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Primordial

facts of mind.

We are now at the end of our analysis, and the results | (2) the motor or active state, where feeling precedes the act
may perhaps be most conveniently summarized by first of attention, which is thus determined voluntarily.
throwing them into a tabular form and then appending a
few remarks by way of indicating the main purport of the
table. Taking no account of the specific difference between
one concrete state of mind and another, and supposing that
we are dealing with presentations in their simplest form,
i.e., as sensations and movements, we have :—

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and (3) by voluntary
attention or "inner-
vation producing
changes in the motor-
continuum.1
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Of the three phases, thus logically distinguishable, the first
and the third correspond in the main with the receptive
and active states or powers of the older psychologists.
The second phase, being more difficult to isolate, was long
overlooked; or, at all events, its essential characteristics
were not distinctly marked: it was either confounded with
(1), which is its cause, or with (3), its effect. But per-
haps the most important of all psychological distinctions
is that which traverses both the old bipartite and the
prevailing tripartite classification, viz., that between the
subject, on the one hand, as acting and feeling, and the
objects of this activity on the other. Such distinction
lurks indeed under such terms as faculty, power, conscious-
ness, but they tend to keep it out of sight. With this
distinction clearly before us-instead of crediting the sub-
ject with an indefinite number of faculties or capacities,
we must seek to explain not only reproduction, association,
agreement, difference, &c., but all varieties of thinking and
acting by the laws pertaining to ideas or presentations,
leaving to the subject only the one power of variously
distributing that attention upon which the intensity of a
presentation in part depends. Of this single subjective
activity what we call activity in the narrower sense (as,
e.g., purposive movement and intellection) is but a special
case, although a very important one.

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To say that feeling and attention are not presentations will seem
to many an extravagant paradox. If all knowledge consists of
presentations, it will be said, how come we to know anything of
feeling and attention if they are not presented? We know of them
indirectly through their effects, not directly in themselves. This
is, perhaps, but a more concrete statement of what philosophers
have very widely acknowledged in a more abstract form since the
days of Kant-the impossibility of the subjective qua subjective
being presented. It is in the main clearly put in the following
passage from Hamilton, who, however, has not had the strength
of his convictions in all cases :-"The peculiarity of feeling,
therefore, is that there is nothing but what is subjectively sub-
jective; there is no object different from self,- -no objectification
of any
mode of self. We are, indeed, able to constitute our states
of pain and pleasure into objects of reflexion, but, in so far as they
are objects of reflexion, they are not feelings but only reflex cogni-
tions of feelings." 3 But this last sentence is not, perhaps, alto-
gether satisfactory. The meaning seems to be that feeling "can
only be studied through its reminiscence," which is what Hamilton
has said elsewhere of the "phænomena of consciousness" generally.
But this is a position hard to reconcile with the other, viz., that
feeling and cognition are generically distinct. How can that which
was not originally a cognition become such by being reproduced?
The statements that feeling is "subjectively subjective," that in it
"there is no object different from self," are surely tantamount to
saying that it is not presented; and what is not presented cannot,
of course, be re-presented. Instead, therefore, of the position that
feeling and attention are known by being made objects of reflexion,
effects, by the changes, .e., which they produce in the character
it would seem we can only maintain that we know of them by their
and succession of our presentations. We ought also to bear in
mind that the effects of attention and feeling cannot be known
without attention and feeling: to whatever stage we advance, there-
fore, we have always in any given "state of mind" attention and
feeling on the one side, and on the other a presentation of objects.
Attention and feeling seem thus to be ever present, and not to
admit of the continuous differentiation into parts which gives to
presentations a certain individuality, and makes their association
and reproduction possible.

