and, in the second place, no such elements of sensations are found to exist, and what we have been pleased to call such leave in them the whole content of the act of which we were supposed to make them a part.
The author concludes that the distinction between stimulus, whether psychologically or physiologically investigated, and response is not one between pre-existent elements; that any phase of the act which could be obtained by analysis may be regarded as stimulus or response. The decision between the two predicates depends upon the direction in which the attention shifts. A type of analysis which follows in the wake of logical and physical sciences, gleaning that which they have dropped, harvests only unreal abstractions. Instead of attempting to identify elements, it is the duty of psychology to look upon these predicates as tools of interpretation. Which is another way of saying that sensation does not serve as a stimulus because of what it is as an independent content, but that it is a sensation because it serves as a stimulus. It is evident, then, that the definition must be made in terms of the act, not in terms of a content; and the following are the definitions given:
Generalized, the sensation as stimulus is always that phase of activity requiring to be defined in order that a co-ordination may be completed. What the sensation will be in particular at a given time, therefore, will depend entirely upon the way in which an activity is being used. It has no fixed quality of its own. The search for the stimulus is the search for the exact conditions of action; that is, for the state of things which decides how a beginning co-ordination should be completed. Similarly, motion, as response, has only functional value. It is whatever will serve to complete the disintegrating co-ordination. Just as the discovery of the sensation marks the establishing of the problem, so the constitution of the response marks the solution of this problem.[44]
And a little farther on:
The circle is a co-ordination, some of whose members have come into conflict with each other. It is the temporary disintegration and need of reconstitution which occasions, which affords the genesis of, the conscious distinction into sensory stimulus on the one side and motor respond on the other. The stimulus is that phase of the forming co-ordination which represents the conditions which have to be met in bringing it to a successful issue; the response is that phase of one and the same forming co-ordination which gives the key to meeting these conditions, which serves as an instrument in effecting the successful co-ordination. They are therefore, strictly correlative and contemporaneous. The stimulus is something to be discovered; to be made out; if the activity affords its own adequate stimulation, there is no stimulus save in the objective sense already referred to. As soon as it is adequately determined, then and then only is the response also complete. To attain either means that the co-ordination has completed itself. [45]
(100) There are two situations suggested here -- that in which the co-ordination is broken up by conflict between its members, and the other that in which the activity in its original form determines its own adequate stimulation. In the first case we have the presentation and solution of a problem, in terms of sensation and response. In the second instance, the author states that "there is no stimulus save in the objective sense." These so-called stimuli are further defined "as minor acts serving by their respective positions to the maintenance of some organized co-ordination."
Although the author has definitely postponed the application of this doctrine to the distinction between sensational and rational consciousness, and to the nature of the judgement, there seem to be some fairly evident conclusions that may be drawn. In the first place, there are presented here certain situations in which the psychical is the nature of consciousness, not because any analysis, or even introspection, produces or, catching our thought as it disappears, reveals a phase of which we were not conscious before, but because the inevitable conflicts of conduct deprive us of the stimuli which further action requires; in other words, deprive us of the objective character of some part of our world. If we compare this position with Wundt's, the following distinction appears at once: Wundt assumes that the logical criticism arises when our anticipations are not satisfied and the interpretations of former experiences are contradicted. The result of this logical criticism, however, is simply to dislodge our objects from their objective position and relegate them to a subjective world, just as they are, deprived only of their validity. And their places are filled by the conceptual objects which a scientific imagination fashions out of figments light as air. That is, Wundt assumes that the criticised object may retain its organized content and yet lose its validity. He denies the mutual dependence of the validity and the form of the content. Dewey assumes that the object or stimulus loses its form in losing its validity. Furthermore, during this state the whole effort is toward a constitution of the object or stimulus again. The object loses its validity and organization as object at the same moment, and at the same moment it becomes psychical, but not as the shade of an object done to logical death, and doomed henceforth to haunt the shadows of a subjective Sheol. The illustration which is given in the article on the reflex arc is of the child of our modern psychology -- not the child of the associational period, that meditative Bambino of the Milanese school with, the orange in his hand; but that somewhat ponderously curious child with the candle, who seems to be taken out of a Dutch interior. Of this child and his candle the author says: " The question whether to reach or abstain from reaching is the question: What sort of a bright light have we here? Is it one which means playing with one's hands, eating milk, or burning one's fingers? The stimulus must be constituted for the response to occur." [46] Now, if these questions are the stuff that the psychical is made of, we are dealing with states which do not have to be caught from behind, as they whisk around the corner, and studied in the faint aromas which they
