As was noted in the early pages of this chapter, the psychologist commonly does adopt the attitude of treating mind as a system of connections long enough to give some account of the facts of instinct, habit, memory, and the like. But the dogma that psychology deals exclusively with the inner stream of mind-stuff has made these accounts needlessly scanty and vague.
One may appreciate fully the importance of finding out whether the attention-consciousness is clearness or is something else, and whether it exists in two or three discrete degrees or in a continuous series of gradations, and still insist upon the equal importance of finding out to what facts and for what reasons human beings do attend. There would appear, for example, to be an unfortunate limitation to the study of human nature by the examination of its consciousnesses, when two eminent psychologists, writing elaborate accounts of attention from that point of view, tell us almost nothing whereby we can predict what any given animal will attend to in any given situation, or can cause in any given animal a state of attention to any given fact.
One may enjoy the effort to define the kind of mind-stuff in which one thinks of classes of facts, relations between facts and judgments about facts, and still protest that a proper balance in the study of intellect demands equal or greater attention to the problems of why any given animal thinks of any given fact, class or relation in any given situation and why he makes this or that judgment about it.
In the case of the so-called action-consciousness the neglect of the connections becomes preposterous. The adventitious scraps of consciousness called ‘willing’ which may intervene between a situation productive of a given act and the act itself are hopelessly uninstructive in comparison with the bonds of instinct and habit which cause the situation to produce the act. In conduct, at least, that kind of psychology which Santayana calls ‘the perception of character’ seems an inevitable part of a well-balanced science of human nature. I quote from his fine description of the contrast between the external observation of a mind’s connections and the introspective recapitulation of its conscious content, though it is perhaps too pronounced and too severe.
“Perception of Character.—There is, however, a wholly different and far more positive method of reading the mind, or what in a metaphorical sense is called by that name. This method is to read character. Any object with which we are familiar teaches us to divine its habits; slight indications, which we should be at a loss to enumerate separately, betray what changes are going on and what promptings are simmering in the organism.... The gift of reading character ... is directed not upon consciousness but upon past or eventual action. Habits and passions, however, have metaphorical psychic names, names indicating dispositions rather than particular acts (a disposition being mythically represented as a sort of wakeful and haunting genius waiting to whisper suggestions in a man’s ear). We may accordingly delude ourselves into imagining that a pose or a manner which really indicates habit indicates feeling instead.
“Conduct Divined, Consciousness Ignored.... As the weather prophet reads the heavens, so the man of experience reads other men. Nothing concerns him less than their consciousness; he can allow that to run itself off when he is sure of their temper and habits. A great master of affairs is usually unsympathetic. His observation is not in the least dramatic or dreamful, he does not yield himself to animal contagion or reënact other people’s inward experience. He is too busy for that, and too intent on his own purposes. His observation, on the contrary, is straight calculation and inference, and it sometimes reaches truths about people’s character and destiny which they themselves are very far from divining. Such apprehension is masterful and odious to weaklings, who think they know themselves because they indulge in copious soliloquy (which is the discourse of brutes and madmen), but who really know nothing of their own capacity, situation, or fate.”[3]
Mr. Santayana elsewhere hints that both psychology and history will become studies of human behavior considered from without,—a part, that is, of what he calls physics,—if they are to amount to much.
Such a prediction may come true. But for the present there is no need to decide which is better—to study an animal’s self as conscious, its stream of direct experience, or to study the intellectual and moral nature that causes its behavior in thought and action and is known to many observers. Since worthy men have studied both, both are probably worthy of study. All that I wish to claim is the right of a man of science to study an animal’s intellectual and moral behavior, following wherever the facts lead—to “the sum total of human experience considered as dependent upon the experiencing person,” to the self as conscious, or to a connection-system known to many observers and born and bred in the animal’s body.