According to this view, then, presentations, attention, feeling, are not to be regarded as three co-ordinate genera, each a distinguishable "state of mind or consciousness,' i.e., as being all alike included under this one supreme category. There is, as Berkeley long ago urged, no resemblance between activity and an idea; nor is it easy to see anything common to pure feeling and an idea, unless it be that both possess intensity. Classification seems, in fact, to be here out of place. Instead, therefore, of the one summum genus, state of mind or consciousness, with its three co-ordinate subdivisions-cognition, emotion, conation-our analysis seems to lead us to recognize three distinct and irreducible facts-attention, feeling, and objects or presentations-as together, in a certain connexion, constituting one concrete state of mind or psychosis. Of such concrete states of mind we may then say there are two forms, more or less distinct, corresponding to the two ways in which attention may be determined and the two classes of objects attended to in each, viz., (1) the sensory or receptive state, when attention is non-voluntarily determined, i.e., where feeling follows the act of attention; and

1 To cover more complex cases, we might here add the words trains of ideas."

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or

Theory of Presentations.

Having now ascertained what seem to be the essential elements in any state of mind, we may next proceed to examine these several elements separately in more detail. It will be best to begin with that which is both the clearest in itself and helps us the most to understand the rest, viz., the objects of attention or consciousness, i.e., presentations. And this exposition will be simplified if we start with a supposition that will enable us to leave aside, at least for the present, the difficult question of heredity.

psycho

We know that in the course of each individual's life Assumpthere is more or less of progressive differentiation or tion of a development; we know too that the same holds broadly Pogical of a race; and it is believed to hold in like manner of the indievolution of the animal kingdom generally. It is believed vidual. that there has existed a series of sentient individuals beginning with the lowest form of life and advancing continuously up to man. Some traces of the advance already made may be reproduced in the growth of each human being now, but for the most part such traces have been obliterated. What was experience in the past has become instinct in the present. The descendant has no consciousness of his ancestors' failures when performing by "an 2 Compare "Gefühle der Lust und Unlust und der Wille. gar nicht Erkenntnisse sind" (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Hartenstein's ed., p. 76).

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Lectures on Metaphysics, ii. p. 432.

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But, while we cannot say that we know what attention and feeling
propriety maintain that we are ignorant of them, inasmuch as they
are, inasmuch as they are not presented, neither can we with any
are by their very nature unpresentable. As Ferrier contends,
can be ignorant only of what can possibly be known; in other words,
there can be ignorance only of that of which there can be knowledge
(Institutes of Metaphysics, § II., Agnoiology, prop. iii. sq.). The
antithesis between the objective and the subjective factors in presenta-
tion is wider than that between knowledge and ignorance, which is an
antithesis pertaining to the objective side alone.

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untaught ability" what they slowly and painfully found out. But if we are to attempt to follow the genesis of mind from its earliest dawn it is the primary experience rather than the eventual instinct that we have first of all to keep in view. To this end, then, it is proposed to assume that we are dealing with one individual which has continuously advanced from the beginning of psychical life, and not with a series of individuals of which all save the first have inherited certain capacities from its progenitors. The life-history of such an imaginary individual, that is to say, would correspond with all that was new, all that could be called evolution or development, in a certain typical series of individuals each of whom advanced a certain stage in mental differentiation. On the other hand, from this history would be omitted that inherited reproduction of ancestral experience, or tendency to its reproduction, by which alone, under the actual conditions of existence, progress is possible.

sent altogether. The worm is aware only of the difference
between light and dark. The steel-worker sees half a
dozen tints where others see only a uniform glow. To
the child, it is said, all faces are alike; and throughout
life we are apt to note the general, the points of resem-
blance, before the special, the points of difference.1 But,
even when most definite, what we call a presentation is
still part of a larger whole. It is not separated from other
presentations, whether simultaneous or successive, by some-
thing which is not of the nature of presentation, as one
island is separated from another by the intervening sea, or
one note in a melody from the next by an interval of
silence. In our search for a theory of presentations, then,
it is from this "unity of consciousness" that we must take
our start. Working backwards from this as we find it
now, we are led alike by particular facts and general con-
siderations to the conception of a totum objectivum or
objective continuum which is gradually differentiated,
thereby becoming what we call distinct presentations, just
as with mental growth some particular presentation, clear
as a whole, as Leibnitz would say, becomes a complex
of distinguishable parts. Of the very beginning of this
continuum we can say nothing: absolute beginnings are
beyond the pale of science. Actual presentation consists
in this continuum being differentiated; and every dif-
ferentiation constitutes a new presentation. Hence the
commonplace of psychologists :- We are only conscious as
we are conscious of change.

