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 Another Random Document on
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these conceptions. What is beyond the crude experiences is not an
alternative to them, but something that means them for me here
and now. It is safe to say that, if ever such a system is satisfactorily
excogitated, mankind will drop all other systems and cling to that
one alone as real. Meanwhile the other systems coexist with the
attempts at that one, and, all being alike fragmentary, each has its
little audience and day.

I have now, I trust, shown sufficiently what the psychologic sources

of the sense of reality are. Certain postulates are given in our
nature; and whatever satisfies those postulates is treated as if real.
[316] I might therefore finish the chapter here, were it not that a few
additional words will set the truth in a still clearer light.

DOUBT.

There is hardly a common man who (if consulted) would not say
that things come to us in the first instance as ideas; and that if we
take them for realities, it is because we add something to them,
namely, the predicate of having also 'real existence outside of our
thought.' This notion that a higher faculty than the mere having of a
conscious content is needed to make us know anything real by its
means has pervaded psychology from the earliest times, and is the
tradition of Scholasticism, Kantism, and Common-sense. Just as
sensations must come as inward affections and then be 'extradited;'
as objects of memory must appear at first as presently unrealities,
and subsequently be 'projected' backwards as past realities; so
conceptions must be entia rationis till a higher faculty uses them as
windows to look beyond the ego, into the real extra-mental world;—
so runs the orthodox and popular account.
And there is no question that this is a true account of the way in
which many of our later beliefs come to pass. The logical distinction
between the bare thought of an object and belief in the object's
reality is often a chronological distinction as well. The having and the
crediting of an idea do not always coalesce; for often we first
suppose and then believe; first play with the notion, frame the
hypothesis, and then affirm the existence, of an object of thought.
And we are quite conscious of the succession of the two mental acts.
But these cases are none of them primitive cases. They only occur in
minds long schooled to doubt by the contradictions of experience.
The primitive impulse is to affirm immediately the reality of all that is
conceived.[317] When we do doubt, however, in what does the
subsequent resolution of the doubt consist? It either consists in a
purely verbal performance, the coupling of the adjectives 'real' or
'outwardly existing' (as predicates) to the thing originally conceived
(as subject); or it consists in the perception in the given case of that
for which these adjectives, abstracted from other similar concrete
cases, stand. But what these adjectives stand for, we now know
well. They stand for certain relations (immediate, or through
intermediaries) to ourselves. Whatever concrete objects have
hitherto stood in those relations have been for us 'real,' 'outwardly
existing.' So that when we now abstractly admit a thing to be 'real'
(without perhaps going through any definite perception of its
relations), it is as if we said "it belongs in the same world with those
other objects." Naturally enough, we have hourly opportunities for
this summary process of belief. All remote objects in space or time
are believed in this way. When I believe that some prehistoric
savage chipped this flint, for example, the reality of the savage and
of his act makes no direct appeal either to my sensation, emotion, or
volition. What I mean by my belief in it is simply my dim sense of a
continuity between the long dead savage and his doings and the
present world of which the flint forms part. It is pre-eminently a case
for applying our doctrine of the 'fringe' (see Vol I. p. 258). When I
think the savage with one fringe of relationship, I believe in him;
when I think him without that fringe, or with another one (as, e.g., if
I should class him with 'scientific vagaries' in general), I disbelieve
him. The word 'real' itself is, in short, a fringe.
 RELATIONS OF BELIEF AND WILL.

We shall see in Chapter XXV that will consists in nothing but a

manner of attending to certain objects, or consenting to their stable
presence before the mind. The objects, in the case of will, are those
whose existence depends on our thought, movements of our own
body for example, or facts which such movements executed in future
may make real. Objects of belief, on the contrary, are those which do
not change according as we think regarding them. I will to get up
early to-morrow morning; I believe that I got up late yesterday
morning; I will that my foreign bookseller in Boston shall procure me
a German book and write to him to that effect. I believe that he will
make me pay three dollars for it when it comes, etc. Now the
important thing to notice is that this difference between the objects
of will and belief is entirely immaterial, as far as the relation of the
mind to them goes. All that the mind does is in both cases the same;
it looks at the object and consents to its existence, espouses it, says
'it shall be my reality.' It turns to it, in short, in the interested active
emotional way. The rest is done by nature, which in some cases
makes the objects real which we think of in this manner, and in
other cases does not. Nature cannot change the past to suit our
thinking. She cannot change the stars or the winds; but she does
change our bodies to suit our thinking, and through their
instrumentality changes much besides; so the great practical
distinction between objects which we may will or unwill, and objects
which we can merely believe or disbelieve, grows up, and is of
course one of the most important distinctions in the world. Its roots,
however, do not lie in psychology, but in physiology; as the chapter
on Volition will abundantly make plain. Will and Belief, in short,
meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two
names for one and the same psychological phenomenon. All the
questions which arise concerning one are questions which arise
concerning the other. The causes and conditions of the peculiar
relation must be the same in both. The free-will question arises as
regards belief. If our wills are indeterminate, so must our beliefs be,
etc. The first act of free-will, in short, would naturally be to believe
in free-will, etc. In Chapter XXVI, I shall mention this again.

