A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

§ 24. The Problem in General.—The chapters on the mental elements—sensation, simple image, feeling—have made you acquainted with the results of psychological analysis; it was only occasionally that you were asked to analyse for yourself. Henceforth we shall be dealing with experiences that offer themselves for analysis; with experiences that, however simple they may at first sight appear, turn out on investigation to be complex. We shall thus be following the example of those men who, long centuries ago, tried to bring order into mental phenomena and to establish a science of mind. We have an enormous advantage; for they were working in the dark, and we are working in the light of their discoveries. Still, our procedure will be the same as theirs; and the change of work brings with it certain difficulties that you must realise at the outset and be ready to face. Well begun is half done.

First of all, then, your reading henceforth will be more difficult, because you will have to keep more things in mind. The analysis even of so comparatively simple a thing as a perception or idea cannot be performed in one breath. A knot in a rope may be beautifully simple, and yet you may spend a week in learning it! Secondly, the examples chosen by the author may not be just the right examples for you; even perceptions and ideas, again, differ a good deal in different minds; and an example that is illuminating to one reader may leave another quite blind. So you must look for your own examples in your own experience. Thirdly, you have now to wrestle with the problem of meaning (p. 26); for all perceptions and ideas, and all our still more complicated experiences, mean something; a perception is always the perception of a tree or a wedding or what not; and an idea too is always the idea of something, whether of the landing of Columbus or of the quarrels of the gods in Homer. You must get clear, then, about the psychology of meaning. Fourthly, these concrete experiences that you are to analyse have a long history; and in seeking their nervous correlates we shall be obliged, oftentimes, to go far back, even beyond the individual, to the development of the race. In doing this we do not change the problem of psychology (p. 18), but we enlarge our view of it; a mere reference to the organ of sense or the present condition of the nervous system is no longer enough.

All this means, in summary, that we are passing from the abstract to the concrete, from the meaningless to the meaningful, from the simple to the complex. We still keep to our scientific point of view, and we still employ our scientific method. The change is not in us, who are psychologising, but in our subject-matter; the plot begins to thicken; and this growing complexity of subject-matter naturally makes increasing demand upon our scientific resources.

[§ 25]. The Analysis of Perception and Idea.—Sensations and simple images can hardly occur, by themselves alone, in our everyday experience. The practised psychologist may be able to focalise a sensation, to make it so vivid that it stands out almost as it would under the experimental control of the laboratory; but his is an exceptional case. The units of our daily experience are rather such things as the sound of the piano in the next room, the sight of the tree budding just outside the window, the memory of last winter’s snow-piles, the forecast of to-night’s Pathetic Symphony; that is, they are perceptions and ideas. Notice that they come to us in the first place as units, as wholes; they show no lines of natural cleavage; they are unitary and self-contained. Yet they are not psychologically simple; if they were, we should never have lit upon sensations and simple images. All perceptions and ideas may be analysed.

A typical perception resolves, to begin with, into a number of sensations. The sound of the piano is, after all, the sound of certain compound tones, played together and in succession; and the sight of the tree is an arrangement of colours. The characteristic part of a perception, then, the part that we may conveniently call its core or nucleus, may thus be analysed into sensations. Only the core, however; for the sensations are supplemented, secondly, by various images. The sound comes to us as the sound of the piano, the instrument of that familiar look; and we may have an imaginal hint of the child playing, of the score, of its special difficulties, of all sorts of related things. The tree, too, is that tree, the familiar cherry that the caterpillars infest so badly, that grew so much last year, that will presently cut off the view across the street, that very likely will interfere with the beech. Remember that these are the author’s instances, and that you must replace them by your own! The point is that the complement of images is there; and you will notice that it is not stable; it may be full or scant, and it may lead the mind this way or that; but, whatever it be, it puts more into the perception than the sensory stimuli can account for; we perceive more than we hear or see.

Yes, and we perceive more than is furnished us by sensations and images. It is a fact (which you will better understand presently) that every perception is shaped and moulded by the action of nerve-forces which show themselves neither in sensation nor in image. The nervous system, whether by racial heritage or by individual habit, meets its impressions halfway, and throws them into certain customary forms. We take both the tree and the piano to be real things, and we take them to be things that occupy real space; we perceive them as objects of the outside world, and we perceive them as solid or space-filling. We do this because we have a natural and ingrained tendency to cast our perceptions into the forms of ‘thing’ and ‘space’; and this tendency of the nervous system does its work automatically; it has no correlate of sensation or image; but it is none the less effective, so to say, behind the sensations and the images, in determining the perception. You must just accept this statement now; it will become clearer later on.

A typical idea, in the same way, has a core or nucleus of images. Last winter’s snow may come to us in many different ways, because our equipment of images is very variable (pp. 75 f.); it will come to most, perhaps, as a visual picture, an uneven spread of white, with streaks of grey-brown on the peaks and along the valleys, honeycombed and broken from some partial thaw. To-night’s music will come, possibly, as the sound of the opening adagio measures, or of some theme from the allegro. Here again, however, the nucleus has its surroundings; other images cluster about it; we recall the day so-and-so got his feet wet, or the big fall of that December Thursday; we see our place in the concert-hall, or hope that this time the tympani will be in tune. Nor is the idea altogether a matter of images. We can hardly think of those opening measures without kinæsthetic sensations from the throat, or from some muscular beat of the rhythm; we can hardly think of getting our feet wet, or of seating ourselves in the hall, without some actual movement that arouses sensation. Find your own instances, once more, and do not trust the author! You will find that the typical idea is thus in part sensation, just as the typical perception is in part image. Finally, the idea, too, is subject to the pressure of the directive nerve-forces; it takes the same customary forms as the perception. Columbus is thought of as a real person, acting in a real world of space and time; and Zeus as an imaginary person in an imaginary world; but there is no difference in the form of the ideas, and no difference of form between these ideas and the perception of the stranger who has just passed the window.

So we have the characteristic nucleus; the varying complement; and the brain-habit behind all. And if we can analyse the perception or idea, nucleus and surroundings both, into its mental elements; if we can say what nervous processes are correlated with these elementary mental processes; and if we can further establish the nature of the guiding and shaping nerve-forces; then our psychological account will be, in strictness, complete. Yet we shall have passed over something that, as we have ourselves admitted, is in everyday life most strikingly characteristic of these experiences; the fact, namely, that they mean; that our perception of the tree means the tree, is a perception of that tree, and our idea of snow means the snow, is an idea of that snow. What, then, from the psychological point of view, is this meaning?

[§ 26]. Meaning in Perception and Idea.—We learned in § 6 that mental processes are not intrinsically meaningful, that meaning is not a constituent part of their nature. We have seen, indeed, that the whole notion of meaning is really foreign to science. When we ask, then, what meaning is, from the psychological point of view, are we not asking an irrelevant and unscientific question?