If an assumption of this kind had been explicitly avowed by the psychologists who have discussed the growth of experience in accordance with the evolution hypothesis, not a few of the difficulties in the way of that hypothesis might have been removed. That individual minds make some advance in the complexity and distinctness of their presentations between birth and maturity is an obvious fact; heredity, though a less obvious fact, is also beyond question. Using Locke's analogy of a writing-tablet-or let us say an etching-tablet-by way of illustration, we may be sure that every individual started with some features of the picture completely preformed, however latent, others more or less clearly outlined, and others again barely indicated, while of others there is as yet absolutely no trace. But the process of reproducing the old might differ as widely from that of producing the new as electrotyping does from engraving. However, as psychologists we know nothing directly about it; neither can we distinguish precisely at any link in the chain of life what is old and inherited-original in the sense of Locke and Leibnitz-from what is new or acquired -original in the modern sense. But we are bound as a matter of method to suppose all complexity and differentiation among presentations to have been originated, i.e., experimentally acquired, at some time or other. So long, then, as we are concerned primarily with the progress of this differentiation we may disregard the fact that it has not actually been, as it were, the product of one hand dealing with one tabula rasa but of many hands, each of which, starting with a reproduction of what had been wrought on the preceding tabulæ, put in more or fewer new touches before devising the whole to a successor who would proceed in like manner.

The pre

tion-con

tingum.

tiation of

But "change of consciousness" is too loose an expression Gradual to take the place of the unwieldy phrase differentiation differenof a presentation-continuum, to which we have been driven. presentaFor not only does the term "consciousness" confuse what tion-conexactness requires us to keep distinct, an activity and its tinuum. object, but also the term "change" fails to express the characteristics which distinguish presentations from other changes. Differentiation implies that the simple becomes complex or the complex more complex; it implies also that this increased complexity is due to the persistence of former changes; we may even say such persistence is essential to the very idea of development or growth. In trying, then, to conceive our psychological individual in the earliest stages of development we must not picture it as experiencing a succession of absolutely new sensations, which, coming out of nothingness, admit of being strung upon the "thread of consciousness" like beads picked up at random, or cemented into a mass like the bits of stick and sand with which the young caddis covers its nakedness. The notion, which Kant has done much to encourage, that psychical life begins with a confused manifold of sensations not only without logical but without psychological unity is one that becomes more inconceivable the more closely we consider it. An absolutely new presentation, having no sort of connexion with former presentations till the subject has synthesized it with them, is a conception for which it would be hard to find a warrant either by direct observation, by inference from biology, or in considerations of an a priori kind. At any given moment we have a certain whole of presentations, a "field of consciousness" psychologically one and continuous; at the next we have not an entirely new field but a partial change within this field. Many who would allow this in the case of representations, i.e., where idea succeeds idea by the workings of association, would demur to it in the case of primary presentations or sensations. "For," they would say, 'may not silence be broken by a clap of thunder, and have not the blind been made to see ?" To

What is implied in this process of differentiation or mental growth and what is it that grows or becomes differentiated these are the questions to which we must now attend. Psychologists have usually represented mental advance as consisting fundamentally in the combination and recombination of various elementary units, the so-called sensations and primitive movements, or, in other words, in a species of "mental chemistry." If we are to resort to physical analogies at all-a matter of very doubtful propriety-we shall find in the growth of a seed or an embryo far better illustrations of the unfolding of the contents of consciousness than in the building up of molecules: the process seems much more a segmentation of what is originally continuous than an aggregation of elements at first independent and distinct. Comparing higher minds or stages of mental development with lower-by what means such comparison is possible we need not now consider-parison of several objects; but that absence or confusion of differences we find in the higher conspicuous differences between pre- which hides the many is really very different from the detection of sentations which in the lower are indistinguishable or ab- resemblances which makes the many one.

