Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

by Hiram Miner Stanley

We have far outgrown the sensation-cognition psychic stage, and speaking of psychic history in biologic terms, it belongs to the early palæozoic. We have yet to formulate the succession of psychic ages, in each of which some distinct psychic power attains dominancy, and produces minds as diverse from ours as the organisms of past ages are different from our own bodies. As already pointed out, it is an extremely difficult problem to realize by subjective method these ancient types. A mere general sensation is a very rare phenomenon in our ordinary consciousness, and even special sensations rarely occur in pure form. To realize what sensation of heat is for a simple consciousness, we must strip our minds bare of most of their furnishings, for all our sensations of heat are interpreted with reference to visual and tactual objects which must be non-existent for early consciousness. Sensation for us is a complex of sensations plus perceptions and other cognitive and emotional elements which lie beyond early mind, but which by an inevitable automorphism we interpret into early forms. This automorphism with the child is complete, and is never perfectly effaced even in the most accomplished psychologist. A life of simple feeling, or of this plus simple sensation is most difficult of realization; still we may have reason to believe that the psychic life of a low type consists wholly in repeated pains and pleasures occasionally rising so high that consciousness reaches to a vague general sensation, or rarely to a thrill of heat, or sense of hunger or pressure. Of course, in all cases we assume will-activity.

And we have to emphasize this again, that all sensation, like all pain, while always from objects is never of objects. The objective description here, as usual, does not give the inner state. Our automorphic tendency leads us inevitably to regard the order in which we perceive the organism to be effected by external objects to be its received order. But a little reflection always convinces us that this is in the nature of the case an erroneous procedure, that what happens within consciousness is not primarily any cognition of a world of objects, nor an apprehension of them in any form. Sensation, while objective by virtue of being cognition, is not in any way a realization of object, but is objective only toward the dynamic within the individual organism, and is not apprehension of static wholes of any kind. It is an objectifying to force, not to things, and this in the modes of physiological affection. It is not appreciation of a something, but of a somehow.

In the earliest stage of mind, as has been before noticed, all manner of material causes rouse nought more than a pure feeling mode; heat, pressure, electricity, sound, light, nutriment or its absence, if they attain to waken the function of consciousness, accomplish no more than pure feeling as bare pain and pleasure. It is, of course, natural to conceive that from the first consciousness, responds objectively in sensation in as many modes as organism is moved by external and internal forces; but a multiform sense origin of consciousness is not borne out by the general tendency and law of evolution, nor yet by such special indications in consciousness as we are able to observe. When a very young infant seems to reach pleasurably to warmth, if we are correct in positing consciousness at all, it is still very unlikely that there is sense of warmth, but the state is probably pure pleasure; and if there is sense of warmth, it did not give the pleasure, but the reverse. We believe likewise that it is probable that a consciousness response to nutriment is, at first, mere pleasure, and only, secondarily, organic sensation. Thus, warmth and nutriment effect, but only, at first, in the one mode of pure feeling, and secondly, pure sensation as general organic satisfaction. Lastly arises a differencing in consciousness for the different bodily changes. And the multiformity of stimulus and paucity of consciousness in modes while so very apparent in early mind is yet always found in all grades of psychic life. The responsiveness of consciousness is never perfected, and mind has a practically infinite field for the acquirement of sensation, for appreciating what has never affected consciousness, or which mind has felt or known only by some general mode. The infant, no doubt, has many pains for which it has no sensation values. These pains, perfectly pure and undifferentiated the one from the other, have had their occasion in a variety of physical changes. A native of the tropics, who on first touching ice says it burns, has at first but a single sensation for very diverse physical affections; but he soon attains an icy sensation, that ice feels not burning, but stinging cold. Men, civilized and educated, often are consciously affected by bodily changes of which they are wholly incognizant, the psychosis being not specialized according to the mode of change. In degraded states of consciousness, which come to all, there often appears obscure feeling and sensation, which is a practically single mode of answer to a very wide variety of physical excitation. In realizing the variety of external objects and changes the mind proceeds but slowly, each new form always at first in pure feeling. It is only as something affects feeling and interest that we ever come to know it or its manifestations in physiological change.

