A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

Hearn has tried by such rather clumsy means to arouse in his reader the specific feeling-attitude in which he wrote. He tries to do the same thing, on a more minute scale, by his system of punctuation; and the net outward result is an unpleasant spottiness of page. Let us, however, keep to the internal; and let us consider only the paragraphing. If you pause to think of it, the paragraph-feeling itself is a somewhat subtle thing; a properly rounded paragraph gives you a feeling of temporary completeness, while yet it invites you to look ahead, leaves you in a certain suspense; a poorly finished paragraph gives you the same feeling of disappointment, of being ‘taken in,’ that you get from a weak ending to a stanza, or from a musical progression that fails to hold its tone-colour. The paragraph that is set off from what follows by a blank line rouses a feeling of greater completeness; you are to stop and take breath, to let your thought play backward a little before you go on; still you are to look forward. The paragraph that begins with a dash opens up the subject from a new angle; you are to hold what you have read, but you are now to see it in a fresh light; the feeling is that of a pleasurable curiosity, with the prospect of reference forth and back. The paragraphs with asterisks between them are like different roads of survey in a country that you are touring; each one is complete in itself, but you are to remember them all for a future synthesis; at the moment you have a sense of relief, but this is mixed with a somewhat exciting responsibility; the author expects you to be ready for him when he comes to summarising. Lastly, the train of periods means a trail of feeling; the device, which is far more freely used by French than by English writers, invites you to let your thought play ahead a little, in the context of the feeling aroused by the paragraph, before you go on. Take the description of the local Shint[=o] festival: “By immemorial custom the upper stories of all the dwellings had been tightly closed: woe to the Peeping Tom who should be detected, on such a day, in the impious act of looking down upon the god!...” Elementary enough, in all conscience; and needlessly emphasised by the italics; and yet tremendously effective; one’s ideas trail off, in a context of feeling, from the seacoast village of Japan to the inland English town, from outraged godhead to the desecration of humanity; not sentimentally, or one has missed the writer’s intention, but in a continuous train of attitudes which derive from literary sentiment. It is a pity, psychologically, that ‘sentimental’ is the adjective of ‘sentimentality’; for sentimentality is at the opposite pole to sentiment, as sentiment is here used; but we cannot help the twists of language.

No doubt, a greater artist than Hearn would have printed his pages in the conventional way, and would still have made his appeal, without signposts, to the expert reader. Yet we may be grateful to him for a psychological object-lesson; he has given outward expression to a set of attitudes that we should otherwise have been obliged to seek and identify for ourselves. All the same, the attitudes would have been there, as certainly and definitely as if they had been indicated; and we could have found them, if we had ever experienced the sentiment of literary fitness. You see what enrichment of the life of feeling such a sentiment breeds, and you see how helpless we should be without it. The proverbs say de gustibus non est disputandum, and quot homines tot sententiæ, as if taste and opinion were matters of the merest chance. They are never that, however far they may lie below the level of sentiment and judgement; for there are solid uniformities of sense-feeling, and there is in every society a basal community of ideas; while, upon the higher level, they are as sure and as uniform as individual differences of talent and temperament allow. They are far more sure and far more uniform than the outsider imagines; technical discussion and technical appreciation have always a reasoned foundation of agreement. Competent critics may debate whether Whistler’s picture of his Mother or that of Miss Alexander is the greater portrait; but think how much must be agreed upon before the debate can begin!

[§ 70]. The Forms of Sentiment.—Emotions go in pairs; an emotion is either joy or sorrow, either hope or fear; there is no midway emotion that is something between the two, but is neither the one nor the other. The sense-feelings, too, go in pairs; a feeling is either exciting or subduing, for instance, and cannot be anything between. When, however, the situation that arouses feeling is met by us in the state of secondary attention, then there is a third possibility; and the sentiments, in fact, run in threes. Here is a theory: is it true or false? If we judge it true, we have the sentiment of belief; if we judge it false, the sentiment of disbelief. But we need not come to a final judgement; facts a, b, c, we will suppose, tell for the theory, and facts x, y, z tell against it; we oscillate, uncertainly, between the two predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’; and the result is the suspensive sentiment of doubt. Language is an unsafe guide in these matters; partly because the same term may stand both for sentiment and for feeling-attitude, but partly also because the sentiments, being less common than emotions, have not always received specific names. In principle, nevertheless, there is in every case a third sentiment, corresponding with oscillation of judgement, between the two extremes.