(101) leave behind them. We are very frankly conscious of our problems and the hypotheses which they call forth, and the problems are not coy visitors that will not remain to be interrogated. We are not dealing with images that have to be cautiously dissected out of our objects, nor even with fancies that vanish as soon as we show an interest in their pedigree and visible means of support. Other theories of the psychical imply an analysis which preserves the content of the criticised object as subjective experience. But at once the difficulty arises of presenting this content. What the psychologist has actual recourse to is the abstraction of qualities from objects which have not been criticised. For example, in dealing with color as psychical we assume at first that, if we had not to distinguish the colored object as it appears to us from that object as our physical theory defines it, it might never have been possible to separate the color from the so-called real thing. But, in the second place, when we ask for the color which has been stripped off from the object, and which has in the process become psychical and subjective, what is offered to us is the logical abstraction of color from objects that remain objects for all the abstraction, under the assumption that it must be the same as that which this critical experience found on its hands when the object evanesced; while the reject itself would be most difficult to reproduce, and only the professional gymnastics of the trained introspectionist would be at all equal to the task, and he comes off with aromas and suggestions, fearfully avoiding the Jabberwock of the psychological fallacy. We deal with substitutes and correspondents in the place of the psychical material which is too subtle for our grasp. And this holds not only for the psychical derived from criticism of physical experience, but also for that which comes to us from the criticism of thought and imagination. Thought maintains its objectivity as proudly as does sense-perception and the analyst who tries to separate thought from the thing is apt to come off with all the object or nothing according to the school that he patronizes. But it is not difficult, of course, to abstract thought in logic, and it is easy to set up these abstractions as the psychical content, or, more correctly, the same thing as the psychical content which an epistemology has shown must be subjective purely.
The position taken by Dewey is that in this psychical situation the object is gone, and the psychical character of the situation consists in the disintegration and reconstruction. The question then arises: In what form do these contents appear when this disintegration and reconstitution takes place ? It does not appear in the form of an object, for it is just this character that it has lost, and consciousness here certainly does not consist in the presentation of copies of objects that will not serve as stimuli, but in their analysis and reconstruction. An answer may be found in that classical description of psychical consciousness, James's chapter on "The Stream of Thought." Are there any of the characteristics of the stream which are not unmistakably present when we face any problem and really construct any hypothesis ? The kaleidoscopic flash of suggestion, and intrusion of the inapt, the unceasing flow of odds and ends of possible objects that will not fit, together with the continuous collision with the hard, unshakable
(102) objective conditions of the problem, the transitive feelings of effort and anticipation when we feel that we are on the right track and substantive points of rest, as the idea becomes definite, the welcoming and rejecting, especially the identification of the meaning of the whole idea with the different steps in its coming to consciousness -- there are none of these that are not almost oppressively present on the surface of consciousness during just the periods which Dewey describes as those of disintegration and reconstitution of the stimulus -- the object. No person who bemoans insoluble difficulties in front of him that does not paint the same picture, though with no such brilliant brush. No scientist who describes the steps of a dawning and solidifying hypothesis who does not follow in the same channel, with the same swirl and eddy of current, and the same dissolving views upon the shores. If there is ever a psychical feeling of relation, it is when the related object has not yet risen from the underworld. It is under these circumstances that identities and differences come with thrills and shocks. Most of the persons who bore us with themselves, and the novelists who bore us with others, are but dilating upon the evident traits of such phases of our life, and they need lay no claim to professional skill of the trained introspectionist to recognize these traits. Let me add also that James's account of the hunt for the middle term in the reasoning process, and much that he writes of the concept, fit perfectly into this phase of experience, and that here as well the psychologist's fallacy seems to have become perfectly innocuous. Consciousness here cannot help being psychical in its most evident form, and the recognition of it is unavoidable under whatever terminology, technical, or non-technical, we may cover it.
