James's Psychology

THE saying of the Preacher, that to everything there is a season, is easily forgotten when the passions run high. In the time of weeping we feel that no time can really be fit for laughter, but that the very existence of laughter denotes a frivolity and hardness of heart over which we should weep; and in the time of hopeful and enthusiastic building up we feel that a time to break down what we have built has never a right to come. Something of this exclusive and imperious passion seems to belong also to the spirit of an age. Whatever this spirit may be, it tends to pervade everything, and no department of life escapes the influence and contagion of the interest of the hour. Even philosophy, which boasts to be eternal, and is reproached with being unprogressive, succumbs to the fashions ; and of late she has made many attempts to dress at least parts of her person in the newest garments of science. Science is now so “ easily queen,舡 and has recently contributed so much to human enlightenment and comfort, that nothing could be more natural than such attempts. Especially in psychology is it legitimate to wish to be scientific, and to arrive at conclusions that shall be not merely speculative, but capable of verification and of compelling universal assent. For our minds are parts and products of nature as much as our bodies, and the thoughts and feelings that arise in us are never separated from those physical phenomena which sometimes we call their causes, and sometimes their manifestations. Our cogitations and passions, and still more those of our neighbors, ought, we feel, to be accounted for; and men’s humors should be neither more nor less predictable than the weather. It is hard to believe that this nearest and most familiar province of nature, our own lives, should be impossible to survey and comprehend, when such remote and unimagined fields as those of chemistry and astronomy have been mapped out successfully. Nevertheless, in spite of the Germans, there is as yet no science of the mind. There are psychologies in plenty ; but it must be confessed that each has its own method, and embodies a personal conception of what the facts of mind are and how they are to be studied. There is no body of doctrine, held by all competent persons, that can be set down in a book and called Psychology.

This fact, regrettable as it may be in itself, will persuade the judicious not to grieve that Professor James, while he has written fourteen hundred pages about psychology, has not produced a system of the human mind. His book does not pretend to cover the entire field, or to lay equal stress upon every portion of the subject. It deals with those points in which the author feels a personal interest, either on moral and philosophical grounds, or on account of recent experiments and controversies. It is essentially a collection of monographs, and in fact many of the chapters have already appeared in various reviews, in the form of articles. As a textbook the work is at once too incomplete and too voluminous, but as a book to be read and referred to it has every advantage ; for by daring to be incomplete it avoids ever being dull and perfunctory, and by daring to be voluminous it succeeds in being exhaustive on several subjects. Indeed, nothing could be more instructive and interesting, or, considering the subtlety of the argument in some parts and the minuteness of the detail in others, so wonderfully clear and easy to read. The lively style no doubt contributes to this end. Professor James’s manner is so homely and direct, so full of humorous and startling turns, that one seems to listen to an improvisation rather than to read set paragraphs written out in cold blood. But individuality is here more than a charm, more than a human warmth and personal flavor pervading the discussions; it is a safeguard against pretension and hollowness. Those who deal with the abstract and general, who think impersonally and along the lines of a universal system, are almost sure to ignore their own ignorance. They acquire what has been called the architectonic instinct; their conceptions of things are bound to be symmetrical and balanced, and to fit into one another with perfect precision. They fancy they overlook the world ; they feel they comprehend every department of nature to which they have given a name. Their cold breath congeals the surface of truth into some system ; and on that thin ice they glide merrily over all the chasms in their knowledge. But Professor James’s simplicity and genuineness have saved him from this danger. He is eager for discovery, and conscious that too little is known for any final or comprehensive statements. The result is that in his book more than in many books of philosophy that which is known is set down, and the rest is omitted.