A practical observation may end this chapter. If belief consists in an

emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we
believe at will? We cannot control our emotions. Truly enough, a
man cannot believe at will abruptly. Nature sometimes, and indeed
not very infrequently, produces instantaneous conversions for us.
She suddenly puts us in an active connection with objects of which
she had till then left us cold. "I realize for the first time," we then
say, "what that means!" This happens often with moral propositions.
We have often heard them; but now they shoot into our lives; they
move us; we feel their living force. Such instantaneous beliefs are
truly enough not to be achieved by will. But gradually our will can
lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only
in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep
acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such
a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so
knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those
which characterize belief. Those to whom 'God' and 'Duty' are now
mere names can make them much more than that, if they make a
little sacrifice to them every day. But all this is so well known in
moral and religious education that I need say no more.[318]
[287] Reprinted, with additions, from 'Mind' for July 1889.
[288] Compare this psychological fact with the corresponding logical truth that all
negation rests on covert assertion of something else than the thing denied. (See
Bradley's Principles of Logic, bk. i. ch. 3.)
[289] See that very remarkable little work, 'The Anæsthetic Revelation and the
Gist of Philosophy,' by Benj. P. Blood (Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874). Compare also
Mind, vii. 206.
[290] "To one whose mind is healthy thoughts come and go unnoticed; with me
they have to be faced, thought about in a peculiar fashion, and then disposed of
as finished, and this often when I am utterly wearied and would be at peace; but
the call is imperative. This goes on to the hindrance of all natural action. If I were
told that the staircase was on fire and I had only a minute to escape, and the
thought arose—'Have they sent for fire-engines? Is it probable that the man who
has the key is on hand? Is the man a careful sort of person? Will the key be
hanging on a peg? Am I thinking rightly? Perhaps they don't lock the depot'—my
foot would be lifted to go down; I should be conscious to excitement that I was
losing my chance; but I should be unable to stir until all these absurdities were
entertained and disposed of. In the most critical moments of my life, when I ought
to have been so engrossed as to leave no room for any secondary thoughts, I
have been oppressed by the inability to be at peace. And in the most ordinary
circumstances it is all the same. Let me instance the other morning I went to walk.
The day was biting cold, but I was unable to proceed except by jerks. Once I got
arrested, my feet in a muddy pool. One foot was lifted to go, knowing that it was
not good to be standing in water, but there I was fast, the cause of detention
being the discussing with myself the reasons why I should not stand in that pool."
(T. S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 1883, p. 43. See also Berger,
in Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vi. 217.)
[291] Note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, i. 412-428.
[292] For an excellent account of the history of opinion on this subject see A.
Marty, in Vierteljahrsch. f. wiss. Phil., viii. 181 ff. (1884).
[293] We saw near the end of Chapter XIX that a candle-image taking exclusive
possession of the mind in this way would probably acquire the sensational
vividness. But this physiological accident is logically immaterial to the argument in
the text, which ought to apply as well to the dimmest sort of mental image as to
the brightest sensation.
[294] In both existential and attributive judgments a synthesis is represented. The
syllable ex in the word Existence, da in the word Dasein, express it. 'The candle
exists' is equivalent to 'The candle is over there.' And the 'over there' means real
space, space related to other reals. The proposition amounts to saying: 'The
candle is in the same space with other reals.' It affirms of the candle a very
concrete predicate—namely, this relation to other particular concrete things. Their
real existence, as we shall later see, resolves itself into their peculiar relation to
ourselves. Existence is thus no substantive quality when we predicate it of any
object; it is a relation, ultimately terminating in ourselves, and at the moment
when it terminates, becoming a practical relation. But of this more anon. I only
wish now to indicate the superficial nature of the distinction between the
existential and the attributive proposition.
[295] I define the scientific universe here in the radical mechanical way. Practically,
it is oftener thought of in a mongrel way and resembles in more points the popular
physical world.
[296] It thus comes about that we can say such things as that Ivanhoe did not
really marry Rebecca, as Thackeray falsely makes him do. The real Ivanhoe-world
is the one which Scott wrote down for us. In that world Ivanhoe does not marry
Rebecca. The objects within that world are knit together by perfectly definite
relations, which can be affirmed or denied. Whilst absorbed in the novel, we turn
our backs on all other worlds, and, for the time, the Ivanhoe-world remains our
absolute reality. When we wake from the spell, however, we find a still more real
world, which reduces Ivanhoe, and all things connected with him, to the Active
status, and relegates them to one of the sub-universes grouped under No. 5.
[297] The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our
attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely, when we wake the
attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a
dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day it is very apt to remain
figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking
world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to
have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner of
the 'spiritual world.' And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as
revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and
creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The 'larger universe,' here, which helps
us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate
reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Supernatural. The dream holds
true, namely, in one half of that universe; the waking perceptions in the other half.
Even to-day dream-objects figure among the realities in which some 'psychic-
researchers' are seeking to rouse our belief. All our theories, not only those about
the supernatural, but our philosophic and scientific theories as well, are like our
dreams in rousing such different degrees of belief in different minds.
[298] Distinguishes realities from unrealities, the essential from the rubbishy and
neglectable.
[299] Inquiry concerning Hum. Understanding, sec. v. pt. 2 (slightly transposed in
my quotation).
[300] Note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, i. 394.
[301] Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Müller, ii. 515-17. Hume also: "When, after
the simple conception of anything, we would conceive it as existent, we in reality
make no addition to, or alteration of, our first idea. Thus, when we affirm that God
is existent, we simply form the idea of such a being as He is represented to us;
nor is the existence which we attribute to Him conceived by a particular idea,
which we join to His other qualities, and can again separate and distinguish from
them.... The belief of the existence joins no new idea to those which compose the
ideas of the object. When I think of God, when I think of Him as existent, and
when I believe Him to be existent, my idea of Him neither increases nor
diminishes. But as 'tis certain there is a great difference betwixt the simple
conception of the existence of an object and the belief of it, and as this difference
lies not in the facts or compositions of the idea which we conceive, it follows that
it must lie in the manner in which we conceive it." (Treatise of Human Nature, pt.
iii. sec. 7.)
[302] I use the notion of the Ego here, as common-sense uses it. Nothing is
prejudged as to the results (or absence of results) of ulterior attempts to analyze
the notion.
[303] Griesinger, Mental Diseases, §§ 50, 98. The neologism we so often hear, that
an experience 'gives us a realising sense' of the truth of some proposition or other,
illustrates the dependence of the sense of reality upon excitement. Only what stirs
us is 'realized.'
[304] The way in which sensations are pitted against systematized conceptions,
and in which the one or the other then prevails according as the sensations are
felt by ourselves or merely known by report, is interestingly illustrated at the
present day by the state of public belief about 'spiritualistic' phenomena. There
exist numerous narratives of movement without contact on the part of articles of
furniture and other material objects, in the presence of certain privileged
individuals called mediums. Such movement violates our memories, and the whole
system of accepted physical 'science.' Consequently those who have not seen it
either brand the narratives immediately as lies or call the phenomena 'illusions' of
sense, produced by fraud or due to hallucination. But one who has actually seen
such a phenomenon, under what seems to him sufficiently 'test-conditions,' will
hold to his sensible experience through thick and thin, even though the whole
fabric of 'science' should be rent in twain. That man would be a weak-spirited
creature indeed who should allow any fly-blown generalities about 'the liability of
the senses to be deceived' to bully him out of his adhesion to what for him was an
indubitable experience of sight. A man may err in this obstinacy, sure enough, in
any particular case. But the spirit that animates him is that on which ultimately the
very life and health of Science rest.
[305] Treatise of Human Nature, bk. i. pt. iii. sec. 7.
[306] Early Hist. of Mankind, p. 108.
[307] See Vol. I. pp. 285-6; Vol. II. pp. 237 ff.
[308] See Theory of Vision, § 59.
[309] Essay, bk. iv. chap. 2, § 14. In another place: "He that sees a candle burning
and hath experimented the force of its flame by putting his finger into it, will little
doubt that this is something existing without him, which does him harm and puts
him to great pain.... And if our dreamer pleases to try whether the glowing heat of
a glass furnace be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man's fancy by
putting his hand into it, he may, perhaps, be awakened into a certainty greater
than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination. So that the
evidence is as great as we can desire, being as certain to us as our pleasure or
pain, i.e. happiness or misery; beyond which we have no concernment, either of
knowledge or being. Such an assurance of the existence of things without us is
sufficient to direct us in the attaining the good and avoiding the evil which is
caused by them, which is the important concernment we have of being made
acquainted with them," (Ibid. bk. iv. chap. 11, § 8.)
[310] W. Bagehot, 'The Emotion of Conviction,' Literary Studies, i. 412-17.
[311] Psychologie Rationnelle, ch. 12.
[312] Two examples out of a thousand:
Reid, Inquiry, ch. ii. § 9: "I remember, many years ago, a white ox was brought
into the country, of so enormous size that people came many miles to see him.
There happened, some months after, an uncommon fatality among women in
child-hearing. Two such uncommon events, following one another, gave a
suspicion of their connection, and occasioned a common opinion among the
country people that the white ox was the cause of this fatality."
H. M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, ii. 388: "On the third day of our stay at
Mowa, feeling quite comfortable amongst the people, on account of their friendly
bearing, I began to write in my note-book the terms for articles, in order to
improve my already copious vocabulary of native words. I had proceeded only a
few minutes when I observed a strange commotion amongst the people who had
been flocking about me, and presently they ran away. In a short time we heard
war-cries ringing loudly and shrilly over the table-land. Two hours afterwards a
long line of warriors were seen descending the table-land and advancing towards
our camp. There may have been between five and six hundred of them. We, on
the other hand, had made but few preparations except such as would justify us
replying to them in the event of the actual commencement of hostilities. But I had
made many firm friends among them, and I firmly believed that I should be able
to avert an open rupture. When they had assembled at about a hundred yards in
front of our camp, Safeni and I walked up towards them and sat down midway.
Some half-dozen of the Mowa people came near, and the shauri began.
"'What is the matter, my friends?' I asked. 'Why do you come with guns in your
hands, in such numbers, as though you were coming to fight? Fight? fight us, your
friends! Tut! this is some great mistake, surely.'
"'Mundele,' replied one of them,... 'our people saw you yesterday make marks on
