Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

by Hiram Miner Stanley

We may then, I think, see the importance of both positive and negative acts in attention. As counter to the theory that positive attention is the only real form, we might plausibly argue the opposite, that it is only the reverse side of negative attention. If we shut out all but one element from consciousness, do we not thereby bring that one into bolder relief and so indirectly strengthen it? May not all intensification of cognition be thus but an indirect result of negative attention? No, for even when all distractions are kept away, there is the inherent difficulty of the act plus the inertia, the general disinclination to effort. Positive attention may rarely appear as practically pure, and rarely also negative attention. Consciousness may sometimes consist of merely pure will tension as keeping off all defined activities; and persons of great will power sometimes achieve this in putting themselves to sleep. Consciousness is a blank field, tensely kept, but perfectly so only for a very brief time.

As to the origin of attention, it must arise with cognition itself. The past act of cognition was, as we have seen (p. 61), a powerful will act, an achievement through struggle, and therefore an attention. The history of cognition and of its ultimate development into the highest forms is a story of incessant and fierce competition in the struggle of life. Man’s power of sense, perception and thought is an inheritance from an immense deal of will effort by untold millions of ancestors. The necessities of existence compelled an alertness, a general cognitive strain, which effected progress and discovery, the attainment and integration of new and most valuable forms of experience which have been handed down to later generations. The earliest cognitive life is then almost entirely attentive; cognition does not come, it must be attained. Gradually, however, some low form like general sensation is so integrated, and requires less and less attention, till it comes, is given, with comparatively no effort, and a state of unattention thus appears in consciousness. The child repeats quickly, easily, without attention, the evolution of the past, and this spontaneous re-enactment continues up to the full point of hereditary integration. Without effort the child is carried on at the incitement of instinctive inherent interest up to a certain comparatively high grade of experience. But heredity momentum gradually ceases, and if there is to be individual progress, attention must come in. Thus, intellectual education is fundamentally a developing of attention. Conscious control of cognition, both positively and negatively, becomes more and more efficient, and the progress of the race is dependent on exceptional attention in exceptional individuals—geniuses. Attention becomes more and more limited and specialized, and a minute subdivision of labour results.

Now, primitive attention is not as Mr. Ward, for example, would make it, a primordial fact of mind, but as a cognitive form of will or will form of cognition—it is essentially secondary. However, Mr. Ward, in his article in the Encyclopædia Britannica, makes a peculiarly advanced form of attention the initial fact of consciousness, namely, by the non-voluntary act of mind being conscious of changes in itself. But mind is not at first a something which is inevitably cognizant of its own experience, but it merely is a state, does not have states, and is not consciously aware of them as such. There is, for instance, pain, but no consciousness of the pain as fact of experience. Mind is not primitively a something acted on, reacting, and cognizant of these self-movements, but merely effortful will activity attaining snatches of cognition at the pressure of pain and pleasure. It seems, indeed, tolerably plain that apperception is not necessary to consciousness as such, and the general law of evolution from simple to complex leads us to suppose that consciousness was not at first with any apperceptive process. Changes, whether as occurring or as being brought about, did not imply an apperception taking cognizance of them. But however this may be, certain it is that apperception, as consciousness of self-change or as consciousness of consciousness, must as a form of cognition arise in will effort like any other forms, must be a real attention, not a so-called non-voluntary attention. We do not see any reason why this form of cognition should be an exception to the general law that every step of consciousness is an acquirement and achievement determined by the struggle for existence.

The relation of attention to feeling has already been touched upon, especially as related to interest. Attention, like other volitions, is aroused by feeling, primarily as direct pleasures and pains, secondarily by the ideal forms of these, that is, interest. Low organisms are incited to attentions as simple sensation-cognitions only by present or immediately impending pain or pleasure. Direct pain does not interest or include interest in itself. There must be, not merely pain, but cognition of it as element in experience, before there is interest, which is always in something. Interest implies representation, the sense of the value for experience of any given thing. What pleases or pains interests only so far as perceived as pleasurable-painful; the thing perceived as source of feeling, or as in any wise related to it, arouses interest. “I am pleased or pained,” does not equal, “I am interested”; but only so far as I have cognizance of the object, pleasing or paining, am I interested in it. The interesting is what touches my interests, what affects my experience, what potentially reaches or touches me. It is obviously to the great advantage of the organism that pleasure-pain object merely perceived should move, excite, or interest, which brings in attention to the thing, and so fuller knowledge and preparedness for action. Interest, then, is practically equivalent to emotion. “It interests me,” is equal to, “It arouses my emotion.” The interesting picture, book, man, animal, etc., is that which awakens emotion, and thus incites attention. What affects me or moves me, interests me. Interest is generally used to denote favourable emotion of rather low intensity, as when I say, “He interests me”; but as a psychological term it may well be used in the broad sense to denote any emotion so far as it stimulates attention. The function of interest lies wholly in its effect upon attention, it is always a feeling stimulant to the will act of cognition. I do not exert my cognitive powers unless I have some interest at stake.