The general reader will probably be most interested in those chapters which have ethical and theological bearings,— the chapters on belief, on the theory of conscious automata, on the will, and on necessary truths. The last contains the author’s theory of knowledge, and is the most interesting, perhaps, from the point of view of general philosophy. Necessary truths, like those of mathematics, he tells us, are not results of experience ; they are expressions of certain ingrained habits of thought, habits which cannot be revised while human nature remains what it is. That the mind has such a structure and such inevitable ways of thinking is to be accounted for by natural causes, by spontaneous variation, and by selection. The innate and inherited character of these habits and intellectual instincts is no pledge of their infallibility. A mind, to be sure, cannot escape from its own ways of seeing things; these ways of seeing things are its own individuality and essence ; but another mind need not have the same structure, and may react differently on the world. There is a front and a back door, as Professor James puts it, through which external influences may reach the mind. The back door is the organic structure of the body, the state of the brain, spontaneous variations in bodily functions, growth, disease, and decay. Our thoughts and feelings, our very necessary truths and primary interests, are dependent on these bodily conditions. To change them is one way of changing our conscious life. The other way is by affecting the senses; this is to enter the mind by the front door. We can properly attribute to experience only that element of consciousness which is furnished by the objects of sense ; the rest, and the more important part, is due to the innate structure of the body. In the same spot, animals of different species live different lives and have a different experience. A cat and a dog living in the same house live in different worlds. The same objects surround them, but their interests, habits, and instincts are diverse. In this way we see that, while man is a product of nature, nature has endowed him with a structure, and with mental and practical predispositions ; so that our reactions on the world, and even our conceptions of it, are due much more to the sort of brain we are horn with than to the sort of objects among which we live.

Professor James tells us that, in all this, he removes himself from the company of the empiricists, and joins the ranks of the a priori philosophers. But we may be allowed to doubt that he will be welcomed by his new friends, or estranged from his old. Few people are now inclined to deny that we inherit a nervous system, and that the quality of our experience depends on what that system is. The cause of quarrel is not so much the origin of our necessary truths as their authority. When empirical thinkers say all knowledge comes from experience, they are not so much denying that there are innate conditions of experience — the organs of sense and the structure of the brain — as they are asserting that our natural axioms and presuppositions have the value of knowledge only by virtue of such application and confirmation as experience gives them. Our ideas may come spontaneously, but only the gradual test of experience can teach us whether they are fit and true. A luxuriant imagination is alike the source of great discoveries and of great illusions ; the possibility or impossibility of verification alone can teach us which is which.

It is not from the side of naturalism or empiricism that Professor James need fear attack. All his battles are with a metaphysical psychology. The most striking characteristic of his book is, perhaps, the tendency everywhere to substitute a physiological for a mental explanation of the phenomena of mind. Psychical for him is only the result, the product, the total consciousness of the moment. The machinery by which this is produced and explained, the links by which it is connected with other conscious states, are entirely physical. He will have no mentality behind the mind. In the abstract such a conception is familiar enough. It is held by all the believers in automatism, and by all the more avowed materialists. For them, too, a mental state is the direct transcript of its physical conditions; former mental states have nothing to do with it directly. Stop the brain, knock me on the head, and all the momentum and interest of my conscious life are helpless to produce any further consequence. My demonstrations stop, my memory fails, my will lets go its object, and all the effort and labor of my thought lead to nothing. A psychological derivation of any mental fact can, therefore, never describe its true cause. The psychological antecedents could not have produced the result had the physical connection been broken ; while this constellation of atoms in the brain, however produced, is bound to give rise to this particular thought and feeling. But Professor James, to whose religions and metaphysical instincts materialism is otherwise so repulsive, has here outdone the materialists themselves. He has applied the principle of the total and immediate dependence of mind on matter to several fields in which we are still accustomed only to metaphysical or psychological hypotheses.

One of these fields is the well-known theory of the association of ideas. For this he substitutes the connection of processes in the brain, and denies that ideas have any existence in the interval between their first and later appearance in the mind, or that they are the same ideas at all when they recur. It has been a habit of philosophers to speak of the association, combination, and persistence of ideas. These expressions, if taken literally, imply that ideas are beings; that they move in and out of the mind like so many personages in a comedy. But where have they been meantime? It may be said they have been stored in the memory; but is the mind a sort of green-room, where ideas gather to await their recall before the footlights of consciousness ? One may say so ; it is not an unnatural figure of speech. But if we look to the facts rather than to words, we shall hardly believe that ideas exist after they fade from consciousness. Ideas are not substances that exist by themselves, and now and then allow us to look upon them. They are creatures of our thought, bubbles of our stream of life, momentary figures in our mental kaleidoscope. When we lose sight of them they no longer exist. Nothing that may follow them in the mind can really call them back, for they are dead; they cannot hear the prompter or mind their cues, for they are not there. The non-existent cannot be acted upon; it can feel no attraction.