some tara-tara [paper]. This is very bad. Our country will waste, our goats will die,
our bananas will rot, and our women will dry up. What have we done to you that
you should wish to kill us? We have sold you food and we have brought you wine
each day. Your people are allowed to wander where they please without trouble.
Why is the Mundele so wicked? We have gathered together to fight you if you do
not burn that tara-tara now before our eyes. If you burn it we go away, and shall
be your friends as heretofore.'
"'I told them to rest there, and left Safeni in their hands as a pledge that I should
return. My tent was not fifty yards from the spot, but while going towards it my
brain was busy in devising some plan to foil this superstitious madness. My note-
book contained a vast number of valuable notes.... I could not sacrifice it to the
childish caprice of savages. As I was rummaging my book-box, I came across a
volume of Shakespeare [Chandos edition] much worn, and well thumbed, and
which was of the same size as my field-book; its cover was similar also, and it
might be passed for the field-book, provided that no one remembered its
appearance too well. I took it to them. 'Is this the tara-tara, friends, that you wish
burned?'
"'Yes, yes, that is it.'
"'Well, take it, and burn it, or keep it.'
"'M—m. No, no, no. We will not touch it. It is fetish. You must burn it.'
"'I! Well, let it be so. I will do anything to please my good friends of Mowa.'
"'We walked to the nearest fire. I breathed a regretful farewell to my genial
companion, which, during my many weary hours of night, had assisted to relieve
my mind when oppressed by almost intolerable woes, and then gravely consigned
the innocent Shakespeare to the flames, heaping the brush fuel over it with
ceremonious care.
"'A-h-h,' breathed the poor deluded natives sighing their relief.... 'There is no
trouble now.'... And something approaching to a cheer was shouted among them,
which terminated the episode of the burning of Shakespeare."
[313] 'Rationality, Activity, and Faith' (Princeton Review, July 1882, pp. 64-9).
[314] J. Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston, 1885). pp. 317-57.
[315] Chapter XXVII.
[316] Prof. Royce puts this well in discussing idealism and the reality of an
'external' world. "If the history of popular speculation on these topics could be
written, how much of cowardice and shuffling would be found in the behavior of
the natural mind before the question, 'How dost thou know of an external reality?'
Instead of simply and plainly answering: 'I mean by the external world in the first
place something that I accept or demand, that I posit, postulate, actively construct
on the basis of sense-data,' the natural man gives us all kinds of vague
compromise answers.... Where shall these endless turnings and twistings have an
end?... All these lesser motives are appealed to, and the one ultimate motive is
neglected. The ultimate motive with the man of every-day life is the will to have
an external world. Whatever consciousness contains, reason will persist in
spontaneously adding the thought: 'But there shall be something beyond this.'...
The popular assurance of an external world is the fixed determination to make
one, now and henceforth." (Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 304—the italics are
my own.) This immixture of the will appears most flagrantly in the fact that
although external matter is doubted commonly enough, minds external to our own
are never doubted. We need them too much, are too essentially social to dispense
with them. Semblances of matter may suffice to react upon, but not semblances of
communing souls. A psychic solipsism is too hideous a mockery of our wants, and,
so far as I know, has never been seriously entertained.—Chapters ix and x of Prof.
Royce's work are on the whole the clearest account of the psychology of belief
with which I am acquainted.
[317] "The leading fact in Belief, according to my view of it, is our Primitive
Credulity. We begin by believing everything; whatever is, is true.... The animal
born in the morning of a summer day proceeds upon the fact of daylight; assumes
the perpetuity of that fact. Whatever it is disposed to do, it does without
misgivings. If in the morning it began a round of operations continuing for hours,
under the full benefit of daylight, it would unhesitatingly begin the same round in
the evening. Its state of mind is practically one of unbounded confidence; but, as
yet, it does not understand what confidence means.
"The pristine assurance is soon met by checks; a disagreeable experience leading
to new insight. To be thwarted and opposed is one of our earliest and most
frequent pains. It develops the sense of a distinction between free and obstructed
impulses; the unconsciousness of an open way is exchanged for consciousness;
we are now said properly to believe in what has never been contradicted, as we
disbelieve in what has been contradicted. We believe that, after the dawn of day,
there is before us a continuance of light; we do not believe that this light is to
continue forever.
"Thus, the vital circumstance in belief is never to be contradicted—never to lose
prestige. The number of repetitions counts for little in the process: we are as
much convinced after ten as after fifty; we are more convinced by ten unbroken
than by fifty for and one against." (Bain: The Emotions and the Will, pp. 511,
512.)
[318] Literature. D. Hume: Treatise on Human Nature, part iii. §§ vii-x. A. Bain:
Emotions and Will, chapter on Belief (also pp. 20 ff.). J. Sully: Sensation and
Intuition, essay iv. J. Mill: Analysis of Human Mind, chapter xi. Ch. Renouvier:
Psychologie Rationnelle, vol. ii. pt. ii. and Esquisse d'une Classification
systématique des Doctrines Philosophiques, part vi. J. H. Newman: The Grammar
of Assent. J. Venn: Some Characteristics of Belief. V. Brochard: De l'Erreur, part ii.
chap. vi, ix; and Revue Philosophique, xxviii. 1. E. Rabier: Psychologie, chap xxi.
Appendix. Ollé Laprune: La Certitude Morale (1881). G. F. Stout: On Genesis of
Cognition of Physical Reality, in 'Mind,' Jan. 1890. J. Pikler: The Psychology of the
Belief in Objective Existence (London, 1890).—Mill says that we believe present
sensations; and makes our belief in all other things a matter of association with
these. So far so good; but as he makes no mention of emotional or volitional
reaction, Bain rightly charges him with treating belief as a purely intellectual state.
For Bain belief is rather an incident of our active life. When a thing is such as to
make us act on it, then we believe it, according to Bain. "But how about past
things, or remote things, upon which no reaction of ours is possible? And how
about belief in things which check action?" says Sully; who considers that we
believe a thing only when "the idea of it has an inherent tendency to approximate
in character and intensity to a sensation." It is obvious that each of these authors
emphasizes a true aspect of the question. My own account has sought to be more
complete, sensation, association, and active reaction all being acknowledged to be
concerned. The most compendious possible formula perhaps would be that our
belief and attention are the same fact. For the moment, what we attend to is
reality; Attention is a motor reaction; and we are so made that sensations force
attention from us. On Belief and Conduct see an article by Leslie Stephen,
Fortnightly Review, July 1888.
A set of facts have been recently brought to my attention which I hardly know
how to treat, so I say a word about them in this foot-note. I refer to a type of
experience which has frequently found a place amongst the 'Yes' answers to the
'Census of Hallucinations,' and which is generally described by those who report it
as an 'impression of the presence' of someone near them, although no sensation
either of sight, hearing, or touch is involved. From the way in which this
experience is spoken of by those who have had it, it would appear to be an
extremely definite and positive state of mind, coupled with a belief in the reality of
its object quite as strong as any direct sensation ever gives. And yet no sensation
seems to be connected with it at all. Sometimes the person whose nearness is
thus impressed is a known person, dead or living, sometimes an unknown one. His
attitude and situation are often very definitely impressed, and so, sometimes
(though not by way of hearing), are words which he wishes to say.
The phenomenon would seem to be due to a pure conception becoming saturated
with the sort of stinging urgency which ordinarily only sensations bring. But I
cannot yet persuade myself that the urgency in question consists in concomitant
emotional and motor impulses. The 'impression' may come quite suddenly and
depart quickly; it may carry no emotional suggestions, and wake no motor
consequences beyond those involved in attending to it. Altogether, the matter is
somewhat paradoxical, and no conclusion can be come to until more definite data
are obtained.
Perhaps the most curious case of the sort which I have received is the following.
The subject of the observation, Mr. P., is an exceptionally intelligent witness,
though the words of the narrative are his wife's.
"Mr. P. has all his life been the occasional subject of rather singular delusions or
impressions of various kinds. If I had belief in the existence of latent or embryo
faculties, other than the five senses, I should explain them on that ground. Being
totally blind, his other perceptions are abnormally keen and developed, and given
the existence of a rudimentary sixth sense, it would be only natural that this also
should be more acute in him than in others. One of the most interesting of his
experiences in this line was the frequent apparition of a corpse some years ago,
which may be worth the attention of your Committee on that subject. At the time
Mr. P. had a music-room in Boston on Beacon Street, where he used to do severe
and protracted practice with little interruption. Now, all one season it was a very
familiar occurrence with him while in the midst of work to feel a cold draft of air
suddenly upon his face, with a prickling sensation at the roots of his hair, when he
would turn from the piano, and a figure which he knew to be dead would come
sliding under the crack of the door from without, flattening itself to squeeze
through and rounding out again to the human form. It was of a middle-aged man,
and drew itself along the carpet on hands and knees, but with head thrown back
till it reached the sofa, upon which it stretched itself. It remained some moments,
but vanished always if Mr. P. spoke or made a decided movement. The most
singular point in the occurrence was its frequent repetition. He might expect it on
any day between two and four o'clock, and it came always heralded by the same
sudden cold shiver, and was invariably the same figure which went through the
same movements. He afterwards traced the whole experience to strong tea. He
was in the habit of taking cold tea, which always stimulates him, for lunch, and on
giving up this practice he never saw this or any other apparition again. However,
even allowing, as is doubtless true, that the event was a delusion of nerves first
fatigued by overwork and then excited by this stimulant, there is one point which
is still wholly inexplicable and highly interesting to me. Mr. P. has no memory
whatever of sight, nor conception of it. It is impossible for him to form any idea of
what we mean by light or color, consequently he has no cognizance of any object
which does not reach his sense of hearing or of touch, though these are so acute
as to give a contrary impression sometimes to other people. When he becomes
aware of the presence of a person or an object, by means which seem mysterious
to outsiders, he can always trace it naturally and legitimately to slight echoes,
perceptible only to his keen ears, or to differences in atmospheric pressure,
perceptible only to his acute nerves of touch; but with the apparition described,
for the only time in his experience, he was aware of presence, size, and
appearance, without the use of either of these mediums. The figure never
produced the least sound nor came within a number of feet of his person, yet he
knew that it was a man, that it moved, and in what direction, even that it wore a
full beard, which, like the thick curly hair, was partially gray; also that it was
dressed in the style of suit known as 'pepper and salt.' These points were all
perfectly distinct and invariable each time. If asked how he perceived them, he will
answer he cannot tell, he simply knew it, and so strongly and so distinctly that it is
impossible to shake his opinion as to the exact details of the man's appearance. It
would seem that in this delusion of the senses he really saw, as he has never done
in the actual experiences of life, except in the first two years of childhood."
On cross-examining Mr. P., I could not make out that there was anything like visual
imagination involved, although he was quite unable to describe in just what terms
the false perception was carried on. It seemed to be more like an intensely
definite conception than anything else, a conception to which the feeling of
present reality was attached, but in no such shape as easily to fall under the heads
laid down in my text.