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1 This last statement is apt to mislead by implying an active com

urge such objections is to miss the drift of our discussion, | gination is no exception, as is shown by the whirl and
and to answer them may serve to make it clearer. Where confusion of ideas incident to delirium, and, indeed, to all
silence can be broken there are representations of preced-
ing sounds and in all probability even subjective pre-
sentations of sound as well; silence as experienced by one
who has heard is very different from the silence of Con-
dillac's statue before it had ever heard. The question is
rather whether such a conception as that of Condillac's is
possible; supposing a sound to be, qualitatively, entirely
distinct from a smell, could a field of consciousness consist-
ing of smells be followed at once by one in which sounds
had part? And, as regards the blind coming to see, we
must remember not only that the blind have eyes but that
they are descended from ancestors who could see. What
nascent presentations of sight are thus involved it would
be hard to say; and the problem of heredity is one that
we have for the present left aside.

Diffusion

and restriction.

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The view here taken is (1) that at its first appearance in psychical life a new sensation or so-called elementary presentation is really a partial modification of some preexisting presentation, which thereby becomes as a whole more complex than it was before; and (2) that this complexity and differentiation of parts never become a plurality of discontinuous presentations, having a distinctness and individuality such as the atoms or elementary particles of the physical world are supposed to have. Beginners in psychology, and some who are not beginners, are apt to be led astray by expositions which begin with the sensations of the special senses, as if these furnished us with the type of an elementary presentation. The fact is we never experience a mere sensation of colour, sound, touch, and the like; and what the young student mistakes for such is really a perception, a sensory presentation combined with various sensory and motor presentations and with representations-and having thus a definiteness and completeness only possible to complex presentations. Moreover, if we could attend to a pure sensation of sound or colour by itself, there is much to justify the suspicion that even this is complex and not simple, and owes to such complexity its clearly marked specific quality. In certain of our vaguest and most diffused organic sensations, in which we can distinguish little besides variations in intensity and massiveness, there is probably a much nearer approach to the character of the really primitive presentations.

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strong excitement. But this "diffusion" or "radiation,"
as it has been called, diminishes as we pass from the class
of organic sensations to the sensations of the five senses,
from movements expressive of feeling to movements de-
finitely purposive, and from the tumult of ideas excited by
passion to the steadier sequences determined by efforts to
think. Increased differentiation seems, then, to be inti-
mately connected with increased "restriction." The causal
relations of the two must be largely matter of conjecture
and cannot be fully discussed here. Probably there may
be found certain initial differentiations which for psycho-
logy are ultimate facts that it cannot explain. But, such
differentiations being given, then it may be safely said
that, in accordance with what we have called the principle
of subjective selection (see p. 42), attention would be
voluntarily concentrated upon some of them and voluntary
movements specially connected with these. To such
subjectively initiated modifications of the presentation-
continuum, moreover, we may reasonably suppose "re-
striction to be in large measure due. But increased
restriction would render further differentiation of the
given presentation possible and so the two processes
might supplement each other. But, be their interaction
what it may, these processes have now proceeded so far
that at the level of human consciousness we find it hard
to form any tolerably clear conception of a field of con-
sciousness in which an intense sensation, no matter what,
might diffuse over the whole. Colours, e.g., are with us
so distinct from sounds that-except as regards the drain
upon attention there is nothing in the intensest colour
to affect the simultaneous presentation of a sound. But
at the beginning whatever we regard as the earliest differ-
entiation of sound might have been incopresentable with
the earliest differentiation of colour, if sufficiently diffused,
just as now a field of sight all blue is incopresentable with
one all red. Or, if the stimuli appropriate to both were
active together, the resulting sensation might have been
what we should describe as a blending of the two, as
purple is a blending of red and violet. Now, on the other
hand, colours and sounds are necessarily so far localized
that we are directly aware that the eye is concerned with
the one and the ear with the other. This brings to our Inco-
notice a fact so ridiculously obvious that it has never been present-
deemed worthy of mention, and yet it has undeniably im-
portant bearings-the fact, viz., that certain sensations or
movements are an absolute bar to the simultaneous pre-
sentation of other sensations or movements. We cannot
see an orange as at once yellow and green, though we can
feel it at once as both smooth and cold; we cannot open
and close the same hand at the same moment, but we can
open one hand while closing the other. Such incopresent-
ability or contrariety is thus more than mere difference,
and occurs only between presentations belonging to the
same sense or to the same group of movements. Strictly
speaking, it does not always occur even then; for red and
yellow, hot and cold, are presentable together provided
they have certain other differences which we shall meet
again presently as differences of local sign.

