II.
We now reach the most obscure and difficult part of our subject. Among the nine hundred and odd replies collected, the one most frequently met with is “nothing.” There is no observation in which it does not occur at least once: in the majority of cases it is found one, two, three, four, or more times. If I take the word cause, the formula “I have no representation,” forms fifty-three per cent. of the total of answers collected; the rest saw the printed word or some concrete image; e. g., a stone falling, horses drawing, or other simulacra, of which several have already been enumerated. It is the same with all the other highly abstract terms (time, infinity, etc.). So that to return to the question which was to be the exclusive object of our investigation,—“Is the general idea when thought, read, or heard, accompanied by anything in consciousness?”—we may reply, an image, a typographical vision, or nothing. We must now inquire, what this nothing is, for it must be something.
We are face to face with the problem which the pure Nominalists attacked, when they took this nil in its proper sense. Were there indeed any who really pretended that we could have in mind words, and words only—nothing besides? This is a historical problem into which it is useless for us to enter. It is possible that some may have pushed their reaction against the extravagances of realism even to this point, but the thesis is totally insupportable; for at that rate there would be no difference between a general term, and a word of any unknown language: the latter is the pure flatus vocis, a sound that evokes nothing. If, on the other hand, by word we mean sign, everything changes, since the sign implies and envelops something. Such appears to me to be the true interpretation.[85]
So that for the cases which alone concern us for the moment, i. e., those in which the reply was “Nothing,” there are two elements, the one existing in consciousness (word heard or auditory image), the other subconscious, but not therefore invalid and inaccurate. Hence we must penetrate into the obscure region of the unconscious, in order to apprehend the something which gives to the word its signification, its life, its power of substitution.
Leibnitz wrote: “Most frequently, e. g., in any prolonged analysis, we have no simultaneous intuition of all the characteristics or attributes of a thing: in their place we use signs. In actually thinking, we are accustomed to omit the explanation of these signs by reference to what they signify—knowing or believing that we have this explanation in our power: but we do not judge the application, or explanation, of the words to be positively necessary.... I have termed this method of thinking, blind or symbolic. We employ it in algebra, in arithmetic, and in fact universally:” which is equivalent to saying that potential knowledge is stored up beneath the general or abstract terms; nor should we be surprised at finding this doctrine in the man who first introduced the idea of the unconscious into philosophy.
To determine the rôle of this inevitably active, albeit silent, factor is a difficult enterprise, and one that is necessarily inaccurate,—since it amounts to the translation of obscure and enveloped states into the clear and analytical language of consciousness. The simplest procedure is to examine how we arrive at the comprehension of general terms.[86] Set a page of a philosophical work before the eyes of a novice or of a man wholly ignorant of the subject. He understands nothing. The only method that will render it intelligible is to take the general or abstract terms one after the other, and translate them into concrete events, into facts of current experience. This labor demands an hour or two. In proportion to the progress of the novice, the translation is effected more quickly; it becomes superfluous for certain terms; and finally but a few minutes are required for the comprehension of a page. Untrained minds are often surprised, on reading a sentence consisting of abstract terms, at understanding each word, and yet not knowing what the whole means. This signifies that they have not beneath each word potential knowledge sufficient to establish a connexion or relation between all the terms, and giving meaning to them. Apart from those who are familiar with abstraction by natural gift or by habit, it is incontestable that to the vast majority the reading of an abstract page is a slow and painful and very fatiguing process. This is because each word exacts an act of attention, an effort, which corresponds to labor in the unconscious or subconscious regions. When this labor becomes useless, and we think, or appear to think, by signs alone all goes rapidly and easily.
In short, we learn to understand a concept as we learn to walk, dance, fence, or play a musical instrument: it is a habit, i. e., an organised memory. General terms cover an organised, latent knowledge which is the hidden capital without which we should be in a state of bankruptcy, manipulating false money or paper of no value. General ideas are habits in the intellectual order. Suppression of effort corresponds with perfected habit; as again with perfect comprehension.