The real crux of the situation is to be found in the feelings of activity. Are they reduced to simple sensations of motion and effort, or may the activity appear directly, without representation? Can we psychically be consciously active, or is psychical consciousness confined to the results of activity? As long as the analysis is logical, i. e., as long as we simply abstract various characteristics of the objects and ascribe to the self assumed psychical elements corresponding to these, changes or motions will be inevitably translated into answering bodily changes or motions, and the only psychical elements that can be attained will be those presumed to accompany them. When psychology attempts to present these elements, it refers to certain feels, as we indicated above. We are now in a position to see where these contents come from. They cannot be the rejects, for reasons already adduced, but they may be the really psychical states forced into an integral act for purposes of interpretation. A successfully thrown ball means to us distance covered, weight of the ball, momentum attained, an entire objective situation. A mistake in the weight of the ball will give rise to a disorganized phase of consciousness, which will be subjective or psychical until it is readjusted. Here the efforts in their inhibition of each other provide us with states of feeling which we assume to be those which accompanied the co-ordinated process, though we could not detect them. This I take to be the real psychologist's fallacy, the attempt to introject a psychical state into a process which is not psychical. We assume that the individual who did move had an unanalyzed consciousness which
(103) contained the motion and this feeling of effort, whereas the feeling of effort belongs to a state in which the individual is not able to move, or in which at least the effort and the motion are in inverse proportion to each other. It is not the individual who could build up a world of masses and momentums, of carrying distances and varying velocities, that has feelings of effort. He has a universe of life and motion instead. Force these elements however, into this universe by a reflective process, and the only statement you can make about them is that they are feelings of those motions. To generalize this statement: the psychical contents which belong to these phases of disintegration and reconstitution, if referred to physical or logical objects that belong to other phases of consciousness, can be only representative, can be only sensations of something. They inevitably lose their immediacy. To present a concrete instance: the man who hesitates before a ditch, which he is not sure that he can jump, is conscious of inhibited activity. If he were sure of his ability to jump it, in the place of that consciousness he would have an estimate of the width of the ditch and the spring as an objective motion. If now we say that the sense of effort which comes with the inhibition is the subjective side of that which is objectively expressed as motion, we introduce into the original process a complexity which was not there for our consciousness. We were consciously moving. But we are told that beside this conscious motion there was this feeling of effort which has been borrowed from the subjective phase. This is not the motion. At most it can be but a feeling of motion. We carry over as an element a content whose peculiar quality depends upon its functional value in one phase of consciousness into another, and insist that it exists there as the subjectivity of this second phase. Under these circumstances it is reduced to the position of standing for something, and this so-called subjective consciousness is made of nothing but sensations of registrations.
I should add that the experimental psychologist is apt to trouble himself comparatively little about this or any other content of subjectivity. He assumes its existence answering to the physical situation, and confines himself to determining these physical situations with reference to the conditions under which this subjectivity is supposed to appear.
If we do not confuse these two phases of consciousness, I see no more difficulty in the immediate consciousness of activity in the subjective situations than of the motion in the objective. It appears primarily in the shifting of attention in the adaptation of habitual tendencies to each other, when they have come into conflict within the co-ordination. They involve effort in the stresses and strains of these different activities over against each other. I cannot go into the discussion of the interpretation of attention in terms of the innervation of the muscles of the sense-organs and of the head and chest. I must confine myself to the demand that we leave different stages of conscious processes to themselves -- to their immediacy -- and to the assertion that, when we do this, no one phase can be made merely cognitive of another, whether we have reference to contents or activities.
(104)The conclusion was reached above that psychical consciousness could be immediate only in so far as it was functional. We may go a step farther and add that, in so far as the psychical state is functional, it cannot be a sensation of something else that is not in that state. Its functional character confines its reference to this function, which is that of reconstruction of the disintegrated co-ordination.