The importance of getting a firm grasp of this conception of a presentation-continuum as fundamental to the whole doctrine of presentations will justify us in ignoring a little longer the details of actual mental development and regarding it first from this more general point of view. In a given sensation, more particularly in our organic sensations, we can distinguish three variations, viz., variations of quality, of intensity, and of what Dr Bain has called massiveness, or, as we will say, extensity. This last characteristic, which everybody knows who knows the difference between the ache of a big bruise and the ache of a little one, between total and partial immersion in a bath, is, as we shall see later on, an essential element in our perception of space. But it is certainly not the whole of it, for in this experience of massive sensation alone it is impossible to find other elements which an analysis of spatial intuition unmistakably yields. Extensity and extension, then, are not to be confounded. Now we find, even at our level of mental evolution, that an increase in the intensity of a sensation is apt to entail an increase in its extensity too; this is still more apparent in the case of movements, and especially in the movements of the young. In like manner we observe a greater extent of movement in emotional expression when the intensity of the emotion increases. Even the higher region of ima

ability.

In the preceding paragraphs we have had occasion to Retendistinguish between the presentation-continuum or whole tiveness. field of consciousness, as we may for the present call it, and those several modifications within this field which are ordinarily spoken of as presentations, and to which—now that their true character as parts is clear-we too may confine the term. But it will be well in the next place, before inquiring more closely into their characteristics, to consider for a moment that persistence of preceding modifications which the differentiation of the presentation

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verified, that we do not distinguish or attend separately to presentations of less than a certain assignable intensity. On attaining this intensity presentations are said to pass over the threshold of consciousness, to use Herbart's now classic phrase. What are we to say of them before they have attained it? After they have attained it, any further increase in their intensity is certainly gradual; are we then to suppose that before this their intensity changed instantly from zero to a finite quantity, and not rather that there was also a subliminal stage where too it only changed continuously? The latter alternative constitutes the hypothesis of subconsciousness. According to this hypothesis, a presentation does not cease to be so long as it has any intensity, no matter how little. We can directly observe that an increase in the intensity of many complex presentations brings to light details and differences before imperceptible; since these details are themselves presentations, they have been brought by this increase from the subconscious stage into the field of consciousness. Similarly, presentations not separately distinguishable, because of too close a proximity in time, become distinguishable when the interval between them is such as to allow of a separate concentration of attention upon each. Again, we find that presentations "revived" or re-presented after their disappearance from the field of consciousness appear fainter and less distinct the longer the time that has elapsed between their exits and their re-entrances. Nobody hesitates to regard such obliviscence as a psychological fact; why, then, should we hesitate to suppose that presentations, even when no longer intense enough directly to influence attention, continue to be presented, though with ever lessening intensity?

