II.
We now pass to a study of transition. In ascending from the lower to the higher forms of abstraction, we traverse the intermediate region between the states directly superposed upon generic images, and the higher concepts. In fact, we shall to some extent have to penetrate into this extreme region, before the close of the chapter.
At the risk of repetition, we must first indicate the characteristics by which the general notions we are at present concerned with are distinguished from the abstractions above and below them. To recapitulate briefly: In the concrete-abstract phase (which we are leaving) the general notion—so-called—is constituted by concrete elements, plus words, whose substitutory office is weak or null.
In the abstract phase (upon which we are entering) the concept is constituted by an evoked or evocable image, which may exhibit every degree from clear representation to the pure schema, plus the word that now becomes the principal element.
In the phase of higher abstractions (to be studied later), no sensory representation arises, or should any such appear, reflexion would find in it only a dubious support, often an obstacle: the word meantime has acquired absolute supremacy in consciousness.
Taken as a whole, psychological development exhibits a complex phenomenon, a binary compound, in which one element is always increasing, the other as steadily decreasing. Words pass from nonentity to autocracy; the concrete from supremacy to nonentity.
We must now return to the higher forms of intermediate abstraction, since we may not content ourselves with any purely theoretical determination. Characteristic examples must be selected; and here we find a certain embarrassment. Does our choice fall on numeration? Yet on leaving the concrete-abstract period, this at once finds its formative law, and introduces us to pure abstraction. Are we to select language? This procedure might seem to be appropriate, seeing that the general ideas with which we are occupied constitute the substrata of our highly civilised modern languages, when, on the other hand, the more developed concepts (of mathematics, metaphysics, etc.) are only found rarely and incidentally. One might even plunder the dictionary, extracting all general terms, with elimination of those that are purely scientific, and classification of the former according to their increasing degree of generality. But this method, besides being very laborious and incapable of reduction to a clear statement for the reader, would suffer the cardinal defect of being arbitrary. How, indeed, could any common measure be established for all these general terms, issuing from the most diverse sources of human activity?[77]
But the best method would seem to be that of taking as our basis the classifications of the naturalists, following their development historically. Here we have the advantage of positive documents, since these refer to concrete beings, and are formed according to characters observed empirically. They create, namely, an ascending progress from the individual to the more general notions, by a methodical process of filiation; they operate upon living beings, or objects of the same nature, having consequently a common standard. The history, even in brief, of these classifications is instructive: it shows the progressive passage of concrete-abstract ideas to more and more abstract concepts, from a statement of gross resemblances to the quest after subtle similarities, from the period of assimilation to that in which dissociation predominates.
Among these different classifications, we may select those of the zoologists, since they appear to be the most numerous, most complete, and best elaborated. For the rest, the succeeding observations apply equally, mutatis mutandis, to the classifications of the botanists. We need scarcely add that our study is strictly psychological, that its object is not the absolute value of classifications, but the determination of the processes followed by the human mind, in proportion as the zoölogical taxonomy has constituted itself.
At the outset we find a pre-scientific period as to which we know little; for these essays in classification differ, according to times and races. The Bible, Hindu literature, the primitive poets and historians of Greece, do however provide sufficient indications of the manner in which man originally classified other living beings. The repartition was usually made in three great categories, according as the animals lived in the water, or upon the earth, or flew in the air. The subdivisions are remarkable. Thus, among terrestrial animals, there are some that walk, and some that climb: in this last group there is a mixture of articulate creatures, of molluscs, reptiles and amphibians. Among aerial animals, we find birds, and many flying insects. These primitive classifications are based upon perception far more than on abstraction, or at any rate rest upon superficial resemblances. The habitual environment, air, water, earth, determines the cardinal classes. Some easily apprehended characteristic makes the subdivisions: e. g., flight (birds, insects), locomotion (walking, climbing). The method employed is hardly superior to that by which generic images are formed; and in the order of classification, this point corresponds with the concrete-abstract period of primitive languages, numerations, and religions, i. e., to a gross generalisation fixed by a word.
The scientific period begins with Aristotle. It has been affirmed that he owes numerous points to predecessors whom he fails to mention: this is a historical matter of no interest in the present connexion. With him, or under his name, we have the commencement of comparative anatomy which involves a preliminary labor of analysis, unknown in the pre-scientific period, and marking the transition from apparent and superficial to profound and essential resemblances. His classification is of course imperfect, often inconsistent; it bears the impress of an epoch of transition.
