A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

It is clear that, so far as the verbal expressions go, the observer is reporting meanings and not processes. Our task is, then, to discover what processes lie behind the meanings; and here the opinions of psychologists are sharply at variance. One party believes that the mental attitudes are unique and simple, that they cannot be further analysed, and that they must therefore be given rank as mental elements alongside of sensation and feeling. Another party, to which the author belongs, believes that the attitudes are analysable, if only they are taken out of the thought-context and examined by themselves under more favourable conditions, and that their analysis yields nothing else than sensations and feelings. The whole matter is still under discussion, and you will do best to suspend judgement. Meantime we may look at a couple of instances.

Consider, first, the attitude of expectation. It is not difficult to devise experiments which shall set up in the observer an expectant attitude; thus, in a very simple case, the experimenter might hang a weight by a cord to the ceiling, tie a loose piece of string to the cord, and light the end of the string; the observer would then watch the progress of the flame, expecting that it will presently reach the cord, burn that, and so cause the weight to fall to the floor. What are the processes in the observer’s mind as he watches? You will naturally think of an image; the observer will imagine the fall of the weight. Not necessarily; not even usually; the image of expectation must go the same road as the image of recognition (p. 184). Ordinarily, expectation consists simply of kinæsthetic and organic sensations; sometimes there are verbal ideas; only occasionally is there an image. If the experience is novel, the sensations are likely to be tinged by feeling; there is a trace of anxiety, of apprehension. Analysis reveals nothing more.

We have, then, in expectation a directed experience; the perception of the flaming string acts as a suggestion, turning the observer’s mental processes into a single channel. The kinæsthetic and organic sensations derive in part from the bodily attitude of attention: tense muscles, inhibited breathing, adjustment of the organ of sight. Yet the observer is not merely attentive; the suggestion, the determination is there; and the sensations derive in part from that. They are contextual processes, and carry the meaning that ‘so-and-so is going to happen.’ They are therefore precisely like the ‘sensations of intended movement’ that characterise the motor reaction (p. 241); we might even call them, following that analogy, ‘sensations of future occurrence.’ All the same, they are, if we regard them as processes, just kinæsthetic and organic sensations, held together in a certain pattern by the perceptive suggestion; expectation shows nothing unique or ultimate behind or beyond them.

In course of time, if the situation is repeated, the feeling of anxiety fades away, and the experience becomes indifferent. With still further repetition, the ‘sensations of future occurrence’ also drop away; the suggestion from the flaming string then sets the organism, automatically, for the coming event; and the set has no mental correlates whatever.

A like procedure might be followed with vacillation, triviality, and the rest; and the outcome, in the author’s belief, would be the same. It is less easy to attack the intellectual attitudes, those expressed by that-clauses. Suppose, however, that you have to write two letters: the one to an intimate friend, dealing with your home-life and things that have happened in your immediate circle, and the other to a business correspondent, regarding some contract that must be drawn up in precise terms. Do you not sit down to write with a felt difference of bodily attitude, almost as if in the two cases you were a different organism? There are different visceral pressures, differences of tonicity in the muscles of back and legs, differences in the sensed play of facial expression, differences in the movements of arm and hand in the intervals of setting pen to paper, rather obvious differences in respiration, and marked differences of local or general involuntary movement,—all of them deriving from the different suggestions or determinations which prompt the letters. Here, then, are two thats: ‘I was sure that he would be interested in any gossip,’ and ‘I knew very well that I had to write carefully’; and the processes that carry these meanings seem, again, to reduce to a certain pattern of kinæsthetic and organic sensations, tinged very likely by feeling. When observation reveals such a wealth of sensory processes, it seems unnecessary to assume a new mental element for the intellectual attitudes.

We saw on p. 4 that the concern of science is with facts. But just because facts are the staple of science, it is well that we should be a little jealous about them, that we should scrutinise every alleged fact as severely as our methods allow, and criticise it in the light of every possible theory. That is the present condition of the mental attitude; experiments are being made, and arguments brought forward, for and against its novelty and uniqueness; and the struggle must be carried through to the bitter end; for only in that way can the truth come stably to light. Meantime, those who are in the fight must of necessity take a side; the onlooker, as we have said, is well advised to await the issue.

[§ 65]. The Pattern of Thought.—There is a broad general resemblance between the pattern of thought and that of constructive imagination; it has indeed been said, though with exaggeration, that thought is an imagining in words, and imagination a thinking in images. The thinker, like the artist, sets out with a plan or design, and aims at a goal; and thought, like imagination, is a more or less steady flow, in a single direction, from the fountain-head of nervous disposition. ‘Happy thoughts’ occur in thinking, as they occur in imagination; there is a like movement between the poles of feeling; and the empathic experiences of the artist are paralleled by the mental attitudes of the thinker. In all these respects, the pattern of thought repeats what has been said on pp. 198 ff. of the pattern of constructive imagination.

Thought, however, has its distinctive features; for it is subject to two of the great directive tendencies that we mentioned on p. 205: the tendency to objectify, to find ‘real things’ in the world about us, and the tendency to dual division. The tendency to objectify underlies perception as well as thought; the earliest ‘real things’ were, we must suppose, external and material things; but with the growth of ideas the tendency bears also upon the things of mind, upon concepts and abstract ideas; these are taken as real in every case of thinking. The tendency to dual division is characteristic of thought; thinking is essentially divisive, even if the goal of thought is constructive. Here, then, is the main difference between thought and constructive imagination: that imagination proceeds to the exhibition of a single something, a statue or a picture or a poem; whereas thought proceeds to the exhibition of two somethings in relation, and ends with what the logicians call a judgement.

The tendency to dual division is so natural to us, and is impressed so deeply in our nervous make-up, that we can hardly hope to go behind it. We can hardly even describe a situation which calls for thought without presupposing the very tendency which is characteristic of thought. For what are the situations? They are situations which ask a question; and we cannot ask a question without putting it in the form of a judgement. Primitive man, wandering from place to place, comes back to a scene that he knew under other circumstances; the tree which was leafy is now bare, the river-bed which was full of water is now dry. If there is no feeling of familiarity, and therefore no recognition, the situation may still ask him: ‘Same?’ and his reply ‘Same scene; different features’ is the reply of thought. He has tried to understand things; his secondary attention has played upon the scene perceived and the scene remembered; he has in the upshot divided the permanent from the changing, the ‘thing’ from the ‘properties’ of the thing; he has reached a conclusion, or formed a judgement.