CHAPTER XXII.[319]

REASONING.

We talk of man being the rational animal; and the traditional

intellectualist philosophy has always made a great point of treating
the brutes as wholly irrational creatures. Nevertheless, it is by no
means easy to decide just what is meant by reason, or how the
peculiar thinking process called reasoning differs from other thought-
sequences which may lead to similar results.
Much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by
another, of a sort of spontaneous revery of which it seems likely
enough that the higher brutes should be capable. This sort of
thinking leads nevertheless to rational conclusions, both practical
and theoretical. The links between the terms are either 'contiguity'
or 'similarity,' and with a mixture of both these things we can hardly
be very incoherent. As a rule, in this sort of irresponsible thinking,
the terms which fall to be coupled together are empirical concretes,
not abstractions. A sunset may call up the vessel's deck from which I
saw one last summer, the companions of my voyage, my arrival into
port, etc.; or it may make me think of solar myths, of Hercules' and
Hector's funeral pyres, of Homer and whether he could write, of the
Greek alphabet, etc. If habitual contiguities predominate, we have a
prosaic mind; if rare contiguities, or similarities, have free play, we
call the person fanciful, poetic, or witty. But the thought as a rule is
of matters taken in their entirety. Having been thinking of one, we
find later that we are thinking of another, to which we have been
lifted along, we hardly know how. If an abstract quality figures in the
procession, it arrests our attention but for a moment, and fades into
something else; and is never very abstract. Thus, in thinking of the
sun-myths, we may have a gleam of admiration at the gracefulness
of the primitive human mind, or a moment of disgust at the
narrowness of modern interpreters. But, in the main, we think less
of qualities than of whole things, real or possible, just as we may
experience them.
The upshot of it may be that we are reminded of some practical
duty: we write a letter to a friend abroad, or we take down the
lexicon and study our Greek lesson. Our thought is rational, and
leads to a rational act, but it can hardly be called reasoning in a
strict sense of the term.
There are other shorter flights of thought, single couplings of terms
which suggest one another by association, which approach more to
what would commonly be classed as acts of reasoning proper. Those
are where a present sign suggests an unseen, distant, or future
reality. Where the sign and what it suggests are both concretes
which have been coupled together on previous occasions, the
inference is common to both brutes and men, being really nothing
more than association by contiguity. A and B, dinner-bell and dinner,
have been experienced in immediate succession. Hence A no sooner
falls upon the sense than B is anticipated, and steps are taken to
meet it. The whole education of our domestic beasts, all the cunning
added by age and experience to wild ones, and the greater part of
our human knowingness consists in the ability to make a mass of
inferences of this simplest sort. Our 'perceptions,' or recognitions of
what objects are before us, are inferences of this kind. We feel a
patch of color, and we say 'a distant house,' a whiff of odor crosses
us, and we say 'a skunk,' a faint sound is heard, and we call it 'a
railroad train.' Examples are needless; for such inferences of
sensations not presented form the staple and tissue of our
perceptive life, and our Chapter XIX was full of them, illusory or
veracious. They have been called unconscious inferences. Certainly
we are commonly unconscious that we are inferring at all. The sign
and the signified melt into what seems to us the object of a single
pulse of thought. Immediate inferences would be a good name for
these simple acts of reasoning requiring but two terms,[320] were it
not that formal logic has already appropriated the expression for a
more technical use.