The discussion so far has considered the immediate characteristic of the psychical. The other element in the definition is its identification with the experience of the individual qua individual. The implication of the functional conception of the psychical is very interesting. If the psychical is functional and the consciousness of the individual at the same time, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this phase of our consciousness -- or, in other words, the individual qua individual -- is functional in the same sense. This individual cannot be the empirical "me" that exists in such profusion in the modern genetic and pathological psychologies; nor yet can it be the transcendental self that is nothing but the function of unity; nor the self whose realization is the goal of the ethics of Green and his ilk; nor the individual whose whole content is the other way of stating the knowable universe. For this individual cannot be an object; and yet it must have a content, but that content cannot be an ideal either of conduct or of knowledge. It cannot be an object, because, for many reasons, some of which will be developed later, it belongs to the subject end of the polarized process of cognitive experience; it must have or be a content, because psychical consciousness does not belong to the normative phase of reflection, and deals therefore with relations and laws only in their appearance within certain fields of experience; it cannot be an ideal, because it must be immediate, and therefore its reference, so far as it is psychical, must lie within its own phase of consciousness.
There is nothing that has suffered more through loss of dignity of content in modern positivistic psychology than the "I." The "me" has been most honorably dealt with. It has waxed in diameter and interest, not to speak of number, with continued analysis, while the "I" has been forced from its metaphysical throne, and robbed of all its ontological garments; and the rags of "feelings of effort about the head and chest," of the "focalization of sense-organs," the "furrowing of the eye-brows" seem but a sorry return for the antique dogmas. But the greatest loss is the constant drain from the "I" to the "me." No sooner is a content of subjectivity made out than it is at once projected into the object world. This is the peculiar theme of our social psychology [47]. The recognition of the social character of the self, that the alii of our experience ar not secondary inferred objects with which our reason endows directly perceived physical things, but construct whose content is derived from subjective consciousness -- this recognition involves the objectifying of a content which used to belong to the subject. In Baldwin's address before the Yale Philosophical Club, upon "Mind and Body from the Genetic Point of View," [48] this exhaus-
(105)-tion of the subjective content in socially organized and therefore objective, minds is shown in a series of "progressions." Starting with a presumed "protoplasmic" condition of consciousness, out of which arise first the " projections," answering to persons and things, there appear next the " progression " of persons into selves, the ego and alii; and finally the recognition of the body, answering to the mind of the other and the corresponding relation of mind and body in the ego. In the final reflective attitude there is left nothing but mind and body. The subjectivity is entirely exhausted. The author is strictly logical in demanding that we recognize the completely correlative positions of mind and body in this position. Attempted reduction of the one to the other is a denial of their mutual dependence not only in their genesis, but in their functions in the reflective process. But this striking application of the results of genetic and social psychology to the epistemological problem leaves the same irreducible parallelism which we have discussed, and surrenders the problem of transcending this dualism to some other philosophic discipline.