Sensations are, then, by no means such original and simple elements of mind as often conceived; but they are developed forms of some general undifferentiated cognitive state, sensation as bare apprehension of bodily disturbance, and this itself cannot be accounted absolutely original. The evolution into particular modes of sensation, as sense of heat, hunger, light, pressure, etc., is in the struggle for existence gradually achieved, and also therewith the evolution of special sense-organs. And we must always bear in mind that it is not the sense-organ that develops the sensation, but on the contrary the effort at sensing that produces, maintains, and improves the sense-organ. The eagle’s eye has been developed by unceasing straining as incited by the necessities of existence felt in pain and pleasure. It is natural for us at our stage of development to suppose that the organs of sense give sensations and to explain the sensation by the physiological organ; but when we reflect that sensations come to us from the organ only up to the measure of the momentum from heredity, we see the insufficiency of purely physiological interpretation. Evolution to-day is on the same basis as evolution at any period, and as it always has been, it always will be, dependent upon a ceaseless nisus. It is only by painstaking effort—labour—that man progresses in sensibility, and this effort has always an incentive in some form of interest that is pleasure-pain basis. Thus it is that the astronomer’s eye, the microscopist’s eye, the artist’s eye, is formed. The multiform sensibility of the tea-taster is attained by assiduous tasting, and the development in organ only follows pari passu. What is seemingly simple and original in sensation for us was, no doubt, like the very special forms of sensibility acquired by our specialist, achieved by the lower forms painfully and toilfully, and passed on to us. Our highest feats of sensation and insight may likewise for our remote descendants be intuitions, whose apparently simple nature may be asserted as the basis of philosophic systems. A genius is one who antedates the general stage of progress of his period by having as intuitions, as seemingly direct and simple knowledges and sensations, what is beyond or barely within the intensest effort of his contemporaries, though it may become common and easy for all men of later ages.

The moving factors, the active agents in the evolution of consciousness, are not, I think, sense-impressions of any kind; these are the results, rather than the incentives, of mental evolutions. Mind acquires its whole sense outfit, and receives no cognition whatever ready-made. It is hard, indeed, for us to put ourselves at the point of view of acquirement of what seem to us simple impressions of sense; but the difficulty is only of the same general nature as to understand how what seem to be direct perceptions of things in space are really indirect. The progress of psychology will, in my opinion, tend to show more and more that givens of all kinds are such in appearance only, and that mind in its essence is purely a feeling-effort.

The differentiation of action secured through sensation and its differentiations is evidently of the utmost importance to life, but still the objectivity secured is small. In the pure feeling stage, reaction is a very hit-and-miss affair, and in pure sensation stage it is but little better. Guided only by present sensations, the organism in the struggle for existence is blind to all objects, and, knowing not itself nor other objects, anticipatory action is entirely beyond its power. The growth of mind is to secure delicacy and precision of adjustment with largest time and space extension, and the achievement of objectification was a tour de force of the highest value. The exigencies of life-struggle lead comparatively early from cognition of mode of affection to the cognition of thing affecting. Perception arises to supplement sensation, and full objectification opens the way for intelligent activities. Thing or object is first, no doubt, apprehended tactually; but the sense of touch is, of course, acquired before cognition of thing touched. We, indeed, find it difficult to appreciate this, since in touch we constantly apprehend things as in contact with us; still, if in some very sluggish state, as deep sleep, when the varied and correlated life of sensation with perception is practically nil, a rough object be made to bear upon the body as a lump in the mattress, it is evident that consciousness begins as bare pain, then general uneasiness as bare general sensation, then sense of touch, and finally cognition of object by means of and through the touch sensation. The sense of thing touched follows on sense of touch. This general order may be illustrated from a squib in a comic paper of the day. A swell finding a friend sitting by an open window on a cold day asks him if he does not feel cold. He answers, “Ya-as; I guess I do. I knew theah was something the mattah with me; I suppose it must be cold.” The threefold movement in this noodle’s mind as evidenced by his words, is, first, feeling pain; second, a something the matter, i.e., general sensing and objectifying thereupon; third, particularizing to feeling cold. He has simply gone back to primitive process. Touch or other sensation is in itself no more than an objectification of physiological change, and calls up no object whatever. In pure sensation there is no image of anything, but it is merely a peculiar modifying of pleasure-pain according to mode of physiological stimulus. A heat thrill does not include objectification to any existences, not even to the physical body of the organism sensing.