'RECEPTS.'

In these first and simplest inferences the conclusion may follow so

continuously upon the 'sign' that the latter is not discriminated or
attended to as a separate object by the mind. Even now we can
seldom define the optical signs which lead us to infer the shapes and
distances of the objects which by their aid we so unhesitatingly
perceive. The objects, too, when thus inferred, are general objects.
The dog crossing a scent thinks of a deer in general, or of another
dog in general, not of a particular deer or dog. To these most
primitive abstract objects Dr. G. J. Romanes gives the name of
recepts or generic ideas, to distinguish them from concepts and
general ideas properly so called.[321] They are not analyzed or
defined, but only imagined.
 "It requires but a slight analysis of our ordinary mental
processes to prove that all our simpler ideas are group-
arrangements which have been formed spontaneously or
without any of that intentionally comparing, sifting, and
combining process which is required in the higher departments
of ideational activity. The comparing, sifting, and combining is
here done, as it were, for the conscious agent, not by him.
Recepts are received; it is only concepts that require to be
conceived.... If I am crossing a street and hear behind me a
sudden shout, I do not require to wait in order to predicate to
myself that there is probably a hansom-cab just about to run
me down: a cry of this kind, and in those circumstances, is so
intimately associated in my mind with its purpose, that the idea
which it arouses need not rise above the level of a recept; and
the adaptive movements on my part which that idea
immediately prompts are performed without any intelligent
reflection. Yet, on the other hand, they are neither reflex actions
nor instinctive actions; they are what may be termed receptual
actions, or actions depending on recepts."[322]

"How far can this kind of unnamed or non-conceptional ideation

extend?" Dr. Romanes asks; and answers by a variety of examples
taken from the life of brutes, for which I must refer to his book. One
or two of them, however, I will quote:

"Houzeau writes that while crossing a wide and arid plain in

Texas, his two dogs suffered greatly from thirst, and that
between thirty and forty times they rushed down the hollows to
search for water. The hollows were not valleys, and there were
no trees in them, or any other difference in the vegetation; and
as they were absolutely dry, there could have been no smell of
damp earth. The dogs behaved as if they knew that a dip in the
ground offered them the best chance of finding water, and
Houzeau has often witnessed the same behavior in other
animals....
 "Mr. Darwin writes: 'When I say to my terrier in an eager voice
(and I have made the trial many times), "Hi! hi! where is it?"
she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted,
and generally first looks quickly all round, and then rushes into
the nearest thicket, to scout for any game, but finding nothing
she looks up into any neighboring tree for a squirrel. Now do
not these actions clearly show that she had in her mind a
general idea, or concept, that some animal is to be discovered
and hunted?'"[323]

They certainly show this. But the idea in question is of an object

about which nothing farther may be articulately known. The thought
of it prompts to activity, but to no theoretic consequence. Similarly in
the following example:

"Water-fowl adopt a somewhat different mode of alighting upon

land, or even upon ice, from that which they adopt when
alighting upon water; and those kinds which dive from a height
(such as terns and gannets) never do so upon land or upon ice.
These facts prove that the animals have one recept answering
to a solid surface, and another answering to a fluid. Similarly a
man will not dive from a height over hard ground or over ice,
nor will he jump into water in the same way as he jumps upon
dry land. In other words, like the water-fowl he has two distinct
recepts, one of which answers to solid ground, and the other to
an unresisting fluid. But unlike the water-fowl he is able to
bestow upon each of these recepts a name, and thus to raise
them both to the level of concepts. So far as the practical
purposes of locomotion are concerned, it is of course immaterial
whether or not he thus raises his recepts into concepts; but ...
for many other purposes it is of the highest importance that he
is able to do this."[324]

IN REASONING, WE PICK OUT ESSENTIAL QUALITIES.

The chief of these purposes is predication, a theoretic function
which, though it always leads eventually to some kind of action, yet
tends as often as not to inhibit the immediate motor response to
which the simple inferences of which we have been speaking give
rise. In reasoning, A may suggest B; but B, instead of being an idea
which is simply obeyed by us, is an idea which suggests the distinct
additional idea C. And where the train of suggestion is one of
reasoning distinctively so called as contrasted with mere revery or
'associative' sequence, the ideas bear certain inward relations to
each other which we must proceed to examine with some care.
The result C yielded by a true act of reasoning is apt to be a thing
voluntarily sought, such as the means to a proposed end, the
ground for an observed effect, or the effect of an assumed cause. All
these results may be thought of as concrete things, but they are not
suggested immediately by other concrete things, as in the trains of
simply associative thought. They are linked to the concretes which
precede them by intermediate steps, and these steps are formed by
general characters articulately denoted and expressly analyzed out.
A thing inferred by reasoning need neither have been an habitual
associate of the datum from which we infer it, nor need it be similar
to it. It may be a thing entirely unknown to our previous experience,
something which no simple association of concretes could ever have
evoked. The great difference, in fact, between that simpler kind of
rational thinking which consists in the concrete objects of past
experience merely suggesting each other, and reasoning distinctively
so called, is this, that whilst the empirical thinking is only
reproductive, reasoning is productive. An empirical, or 'rule-of-
thumb,' thinker can deduce nothing from data with whose behavior
and associates in the concrete he is unfamiliar. But put a reasoner
amongst a set of concrete objects which he has neither seen nor
heard of before, and with a little time, if he is a good reasoner, he
will make such inferences from them as will quite atone for his
ignorance. Reasoning helps us out of unprecedented situations—
situations for which all our common associative wisdom, all the
'education' which we share in common with the beasts, leaves us
without resource.