The interesting situation suggested here is that, if we do accept this dualism for psychology, we do it at the sacrifice of a subject that is anything more than an assumption -- possibly an assumption of some particular psychical processes such as attention, apperception, but still a subject that can never appear in persona within the domain of psychology. It is all very well to send a sergeant-at-arms into the fields of the transcendental ego after him. If it actually appeared, its presence would, according to Baldwin, act like the nymph's magic kiss and reduce the whole experience to "protoplasmic" babyhood. That is, from this genetic standpoint the subject as a conscious stage must disappear before the reflective stage can arise. It must disappear in order that the contents of mind and body may arise. It is as much a presupposition here as it is over against the processes of attention or the activities in general; which is tantamount to saying that the relation of the psychical to the subject cannot be made a characteristic in the definition of the psychical. For the relation to an empirical "me" cannot be made particular. We inevitably generalize the experiences of these " me's" so that what belongs to one may belong to another. To say, with Wundt, that our concepts are used merely for the purposes of classification and arrangement, implies that we can present the material outside of the conceptual formulation. We have already seen that this is Wundt's assumption, but that it is an assumption which is hopelessly unproductive of any psychical content. These contents turn out to be nothing but the rejected elements of the object when it is subjected to logical analysis, and therefore stated in terms of the conceptual object in whose interest the abstraction is made. We have also seen that there is a phase that is not stated in terms of such an analysis, one that arises in the period of disintegration and reconstitution of the stimulus-object; that the content in this period is not what is abstracted from the former object when the conceptual object is erected in its place, but the content that appears when experience has lost its objectivity because of the conflicting tendencies to react, and that, instead of its being a reject, for the time being it includes all
(106) that is given at all. Not only this, but it is characterized by the consciousness of the reconstruction, of activities of attention and organization. We have seen that, as long as the activities of experience are present only in terms of their results, they can only appear in the form of sensations of the activities, but that in this stage the directing attention is immediately given. Thus, in the theories we have criticised the subject is represented in two aspects, neither of which can presumably be present in the material with which the science deals; first as a content, the original subjectivity out of whose "projection" or "imitative introjection" arise not only the others' selves, but reactively our own, and second the "activities" that answer to attention or apperception but in this phase of disintegration and reconstruction both these aspects are immediately given. The disintegration of the object means a return, with reference to a certain field, to the original phase of protoplasmic consciousness and within these limits there is neither mind nor body, only subjectivity. The reconstruction is the immediate process of attention and apperception, of choice, of consciously directed conduct.
This stage of disintegration and reconstruction requires a more detailed description and analysis. The characteristics which identify it with the reflective consciousness are the sharp definition of the problem within one field of consciousness and the forms which the other contents of consciousness take in the statement and solution of the problem. The assumptions made in this description are: (1) that consciousness is so reorganized with reference to conduct that the objects in cognitive experience may all be regarded as means to the accomplishment of the end involved in that conduct; (2) that this end may be stated in psychological terms as the expression of an impulse; (3) that when the co-ordination is unbroken the stimulus is the object determined by the preceding processes of the act; and (4) that the rest of the field of consciousness is organized with reference to this object, and may be stated either in positive or negative terms of it; (5) that, in so far as the co-ordination is unbroken, the end is for the time being adequately expressed in terms of the means, i. e., the object and its background which provide an adequate stimulus for continuance of the activity, and thus the distinction between the act and the conditions of the act does not appear; (6) that when the coordination is broken up -- or, in other words, when an adequate stimulus for the expression of the impulse is not given, but the conflicting tendencies to act deprive the object of its power as a stimulus -- then consciousness is divided into two fields: that within which the new stimulus or object must be constructed, and the rest of experience which with reference to the new possible object can have no other content then that of conditions of its formation. An illustration of these characteristics can be found in social experiences in which we are forced to reconstruct our ideas of the character of our acquaintances. As long as we can act with reference to them successfully that which we later consider our ideas of them constitute their characters as persons. That the organization of these characters springs from our mutual relations, and that the psychological statement of these relations would be found in our social impulses or activities, the analysis of social objects since Hegel, and the results of
(107) genetic and social psychology have, I think, abundantly demonstrated. It would also be admitted that the particular form which that character took on, in any instance, depends upon what particular social activity we are engaged in, and that the whole social environment would be more or less definitely organized as the background and sustaining whole of the individual or individuals who were the immediate stimuli of our conduct. If we assume now that some experience should run quite counter to the nature of an acquaintance as we have known him, the immediate result would be that we would be nonplused and quite unable to act with reference to him for the time being. The immediate result would be a state of consciousness within which would appear mutually contradictory attitudes toward the acquaintance which would inevitably formulate themselves in a problem as to what the real nature of the man was, and over against this a mass of data drawn from our experience of him and of others that would constitute the conditions for the solution of the problem. The contradictory attitudes of approval and abhorrence include in their sweep not only the man in question, but also ourselves in so far as mutual interrelationship has helped to form our selves over against his. Or, in other words, we should be as uncertain of our own capacity of judging him as of the man himself. In so far the subject and object relation, the ego and alter, would have disappeared temporarily within this field. The situation may be of such hopeless perplexity that consciousness in this regard could be well called protoplasmic; or at least would be of the same nature as the original subjectivity due to checks and inhibitions out of which is projected the other selves of a social consciousness.