continuum implies. This persistence is best spoken of as | retentiveness; it is sometimes confounded with memory, though this is something much more complex and special. Retentiveness is both a biological and a psychological fact; memory is exclusively the latter. In memory there is necessarily some contrast of past and present, in retentiveness nothing but the persistence of the old. If psychologists have erred in regarding the presentations in consciousness together as a plurality of units, they have erred in like manner concerning the persisting residua of such presentations. As we see a certain colour or a certain object again and again, we do not go on accumulating images or representations of it, which are somewhere crowded together like shades on the banks of the Styx; nor is such colour, or whatever it be, the same at the hundredth time of presentation as at the first, as the hundredth impression of a seal on wax would be. There is no such constancy or uniformity in mind. Obvious as this must appear when we pause to think of it, yet the explanations of perception most in vogue seem wholly to ignore it. Such explanations are far too mechanical and, so to say, atomistic; but we must fall back upon the unity and continuity of our presentation-continuum if we are to get a better. Suppose that in the course of a few minutes we take half a dozen glances at a strange and curious flower. We have not as many complex presentations which we might symbolize as F1, F2, F3. But rather, at first only the general outline is noted, next the disposition of petals, stamens, &c., then the attachment of the anthers, form of the ovary, and so on; that is to say, symbolizing the whole flower as [p' (a b) s' (c d) o' (ƒ g)], we first apprehend say [p'..s'..o'], then [p' (a b) s'..o'.], or [p' (a..)s (c..) of..)], and so forth. It is because the earlier apprehensions persist that the later are an advance upon them and an addition to them. There is nothing in this process properly answering to the reproduction and association of ideas: in the last and complete apprehension as much as in the first vague and inchoate one the flower is there as a primary presentation. There is a limit, of course, to such a procedure, but the instance taken, we may safely say, is not such as to exceed the bounds of a simultaneous field of consciousness. Now the question is: Ought we not to assume that such increase of differentiation through the persistence of preceding differentiations holds of the contents of consciousness as a whole? Here, again, we shall find limitations,-limitations too of great practical importance; for, if presentations did not pale as well as persist, and if the simpler presentations admitted of indefinite differentiation, mental advance unless the field of consciousness, i.e., the number of presentations to which we could attend together, increased without limit-would be impossible. But, allowing all this, it is still probably the more correct and fundamental view to suppose that, in those circumstances in which we now have a sensation of, say, red or sweet, there was in the primitive consciousness nothing but a vague modification, which persisted; and that on a repetition of the circumstances this persisting modification was again further modified. The whole field of consciousness would thus, like a continually growing picture, increase indefinitely in complexity of pattern, the earlier presentations not disappearing, like the waves of yesterday in the calm of to-day, but rather lasting on, like old scars that show beneath new

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There is yet one more topic of a general kind calling for attention before we turn to the consideration of particular presentations-the hypothesis of unconscious mental modifications, as it has been unfortunately termed, the hypothesis of subconsciousness, as we may style it to avoid this contradiction in terms. It is a fact easily

On the whole we seem justified in assuming three grades of consciousness thus widely understood-(1) a centre or focus of consciousness within (2) a wider field, any part of which may at once become the focus. Just as in sight, surrounding the limited area of distinct vision on which the visual axes are directed, there is a wider region of indirect vision to any part of which those axes may be turned either voluntarily or by a reflex set up by the part itself, as happens, e.g., with moving objects quite on the margin of vision. But in describing (3) subconsciousness as the third grade, this simile, due to Wundt, more or less forsakes us. Presentations in subconsciousness have not the power to divert attention, nor can we voluntarily concentrate attention upon them. Before either can happen the subconscious presentations must cross the threshold of consciousness, and so cease to be subconscious; and this, of course, is far from being always possible. Now in the case of sight an object may fail to catch the eye, either because, though within the field of sight, it is too far away to make a distinct impression or because it is outside the field altogether. But we cannot conveniently interpret "threshold of consciousness" in keeping with the latter alternative; mere accretion from without is a conception.as alien to psychology as it is to biology. We must make the best we can of a totum objectivum differentiated within itself, and so are confined to the first alternative. Our threshold must be compared to the surface of a lake and subconsciousness to the depths beneath it, and all the current terminology of presentations rising and sinking implies this or some similar figure.

This hypothesis of subconsciousness has been strangely misunderstood, and it would be hard to say at whose hands it has suffered most, those of its exponents or those of its opponents. In the main it is nothing more than the application to the facts of presentation of the law of continuity, its introduction into psychology being due to Leibnitz, who first formulated that law. Half the difficulties in the way of its acceptance are due to the manifold ambiguities of the word consciousness. With Leibnitz consciousness was not coextensive with all psychical life, but only with certain

