A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

Experiment shows that the one thing necessary to recognition is the feeling of familiarity. In some cases the incoming ideas, and more especially the direct verbal supplement of the perception, the name, seem to be integral factors in the experience; but recognition is possible in their absence; and, what is more, recognition may fail in their presence; a perception may call up ideas that are objectively correct, and yet there may be no recognition of the thing perceived. Recognition, then, is essentially a feeling, a sense-feeling of the agreeable and relaxing type, diffusively organic in its sensory character; any perception or idea to which this feeling attaches is, by that very fact, the perception or idea of something recognised. That is as far as analysis can take us. If we care to go further, and speculate, we may venture to guess that the feeling of familiarity is a weakened survival of the emotion of relief, of fear unfulfilled. There is a distinct touch of pleasurable relief, of the letting-down of strain, in the feeling as we have it; and the derivation is therefore psychologically reasonable. Moreover, primitive man was so defenceless an animal that the strange must always have been cause for anxiety; language, indeed, bears witness on the point; for ‘fear’ is, etymologically, the state of mind of the traveller, the ‘farer’ away from home; and ‘hostis,’ which we translate enemy, originally meant simply stranger. The bodily and mental attitude which expresses recognition thus seems to be still the attitude of going off guard, of ease and confidence. In our everyday life, as you will readily see, the tinge of sense-feeling may be overlaid by the heavier colours of some positive emotion; we may recognise an acquaintance with whom we are heartily angry, or whose conduct has brought us sorrow; primitive man himself recognised his enemies! But in the laboratory, where these disturbing influences are ruled out, the nature of the feeling of familiarity comes clearly to light; intrinsically, recognition is always an agreeable and relaxing experience.

In everyday life, again, our recognitions may be of all degrees of definiteness. They are indefinite when the feeling of familiarity comes up alone, without the name or the associated ideas; when, for instance, we pass someone on the street, and say to our companion “I’m sure I know that face!” and so pass on. They are somewhat more definite when the perception is supplemented by a general name. As we glance down the line of strangers in the street-car we may think to ourselves “doctor,—farmer,—commercial traveller—soldier”; the feeling of familiarity then represents our recognition of the class. Lastly, they are definite when one or more of the contributory factors—the name, the organic stir of the feeling, the incoming ideas—carry an unequivocal reference to our past experience, mean some definite incident of our past life. We chance to overhear a name in conversation; and “Why,” we break in, “that’s the man I went up the Gross Glockner with in ‘98!”—the recognition is definite. There is no real psychological difference between the three cases; the difference lies only in the range of meaning which the contextual processes carry.

There is a psychological difference, however, between all the cases of recognition which we have hitherto mentioned and certain other cases: a difference between direct and indirect recognition. The recognition is direct when the perception at once, of itself, calls up the recognitive feeling. It is indirect when the feeling attaches, not directly to the perception, but to some idea or some other perception connected with the given perception. We pass a stranger on the street; but we are suddenly hailed by a familiar voice; the recognition of the voice makes us look hard at the stranger’s face, and we then recognise him as an old college friend. We try to find our host’s face in a group-photograph of schoolboys, and we are wholly puzzled to identify him; the face is pointed out in the picture, and we turn from it to the mature face with which we are familiar; the photograph grows more and more like, the more closely we compare the two; presently we get a sudden conviction of their identity, the recognition of the photograph is complete, and we wonder that we could have failed to pick the right boy at the outset. In both these instances, recognition hinges on the feeling of familiarity; but something else happens, something that reminds us of the second connective pattern of p. 161, where an idea is read into a perception, or the perception resolved into an idea. There are times, too, when recognition is halting and partial, when the feeling of familiarity alternates with a feeling of strangeness; in such experiences the play of associative tendencies may be extremely complex.

[§ 39]. Direct Apprehension.—We saw on p. 120 that meaning, which was at first a fringe of mental processes, a contextual setting of some bit of bare experience, may in course of time be carried by nerve-processes which have no mental correlates of any kind. The same thing seems to hold of recognition. We do not, in strictness, ‘recognise’ the clothes that we put on every morning, or the desk at which we are accustomed to write; we apprehend them, directly, as our clothes and our desk; we take them for granted. The feeling of familiarity, the feeling of being at home with our own things, changes first to something that is still a feeling, though weaker and more nebulous; to something that we may describe as an ‘of-course’ feeling, which is still some distance away from sheer indifference. As the days and weeks go on, this of-course feeling itself dies out; the stimuli no longer have power to arouse a feeling at all, and the organism faces the habitual situations without any organic stir. We apprehend the clothes and desk as ours, precisely as we perceive the tree and the piano as spatial (p. 115). In experiments on the recognition of greys, the author has reported positively that a particular grey had been seen before, without being able to find anything whatsoever, in the way of verbal idea or kinæsthetic quiver or organic thrill, that might carry the meaning of familiarity; the brain-habit just touched off the report ‘Yes,’ and that was all that could be said.

