A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

[§ 62]. Imaginal Processes in Thought: The Abstract Idea.—A great deal of controversy has raged about the abstract or general idea. We can see to-day that the name is, psychologically, a misnomer. Just as no idea is, in its own right, an idea of memory or of imagination, so also no idea is, in its own right, an abstract idea; an idea becomes, is made into, an abstract idea whenever its context and determination carry the meaning of abstractness and generality. The associationists, however, looked at things differently; they thought that any idea which means ‘abstract’ must also itself be abstract; and so they distinguished a special class of abstract ideas. We obtain such ideas, they said, in this way: we review a large number of particular ideas, and we separate out the elements that are common to all of them; this common remainder is then a general or abstract idea which represents the whole group of particulars. Thus, “by leaving out of the particular colours perceived by sense that which distinguishes them one from another; and retaining that only which is common to all; the mind makes an idea of colour in abstract which is neither red, nor blue, nor white, nor any other determinate colour.”

An emphatic protest was raised against this theory by the idealistic philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753). “The idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white or a black or a tawny, a straight or a crooked, a tall or a low or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive [that is, mentally picture] the abstract idea above described.” It is, truly, a little difficult to imagine an abstract ‘colour’ with all the specific colour-elements left out! Yet the theory is so plausible, as long as process and meaning are confused, that it has been revived again, though in somewhat altered form. The suggestion has been made that an abstract idea is a sort of composite photograph, a mental picture which results from the superposition of many particular perceptions or ideas, and which therefore shows the common elements distinct and the individual elements blurred. A passage from Huxley illustrates this view. “An anatomist who occupies himself intently with the examination of several specimens of some new kind of animal, in course of time acquires so vivid a conception of its form and structure, that the idea may take visible shape and become a sort of waking dream. But the figure which thus presents itself is generic, not specific. It is no copy of any one specimen, but, more or less, a mean of the series.” To which we reply that ‘the figure which presents itself’ is as specific and particular as any other idea; only, it means the genus; the anatomist is working under the suggestion of a type, of a composite picture that will make a diagram in a text-book or monograph; and his idea is abstract in virtue of this determination and context, and not because it pictures the mean of a series.

The fact is, to repeat, that any idea is made into an abstract idea when context and determination carry the meaning of abstractness; and there is no doubt that, in minds of a certain type, imaginal processes other than words may take on this context and suffer this determination, so that thought may go on in imaginal terms. Experiments show that visual imagery may play its part, along with verbal ideas and attitudes, in a single train of thought; one recent writer describes visual images of a complex kind as centres of ‘activity’ in the progress of thinking. Blindfold chess-players, if they are of the motor type, think of attack and defence in terms of ‘lines of force’ which connect the various pieces on the board, and which they themselves ‘feel’ in kinæsthetic imagery as pushes and pulls in hand and arm. We saw on p. 77 that such general notions as ‘virtue’ and ‘commerce’ may come to mind in the form of habitual images. No doubt, these images were at first contextual processes surrounding a verbal idea; they are therefore secondary, and not original; yet they may now replace the verbal idea, and do duty by themselves as abstract ideas. There are probably a good many of us whose abstract idea of ‘triangle’ is simply a mental picture of the little equilateral triangle that stands for the word in text-books of geometry.

Is there, then, no truth at all in the theory of the composite photograph? Not an atom, so far as regards the genesis of the abstract idea; one might superpose individual ideas ad infinitum, and one would still have nothing more than an individual idea. But if we leave the abstract idea out of the question, and consider the history of ideas, in minds of the imaginal type, then the composite photograph has more to say for itself. For we know from p. 156 that the associative tendencies, if left to themselves, gradually die out; and that the weaker die out more quickly than the stronger. Consider what this means! I have a mental picture of a landscape, and I do not see the actual scene for some years. The picture fades out; but it fades out unevenly; its various features are correlated with associative tendencies of varying strength. So I shall always imagine a semicircle of mountains with the valley opening towards me, and the river meandering down the valley; for these are features common to many landscapes and strongly impressed upon my nervous system; but I shall lose the relative heights of the mountains, and the particular turns of the river, and the special distribution of villages and churches; for these are individual features, and have been less frequently repeated. My mental picture of the landscape thus approaches a type; and the same thing is true of all complex images, if they are left to themselves, and the underlying associative tendencies decay from old age. These typical images are, nevertheless, ideas of particular scenes or things or faces; their rounding and smoothing do not make them abstract; while, conversely, the image that carries an abstract meaning may be as firmly outlined as a steel engraving. The typical image depends upon the inherent strength and weakness of associative tendencies; the abstract meaning is due to determinations which cut across the associative tendencies, perhaps to arrest or short-circuit, perhaps to rearrange them; there can be no necessary connection between typical image and abstract idea.

[§ 63]. Thought and Language.—It has often been said that thought would be impossible without words; and it is true that we can hardly conceive of human thought save as formed and embodied and expressed in language. Thought and articulate speech grew up, so to say, side by side; each implies the other; they are two sides of the same phase of mental development. The old conundrum ‘Why don’t the animals talk? Because they have nothing to say’ contains so much of sound psychology; if the animals thought, they would undoubtedly use their vocal organs for speech; and since they do not talk, they cannot either be thinking. All this is true: and yet we must acknowledge that thought is not necessarily wedded to speech; it probably appeared, at least in rudimentary guise, before words came into being, and it persists (so to say) after words have ceased to be. There is a gesture-language that can serve as the medium of thought, and that is probably older than speech; and there is a thinking in images and attitudes that dispenses with words.