Let us make this ability to deal with novel data the technical
differentia of reasoning. This will sufficiently mark it out from
common associative thinking, and will immediately enable us to say
just what peculiarity it contains.
It contains analysis and abstraction. Whereas the merely empirical
thinker stares at a fact in its entirety, and remains helpless, or gets
'stuck,' if it suggests no concomitant or similar, the reasoner breaks
it up and notices some one of its separate attributes. This attribute
he takes to be the essential part of the whole fact before him. This
attribute has properties or consequences which the fact until then
was not known to have, but which, now that it is noticed to contain
the attribute, it must have.
Call the fact or concrete datum S;
the essential attribute M;
the attribute's property P.
Then the reasoned inference of P from S cannot be made without
M's intermediation. The 'essence' M is thus that third or middle term
in the reasoning which a moment ago was pronounced essential. For
his original concrete S the reasoner substitutes its abstract property,
M. What is true of M, what is coupled with M, then holds true of S, is
coupled with S. As M is properly one of the parts of the entire S,
reasoning may then be very well defined as the substitution of parts
and their implications or consequences for wholes. And the art of the
reasoner will consist of two stages:
First, sagacity,[325] or the ability to discover what part, M, lies
embedded in the whole S which is before him;
Second, learning, or the ability to recall promptly M's consequences,
concomitants, or implications.[326]
If we glance at the ordinary syllogism—
M is P;
S is M;
Therefore S is P
—we see that the second or minor premise, the 'subsumption' as it
is sometimes called, is the one requiring the sagacity; the first or
major the one requiring the fertility, or fulness of learning. Usually
the learning is more apt to be ready than the sagacity, the ability to
seize fresh aspects in concrete things, being rarer than the ability to
learn old rules; so that, in most actual cases of reasoning, the minor
premise, or the way of conceiving the subject, is the one that makes
the novel step in thought. This is, to be sure, not always the case;
for the fact that M carries P with it may also be unfamiliar and now
formulated for the first time.
The perception that S is M is a mode of conceiving S. The statement
that M is P is an abstract or general proposition. A word about both
is necessary.

WHAT IS MEANT BY A MODE OF CONCEIVING.

When we conceive of S merely as M (of vermilion merely as a

mercury-compound, for example), we neglect all the other attributes
which it may have, and attend exclusively to this one. We mutilate
the fulness of S's reality. Every reality has an infinity of aspects or
properties. Even so simple a fact as a line which you trace in the air
may be considered in respect to its form, its length, its direction, and
its location. When we reach more complex facts, the number of
ways in which we may regard them is literally endless. Vermilion is
not only a mercury-compound, it is vividly red, heavy, and
expensive, it comes from China, and so on, in infinitum. All objects
are well-springs of properties, which are only little by little developed
to our knowledge, and it is truly said that to know one thing
thoroughly would be to know the whole universe. Mediately or
immediately, that one thing is related to everything else; and to
know all about it, all its relations need be known. But each relation
forms one of its attributes, one angle by which some one may
conceive it, and while so conceiving it may ignore the rest of it. A
man is such a complex fact. But out of the complexity all that an
army commissary picks out as important for his purposes is his
property of eating so many pounds a day; the general, of marching
so many miles; the chair-maker, of having such a shape; the orator,
of responding to such and such feelings; the theatre-manager, of
being willing to pay just such a price, and no more, for an evening's
amusement. Each of these persons singles out the particular side of
the entire man which has a bearing on his concerns, and not till this
side is distinctly and separately conceived can the proper practical
conclusions for that reasoner be drawn; and when they are drawn
the man's other attributes may be ignored.
All ways of conceiving a concrete fact, if they are true ways at all,
are equally true ways. There is no property absolutely essential to
any one thing. The same property which figures as the essence of a
thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential feature upon
another. Now that I am writing, it is essential that I conceive my
paper as a surface for inscription. If I failed to do that, I should have
to stop my work. But if I wished to light a fire, and no other
materials were by, the essential way of conceiving the paper would
be as combustible material; and I need then have no thought of any
of its other destinations. It is really all that it is: a combustible, a
writing surface, a thin thing, a hydrocarbonaceous thing, a thing
eight inches one way and ten another, a thing just one furlong east
of a certain stone in my neighbor's field, an American thing, etc.,
etc., ad infinitum. Whichever one of these aspects of its being I
temporarily class it under, makes me unjust to the other aspects. But
as I always am classing it under one aspect or another, I am always
unjust, always partial, always exclusive. My excuse is necessity—the
necessity which my finite and practical nature lays upon me. My
thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I
can only do one thing at a time. A God, who is supposed to drive the
whole universe abreast, may also be supposed, without detriment to
his activity, to see all parts of it at once and without emphasis. But
were our human attention so to disperse itself we should simply
stare vacantly at things at large and forfeit our opportunity of doing
any particular act. Mr. Warner, in his Adirondack story, shot a bear by
aiming, not at his eye or heart, but 'at him generally.' But we cannot
aim 'generally' at the universe; or if we do, we miss our game. Our
scope is narrow, and we must attack things piecemeal, ignoring the
solid fulness in which the elements of Nature exist, and stringing one
after another of them together in a serial way, to suit our little
interests as they change from hour to hour. In this, the partiality of
one moment is partly atoned for by the different sort of partiality of
the next. To me now, writing these words, emphasis and selection
seem to be the essence of the human mind. In other chapters other
qualities have seemed, and will again seem, more important parts of
psychology.
Men are so ingrainedly partial that, for common-sense and
scholasticism (which is only common-sense grown articulate), the
notion that there is no one quality genuinely, absolutely, and
exclusively essential to anything is almost unthinkable. "A thing's
essence makes it what it is. Without an exclusive essence it would
be nothing in particular, would be quite nameless, we could not say
it was this rather than that. What you write on, for example,—why
talk of its being combustible, rectangular, and the like, when you
know that these are mere accidents, and that what it really is, and
was made to be, is just paper and nothing else?" The reader is
pretty sure to make some such comment as this. But he is himself
merely insisting on an aspect of the thing which suits his own petty
purpose, that of naming the thing; or else on an aspect which suits
the manufacturer's purpose, that of producing an article for which
there is a vulgar demand. Meanwhile the reality overflows these
purposes at every pore. Our usual purpose with it, our commonest
title for it, and the properties which this title suggests, have in reality
nothing sacramental. They characterize us more than they
characterize the thing. But we are so stuck in our prejudices, so
petrified intellectually, that to our vulgarest names, with their
suggestions, we ascribe an eternal and exclusive worth. The thing
must be, essentially, what the vulgarest name connotes; what less
usual names connote, it can be only in an 'accidental' and relatively
unreal sense.[327]
Locke undermined the fallacy. But none of his successors, so far as I
know, have radically escaped it, or seen that the only meaning of
essence is teleological, and that classification and conception are
purely teleological weapons of the mind. The essence of a thing is
that one of its properties which is so important for my interests that
in comparison with it I may neglect the rest. Amongst those other
things which have this important property I class it, after this
property I name it, as a thing endowed with this property I conceive
it; and whilst so classing, naming, and conceiving it, all other truths
about it become to me as naught.[328] The properties which are
important vary from man to man and from hour to hour.[329] Hence
divers appellations and conceptions for the same thing. But many
objects of daily use—as paper, ink, butter, horse-car—have
properties of such constant unwavering importance, and have such
stereotyped names, that we end by believing that to conceive them
in those ways is to conceive them in the only true way. Those are no
truer ways of conceiving them than any others; they are only more
important ways, more frequently serviceable ways.[330]
So much for what is implied, when the reasoner conceives of the
fact S before him as a case of which the essence is to be M. One
word now as to what is involved in M's having properties,
consequences, or implications, and we can go back to the study of
the reasoning process again.