His terminology is poor, unstable, floating. He distinguishes two sorts of groups only: the genus (γένος) and the species (εἶδος). “But the term γένος has the least constant significance: it serves as the indistinct designation of any group of species, however great its extension, as well what we now term classes, as other lower groups.”[78] Sometimes however Aristotle speaks of large genera (γένη μέγαλα) and of very large genera (γένη μέγιστα), without any precise denotation. It has been said that penury of words was an obstacle to him: yet this is hardly a plausible reason, seeing that he found means to create the word ἔντομα to designate insects. The true obstacle was the insufficient determination of character.
Again, independently of nomenclature, “while Aristotle knew a fairly large number of animals, the notion of grouping them in definite order, which should express their greater or less degree of similarity, does not appear to have presented itself to his mind. Hence he did not attempt what we call classification. He compares different animals together, by every possible means, and endeavors to reduce the result of his comparisons to general propositions.” In this way he arrives at relations which are sometimes important, sometimes without importance. For example: among animals, some have blood, some lymph, which takes its place: this division, notwithstanding the error on which it is based, corresponds broadly speaking with the distinction between vertebrates and invertebrates. Animals “which have blood” are subdivided into viviparous and oviparous. Further, animals that fly are ranged in three categories, according as their wings are feathered (birds), or formed by a fold of skin (bats), or dry, thin, and membranous (insects). Then there is a division of animals into aquatic and terrestrial, social and solitary, migratory and sedentary, diurnal and nocturnal, domestic and wild, etc.
In sum, there is co-existence of two processes: one scientific, implying a preliminary analysis; the other of common observation, which does not sensibly differ from concrete-abstract classifications; and the idea of a hierarchy formed by abstraction of abstracts, by a systematic arrangement of the animal kingdom, has not yet made its appearance. Yet Aristotle’s work, just by reason of its composite nature, is interesting to the psychologist who studies the evolution of the faculty of abstracting and generalising.
We may pass over two thousand years, during which no progress was made, till we come to Linnæus. “He was the first man who distinctly conceived the idea of expressing, under a definite formula, what he believed to be the system of nature.” His nomenclature is fixed. Under the names of classes (genus summum), orders (genus intermedium), genera (genus proximum), species, varieties, he proposes subdivisions of decreasing value, embracing a greater or less number of animals which all present in common more or less general attributes. He pursues the research after fundamental characteristics, and essential similarities, incessantly correcting his first results. Thus it is only at the eleventh edition of his Systema naturæ that the class of “Quadrupeds” is converted into Mammals: the Cetacea are included in this class, and no longer placed among the fish, as also bats, which were formerly classified with birds, etc.[79] Whatever their objective value, we have here a true system of rational concepts.
We may instance Cuvier for the clearness with which he separates the predominant and subordinate characteristics: “If,” he says, “we consider the animal kingdom on the principles just laid down, regarding only the organisation and nature of the animals, instead of their size and utility, according to our knowledge of them, or the sum of accessory circumstances, we find that there are four principal forms, four general plans, if we may so express ourselves, on which all animals seem to have been modelled,” etc. These four branches (a new word created by him), which he held to be irreducible, were the Vertebrata, Articulata, Mollusca, and Radiata.
Finally, since the progress of consecutive abstraction and generalisation consists in incessantly seeking out extracts of extracts, and simplifications of simplifications, the natural movement of the mind tends fatally towards pure unity as its supreme end. This last phase belongs to the nineteenth century, and still more to the contemporary epoch. It comes from various sources, and has assumed different forms:
1. Speculative in the school of Schelling. To Oken, the highest representative of this view, man is the prototype and measure of animal organisation; all other animals are constructed after his pattern. “Their body is in some sort the analysed body of a man; the human organs live, whether in isolation, or in different combinations, in the state of independent animals. Each such combination constitutes a class.”
2. Embryological, according to the labors of Von Baer. While Cuvier, in classification, brought anatomy and morphology to the front, a new system now appears, founded upon development only; the science of embryology. To be accurate, Baer’s conception was not unitary, since it admitted four types: peripheral (radiate), massive (molluscan), longitudinal (articulated), bi-symmetrical (vertebrate). But little by little, the oft-substantiated principle asserted itself and found firm footing among his successors: the animal with the highest organisation passes, during its individual development, through phases which, in less highly evolved beings, are permanent states; or, more briefly, among the higher animals, ontogenesis is a repetition of phylogenesis.
3. Transformist. The boldest partisans of this view, e. g., Haeckel, adopt a rigorously unitary conception: all the innumerable examples of the animal kingdom have issued from one common stock.
In all there is a fundamental trend of the mind towards the idea of original unity. It is unimportant for the moment to examine whether this concept of ideal unity (we might also recall the vegetable ideal of Goethe, and the vertebrate ideal of Richard Owen) is a delusion, or a true apprehension: we shall return to this later, in discussing the objective value of the notions of genus and species ([Chap. V. § vi]). At this point, the subjective psychological process alone is relevant to our purpose.
