A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

[§ 77]. Consciousness and The Subconscious.—“Consciousness,” says Professor Ward, “is the vaguest, most protean, and most treacherous of psychological terms”; and Bain, writing in 1880, distinguished no less than thirteen meanings of the word; he could find more to-day! The ambiguity of the term seems to be due, in the last resort, to the running together of two fundamental meanings, the one of which is scientific or psychological, the other logical or philosophical. In the latter, the logical meaning, consciousness is awareness or knowledge, and ‘conscious of’ means ‘aware of’; in the former, the scientific meaning, consciousness is mental experience, experience regarded from the psychological point of view, and one can no more use the phrase ‘conscious of’ than one can use ‘mental of.’ If you think how natural it is to say ‘I was conscious of so-and-so,’ you will realise that the logical meaning is generally current; and if you remember that we have the terms ‘mind,’ ‘mental process,’ as names of mental experience, you will see that in psychology the word ‘consciousness’ is unnecessary; we have, in fact, not used it in this book,—until we came upon the popular expression ‘self-consciousness’ in § 76.

We have avoided the word, however, not only because it is unnecessary, but also because the logical or philosophical meaning that it tends to suggest is directly harmful in psychology. For the psychologist has nothing in the world to do with knowledge or awareness; he stands, in this regard, upon precisely the same level as the physicist or the chemist. Look up the word atom in a dictionary; you find, perhaps, that it is ‘an ultimate indivisible particle of matter’; and you would smile if you read ‘knowledge of an ultimate indivisible particle of matter.’ Look up metal; and you find ‘an elementary substance possessing such and such properties’; you would think it absurd to say ‘an awareness of an elementary substance’ possessing those properties. But now think of sensation, which is an elementary mental process (p. 65): you would probably not smile if you found ‘the first stage of knowledge; the elementary way of knowing some phenomenon of the outside world’; and that is because you are thoroughly accustomed to regard consciousness as awareness, and conscious processes as processes which are aware of something beyond themselves. Yet it is every whit as absurd, from the scientific point of view, to make sensation a ‘stage of knowledge’ or a ‘way of knowing’ as it is to define the atom as ‘knowledge’ or the metal as ‘an awareness.’ Science takes experience for granted, deals with the nature of things given (p. 4); so that questions about ‘knowing’ or ‘being aware of’ lie beyond the range of science, whether the particular science is psychology or physics.

You now understand why it is that we have avoided the term ‘consciousness.’ If we had said that red is an elementary conscious process, then you might have supposed that it is an elementary process in or by which you become aware of a red object; whereas, if we say that red is an elementary mental process, you have no reason to think of the red object, since ‘to become mental of a red object’ is not English. It is very likely, all the same, that you have been thinking of the object of knowledge, in spite of the terminology of the book, and in spite of the express warning that science has nothing to do with values or meanings or uses; the statements of a text-book, however emphatic they are, cannot always make headway against ingrained habits of thought and speech. If, then, you have at any point fallen into this mistake (and it may comfort you to know that the author, in his first years of studentship, was trapped by it again and again), go back now and read over the chapters in point; and if you discover that the mistake was partly due to the language there employed, remember that authors are human and that words are very slippery things.

So much of consciousness: what, now, shall we say of the subconscious? The term is fashionable; and though we have nowhere used it, we can hardly pass it by without mention. The subconscious may be defined as an extension of the conscious beyond the limits of observation. As an extension of the conscious, it tends always to be an extension of meaning beyond the meaning of the conscious; we do not hear of a ‘submental.’ As an extension of the conscious, it is always a matter of inference; what we cannot observe, we must infer. So there needs no argument to prove that the subconscious is not a part of the subject-matter of psychology. How, then, does it come into psychology?

