The difficulty of this subjective method, this reflex investigation, is almost insurmountable. Consciousness must act as both revealer and revealed, must be a light which enlightens itself. A fact of consciousness to be known must not simply exist like a physical fact or object, as a piece of stone, but it must be such that the observing consciousness realizes or re-enacts it. To know the fact we must have the fact, we must be what we know. Mind is pure activity; we do not see an organ and ask what it is for, what does it do; but we are immediately conscious of consciousness as activity, and not as an objective organ. We must here, then, reverse the general order and know the activity before we can identify the organ as a physical basis.
By the purely objective vision of the lower sciences we can easily determine a genetic series of forms most remote from our own life, but in psychology, mind can be for us only what mind is in us. The primitive types of psychosis are, no doubt, as remote and foreign from our own as is the primitive type of heart or nervous system from that of man’s. In the case of heart and nerve we can objectively trace with certainty the successive steps, but in endeavouring to realize by subjective method the evolution of mind we are involved in great doubt and perplexity. How can we understand an insect’s feelings? How can we appreciate minds which are without apprehension of object, though there is reason to believe such minds exist? Only to a very limited extent can a trained and sympathetic mind project itself back into some of its immediately antecedent stages. Consciousness, because of its self-directive and self-reflective power, is the most elastic of functions, yet it can never attain the power of realizing all its previous stages. Sometimes, however, the mind in perfect quiescence tends to relapse into primitive modes, which may afterward be noted by reflection, but such occasions are comparatively rare. The subjective method means a commonalty of experience which is often impossible to attain. Thus a man may believe there are feelings of maternity; he has observed the expression of nursing mothers, and knows in a general way that here is a peculiar psychosis into which he can never enter, and which is, therefore, beyond his scientific analysis. The psychic life of the child is more akin to his than that of the mother; yet it is only by an incessant cultivation of receptivity and repression of adult propensities that one can ever attain any true inkling of infant experience. There is then, I think, a vast range of psychic life which must for ever lie wholly hidden from us, either as infinitely below or infinitely above us; there is also an immense realm where we can only doubtfully infer the presence of some form of consciousness without being able to discriminate its quality, or in exceptional cases to know it very partially; and there is but a relatively small sphere where scientific results of any large value may be expected. By reason of its objective method the realm of physical science is practically illimitable, but psychic science is, by reason of its subjective method, kept for ever within narrow boundaries.
We must then take into account the inherent difficulties of the subjective method as applied to the study of feeling and mind in general, and yet we must recognise its necessity. No amount of objective physiological research can tell us anything about the real nature of a feeling, or can discover new feelings. Granting that neural processes are at the basis of all feelings as of all mental activities, we can infer nothing from the physiological activity as to the nature of the psychic process. It is only such feelings and elements as we have already discovered and analyzed by introspection that can be correlated with a physical process. Nor can we gain much light even if we suppose—which is granting a good deal in our present state of knowledge—that there exists a general analogy between nerve growth and activity, and mental operations. If relating, i.e., cognition, is established on basis of inter-relation in brain tissue, if every mental connecting means a connecting of brain fibres, we might, indeed, determine the number of thoughts, but we could not tell what the thoughts were. So if mental disturbance always means bodily disturbance, we can still tell nothing more about the nature of each emotion than we knew before. We must first know fear, anger, etc., as experiences in consciousness before we can correlate them with corporeal acts.
Is now this necessarily subjective method peculiarly limited as to feeling? Can we know feeling directly as psychic act or only indirectly through accompaniments? Mr. James Ward (vide article on Psychology in the Encyclopædia Britannica, p. 49, cf. p. 71) remarks that feelings cannot be known as objects of direct reflection, we can only know of them by their effects on the chain of presentation. The reason for this is, that feeling is not presentation, and “what is not presented cannot be re-presented.” “How can that which was not originally a cognition become such by being reproduced?”
It cannot. But do we need to identify the known with knowing, in order that it may be known? Must feeling be made into a cognition to be cognized? It is obvious enough that no feeling can be revived into a representation of itself, but no more can any cognition or any mental activity. Revival or recurrence of consciousness can never constitute consciousness of consciousness which is an order apart. If cognition is only presentation and re-presentation of objects, we can never attain any apprehension of consciousness, any cognition of a cognition or of a feeling or of a volition, for they are all equally in this sense subjective acts. Re-presentation at any degree is never by itself sense of re-presentation or knowledge of the presentation.