That brain-habit, however, had a psychological history behind it; and the history shows itself whenever our direct apprehension is in some manner disturbed or prevented. We reach out to our inkstand, and find that the pen which always lies in it has disappeared; or we glance round the breakfast-room, and notice that a picture which always hangs upon a certain wall has gone. We have not been wont to recognise the pen and the picture; they were just matters of course. Now that they are absent, however, the situation jars upon us; we have a pronounced feeling of helplessness or of displeased surprise. That is as far, perhaps, as ordinary observation goes; but there is really more to be observed. For at the moment of disturbance, before the disagreeable feeling has arisen, the ‘of-course’ feeling springs up in unusual strength; it is as if, for a brief space, we reverted in imagination to a true recognition of the missing object. And even after the displeasure is there, we may go back more than once to the familiar state of affairs; we can’t believe, as we say, we can’t trust our eyes, the thing has always been in that place; so that the glow of recognition alternates with the dominant feeling. In a word, the disturbance of apprehension has brought back to life certain stages in the past history of the brain-habit, stages in which the nerve-processes had as their correlates the mental processes that make up the feeling of familiarity.

This passage of recognition, from the characteristic feeling of familiarity through the weaker of-course feeling into a sheer brain-habit or nervous set, illustrates the descending phase of a progression which is typical in psychology, and which is summed up in the law of mental growth and decay. We are constantly finding that a mental formation, a particular complex of mental processes, is at first thin and scant, then enriches itself by various supplementary processes, and then again thins out or tails off—finally, into mental nothingness; and recognition illustrates the downward half of the curve. The law was strongly insisted on by the late G. H. Lewes, an author who wrote largely on psychological topics, but who is better known to the general reader from his association with George Eliot. “This process,” Lewes tell us, “underlies all development. The voluntary actions become involuntary, the involuntary become automatic; the intelligent become habitual, and the habitual become instinctive. It is the same in the higher regions of intellect: the slow acquisitions of centuries of research become condensed into axioms which are intuitions.” We have already met the law in our discussions of attention and meaning; and we shall meet it again when we come to discuss action.

[§ 40]. The Memory-Idea.—But where, all this while, is the memory-image? If you had been asked, before you read the foregoing paragraphs, what happens when you recognise somebody or something, you would probably have replied, as the associationists reply: ‘The present sight of the object calls up an image of that object, by the law of similarity; then the image or idea is compared with the perception, and the two are found to agree; and this agreement is what I mean by recognition.’ If it were then objected that observation fails to show any such idea or image, you would perhaps have said: ‘The whole thing takes place so quickly that the factors cannot ordinarily be distinguished; but all the same that is what must happen.’ And so you would have kept your faith in the image.

Such an image may, in fact, appear. It may appear in the cases of halting and partial recognition that we referred to on p. 181; but it need not necessarily appear even there; its intervention is, indeed, as rare as the third type of mental connection, the clean-cut succession of p. 161. You will perhaps get at the heart of the matter most easily if we lay down, at once, the general principle that no imaginal process or complex of imaginal processes is in its own right a memory-idea. Even if the simple images which compose it are different from sensations (p. 77), it must still be called a complex image, and nothing more; not an idea of memory. A complex of imaginal processes becomes, is made into, a memory-idea by an attendant feeling of familiarity; just exactly as a perception, a complex of sensory processes, is made into a recognition of something by the same feeling of familiarity. So that an idea, in order to be a memory-idea, must bear the memory-label; and the label will be either the sense-feeling of familiarity proper, or else some weaker and more fleeting feeling of the ‘of-course’ kind. It is true, again, that an idea which has lived through this history may be taken as a memory-idea when the label has dropped away; but even then it is a memory-idea, not in its own right, but in right of the brain-habit behind it. No group of images, taken out of its mental setting or removed from the directive pressure of a brain-habit, can be known as a memory; it might be hallucination or dream or imagination or anything else; it is just a group of images.

Our quarrel with popular psychology goes further still. The whole notion that a memory-idea is a copy of past experience is wrong; the idea may copy the perception, but it need not; and usually it does not. You remember that, after we had formulated our own law of mental connection, we introduced the catch-phrase ‘marriage by proxy’; and you remember why. What, now, is the essential thing about a memory-idea? Not, surely, that it should copy past experience, but that it should mean past experience. Our individual equipment of images is so variable (p. 139) that we should be very badly off if we were limited, in what we remember, to copies of our perceptions; A, who has no visual images, could then remember nothing that he had seen, and B, who has no auditory images, could remember nothing that he had heard! Such are the straits to which popular psychology must logically reduce us. In point of fact, A remembers well enough what he has seen; only, the visual parts of his experience are translated into other modes, perhaps verbal-motor. In that event a verbal-motor image, set in the right context and accompanied by a feeling of familiarity, may mean for A some visual object that he perceived so many years since. It goes flat against common sense to assert that a verbal-motor image is the ‘memory’ of the visual perception; and yet that is just what the verbal-motor image, in its present setting, actually is.