There follows the definition of the problem, the delineation of which would be a task for logic. But there is a phase of the process with which logic does not deal or has not dealt; not because logic is a normative, while psychology is an explanatory and descriptive science simply, but because in that phase the content and the procedure cannot be distinguished. It is the hunt for a hypothesis, when the consciousness is more or less incoherent or, in other terms, the distinction between subject and predicate cannot be made. To return to the illustration, we are uncertain whether the conduct of our acquaintance is abhorrent, being logically a predicate and psychologically a stimulus to action, that of repulsion; or whether this possible predicate is not a prejudice of our own, being therefore subject. Given either alternative, and it takes its logical position, but for the time being it is actually neither, and cannot become such but by a further reconstruction in which there will emerge subjects and predicates which were never there before. Modern logic is ready enough to admit that the judgment is a process of reconstruction, by which through ideal interpretation of our world, it becomes another world, but what it does not seem to me to recognize is that the idea has to arise, and that while it is arising it is not idea and cannot function as such; that the ideas we have are abstracted from our old world and cannot reconstruct it; and that we must allow for the situation in which what is essentially novel emerges before it even takes on the form of a hypothetical predicate. What I wish to
(108) insist upon is that, while we have not as yet a predicate, we also have no subject; that, while the negative statement of the problem clears the ground for its solution, it does not give that solution; and that the statement of the rest of experience in terms of the conditions of the solution of the problem, the gathering of data, does not give the positive touch of reconstruction which is involved in the presentation of a hypothesis, however slight and vague it may be; that this step takes place within the field of subjectivity, which in so far is neither me nor other, neither mind nor body. And it is in this phase of subjectivity, with its activities of attention in the solution of the problem, i. e., in the construction of the hypothesis of the new world, that the individual qua individual has his functional expression or rather is that function.
To appreciate this we need to consider this situation in consciousness from another point of view -- that of the relation of the conditions for the solution, reflectively presented, to the problem itself. From the standpoint of science, these conditions are the data of investigation. They are abstractions which arise through the conflict. In the illustration used above the conduct is abstracted from the particular person and particular situation within which it appeared. This abstraction is due to our inability to treat the person as an acquaintance and continue our relations with him, or, on the other hand, to surrender him and pass judgment upon his conduct as we would but for our past knowledge of his character. This datum is therefore strictly correlative to the psychical consciousness of the conflicting tendencies and the disintegration of the object, but the ability to present this reflective content is due to the integral character of the rest of our world. This forms the basis upon which the reconstruction can take place. Not that this world will not eventually be brought within the reconstruction, at least by implication, but that for the time being the world and the individual have sufficient coherence to give the conditions under which the problem may be solved, representing, as they do, the organized system which remains the criterion of the reality of the result. The individual corresponding to the world of data or conditions is that given in the state of subjectivity. But it is evident that, as the function of the world is to provide the data for the solution, so it is the function of the individual to provide the hypothesis for that solution. It is equally evident that it is not the individual as a "me" that can perform this function. Such an empirical self belongs to the world which it is the function of this phase of consciousness to reconstruct. The selves of our scientific theory are part of the data which reflection presents to us. We have already seen that the content which is ascribed to them cannot be immediate. Furthermore, one of the results of the reconstruction will be a new individual as well as a new social environment. The reference which is made of this state of subjectivity to the presented self is therefore only in the sense of a statement of the conditions under which the new self is to be organized. In the meantime the experience in this psychical phase is not a presentation, but an immediate and direct experience. That is, this is the self in the disintegration and reconstruction of its universe, the self functioning, the point of immediacy that must exist
(109) within a mediate process. It is the act that makes use of all the data that reflection can present, but uses them merely as the conditions of a new world that cannot possibly be foretold from them. It is the self of unnecessitated choice, of undreamt hypotheses. Of inventions that change the whole face of nature.