This review has no pretensions at being even an abridged history of zoölogical classifications. It merely aims at showing by facts, (1) how a hierarchy of concepts is constituted, and in the travail of centuries passes from the period of generic images to the ideal of embryological unity, common to all beings; (2) how the work of dissociation and analysis has always gone on, and multiplied, in quest of similarities more and more difficult to discover—often indeed fragile or dubious—to stop at unity only, the supreme abstraction.
We are now at the threshold of the last period of abstraction, that of complete symbolism, and it is not without interest to note that what passes in the theoretical order has its equivalent in another form of human activity—the practical order—where the mechanism of exchange is again developed by the aid of an ever-increasing substitution. Thus, at the lowest stage, all commercial transactions are reduced to truck, to exchange by barter. The concrete for the concrete is the method of primitive peoples. An immense step is taken when this rudimentary process is succeeded by the employment of precious metals. A substitutory value is taken as the common measure of other values. At the outset, silver and gold, in the form of powder or of small bullion, were weighed out by the contractors for each particular transaction. Next, this inconvenient procedure was replaced by coined money, issued under the control of an officer, or of the social aggregate, thus conferring a general value on the instrument of exchange. Lastly, at a much later period, bills of exchange, bank-notes, and numerous forms of letters of credit, were substituted for gold and silver; so that a sheet of paper worth less than a centime may become the symbol of millions and tens of millions.
This resemblance of the two cases is by no means fortuitous. It is based upon identity of psychological process, namely a substitution of ascending degrees, an ever increasing simplification, whether in the order of speculative research, or in the department of commercial transaction: and just as paper tokens, unless financially convertible into objects of consumption, for use or luxury, are nonentities that can accumulate in the bank without the gain of anything more than a simulacrum—so, if the highest symbols of abstraction cannot be reduced to the data of experience, we may, as too often occurs, accumulate, manipulate, build up concepts, and still be in a state of permanent intellectual bankruptcy.
CHAPTER IV.
THE HIGHER FORMS OF ABSTRACTION. THEIR NATURE.
Before we embark on the study of the principal concepts, it is incumbent upon us (in order to determine for each of these, separately, the conditions of their genesis and development—as was shown for abstraction in general) to throw as much light as possible upon the very vexed question of the psychological nature of the concepts of pure symbolism, where the word appears as the sole element that exists in consciousness. Is it true that we can think effectually and usefully with words and nothing but words, as has been sustained to satiety? Is not this assertion founded upon the misapprehension of a factor which, although it does not enter into consciousness, is none the less in active existence? The investigation of this point is the prime object of the following chapter.
It is unnecessary to enter in detail into the researches of the last thirty years, as to the seat and the nature of images. Yet since these have been the point of departure of the following inquiry, the results may be briefly summarised.
It is generally admitted that the image occupies the same seat as the percept of which it is a weak and incomplete residuum, i. e., in order to produce itself in consciousness it demands the putting into activity of certain definite portions of the cerebral centres. The energy of the representative faculty does not merely vary from individual to individual in a general manner: there are particular forms of imagination, constituted by the very marked predominance of a certain group of representations, visual, auditory, muscular, olfactory, gustatory.
Normal observation, and still more pathological documents, have thus determined certain types. We may also (though this is mere hypothesis and difficult to verify) admit a “mixed” or “indifferent” type, in which the different species of sensations are represented by corresponding images of equal clearness and vigor, without marked predominance of any one group, whilst still maintaining their relative importance: e. g., it is clear that in man the visual and olfactory images cannot be equivalent in absolute importance. Excluding this indifferent type, we have three principal “pure” types: visual, auditory, muscular or motor, signifying a tendency to represent things in terms borrowed from vision, from sound, or from movement. If we push the investigation further, we find that these types again imply variations or sub-types. Thus there may be a lively faculty for representation of complex visual forms (faces, landscapes, monuments) along with a weak sense for graphic signs (printed or written words) and so on.
The numerous works devoted to this subject, and too well known to be insisted on here, lead us to this conclusion: that there is no general faculty of imagination. This is a vague term which designates very different individual variations; these last alone have any psychological reality, and are alone important in cognising the mechanism of the intellect.
May it not be the same for the faculty of conception? May not the word “general idea” or “concept” be in its kind the equivalent of the word image, namely a vague formula,—its psychological reality lying in types or variations as yet undetermined? I am exposing for ideas, the problem that has already been set forth for images, while recognising its much greater obscurity. The psycho-physiological conditions of the existence of concepts are practically unknown: this is a terra incognita wherein the new psychology has hardly adventured itself, and where it would indeed have been chimerical to tread before the preliminary study of the image.