Of course, the doctrine of relativity applies to introspection as to all cognition, and subject qua subject is as unknowable as object qua object. We do not know feeling in itself, nor anything else in itself, the subjective like the objective ding an sich is beyond our ken. Yet kinds of consciousness are as directly apprehended and discriminated as kinds of things, but the knowing is, as such, distinct from the known even when knowing is known. Here the act knowing is not the act known and is different in value. The object known is not, at least from the purely psychological point of view, ever to be confounded with the knowing, to be incorporated into cognition by virtue of being cognized. Feeling, then, seems to be as directly known by introspection and reflection as any other process. It is not a hypothetical cause brought in by the intellect to explain certain mental phenomena, but it is as distinctly and directly apprehended as cognition or volition.
The distinction between having a feeling and knowing a feeling is a very real one, though common phraseology confuses them. We say of a brave man, he never knew fear; by which we mean he never feared, never experienced fear, and not that he was ignorant of fear. Again, in like manner, we say sometimes of a very healthy person, he never knew what pain was, meaning he never felt pain. These expressions convey a truth in that they emphasize that necessity of experience in the exercise of the subjective method upon which we have already commented, but still they obscure a distinction which must be apparent to scientific analysis. We cannot know feeling except through realization, yet the knowing is not the realization. Being aware of the pain and the feeling pain are distinct acts of consciousness. All feeling, pain and pleasure, is direct consciousness, but knowledge of it is reflex, is consciousness of consciousness. The cognition of the pain as an object, a fact of consciousness, is surely a distinct act from the pain in consciousness, from the fact itself. The pain disturbance is one thing and the introspective act by which it is cognized quite another.
These two acts are not always associated, though they are commonly regarded as inseparable. It is a common postulate that if you have a pain you will know it, or notice it. If we feel pained, we always know it. This seemingly true statement comes of a confounding of terms. If I have a pain, I must, indeed, be aware of it, know it, in the sense that it must be[must be] in consciousness; but this makes, aware of pain, and knowing pain, such very general phrases as to equal experience of pain or having pain. But there is no knowledge in pain itself, nor pain in the knowing act per se. The knowing the pain must be different from the pain itself, and is not always a necessary sequent. We may experience pain without cognizing it as such. When drowsy in bed I may feel pain of my foot being “asleep,” but not know it as a mental fact. We may believe, indeed, that pain often rises and subsides in consciousness without our being cognizant of it, but, of course, in the nature of the case there is no direct proof, for proof implies cognizance of fact. Pain as mental fact, an object for consciousness, not an experience in consciousness, is what is properly meant by knowing pain. Consciousness-of-pain as knowledge of it is not always involved by pain-in-consciousness as experience of it. Consciousness of pain by its double meaning as cognizance of pain and experience of pain leads easily to obscurity of thought upon this subject. But experience does not, if we may trust the general law of evolution from simple to complex, at the first contain consciousness of experience. This latter element is but gradually built up into experience, though in the end they are so permanently united in developed ego life that it is difficult to perceive their distinctness and independence. That pain and pleasure are cognized as facts of consciousness seems to us clear, but this does not deny that for us, at least, they may be cognizable only in fusion with other elements, as with sensation or volition. But whether known only with other elements or not, pleasure-pain is equally known only by direct introspection. I know directly and immediately pain and pleasure when I experience them, though they always occur bound up with some sensation. It may be that I never experience mere pain but some kind of pain, as a pricking pain, burning pain, etc., and that I always recall pain by its sensation tone, that I cannot isolate it by any act of attention. (E. B. Titchener, Philosophical Review, vol. iii., p. 431.) However I know that I have pain as well as I know that I have a pricking or burning sensation. “Did you feel the prick?” “Yes.” “Was it painful or pleasurable?” “Pleasurable”; such a common colloquy implies as direct consciousness of the pleasure-pain as of the sensation. That I can at once discriminate a sensation as either pleasurable or painful certainly shows a direct awareness of pleasure-pain.
If pure pleasure-pain is primitive consciousness (see chap. ii.), it must be most rare phenomenon in such an advanced consciousness as that of the human adult: and it is not surprising that one should search for it in vain. But in any case it could not yield to attention. Attention as cognition views its object in relation, in a milieu; it can reproduce only by fastening upon something to reproduce by, but pure pleasure-pain has nothing connected with it. Again, attention as volition cannot reproduce mere pleasure-pain which is not volitional in its origin and growth like sensing, perceiving, or ideating. We merely “suffer” pain. Both pleasure and pain in themselves are purely passive; willing cannot directly affect them, and they are not, like cognitions, modes of volition, or effortful activities. For man to have a primitive consciousness by exercise of will would be quite as difficult as to turn himself into a protozoön.
Further, would not attention as introspective alertness to discover such a fact of consciousness as pure pleasure-pain denote that consciousness is thereby raised far above the level at which such a phenomenon can occur? In general also constant introspective attention tends to defeat itself. A continual intentness and watching for a given psychic phenomenon is a state which, the more intense and persistent it is, tends to bar out the particular state watched for, and, indeed, all other states than itself. If attention as act engrosses, it defeats itself.