What occurs each time we have in consciousness merely the general term, is only a particular case of a very common psychological fact: as follows:—The useful work is carried on below consciousness, and above its surface only results, indications, or signs appear. The facts enumerated above are all taken from motor activity. Their equivalents abound in the domain of feeling. The “causeless” states of joy or sorrow, which are frequent in the sound man, and still more in the invalid, are only the translation into consciousness of ignored organic dispositions operating in obscurity. What gives intensity and duration to our passions is not the consciousness we have of them, but the depth of the roots by which they plunge into our being, and are organised in our viscera, and subsequently in our brain. They are no more than the expression of our constitution, permanent, or momentary. We might run over the whole province of psychology, with variations on the same theme. I do not propose to do so here, but would simply recall that every state of consciousness whatsoever (percept, image, idea, feeling, passion, volition) has its substrate; that the concept reduced to the bare word is but another case of the same kind, and in no wise peculiar: that to believe that there is nothing more than the word, because it alone exists in consciousness, is to seize only the superficial and visible part of the event,—perhaps, all things considered, the least part. This unconscious substratum, this organised and potential knowledge, gives not merely value, but an actual denotation to the word,—like harmonics superadded to the fundamental note.
To conclude: we think not with words in the strict sense (flatus vocis) but with signs. Symbolic thought, which is a purely verbal operation, is sustained, co-ordinated, vivified, by potential knowledge and unconscious travail. To this it must be added that potential knowledge is a genus, of which the concept is only a species. All memory can be reduced to latent knowledge, organised, susceptible of revival, but all memory is not material for concepts. The man who knows many languages even when not speaking them, the naturalist capable of identifying millions of specimens while not classifying them, have a very extended potential knowledge, but it is all concrete. The potential knowledge which underlies concepts consists in a sum of characters, qualities, extracts, which are the less numerous in proportion as the concept approximates to pure symbolism: in other terms what underlies the concept is an abstract memory, a memory for abstracts.
In my opinion, a large measure of the obscurities and dissensions which prevail as to the nature of concepts, arises from the fact that the rôle of unconscious activity has for centuries been misunderstood or forgotten,—psychology having confined itself exclusively to consciousness: and while its action is universally admitted to-day for all other manifestations of mental life—instincts, percepts, feelings, volition, etc.—it is still excluded from the domain of concepts. The whole of the foregoing discussion is an essay towards its reintegration.
Need we add that the opinion adopted as to the nature of the unconscious matters little in the present connexion? On this point there are, we know, two principal hypotheses. According to the one it is a purely physiological event, and can be reduced to unconscious cerebration. According to the other, the unconscious is still a psychical fact; whether it be an affective rather than a representative state, or a complex of little, scattered consciousnesses, isolated, evanescent, with no linkage to the self, or, again, an organisation or sequence of states, which forms another current coexistent with that of clear consciousness. These theories, and others which I omit, have nothing to do with our purpose. It is sufficient to recognise unconscious activity as a fact, without any explanation, and this position would seem to be incontestable.
We have seen that abstraction, in proportion as it ascends and strengthens, separates itself more and more from the image, until finally, at the moment of pure symbolism, the separation becomes antagonism. This is because there is fundamentally, and from the outset, an opposition of nature and procedure between the two. The ideal of the image is an ever-growing complexity, the ideal of abstraction an ever-growing simplification, since the one is formed by addition, the other by subtraction.
To the man who is gifted with a rich internal vision, the shape of people, of monuments, of landscapes, surges up clearly and well defined: under the influence of attention, and with time, details are added,—the representation completes itself, and approaches more and more completely to the reality. So too with internal audition: witness the musician who hears ideally every detail of a symphony.