If we ask now what sort of scientific treatment this phase of consciousness may receive, we find the reply already given. It cannot be a presentation of contents. These presentations all take their place among the data or conditions of this activity. On the other hand, there is nothing mysterious about its flow. It may be as vividly and definitely described as any immediate experience, but it is not the content as content that constitutes the scientific character of the description, but its definition in terms of the laws of analysis and construction. It will not be a statement of the laws of these processes. This statement would belong to general logic, but the formulation of psychical experience in terms of those laws. The theory of the conflict within an organized universal whole is logical, but the statement of the conflict of an impulse with a co-ordination of impulses and the inhibition of these impulses will be a scientific treatment of the psychical. The theory of the reconstruction of a given world as, subject through the interpretation of a hypothetical idea or predicate lies in the sphere of logic, but the shifting of attention in the reco-ordination of the impulses, the control of the outgoing activities by the sense-processes during this co-ordination, and the like, will fall within the science of the psychical.
There appears to be, therefore, a field of immediate experience within reflection that is open to direct observation, that does not have to be approached from the standpoint of parallelism, but which is a presupposition of that parallelism, as it is of all presentation of data, which voluntaristic psychology presupposes, but does not directly deal with, and for which there is arising the modern discipline of functional psychology. Over against this would still stand the parallelistic psychology as presenting the conditions under which empirical bodies and minds must act in the reconstructions arising within the field of the psychical. For this functional psychology an explicit definition of its subject-matter seems highly important. That suggested in this paper is as follows: that phase of experience within which we are immediately conscious of conflicting impulses which rob the object of its character as object-stimulus, leaving us in so far in an attitude of subjectivity; but during which a new object-stimulus appears due to the reconstructive activity which is identified with the subject "I" as, distinct from the object "me."
There are two illegitimate transfers in modern psychology upon which we have commented. In the first place, the psychologist who is interested in so-called psychical elements has abstracted the quales of sensation from the object of reflection by a process of simple analysis, and has assumed that he may transfer them in this form to the domain of the psychical (p. 27). In the second place, the voluntaristic psychologist has recognized the feelings of stress and strain that belong to the psychical phase of consciousness, and has transferred them to unanalyzed experience and its movements,
(110) where they are assumed to be the sensations of these movements (p. 28). It would be a mistake, however, to leave these treatments without some indication of their proper function, especially when an attempt is being made to relate psychical consciousness to other phases of the process of reflection.
The position of the "elements" is indicated at once by their origin. They are part of the data which define the conditions under which the immediate problem is to be solved. What distinguishes them from the data of the other sciences is their relation to the individual through physiological psychology. This science enables us to state all the data of the physical sciences in terms of the individual -- the "corporeal individual." Their logical function must then be the same as that of the data of the other sciences, that of stating the conditions of the solution -- the function of the subject of the judgment when the problem is as yet only stated. Now the hypothesis which is to arise must make its appearance in the individual qua individual. The general statement of conditions which are valid for all is not adequate for this situation. There must be a statement which will translate these into the conditions of this individual. The difficulty with the customary psychological statement is that they are not treated as conditions, but as contents which existed in advance of the appearance of the problem. It is, then, not remarkable that these so-called elements which have in reality been simply abstracted from scientifically determined objects do not appear in psychical consciousness at all. as introspection abundantly shows. What appear are the emerging objects, indistinct and still subject to the disintegration of conflicting impulses. But the conditions of the problem stand there as the form, so to speak, to which the hypothesis must conform itself. The attempt to give these conditions content apart from the immediate psychical experience inevitably drives the psychologist to borrow a filling from the abstractions of the outer scientific would -- the "elements." Apart from the particular problem of constructing a sounding, colored, felt world, there is a certain legitimacy in referring to these conditions of individual reconstruction as sensations of color, sound, etc. But to assume that this content is determinable independently of the problem is utterly false. The only thing that is determinable in advance is the function of seeing, of hearing, and of feeling. What the content of this function is going to be is dependent upon the character of the process.