It comes in as an explanatory concept, like the older concept of association (p. 146), to account for, to rationalise, the phenomena that are conscious. We have ourselves been satisfied with description and correlation, and we have therefore confined ourselves to mental and nervous processes which are in principle observable; though we have often enough been obliged to say that the facts, in this or that chapter of psychology or neurology, are few or wanting. There is, however, in many minds, a craving for ‘explanation’; and it must be admitted that such a craving is natural enough; for it shows in every phase of primitive thought, and may be traced throughout the history of science. Think, for instance, of the potency of explanation by ‘cause and effect’!—though when we examine a case of cause and effect we never, in fact, find anything more than correlation. There are many psychologists, then, who cannot be satisfied with description and correlation; they must refer the direction of thought to a ‘subconscious disposition,’ and explain the connections of ideas by ‘subconscious tendencies,’ and so on. They have recourse to the subconscious for purposes of explanation.

We must urge two objections against this mode of psychologising. In the first place, the construction of a subconscious is unnecessary. Science is not called upon to ‘explain’ anything; description and correlation are the modern—and more modest—representatives of the ‘explanation’ that an older science looked for and professed to find. Secondly, the introduction of a subconscious is dangerous. It is a matter of inference from the conscious; but who shall draw the line, in such a case, between legitimate and illegitimate inference? When from the course of the mental stream and the interplay of mental processes we infer the existence of associative and determining tendencies in the nervous system, our argument is safeguarded. No man, it is true, has seen those tendencies in course; but the inference to them is checked and controlled by the whole vast body of fact and method that makes up modern physiology. Things stand very differently with the subconscious. Here the inference must, it is plain, go beyond the conscious, since its aim is to explain the conscious; yet the conscious facts are all the facts we have; when once we have embarked on the subconscious, there are no more facts to steer by. Henceforth everything depends upon individual preference; and we may have many theories of the subconscious, widely different and equally plausible. The danger is that an erroneous theory of the subconscious distort our view of the conscious.

There is, however, another side to this whole question. The notion of a subconscious has proved useful in certain fields of practical psychology, and more especially in psychiatry and psychotherapeutics; and in matters of practice utility is a sufficient justification. Science cannot ask the physician to give up a theory which works. She can only point out that present utility is no test of ultimate truth,—there were plenty of useful inventions in the days when the physics of heat was dominated by the theory of caloric, and the physics of light by the theory of emission!—and that nobody has ever observed, or can ever observe, the subconscious at work; the wonderful things that it does testify rather to their reporter’s thought and imagination, to his conscious ingenuity in explaining, than to the scientific reality of the subconscious itself.

[§ 78]. Conclusion.—So we are at an end; and as you look back over the chapters of the book, you will have your own thoughts about the work done,—about your change of attitude from common sense to psychology, about the nature of mind, when mind is regarded from the scientific point of view, about the difficult or unsatisfactory places in psychology. The author has no wish to disturb these thoughts; every student must sum things up for himself, as every student, if he is to get the scientific point of view, must rely on his own thinking from the beginning (p. 36); for the kingdom of science is not in word but in power. There are, nevertheless, a few considerations that may be set down here, not as a summary made for you by the author, but simply as a general supplement to your own conclusions.

Realise, then, first of all, that there is nothing in the whole wide world that cannot be psychologised. Sound and light and heat, law and language and morals, “the whole choir of heaven and furniture of earth,” all alike become subject-matter of psychology if we regard them from the psychological standpoint, as they are in man’s experience (p. 9). The range of psychology is the range of that experience, and nothing more narrow. The psychological point of view is logically coordinate with the point of view of the physical sciences; these describe the world with man left out, psychology describes the world with man left in; but the psychologist surveys the broader field.

Realise, secondly, that you have the materials and the opportunity of psychological observation always with you. Truly, we must have laboratories; if we are to attain to accurate and comparable results, we must put ourselves under conditions that can be rigorously controlled. But get the habit of psychological observation, and you will be surprised to find (though it follows, does it not, from the laws of attention?) how much psychology there is in your daily life; how often you can snapshot a baffling experience, and catch a hint of analytical possibilities; how often you light upon something that the text-books do not discuss, but that this habit of observation reveals and places for you. Take the occasions as they come; plenty of good astronomical work has been done with a pair of opera glasses!—and if you cannot, later on, experiment for yourself in a laboratory, at least you have gained a new outlook and a new competence; it is as if you had gained access to a whole literature by the mastery of some foreign language.