WHAT IS INVOLVED IN GENERAL PROPOSITIONS.

M is not a concrete, or 'self-sufficient,' as Mr. Clay would say. It is an
abstract character which may exist, embedded with other characters,
in many concretes. Whether it be the character of being a writing
surface, of being made in America or China, of being eight inches
square, or of being in a certain part of space, this is always true of
it. Now we might conceive of this being a world in which all such
general characters were independent of each other, so that if any
one of them were found in a subject S, we never could be sure what
others would be found alongside of it. On one occasion there might
be P with M, on another Q, and so on. In such a world there would
be no general sequences or coexistences, and no universal laws.
Each grouping would be sui generis; from the experience of the past
no future could be predicted; and reasoning, as we shall presently
see, would be an impossibility.
But the world we live in is not one of this sort. Though many general
characters seem indifferent to each other, there remain a number of
them which affect constant habits of mutual concomitance or
repugnance. They involve or imply each other. One of them is a sign
to us that the other will be found. They hunt in couples, as it were;
and such a proposition as that M is P, or includes P, or precedes or
accompanies P, if it prove to be true in one instance, may very likely
be true in every other instance which we meet. This is, in fact, a
world in which general laws obtain, in which universal propositions
are true, and in which reasoning is therefore possible. Fortunately
for us: for since we cannot handle things as wholes, but only by
conceiving them through some general character which for the time
we call their essence, it would be a great pity if the matter ended
there, and if the general character, once picked out and in our
possession, helped us to no farther advance. In Chapter XXVIII we
shall have again to consider this harmony between our reasoning
faculty and the world in which its lot is cast.[331]
To revert now to our symbolic representation of the reasoning
process:
 M is P
S is M
———
S is P
M is discerned and picked out for the time being to be the essence
of the concrete fact, phenomenon, or reality, S. But M in this world
of ours is inevitably conjoined with P; so that P is the next thing that
we may expect to find conjoined with the fact S. We may conclude
or infer P, through the intermediation of the M which our sagacity
began by discerning, when S came before it, to be the essence of
the case.
Now note that if P have any value or importance for us, M was a
very good character for our sagacity to pounce upon and abstract. If,
on the contrary, P were of no importance, some other character than
M would have been a better essence for us to conceive of S by.
Psychologically, as a rule, P overshadows the process from the start.
We are seeking P, or something like P. But the bare totality of S does
not yield it to our gaze; and casting about for some point in S to
take hold of, which will lead us to P, we hit, if we are sagacious,
upon M, because M happens to be just the character which is knit up
with P. Had we wished Q instead of P, and were N a property of S
conjoined with Q, we ought to have ignored M, noticed N, and
conceived of S as a sort of N exclusively.
Reasoning is always for a subjective interest, to attain some
particular conclusion, or to gratify some special curiosity. It not only
breaks up the datum placed before it and conceives it abstractly; it
must conceive it rightly too; and conceiving it rightly means
conceiving it by that one particular abstract character which leads to
the one sort of conclusion which it is the reasoner's temporary
interest to attain.[332]
The results of reasoning may be hit upon by accident, The
stereoscope was actually a result of reasoning; it is conceivable,
however, that a man playing with pictures and mirrors might
accidentally have hit upon it. Cats have been known to open doors
by pulling latches, etc. But no cat, if the latch got out of order, could
open the door again, unless some new accident of random fumbling
taught her to associate some new total movement with the total
phenomenon of the closed door. A reasoning man, however, would
open the door by first analyzing the hindrance. He would ascertain
what particular feature of the door was wrong. The lever, e.g., does
not raise the latch sufficiently from its slot—case of insufficient
elevation—raise door bodily on hinges! Or door sticks at top by
friction against lintel—press it bodily down! Now it is obvious that a
child or an idiot might without this reasoning learn the rule for
opening that particular door. I remember a clock which the maid-
servant had discovered would not go unless it were supported so as
to tilt slightly forwards. She had stumbled on this method after many
weeks of groping. The reason of the stoppage was the friction of the
pendulum-bob against the back of the clock-case, a reason which an
educated man would have analyzed out in five minutes. I have a
student's lamp of which the flame vibrates most unpleasantly unless
the collar which bears the chimney be raised about a sixteenth of an
inch. I learned the remedy after much torment by accident, and now
always keep the collar up with a small wedge. But my procedure is a
mere association of two totals, diseased object and remedy. One
learned in pneumatics could have named the cause of the disease,
and thence inferred the remedy immediately. By many
measurements of triangles one might find their area always equal to
their height multiplied by half their base, and one might formulate
an empirical law to that effect. But a reasoner saves himself all this
trouble by seeing that it is the essence (pro hac vice) of a triangle to
be the half of a parallelogram whose area is the height into the
entire base. To see this he must invent additional lines; and the
geometer must often draw such to get at the essential property he
may require in a figure. The essence consists in some relation of the
figure to the new lines, a relation not obvious at all until they are put
in. The geometer's sagacity lies in the invention of the new lines.

THUS, THERE ARE TWO GREAT POINTS IN REASONING:

First, an extracted character is taken as equivalent to the entire
datum from which it comes; and,
Second, the character thus taken suggests a certain consequence
more obviously than it was suggested by the total datum as it
originally came. Take them again, successively.