Association is purely a physiological matter. In the brain currents may tend to flow in beaten paths and revive former excitements, because the modified brain actually persists, and retains impressions and predispositions to habitual action. The repetition of a brain process will of course make the idea recur which was first connected with it; but neither the process nor the idea it produces will be absolutely similar to the previous phenomenon ; and just as the brain process is only an arbitrarily bounded portion of the total active brain, so the idea will be but an arbitrarily bounded portion of the total consciousness of the moment. In fact, Professor James’s conception may, perhaps, be best expressed by saying that the human mind is a series of single sensations, each of which has the whole brain for its cause and the whole world for its object.

A further illustration of this may be found in his striking theory of the emotions. These, according to him, are sensations caused by that motion of the body which we commonly call their expression. Fear is the sensation of trembling, anger the sensation of set teeth and clenched fists, joy the sensation of a bounding heart and expanded bosom. Extraordinary as this reversal of common conceptions may seem, it is really involved in the physiological principles we have been dwelling upon. The thought or perception which, as we say, arouses a passion can do so only indirectly, — only because the physical condition that involves the thought leads to the physical condition that involves the passion. So much will hardly be denied by the unprejudiced; and if this concession does not amount to saying, with Professor James, that we do not tremble because we are afraid, but are afraid because we tremble, it amounts at least to this : fear is produced by a state of the brain by which trembling is generally caused also.

The question between Professor James and other modern psychologists is not, then, one of principle; it can only be one of detail. Professor James thinks that the cerebral condition that produces violent passion involves the excitement of the sensory centres; unless we feel the agitation of the body we cannot be greatly stirred by emotion. Others might say that the excitement of ideational centres would suffice. Unquestionably, the more vehement the passion, the more intense the cerebral excitement ; and any great excitement in the brain can hardly fail to modify the whole attitude and expression of the mail. It would be hard indeed, in such a case, to prove how much of the total consciousness is due to the rush of images in the fancy, and how much to the sense of strain in the body. The two factors commonly come together, and it would be necessary to isolate them to discover what is contributed by each. The hypothesis that all the emotional element comes from below the brain, and that the internal excitement of that organ would produce merely cold and intellectual perception, has certainly the charm of clearness and the merit of originality. It is so simple and luminous that one cannot help wishing it may be true. At the same time, what shall assure us that it does not abstract too much, or that the most limpid of the images of our fancy could ever have the tincture of emotion quite washed out of it? These doctrines are perhaps the most distinctive and radical advanced by Professor James, — those that make his book a real contribution to psychology, and undoubtedly the most important that has yet been made in America. But to mention them alone would convey a false impression of the tone and temper of the author, and of his general attitude in philosophy. His treatment of every subject is not equally radical and incisive ; where his sympathies are engaged the edge of his criticism is blunted. One has but to turn from the discussion of space perception, for instance, to that of free will, automatism, or the nature of the soul, to mark the change. In regard to these matters Professor James is cautious, puzzled, and apologetic; and in making his final decision he is avowedly guided by his æsthetic and moral bias. Such procedure is not unphilosopliie for one who believes, with Lotze, that our moral and emotional instincts are the best guides to ultimate truth. Of course the skeptic will smile at such convictions, and murmur something about mysticism and superstition; and to hold such a faith and build upon it does, possibly, mar the unity and weaken the force of a treatise like this, the method of which is generally objective and experimental. But it would be pedantry to regret the loss of logical unity in a book so rich and living, in which a generous nature breaks out at every point, and the perennial problems of the human mind are discussed so modestly, so solidly, with such a deep and pathetic sincerity. Many, no doubt, will begin these two thick volumes with a shudder at the labor in store; but those who persevere will read them with increasing interest and pleasure, and no one who can draw from them the instruction and inspiration they contain will close them without gratitude.