A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

But the degeneration may go further still. “There is a story,” writes Huxley, “which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out ‘Attention!’ whereupon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter.” Huxley calls this an artificial reflex action; and indeed the organism responds, in such cases of thorough drill, as fatally and automatically as in the physiological reflexes, and with as little apprehension of the nature of the stimulus; there is nothing to choose, psychologically, between this direct response to the word ‘Attention!’ and the blinking of the eye in response to a threatened blow, or the snatching back of the hand from a hot surface, or the withdrawal of the foot when the sole is tickled. From the psychological point of view, impulsive action, instinctive action and artificial reflex all shade off into one another; and the artificial and physiological reflexes are indistinguishable.

Only, as we know, the artificial reflex has a mental history; the word ‘Attention!’ had been called out many thousand times before it became a compelling suggestion. What, then, of the physiological reflex? Has it, too, a mental history, extending beyond the individual to the race; is it a racially degenerate impulsive action? or does it belong to a class apart, purely physiological in character, and without right to mention in a text-book of psychology?

The answer to these questions must be speculative; and speculation, as is almost always the case, has swung between opposed extremes. Some psychologists teach that all action has its origin in the physiological reflex; the organism at first moved reflexly, automatically, fatally; and then, later, mental processes were somehow ‘imported’ into its activities. Others hold that all organic movements were originally of the impulsive sort; the physiological reflex, so far from being primary, is a late development, the final term in a series which begins with movement of a large, diffuse sort, accompanied by mental processes, and which ends with precise, local movement devoid of mental correlates. Both these views are open to objection from the biological side; and it seems reasonable to suppose that the earliest movements of the earliest organisms were of two kinds: some were bare reflexes, or—to use the newer word—physiological ‘tropisms’; others, however scanty and undifferentiated their mental accompaniment, were still of the nature of impulsive actions. If this mediating view be adopted, as a working hypothesis, the zoologist and the comparative psychologist must join forces, to trace the racial history of the physiological reflexes, and to determine what part of our human equipment is ultimately tropistic, and what part may be referred back to earlier impulses.

The passage from an impulsive action to an artificial reflex may be regarded, broadly, as an example of the effect of practice. We have seen that improvement in such activity as piano-playing depends, not solely upon repetition, but largely also upon changes in our method of working; upon the sudden discovery of some new trick of procedure, or the sudden release from some hampering peculiarity of method (p. 170). Turning-points of this same sort are characteristic of the path from impulse to reflex; we do not find a gradual refining of movement and a corresponding simplification of its mental accompaniments; the history is rather a matter of short-cuts and substitutions; the organic machine is too complicated, too sensitive, has too great a variety of resources, to follow a beaten track. So the course of impulsive action, though it be downhill, cannot be expected to run smooth.

[§ 58]. The Development of Action: From Impulsive to Selective and Volitional.—Action appears in its simplest form when it is singly or unequivocally determined (p. 235); and this implies that actions of more complicated form are multiply or equivocally determined. What that means you will see at once if you recall the development of attention. Primary passes into secondary attention because we have many sense-organs, all of them open to manifold stimulation at the same time, and because we have many different lines of interest, several of which may be appealed to by the situation in which we chance to find ourselves; there are rival claimants for the centre of the field of attention. Impulsive passes into selective action, in precisely the same way, when the nervous system is the seat of a conflict of impulsive tendencies.

The passage, however, is not made at one step; the conflict of impulses may remain a mere conflict of impulses, without rising to the pitch of selective action. We have already had an instance: the young child, face to face with a strange dog, behaves as if pulled back and forth by strings; it goes toward the dog, runs back to its father, approaches the dog again, shrinks back again, and so on. It has happened to the author, in presence of the two impulses to shut a door on the right and to seat himself at a desk on the left, to begin the right-hand movement towards the door, and then all at once to slue around to the desk without having closed it. In such cases, the organism acts impulsively or instinctively, but acts nevertheless under a dual determination; the instincts or impulses are in conflict. Buridan’s ass, starving to death between its two bundles of hay, illustrates the logical outcome of an exact equality of the conflicting tendencies.

One may observe this sort of action, typically shown, in the behaviour of those who are asked to guess a riddle or solve a mechanical puzzle. Some people, of course, set to work deliberately, and think the matter out in all its bearings; they are not here in question. A great many will behave in the manner just described; they will hazard guess after guess in quick succession, and they will snatch at one possibility of solution after another, risking everything upon the impulse that happens to be dominant at the moment, until they either light upon the right principle or ‘give up.’ Professor Lloyd Morgan, one of the best-known writers upon comparative psychology, thinks that this method of ‘trial and error’ is characteristic of animal intelligence. The dog, for instance, placed in novel circumstances, meets the situation at once by some action that derives from his individual experience or from racial inheritance; if that first response fails, he ‘tries’ another action, similarly derived; and so on, until luck favours him or he is diverted to something else. Only man advances beyond the stage of ‘trial and error’ to the level of rational selection; and man himself need not; in the story of Dite Deuchars Sir J. M. Barrie draws an accurate picture of human conduct permanently arrested between impulsive and selective action.

Selective action appears when the rival impulses are so evenly matched that no one of them can find direct issue in movement; it implies the state of secondary attention; and it is possible only to organisms that possess free ideas of memory and imagination,—probably, that is, only to man. Any biography that goes at all minutely into details will furnish examples. Thus, when the first Napoleon was at liberty to turn his thoughts to England, after the treaty of Schönbrunn (1809), he found two possibilities of action: he might himself take in hand the conduct of the war in Spain, or he might devote himself to heightening the rigour of the blockade in the north and north-west. He ‘chose’ the latter course; that is to say, he passed through a period of doubt and hesitation, weighing the alternatives and estimating results,—we know the pattern of secondary attention,—until presently the stronger impulse won. It is always the strongest impulse that wins; though here, as also in the case of attention, it is not necessarily the impulse that looks the strongest to psychological observation; there may be a more impressive array of ideas on the side that finally gives way. The winning impulse, as we see in historical examples of selective action, is that which has the strongest backing of nerve-forces (p. 96). The actor, oftentimes, cannot make his action plausible, even to himself, when he tries to state his ‘reasons’; but the sympathetic historian can trace the influence of tendencies which had no mental correlates, and whose existence was therefore unsuspected by their possessor.

All this is clear in principle, though psychology stands sorely in need of detailed analyses. Let us add a final word of caution,—that you beware of confusing the practical or moral value of selective action with its psychological status. Napoleon the Great was an incomparably more efficient person than Dite Deuchars, and the results of his action were incomparably wider; but with a trifle more balance in the impulsive tendencies, and a little freer play of ideas, the latter gentleman could have performed selective actions of the same psychological type as Napoleon’s.