The legitimate result of this type of 'elemental' psychology is found, not in the psychical correspondents of the physical originals, but in the physical statement itself. All the value of the study of so-called quales of sensation is to be obtained eventually in the statement of the nervous mechanism. And this mechanism is only a series of paths. It is impossible to isolate anything in the nervous system except processes unless one arbitrarily assumes physical elements to answer to arbitrarily assumed psychical elements. To repeat the statement made above, the logical function of physiological psychology is to give a statement of the world of the physical sciences in terms of the individual so that the conditions of the hypotheses that can arise only
(111) in psychical consciousness may be so stated that they will hold for that consciousness. In my judgment, however, we must recognize not only a corporeal individual, but a social and even logical individual, each of whom would answer to the translation of the results of the social and logical sciences into terms of psychical consciousness. That is, if we find it convenient to set up a social environment or an epistemological environment in which we abstract from the physical statement, we must state the laws of these environments in terms of the individual, to put them at his disposal. In any case, such a statement is the subject-function of the judgment.
If we seek a psychological expression for the actual use of these conditions in experience we will find it in the term "image." However unfortunate the historical implications of the term may be, there is no other expression that answers to such an organization of a subjective state that it may become objective. The unfortunate implication of the term is still maintained in much of the psychological doctrine of the memory. The implication is that the memory image depends for its organization upon past experience, that the selection and ordering of its content looks back and not forward. There can be, however, no question that the activities with which psychology deals find their expression in the formation of the image, and that these activities are essentially forward-looking. The fallacy of referring these activities backward as the sensations of unanalyzed movements we have already commented upon at length (p. 28). As the statement in terms of elements stands only for the conditions of reconstruction, so these activities presented in the image stand only for the direction of the reconstruction. A psychology which assumes that these images are registrations of past experiences which exist ready to hand in some storehouse of the mind is as illegitimate as a psychology of "elements," even if it bring in attention or apperception as a force from the outside to order the material. For it has a material which is only made up out of logical abstractions. The ordering of this material by laws of the association of ideas or by attentive processes is unreal as long as these forces operate upon material which is quite separate from the immediate problem of consciousness. The image whose meaning alone makes association conceivable, and which can only arise through its successful reconstruction of the object, can no more be separated from the psychical state as a content than can the conditions discussed above. The image stands for the predicate as the quales stand for the subject.
The image is the suggested object-stimulus, adapting itself to the conditions involved in the problem. It interprets the conditions as the predicate interprets the subject. But neither the subject nor the predicate is there in fixed form, but are present in process of formation. The value and content of the conditions is continually changing as the meaning of the problem develops, and this meaning grows as it recognizes and accepts the conditions that face it. It is evident that in this state of reflection it is impossible to present the elements out of which the new world is to be built up in advance for disintegration and analysis of the old is as dependent upon the problem that arises as is the reconstruction. It is equally impossible to state the
(112) form which the world will take in advance. Neither elements nor image can be given in advance of the actual problem or, what is the same thing for psychology, in advance of the psychical state. For this psychical state they are reciprocal functions which have now this expression and now that. What this expression is depends upon the selective activity of attention or apperception -- an activity that is practically co-terminous with the psychical state as such.
The logical correspondent of this psychical state can be no other than the copula phase of the judgment; that in which subject and predicate determine each other in their mutual interaction. The subject and predicate -- the conditions or elements and the images -- may be reduced as contents to zero in the equation and be present only as felt functions. In this case we have the limit of subjectivity. Or we may have definite conditions and a working hypothesis, and then the state approaches objectivity. Here the elements of sensuous experience fit into the structure of the world perfectly under the interpretation of the image.
One word of recognition is due the types of psychology which have been criticised. If we wish to make a symbolical statement of the conditions of organizing or co-ordinating experience, it may be legitimate to take colors, sounds, feels, and odors by logical abstraction from the objects around us, and if we wish to present the image symbolically it may be legitimate to use logical abstractions from our thought-objects -- the ideas -- as contents for this function. In actual psychical experience the material in which these functions express themselves are the disintegrating and reforming objects of the changing universe. The only justification, however, for these symbolical presentations must be found in their interpretation of actual psychical processes, and they can be properly used only as this function is kept in mind, and when the assumption is avoided that they offer a real account of what transpires in subjective consciousness. [49]
