If now we make the consciousness of consciousness effortful, it is plain that we diminish the consciousness cognized in still greater measure. A consciousness of consciousness cannot be forwarded except at expense of general mental capacity, and so as diverting force from the act observed, whatever this be. Attention to a feeling must then on general principles diminish the feeling, and that in a marked measure. The psychologist who is always twigging his own consciousness to find out what is going on there must often be surprised to find nothing there. It is astonishing how fast feeling disappears when we begin to examine and analyse it. The emotion fades the moment we turn attention to it. We find that in psychological matters as elsewhere that we cannot have our cake and eat it too. We murder to dissect. Apperceptive effort is never intensification in the consciousness cognized, but cognition and pleasure-pain feeling as a consciousness cognized lose in force, just as in the body, an undue exaltation of one function is always a depressing of others by withdrawal of force. The more conscious I am of my fear the less I fear. While this law of withdrawal of force is obviously the case when consciousness is at its fullest capacity, yet it may be said that apperception in other phases acts as stimulant to waken latent forces, just as in the body stimulus of one function is often stimulus of all, though we doubt that apperception is original and permanent function in consciousness. But still in such cases it is a new consciousness which is stimulated and strengthened and not the consciousness which is being cognized, and still more then is there decrease in the latter. A given feeling is never increased by attentive consciousness of it. When a feeling is said to be intensified by attention to it, we may suspect either inaccurate analysis or misuse of terms. This, of course, does not deny that within a certain range immanent attention increases pleasure, etc., for example, the more actively we taste an orange the more taste pleasure we get.
We note in passing the very interesting psychological paradox that the more we view ourselves the less we have to view, the principle of which has been set forth above. We know well that the very reflective and self-conscious have little personal force and individual quality. Moreover the self-conscious stage in youth is precisely the period when there is the least real self to be conscious of. A strong multiplex mind is rarely very self-observant.
Finally we have to remark upon the way in which attention may be divisive of cognition. Boswell makes Dr. Johnson to say, “If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so that there is but one half to be employed on what we read.” But admitting the necessity of intrinsic interest, this does not do away with attention. Attention hinders rather than helps cognition only when it becomes wearing strain, as in reading when much fatigued. But attention as fulness of vigorous normal will activity gives a force and value to cognition which it would not otherwise have, and often makes its very existence possible. The greatest, most significant cognitions in the mental life of any individual are those which are achieved at the top of endeavour. Real knowledge as advancement and acquirement is always the fruit of long training and attention.
The act of attention is painful and therefore is not exercised by lower organisms, at least, only under absolute necessity. Often the pain from attention is so great that the individual prefers to suffer than to exert himself cognitively and so help to remove pain-giver. It is only under the greatest pressure that new knowledge and new ideas are acquired, and the history of mind shows a series of tours de force achieved only in moments of direst need. The strengthening and the holding of cognitive powers to a given point by effort of will is peculiarly distasteful and painful activity. All minds tend toward inaction or toward the regions of effortless action where overwhelming interest carries them freely along. Attention, while the most advantageous of actions, is yet most irksome and painful. It would seem to us at first blush that if pleasure and not pain had attached to the attentive act from the beginning, the evolution of mind would have been accomplished in the merest fraction of the time actually required. It would have been the difference between going down a steep incline rather than up. Why progress should only be realized through painful effort and struggle is a problem which has vexed the thought of man throughout history but upon which psychology has little light to throw. Our present concern is to simply emphasize the fact that cognitive act as attention is always painful, and if the act of cognition is performed without pain we may promptly deny this to be an attention. This is, of course, far from asserting that all cognizings with pain are attentions.
CHAPTER XV
SELF-FEELING
Popular and scientific observation agree that a very interesting and important phenomenon in consciousness is the sense of self as involving such feelings as pride, shame, self-satisfaction, and self-disgust. And the evolutionary psychologist is bound to consider self-consciousness in its rise and development as a life factor. What is its significance for life? How and when did it arise as answering a demand in the struggle for existence? Further, the psychologist is bound to clearly define and analyse the self-sense as psychic fact, to understand just what it is, as well as what it seems. The nature of the self-sense must be carefully studied by introspection, and its elements and quality determined. However, the psychist has nothing, of course, to do with the self which is sensed, an inquiry which belongs alone to the metaphysician.
Self-consciousness has been throughout all our discussion assumed and implied as factor in emotion life. Object is not merely perceived, for this in itself has no life value, but is at once interpreted in experience terms, is self-related, and emotion arises and stimulates suitable will-response in bodily activities. Thus all response to environment through cognition of environment means with sense of the environment as its own. Thus, and thus only, is sense of environment rendered efficacious, for bare objectivity, which signifies nothing, has no value for life. Under the conditions of existence in the struggle of life object cognition could not originate because it has no function. The theory of natural selection then requires that object and subject cognition be regarded as complementary psychic factors, coincident in their origin, and developing in strict correlation.
This corollary from the theory of natural selection, implying a self-relating act in all cognition under the condition of struggle for existence, is seen to be a likely hypothesis so far as we can judge from the action of low psychisms. Any one who closely observes animals must recognise that self-interest determines their cognitive activities and in turn is roused by it. The alert listening and looking of a squirrel is obviously impelled by fear and awakens fear. The object perceived is constantly interpreted for its experience value, that is, there is constant self-reference. This is the type of all cognition under natural selection, i.e., where use dominates.
Assuming then psychism as mode of adaptive reaction, we see the necessity for the correlation of the sense of self with the sense of things. An experiencer blind to self, who has no awareness of self, but merely blindly strives, has little advantage, for it possesses no self-directivity and no power of intelligent action. Its adaptation is purely general; to be specific adaptation it must appreciate differences in environment in their differential action upon itself, an appreciation of the objective in subjective terms. It is probable then that the first knowledge was the apprehension of thing as painer and then of the thing as pleasurer. A discrimination of the two is attained, probably tactile, as hard and soft. The subjective import of the thing is at once realized from these signs.
It is obvious that the origin of self-consciousness must be placed very early in psychic life. With organisms which have but a few flashes of consciousness during their whole individual existence, whose whole experience is a mere sum of separate pleasure-pain thrills and blind efforts, there is neither sense of objectivity nor subjectivity. These very lowest psychisms have experience, but no sense of experience; pleasures and pains possess them, but they do not possess these. But if mentality arises and progresses solely by virtue of its function in saving and profiting the individual living organism, if the end of psychosis is this self-conservation of the bodily whole in its vitality, there is an imperative demand for self-cognizance in order to self-care. Under the law of struggle and survival of the fittest, the organism which does not look out for itself must go to the wall or be in the lowest grade. Self-conservation is closely linked with self-sense. Hence the individual very early acquires some sense of itself in its environment, and so acts and conducts itself. Thus under adverse forces it learns to know itself, to realize its own place and power, and to feel fear, anger, and so to appropriately respond to any environment. Thus is secured manifold and special response to multiform conditions, whereas in the organism which has only pure subjectivity of pain the response would be uniform.