It is only by and through sense of physiological disturbance that awareness of object is achieved. Intense sensation stimulates to full cognition, to complete act of objectifying. This tendency of sensation is illustrated by the common saying, “hunger sharpens wit”; and certain it is that presentation of food objects is arrived at only by this stimulus. The earliest objectifying, no doubt, arose from a pain-sensation of some kind; but this primitive cognition of object was purely general, just as primitive sensation was purely general. A world of objects is not at first and at once attained, but only object barely as such, dim awareness of a mere mass. In the earliest stage every presentation is of a bare objectivity, so that one cognition differs from another in no wise as regards content. This mere thing, which is first full cognition content, is next to no-thing. When we try to conceive this thing we inevitably foist in some special sensation and perception, most generally sense of light and seeing; and the explication just made in the previous sentence was undoubtedly understood by the reader in visual terms. Our apprehension of object is correlation of several modes, and it is most difficult to intimate in any wording what bare undifferentiated apprehension of object may be. If the embryology of mind were more thoroughly studied, we should understand in some measure, for this stage most probably occurs in the very earliest activities of every human and animal mind. A totum objectivum, which is thing and nothing more, is, perhaps, occasionally observable in our own consciousness when at very low ebb—at such times when pure feeling and pure sensation become possible phases.

This general, undifferentiated cognition of object and all the special forms therefrom developed must always be accounted as coming about in no spontaneous way, but as attained and supported through will activity of an intense form. Perception of object is not in any true sense impressed from without, nor yet in any true sense is it a native faculty or power. It is not more or less freely constructed out of more or less given data. It is the necessities of life that bring mind to achieve full cognition; and this alone is the first cause of cognition, which is always in its inception cognitive effort toward objective realities, towards a world of things. These objects, among which and in close relation to which some single object, organism, must live—this is the common postulate of all biologic science, psychology included—constitute a world. The living object is such by virtue of the simplest consciousness, a feeling-will, as absolutely essential to any advantageous action. It is by this root-form, feeling-will, that cognition is ultimately accomplished, and not by virtue of any imprinting of objects upon mind as in some measure a tabula rasa, nor yet in any purely subjective construction of object. Object is revealed neither from without nor from within; it is achieved solely as a guide to advantageous action in the struggle for existence. Of course, the mind does not knowingly reach knowledge, does not foreknow it and its advantage in order to attain it; this is a contradiction in terms, and profects backward a highly refined teleology. All we do at present is to simply assume it as law that serviceable consciousnesses, cognition and others, are inevitably attained in the stress of existence. For the science of psychology, metaphysics apart, this is the best standpoint, and all we can now say. The confirmation of an organism’s activity, cognitive and otherwise, as serviceable, is in feeling pain and pleasure, which is the original mode in which objects excite consciousness or consciousness reacts to them. It is in feeling as the starting point that cognition is determined and maintained. We cannot scientifically speak of any mental process as native, that is, mind itself is not native. By the very term original we exclude inborn. The first consciousness occurred, it was merely event, useful event; and if we further say it was acquired, we probably say what agrees best with biology as a whole. It is impossible at present to discuss whether or not mind may be a primitive vital function, for where life begins or ends is itself a most obscure problem; but whether it be primary or secondary, mind in no form is properly native, that is a pure given, but we simply say the function is displayed, as we speak of nutrition or reproduction. In the organism we see something which has nutritive, reproductive, motor processes, perhaps also consciousness processes; and so far as there is any problem as to the nature of consciousness as native function it belongs to a general biologic problem. As to the question as to whether cognition or what cognitions are original and simple in all mind, we have already excluded the whole field of cognition from this position.

Does the general objectification, the first stage in cognition of object, have any special function for the developed presentation forms of later consciousness? Mr. Ward, in his suggestive article in the Encyclopædia Britannica, seems to intimate that it has. He says (p. 50), "Actual presentation consists in this continuum being differentiated and every differentiation constitutes a new presentation.“ Mr. Ward in this connection sets forth that presentation-continuity in consciousness is determined by a presentation-continuum which is ”totum objectivum." Presentation activity is fundamentally a differentiating of this constant element. We might compare this continuum to an ocean from whose surface rise waves, particular presentations, which subside again into the parent sea, which ever remains as the constant basis of all wave movements.

Now the question of continua is a very broad one. Do the early stages of consciousness, pure feeling, pure sensation, pure objectivity, remain as constituting the basic bulk of all higher consciousness, and is all higher consciousness but differentiation of these as well as from these, that is, is it no more than differentiating activity kept up on a vast series of levels and sub-levels? Or are we to regard them as regressive stages to which developed consciousness rarely returns? May we consider that there is a certain histology of mind, that certain primitive forms, like tissues in the body, constitute the inner and constant structure of mind?