The contrary holds for abstraction. “There is,” says Cournot, “an analysis which separates objects, and an analysis which distinguishes without isolating them. The use of the refracting prism is an instance of the analysis which separates or isolates. If, instead of isolating the rays so as to cause them to describe different trajectories, they are made to traverse certain media which have the property of extinguishing a definite color, we are able to distinguish without isolating.”[87]
Abstraction belongs to this last type, with intervention of the process described by Cournot. Attention brings a feature into relief; inattention, and voluntary inhibition, act as extinguishers to the other characteristics.
Let us pass from theory to practice. This antagonism is of current observation, almost a banality, whenever men of imagination are confronted with abstract thinkers. We must of course exclude those who by a rare gift of nature (Goethe), or by the artifice of education, are capable of handling the image and concept alternately.
Let us take the artists as type of the imaginative thinker: the novelist, poet, sculptor, painter, musician, etc. Each dreams of an organic, living work, a complex. Some with words, others with forms, others with sounds; realists with the aid of minute detail, classics by means of general sketches; all make for the same end. Music again, which from its nature seems a thing apart, is an architecture of sounds of amazing complexity, often exciting contradictory states of mind.
Among abstract thinkers (theorists, scientists) the tendency is always towards unity, law, generalities—towards simplification: by what is fundamental and essential, if the man be genuine; by shifting and accidental features, if he is a charlatan. The mathematician and the pure metaphysician have usually a distaste for facts, for multiplicity of detail. A writer whose name has escaped me says: “Every scientist smells of the cadaver.” This is our thesis, under the form of an image. Abstract thought is a cadaver. It would be more just, though less picturesque, to say a skeleton; for scientific abstraction is the bony framework of phenomena.
The antagonism between the image and the idea is thus fundamentally that of the whole and the part. It is impossible to be at the same time an abstract thinker and an imaginative thinker, because one cannot simultaneously think the whole and the part, the group and the fraction; and these two habits of mind while not absolutely exclusive are antagonistic.
In conclusion, have we general ideas, or merely general terms? It must first be remarked that the expressions, “general ideas or notions,” “concepts,” are equivocal or rather multivocal. We have seen that concepts differ widely in their psychological nature according to their degree, having but one characteristic in common—that of being extracts. It is therefore chimerical to attempt to include them all under a single definition. To take the highest only, as most frequently debated, some say, “There are no general ideas but only general terms.” To others the general idea is only an indefinite series of particular ideas, or “a particular idea that the mind proposes as the first stake in a forward march.”[88] To others it is a system of tendencies accompanied or not by the possibility of images.[89] For my own part I prefer the formula of Höffding[90]: “General ideas exist therefore in the sense that we are able to concentrate the attention on certain elements of the individual idea, so that a weaker light falls on the other elements.”
This is the sole mode of existence that can be legitimately conceded to them.
In regard to the higher concepts we have endeavored to show that they have their distinctive psychological nature: on the one hand a clear and conscious element which is always the word, and sometimes in addition the fragmentary image; on the other an obscure and unconscious factor,—without which, nevertheless, symbolic thought is only a mechanism turning in the air, and producing naught but phantoms.
CHAPTER V.
EVOLUTION OF THE PRINCIPAL CONCEPTS.
After this general study of the nature of the most elevated forms of abstraction, we must take the principal concepts one by one, and retrace their evolution in outline. Let us once more note that we are concerned with pure psychology, and are to eliminate all that depends on the theory of knowledge and other transcendental speculations. As regards the first origin of our notions of time, space, cause, etc., each may adopt the opinion that pleases him. Whether we admit the hypothesis of à priori forms of the mind (Kant), or that of an innate sense acquired by repetition of experience in the species, and fixed by heredity in the course of centuries (Herbert Spencer), or any other whatsoever—it is clear that the appearance of these concepts, and the data of their evolution, depend on experimental conditions, and consequently fall within our province. Accordingly it is with their empirical genesis, and development through experience, that we are concerned—and with that alone.