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higher phases1 of it. Of late, however, the tendency has been to
make consciousness cover all stages of mental development and all
grades of presentation, so that a presentation of which there is no
consciousness resolves itself into the manifest contradiction of an
unpresented presentation—a contradiction not involved in Leibnitz's
"unapperceived perception." Moreover, the active form of the
word conscious almost unavoidably suggests that an "uncon-
scious mental modification" must be one in which that subjective
activity, variously called consciousness, attention, or thinking, has
no part. But such is not the meaning intended when it is said,
for example, that a soldier in battle is often unconscious of his
wounds or a scholar unconscious at any one time of most of the
knowledge "hidden in the obscure recesses of his mind." There
would be no point in saying a subject is not conscious of objects
that are not presented at all; but to say that what is presented
lacks the intensity requisite in the given distribution of attention
to change that distribution appreciably is pertinent enough. Sub-
conscious presentations may tell on conscious life—as sunshine or
mist tells on a landscape or the underlying writing on a palimpsest
-although lacking either the differences of intensity or the indivi-
dual distinctness requisite to make them definite features. Even
if there were no facts to warrant this conception of a subliminal
presentation of impressions and ideas it might still claim an a priori
justification. For to assume that there can be no presentations
save such as pertain to the complete and perfect consciousness of
a human being is as arbitrary and as improbable as it would be
to suppose in the absence of evidence to the contrary-that there
was no vision or audition save such as is mediated by human eyes
and ears. Psychological magnification is not more absurd than
physical, although the processes in the two cases must be materially
different; but of course in no case is magnification possible with-
out limit. The point is that, while we cannot fix the limit at
which the subconscious becomes the absolutely unconscious, it is
only reasonable to expect beforehand that this limit is not just where
our powers of discrimination cease.

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but the power of reproducing them." But surely the capability of
being put into a mental state is itself a mental state and something
actual, and is, moreover, a different something when the state to
be reproduced is different. If not, how is such capability ever
exerted? Even where the capability cannot be consciously exerted,
must there not still be something actual to justify the phrase latent
power? The "exaltation" of delirium may account for the intensi-
fication but not for the contents of the "extinct memories" which
its unwonted glow reveals. It seems extraordinary that Mill of
all men, and in psychology of all subjects, should have supposed
such merely formal conveniences as these conceptions of faculties
and powers could ever dispense us from further inquiry. It might
be urged in Mill's defence that he has investigated further and
concludes that the only distinct meaning he can attach to uncon-
scious mental modification is that of unconscious modification of
the nerves a modification of the nerves, that is to say, without
any psychical accompaniment. But, while we can frequently under-
stand a psychical fact better if we can understand its physical
counterpart, a physiological explanation can never take the place
of a psychological explanation. If all we have to deal with are
nervous modifications which have no psychical concomitants, then
so far there is nothing psychological to explain; but, if there really
is anything calling for psychological explanation-and this Mill
does not deny-then physical accompaniments must admit of
psychical interpretation if they are to be of any avail. And in
fact, although Mill professes to recognize only unconscious modi-
fications of nerves, he finds a psychological meaning for these by
means of his "mental chemistry, -a doctrine which has done its
work and which we need not here discuss.

Over and above hindrances to its acceptance which may be set down to the paradoxical and inaccurate use of the word unconsciousness, there are two material difficulties which prevent this hypothesis from finding favour. First, the prevailingly objective implications of language are apt to make us assume that, as a tree remains the same thing whether it is in the foreground of a landscape or is lost in the grey distance, so a presentation must be a something which is in itself the same whether above the threshold of consciousness or below, if it exist, that is, in this lower degree at all. But it must be remembered that we are not now dealing with physical things but with presentations, and that to these the Berkeleyan dictum applies that their esse is percipi, provided, of course, we give to percipi the wide meaning now assigned to consciousness. The qualitative differences of all presentations and the distinctness of structure of such as are complex both diminish with a diminution of intensity. In this sense much is latent or "involved" in presentations lying below the threshold of consciousness that becomes patent_or evolved" as they rise above it. But, on the other hand, the hypothesis of subconsciousness does not commit us to the assumption that all presentations are by their very nature imperishable: while many modifications of consciousness sink only into obliviscence, many, we may well suppose, lapse into complete oblivion and from that there is no recall. Secondly, to any one addicted to the atomistic view of presentations just now referred to it may well seem incredible that all the incidents of a long lifetime and all the items of knowledge of a well-stored mind that may possibly recur-"the infinitely greater part of our spiritual treasures," as Hamilton says-can be in any sense present continuously. The brunt of such an objection is effectually met by the fact that the same presentation may figure in very various connexions, as may the same letter, for example, in many words, the same word in many sentences. We cannot measure the literature of a language by its vocabulary, nor may we equate the extent of our spiritual treasures as successively unfolded with the psychical apparatus, so to say, into which they resolve.2