The three just mentioned, belief-doubt-disbelief, belong to the class of intellectual sentiments. An attempt has been made to examine them under experimental conditions; with the result that they prove to be of rare occurrence; that they are characterised in different minds—as might perhaps be expected, from the complexity of the situation—by different complexes, by the kinæsthesis of bodily attitude, by internal speech, by the interplay of visual imagery; and that they are ordinarily replaced by the feeling-attitudes of certainty and uncertainty. The mental patterns of belief and disbelief turn out to be the same; and this result is psychologically reasonable; for the positive and negative of the terms are logical, an affair of meaning; so far as experience goes, disbelief is as positive as belief. Hence it is natural that both of them should be represented in feeling-attitude by the same ‘certainty,’ Another group of intellectual sentiments, less often named, but familiar to everyone who has set to work seriously to master a new writer or a new subject, consists of agreement, obscurity and contradiction. These have not, to the author’s knowledge, been subjected to analysis; indeed, the present paragraphs can do little more than catalogue a few of the more obvious sentiments; the experiences are difficult to induce, and their detailed study is yet to come.

In the sphere of the moral or social sentiments, we have such opposites as trust-distrust, honour-dishonour, justice-injustice. There is always a suspensive sentiment, corresponding with oscillation of judgement, though its name can be made only approximative; we may, perhaps, speak of trust-trial-distrust, honour-ambiguity-dishonour, justice-equivocalness-injustice; think yourself into concrete situations, and you will get the meaning of the terms! Social situations are, however, of great practical importance; and we usually meet them, not by a sentiment, but by some emotion based upon instinctive tendencies; vanity, shame, pride, sympathy are emotions of this sort. The same thing holds of religious situations. Triads like faith-perplexity-denial, communion-insecurity-estrangement point to the state of secondary attention; but in general the religious situation sets up an emotion.

We come, lastly, to the æsthetic sentiments. These are confused, by the majority of civilised mankind, with the emotions aroused by the subject of the work of art; whereas this subject is really of very minor importance; of no importance at all, if it is dictated by tradition and environment; and of secondary importance, only as it is chosen by the artist, from a number of possible subjects, because it allows the expression of personality or offers a test of difficulties overcome. What do you suppose Michael Angelo was trying to do when he painted the Last Judgement, or Titian when he painted the Entombment of Christ? The æsthetic sentiments are, in reality, those of success-bafflement-failure, ease-confusion-difficulty, approbation-criticism-condemnation, and the like. When Ruskin said “Everything that Velasquez does may be taken as absolutely right by the student,” the unmeasured approbation expresses a true æsthetic sentiment; Ruskin had worked over Velasquez. When a recent writer on art directs us, in Millet’s Gleaners, to “these forms bowed down by labour, these coarse habiliments, these work-hardened hands,” he is outside the sphere of æsthetics altogether, and his appeal lies—at the best—to a social emotion.

These groups of sentiments, the intellectual, the moral or social, the religious and the æsthetic, are usually regarded as distinct and different. It is true that they are called forth by different kinds of situation. We must remember, however, that there are only two kinds of mental pattern involved: the thought-pattern and the pattern of constructive imagination; and we have seen that these are themselves broadly similar. It is not likely, therefore, that the sentiments, or the feeling-attitudes that derive from them, differ in anything but inessentials from group to group; M. Bergeret and M. l’abbé Lantaigne felt in very much the same way. The variety of the feeling-attitudes is, indeed, surprisingly large; the point here is that this variety is essentially the same, whether one be sage or saint, artist or moralist.

[§ 71]. The Situations and Their Appeal.—If we wish to enquire into the nature of the situations which arouse a sentiment, two courses are open to us. We may undertake a study of origins; we may trace the history of primitive science and primitive art, and so on; and we may then try to generalise, both as regards the circumstances which called forth the scientific or artistic response, and as regards the appeal that such circumstances make to the human organism. Or we may turn our attention to acknowledged masterpieces, and try in like manner to ‘get behind’ them; trusting in this event rather to the typical than to the general. Both courses have been followed, and followed assiduously; but the outcome is still uncertain.

The tendency has been to refer a group of sentiments to some single root in human nature. That is only natural; for it is always satisfactory to simplify; and when once the investigator has hit upon what he takes to be the primule or germ of later development, he is prepared to accept whatever makes for his theory and to reject whatever tells against it (p. 98). Yet we must remind ourselves that man’s instinctive tendencies are not carried intact throughout his history; man reasons, as we said (p. 210), on the basis of fragments of instinctive tendency, disjoined from their original connections and recombined to suit the occasion. We may, for instance, refer the intellectual sentiments to a native curiosity (p. 205); but what is curiosity? A very mixed medley of instinctive responses: Professor Thorndike includes under it “attention to novel objects and human behaviour, cautious approach, reaching and grasping, the food-trying reactions of putting in the mouth, tasting and biting, general exploration with the eyes and manipulation with the hands,” as well as “the love of sensory life for its own sake.” Again, we may refer the moral and social sentiments to a native sympathy or empathy; but here, also, we should find, in the concrete, a mixed medley of particular responses. These references are, nevertheless, fairly satisfactory. What shall we say of religion and art?