1. Suppose I say, when offered a piece of cloth, "I won't buy that; it
looks as if it would fade," meaning merely that something about it
suggests the idea of fading to my mind,—my judgment, though
possibly correct, is not reasoned, but purely empirical; but, if I can
say that into the color there enters a certain dye which I know to be
chemically unstable, and that therefore the color will fade, my
judgment is reasoned. The notion of the dye which is one of the
parts of the cloth, is the connecting link between the latter and the
notion of fading. So, again, an uneducated man will expect from
past experience to see a piece of ice melt if placed near the fire, and
the tip of his finger look coarse if he views it through a convex glass.
In neither of these cases could the result be anticipated without full
previous acquaintance with the entire phenomenon. It is not a result
of reasoning.
But a man who should conceive heat as a mode of motion, and
liquefaction as identical with increased motion of molecules; who
should know that curved surfaces bend light-rays in special ways,
and that the apparent size of anything is connected with the amount
of the 'bend' of its light-rays as they enter the eye,—such a man
would make the right inferences for all these objects, even though
he had never in his life had any concrete experience of them; and he
would do this because the ideas which we have above supposed him
to possess would mediate in his mind between the phenomena he
starts with and the conclusions he draws. But these ideas or reasons
for his conclusions are all mere extracted portions or circumstances
singled out from the mass of characters which make up the entire
phenomena. The motions which form heat, the bending of the light-
waves, are, it is true, excessively recondite ingredients; the hidden
pendulum I spoke of above is less so; and the sticking of a door on
its sill in the earlier example would hardly be so at all. But each and
all agree in this, that they bear a more evident relation to the
conclusion than did the immediate data in their full totality.
The difficulty is, in each case, to extract from the immediate data
that particular ingredient which shall have this very evident relation
to the conclusion. Every phenomenon or so-called 'fact' has an
infinity of aspects or properties, as we have seen, amongst which
the fool, or man with little sagacity, will inevitably go astray. But no
matter for this point now. The first thing is to have seen that every
possible case of reasoning involves the extraction of a particular
partial aspect of the phenomena thought about, and that whilst
Empirical Thought simply associates phenomena in their entirety,
Reasoned Thought couples them by the conscious use of this
extract.

2. And, now, to prove the second point: Why are the couplings,
consequences, and implications of extracts more evident and
obvious than those of entire phenomena? For two reasons.
First, the extracted characters are more general than the concretes,
and the connections they may have are, therefore, more familiar to
us, having been more often met in our experience. Think of heat as
motion, and whatever is true of motion will be true of heat; but we
have had a hundred experiences of motion for every one of heat.
Think of the rays passing through this lens as bending towards the
perpendicular, and you substitute for the comparatively unfamiliar
lens the very familiar notion of a particular change in direction of a
line, of which notion every day brings us countless examples.
The other reason why the relations of the extracted characters are
so evident is that their properties are so few, compared with the
properties of the whole, from which we derived them. In every
concrete total the characters and their consequences are so
inexhaustibly numerous that we may lose our way among them
before noticing the particular consequence it behooves us to draw.
But, if we are lucky enough to single out the proper character, we
take in, as it were, by a single glance all its possible consequences.
Thus the character of scraping the sill has very few suggestions,
prominent among which is the suggestion that the scraping will
cease if we raise the door; whilst the entire refractory door suggests
an enormous number of notions to the mind.
Take another example. I am sitting in a railroad-car, waiting for the
train to start. It is winter, and the stove fills the car with pungent
smoke. The brakeman enters, and my neighbor asks him to "stop
that stove smoking." He replies that it will stop entirely as soon as
the car begins to move. "Why so?" asks the passenger. "It always
does," replies the brakeman. It is evident from this 'always' that the
connection between car moving and smoke stopping was a purely
empirical one in the brakeman's mind, bred of habit. But, if the
passenger had been an acute reasoner, he, with no experience of
what that stove always did, might have anticipated the brakeman's
reply, and spared his own question. Had he singled out of all the
numerous points involved in a stove's not smoking the one special
point of smoke pouring freely out of the stove-pipe's mouth, he
would, probably, owing to the few associations of that idea, have
been immediately reminded of the law that a fluid passes more
rapidly out of a pipe's mouth if another fluid be at the same time
streaming over that mouth; and then the rapid draught of air over
the stove-pipe's mouth, which is one of the points involved in the
car's motion, would immediately have occurred to him.
Thus a couple of extracted characters, with a couple of their few and
obvious connections, would have formed the reasoned link in the
passenger's mind between the phenomena, smoke stopping and car
moving, which were only linked as wholes in the brakeman's mind.
Such examples may seem trivial, but they contain the essence of the
most refined and transcendental theorizing. The reason why physics
grows more deductive the more the fundamental properties it
assumes are of a mathematical sort, such as molecular mass or
wave-length, is that the immediate consequences of these notions
are so few that we can survey them all at once, and promptly pick
out those which concern us.

Sagacity; or the Perception of the Essence.

To reason, then, we must be able to extract characters,—not any

characters, but the right characters for our conclusion. If we extract
the wrong character, it will not lead to that conclusion. Here, then, is
the difficulty: How are characters extracted, and why does it require
the advent of a genius in many cases before the fitting character is
brought to light? Why cannot anybody reason as well as anybody
else? Why does it need a Newton to notice the law of the squares, a
Darwin to notice the survival of the fittest? To answer these
questions we must begin a new research, and see how our insight
into facts naturally grows.
All our knowledge at first is vague. When we say that a thing is
vague, we mean that it has no subdivisions ab intra, nor precise
limitations ab extra; but still all the forms of thought may apply to it.
It may have unity, reality, externality, extent, and what not—
thinghood, in a word, but thinghood only as a whole.[333] In this
vague way, probably, does the room appear to the babe who first
begins to be conscious of it as something other than his moving
nurse. It has no subdivisions in his mind, unless, perhaps, the
window is able to attract his separate notice. In this vague way,
certainly, does every entirely new experience appear to the adult. A
library, a museum, a machine-shop, are mere confused wholes to
the uninstructed, but the machinist, the antiquary, and the
bookworm perhaps hardly notice the whole at all, so eager are they
to pounce upon the details. Familiarity has in them bred
discrimination. Such vague terms as 'grass,' 'mould,' and 'meat' do
not exist for the botanist or the anatomist. They know too much
about grasses, moulds, and muscles. A certain person said to
Charles Kingsley, who was showing him the dissection of a
caterpillar, with its exquisite viscera, "Why, I thought it was nothing
but skin and squash!" A layman present at a shipwreck, a battle, or
a fire is helpless. Discrimination has been so little awakened in him
by experience that his consciousness leaves no single point of the
complex situation accented and standing out for him to begin to act
upon. But the sailor, the fireman, and the general know directly at
what corner to take up the business. They 'see into the situation'—
that is, they analyze it—with their first glance. It is full of delicately
differenced ingredients which their education has little by little
brought to their consciousness, but of which the novice gains no
clear idea.
How this power of analysis was brought about we saw in our
chapters on Discrimination and Attention. We dissociate the
elements of originally vague totals by attending to them or noticing
them alternately, of course. But what determines which element we
shall attend to first? There are two immediate and obvious answers:
first, our practical or instinctive interests; and, second, our æsthetic
interests. The dog singles out of any situation its smells, and the
horse its sounds, because they may reveal facts of practical moment,
and are instinctively exciting to these several creatures. The infant
notices the candle-flame or the window, and ignores the rest of the
room, because those objects give him a vivid pleasure. So, the
country boy dissociates the blackberry, the chestnut, and the
wintergreen, from the vague mass of other shrubs and trees, for
their practical uses, and the savage is delighted with the beads, the
bits of looking-glass, brought by an exploring vessel, and gives no
heed to the features of the vessel itself, which is too much beyond
his sphere. These æsthetic and practical interests, then, are the
weightiest factors in making particular ingredients stand out in high
relief. What they lay their accent on, that we notice; but what they
are in themselves, we cannot say. We must content ourselves here
with simply accepting them as irreducible ultimate factors in
determining the way our knowledge grows.
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