There are, of course, many degrees of interest. Often interest is so slight as not to rouse attention, being too weak to overcome natural inertia to will effort or unable to deflect will as bent by some conflicting interest. A lesson is to be learned, but the interest, often extrinsic, does not rise to attention point till possibly a few minutes before recitation. The interest, fear of failure, may then be sufficiently strong to induce very vigorous attention, and within a certain range the stronger the interest, the stronger the attention. Yet at a certain point of intensity emotion begins to derange will activity and to hinder and even destroy attention. Fear which has become fright extinguishes attention. Self-controlling power of attention is lost in a flood of emotion. Yet ungovernably intense emotion is no longer properly termed interest, which always implies cognitive power. Interest is properly comparatively mild emotion state, which includes definite cognitive element. But interest may be not only at or below attention point, but it may be of such an intensity and kind as to do away with need of attention, securing a spontaneous, or practically spontaneous, cognition. Thus, my interest in a book may at first be insufficient, i.e., practically nil, to constrain attention in any degree; it may become so strong that I make constant cognitive effort, and finally, as it becomes profound and absorbing, I cognize without any attention. When anything becomes sufficiently interesting, interest acts of itself directly upon cognition, which is then performed without attention. Interest frequently increases to the spontaneous cognition point, carries cognition in it; but we must remember, nevertheless, that all cognition had its origin in attention. Interest acquired and become habitual demands less and less force of attention, so that our customary interests finally awake cognition without any attention act. If given cognitions always required the original will effort,—attention,—intellect could not progress, delicate and far-reaching reactions could not be initiated, for they could have no basis. The force of inherent hereditary interests makes itself felt throughout all advanced psychic life. A survey of the cognitions of any single day would show us that by far the greater number are by this type and degree of interest. The common cognitions and adjustments of every-day life in walking, sitting down, and in matters of routine, are mostly of this type.

It is tolerably plain that the relation of feeling to cognition cannot be expressed by any single formula, and it is certainly far from true that sensation or other cognition is inversely as the intensity of feeling. If feeling, either as simple pleasure-pain or as interest, is the incentive of attention, which is the primary measure of cognition; then intensity of cognition is directly as intensity of feeling for a certain range, and this is also true where attention has lapsed. The law of inverse ratio applies only when feeling has risen beyond the point of highest efficiency, when there is over pressure, and mind runs wild beyond self-control and attention. Then we should, of course, find at a certain point, if we could make exact measurement, geometrical decrease in cognition for arithmetical increase in feeling, but ratio would constantly change. The centre and spring of any high psychic life is interest, and as interest increases intellection and volition increases pari passu. In cases of decline, where interest or capacity for emotion is lost, psychic life as a whole dissolves and disappears. On the contrary, the progress of mind is in the strengthening and extension of interest.

Interest leads to attention in the forms mentioned, but it seems also a mode of attention when, at the bidding of interest, we not only promote or inhibit some cognition, but some particular feeling. In a fit of anger we may be prompted by prudence or conscience to forcibly and directly restrain and abate it. I may similarly maintain an amiable frame of mind as opposed to crossness. To repel a fit of anger of course implies repelling the representations which enter into the angry emotion, and so it is that the repressing or stimulating all emotions, by reason of their representative nature, necessitates a will effort with reference to the cognitive element, and thus an attention.

It is commonly believed that attention to a feeling intensifies it—that the more we attend to our feelings the stronger they are, and the less attention we pay to them the weaker they are. A soldier wounded on the field of battle heeds not the pain in the excitement of the conflict. But the truth is in this case that he has no pain so long as he feels none, and that he does not attend to the pain signifies simply that pain does not become a psychic fact, but is wholly physiological, and so not a subject for psychological discussion. This is a case of the confusing use of attention for consciousness in general which we have before criticised. Very often, indeed, such an expression as, “The more he attends to his pain the more he has,” means simply, the more pain he has the more he feels, an identical proposition. But we must also discriminate between attention in a feeling and attention to a feeling. I work myself up into a passion by strenuously dwelling on representations involved in anger—this is an attention in a feeling; but attention to anger would be self-observational effort. The former does not involve consciousness of the feeling, the latter is nothing more than strenuous consciousness of the feeling. Men are often angry without being conscious of it or but dimly so, and attention to the feeling would consist in intensifying by will effort this consciousness. When a person says, “I was mad and I knew it,” he asserts the distinctness of the acts and that the first does not always imply the second. This cognition originally, like all cognition, required volition, and it is still subject to volitional control and emphasis, that is attention, even in advanced consciousness. Attention to a feeling is cognitive effort in attaining or strengthening consciousness of feeling, hence is but a mode of apperceptive or introspective effort.

We must distinguish sharply then between the observing act and the observed feeling, between a cognition of consciousness of pain and a pain consciousness, and we must note that attention may be either, neither, or both. Apperception has become such a habit with higher human consciousness that it is commonly exercised without attention, and so has seemed to some as a necessary fact of all consciousness, an anthropomorphism, which seems to us erroneous. When we are conscious we are generally conscious that we are conscious; when a man has toothache there is not only pain, ache, toothache, but consciousness of this as fact of experience; but this does not establish apperception as fact of all consciousness.

Is it true now that the more we are conscious of a consciousness the less we have of the latter? Certainly the more conscious we are of it does not imply having the more of it, though we may say with truth that within a limited range the greater and intenser the consciousness, the greater the facility for consciousness of consciousness. A mental fact must have a certain definiteness and prominence before it is clearly and easily cognizable. However, speaking of the effect of apperception upon the consciousness apperceived, it must be evident that it is always a minifying and not a magnifying. Consciousness is self-divided when there is both experience and consciousness of experience, hence a loss of force for the consciousness cognized. A feeling self-consciously felt is weakened thereby. The feelings we are most conscious of are of comparatively low intensities. In very intense feelings we lose or forget ourselves: we do not know what we are doing or feeling.