The attempt has more than once been made to avoid the difficulties besetting subconsciousness by falling back on the conceptions of faculties, capacities, or dispositions. Stored-up knowledge, says J. S. Mill, is not a mental state but a capability of being put into a mental state"; similarly of the cases which Hamilton records, "in which the extinct memory [?] of whole languages was suddenly restored," he says, "it is not the mental impressions that are latent 1 The following brief passage from his Principes de la Nature et de la Grace (§ 4) shows his meaning- "Il est bon de faire distinction entre la Perception, qui est l'état intérieur de la Monade representant les choses externes, et l'Apperception, qui est la Conscience, ou la connoissance réflexive de cet état intérieur, laquelle n'est point donnée à toutes les âmes, ni toujours à la même âme. Et c'est faute de cette distinction que les Cartésiens ont manqué, en comptant pour rien les perceptions dont on ne s'apperçoit pas, comme le peuple compte pour rien les corps insensibles" (Op. Phil., Erdmann's ed., ii. p. 715).

2 Much light may be thrown on this matter and on many others by such inquiries as those undertaken by Mr Francis Galton, and described in his Inquiries into Human Faculty, pp. 182-203.

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The exposition of subconsciousness given by Wundt is in the
main an advance on that of Mill and calls for brief notice. Pre-
sentations, says Wundt, are not substances but functions, whose
physiological counterparts in like manner are functional activities,
viz., of certain arrangements of nerve-cells. Consciousness of the
presentation and the nervous activity cease together, but the
latter leaves behind it a molecular modification of the nervous
structure which becomes more and more permanent with cxercise,
and is such as to facilitate the recurrence of the same functional
activity. A more precise account of these after-effects of exercise
is for the present unattainable; nevertheless Wundt regards it as
obvious that they are no more to be compared to the activity to
which they predispose than the molecular arrangement of chlorine
and nitrogen in nitric chloride is to be compared to the explosive
decomposition that ensues if the chloride is slightly disturbed.
Mutatis mutandis, on the psychological side the only actual pre-
sentations are those which we are conscious of as such; but pre-
sentations that vanish out of consciousness leave behind psychical
dispositions tending to renew them. The essential difference is
that, whereas we may some day know the nature of the physical
disposition, that of the psychical disposition must of necessity be
for ever unknown, for the threshold of consciousness is also the
limit of internal experience. The theory thus briefly summarized
seems in some respects arbitrary, in some respects ambiguous. It
is questionable, for instance, whether the extremely meagre in-
formation that physiologists at present possess at all compels us
to assume that the "physical disposition" of Wundt cannot con-
sist in a continuous but much fainter discharge of function. At
all events it is quite beside the mark to urge, as he does, that the
effect of training a group of muscles is not shown in the persist-
ence of slight movements during intervals of apparent rest. The
absence of molar motions is no evidence of the absence of molecular
motions. And it is certain that psychologically we can be conscious
of the idea of a movement without the movement actually ensuing,
yet only in such wise that the idea is more apt to pass over into
action the intenser it is, and often actually passes over in spite of
Surely there must be some functional activity answering to
this conscious presentation, and if this amount of activity is possible
without movement why may not a much less amount be conceived
possible too? Again, what meaning can possibly be attached to a
psychical disposition which is the counterpart, not of physical
changes, but of an arrangement of molecules? Compared with such
an inconceivable unknown, the perfectly conceivable hypothesis of
infinitesimal presentations so faint as to elude discrimination is
every way preferable. In fact, if conceivability is to count for any-
thing, we have, according to Wundt, no choice, for "we can never
think of a presentation that has disappeared from consciousness
except as retaining the properties it had when in consciousness."
None the less he holds it to be an error "to apply to presentations
themselves a style of conception that has resulted from our being of
necessity confined to consciousness." Verily, this is phenomenalism
with a vengeance, as if presentations themselves were not also
confined to consciousness!

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