A gesture is an expressive movement; and all gestures have their origin in the movements that express emotion. But a gesture can serve as the medium of thought only if it is made with the intention to communicate, to impart some meaning; and it is this intention that seems to be the important thing, the specifically human endowment; though we can say nothing more of it now than that it is one of the ingrained tendencies of our nervous system (p. 135). Gestures, at any rate, can give rise to a language of their own; and we may study this language in various dialects; among deaf-mutes who have not been subject to special training; in the Cistercian communities, which are vowed to silence in the ordinary affairs of life; among uncivilised peoples, like the Indian tribes of North America; and finally in the lower strata of civilised societies,—here the Southern Italians are typical. There is a strong family resemblance throughout. We find that gestures express both the feeling-side and the idea-side of emotions; and we find, naturally enough, that development has gone further on the side of idea, where the gesture becomes a means for the expression of thought. The simplest kind of ideational gesture is the demonstrative, which points towards, directly indicates, the object that excites emotion; we point our finger at the thing that has frightened us, or shake our fist at the man who has made us angry. Representative gesture depicts the object: whether by a finger-drawing of its outline in the air, or by the reproduction of one of its characteristic features, or by some purely symbolic movement. Thus, a deaf-mute gesture for ‘smoke’ is a spiral action of the forefinger from below upwards; for ‘child,’ the action of cradling and rocking the right elbow in the left hand; for ‘truth,’ the movement of the forefinger in a straight line from the mouth. This gesture-language has its own syntax, its own laws of growth and change, its own psychological history; but it could not hold its own against articulate speech.

The struggle was, in all probability, brief; because, at the very beginning, speech itself was a gesture; the essential thing about it was not the sound, but the movement. If, then, gesture-language is older than speech, it can hardly be much older; for the sound that accompanied the gesture would soon attract attention, and the superiority of articulate sound over visible movement would soon be recognised. Attempts have been made, of course,—we may say ‘of course’ at this point of our psychological knowledge!—to read a meaning into the sounds themselves. There is a theory which traces the origin of language to the imitation of natural sounds, and so makes it begin with words like hiss and roar; and there is a theory which traces it to ejaculations and merely mechanical utterances, and so makes it begin with oh and ah and a sort of infantile babble. Neither of these theories will hold water. Apart from the psychological arguments, which we cannot here set forth, there is the evidence of fact: words like hiss and roar form a very small part of the vocabulary of any language; exclamations and interjections are emotive and not ideational, and have had but little development; and the babble of the human infant is not primitive, but corresponds with a stage in the maturing of an inherited speech-mechanism. No! the sound was, at first, simply the incidental accompaniment of the gesture, of a movement which included the muscles of the larynx; it derived its meaning from the gesture-context; and presently, under the influence of continued social intercourse, it proved its superiority to gesture and acquired its independence. We may say in the large that the word heard has never had any other than a derivative and symbolic meaning, and that the self-sufficiency of the word-gesture, combined sound and movement, is the origin of language.

What a word should ‘mean,’ therefore, depended in the first instance upon the context and determination of the articulated sound. Just as any idea may serve as an abstract idea, so may any word whatever serve as an abstract verbal idea, as what is technically called a concept, provided only that its context and determination carry the meaning of abstractness. We saw, however, that the context of the abstract idea may drop away, and the mental correlates of its determination lapse, so that finally some conventional image, like the triangle, is taken as abstract, wears the very stamp of abstractness upon it. This is preeminently the case with words. Every generation, we must remember, inherits the speech of preceding generations; language comes to us ready made. We learn from the study of language itself that the abstract words were originally concrete; thus the Latin sapio, to taste, sapor, taste, are connected with sapa, must, sapo, soap, sebum, tallow,—with the names of substances that are readily diluted or liquefied; but the situations that made them abstract dropped out of mind long ago. The child finds language waiting for it, and finds that every word incorporates a meaning; and so it comes about, not only that the mental representation of honesty or pride may be the mere word, ‘honesty’ or ‘pride,’ as it occurs in internal speech, but also that the same internal speech embodies the meaning of abstractness; the verbal image stands psychologically for an idea and logically for a meaning.

[§ 64]. Mental Attitudes.—If you look back over a course of thought, you will find verbal ideas, and you will perhaps find imaginal complexes of various kinds; but you will also find experiences of another sort, which have come to be known as mental attitudes. They are vague and elusive processes, which carry as if in a nutshell the entire meaning of a situation. Some of them belong to the feeling-side of mind: for feeling enters into the train of directed thought no less than into the freer play of association (p. 161): they are reported as ‘feelings’ of hesitation, vacillation, incapacity, expectancy, surprise, triviality, relevancy, and so on. Others are more nearly related to ideas; they are generally reported by a phrase beginning with ‘I knew that ...,’ ‘I was sure that ...,’ ‘I realised that ...,’ or some like expression. Suppose, for instance, that the observer is required to solve ‘in his head’ some mathematical problem, or to think out the answer to some difficult question that bears upon his special line of study. He may say, in the course of his report: “At that point it occurred to me that I had lost the first partial product,” “It seemed to me that the whole thing was taking too long a time,” “I suddenly realised that I had never thought of that before,” “It flashed upon me that the question was only another form of the old difficulty,” “I could not see the answer, but I knew that I could work it out,” and so forth. All these that-clauses may stand for mental attitudes.