The threefold division between the causes, character and consequences of a mental event, conscious or unconscious, corresponds, with certain qualifications, to the usual division in traditional psychology of thought (or cognition), feeling, and will (or conation). To be cognisant of anything, to know it, is to be influenced by it; to desire, to seek, to will anything is to act towards it. In between these two are the conscious accompaniments, if any, of the whole process. These last, the conscious characters of the mental event, include evidently both sensations and feelings. (Cf. Chapter XVL, pp. 125-128.)
The correspondence is not by any means simple. Many things are included under knowing, for example, which on this reconstruction of psychology would have to be counted as willing.[*] Expectation, usually described as a cognitive attitude, becomes a peculiar form of action, getting ready, namely, to receive certain kinds of stimuli rather than others. The opposite case is equally common. Hunger, a typical desire on the usual account, would become knowledge, giving us, when genuine hunger, obscure awareness of a lack of nourishment, when habit-hunger, awareness of a certain phase in a cyclic visceral process. These illustrations bring out clearly what is everywhere recognised, that the customary cognition-feeling-conation classification of mental goings on is not a pigeon-holing of exclusive processes. Every mental event has, in varying degrees, all three characteristics. Thus expectation as a preparation for certain stimuli may lower the threshold for them, and sometimes makes their reception more and sometimes less discriminating; hunger also is characteristically accompanied by a search for food.
The advantage of substituting the causation, the character and the consequences of a mental event as its fundamental aspects in place of its knowing, feeling, and willing aspects is that instead of a trio of incomprehensible ultimates we have a set of aspects which not only mental events but all events share. We have, of course, to introduce qualifications. Stimuli, as we have mentioned above, are not the only causes of mental events. The nervous system is specialised to receive impressions through the organs of sense, but its state at any moment is also determined by a host of other factors. The condition of the blood and the position of the head are typical instances. Only that part of the cause of a mental event which takes effect through incoming (sensory) impulses or through effects of past sensory impulses can be said to be thereby known. The reservation no doubt involves complications. But any plausible account of what knowledge is and how it happens is bound to be complicated.
Similarly, not all the effects of a mental event are to be counted as what that event wills or seeks after; apoplectic strokes, for example, can be ruled out. Only those movements which the nervous system is specialised to incite, which take place through motor impulses, should be included.
On all other accounts the relation between an awareness and what it is aware of is a mystery. We can name the relation as we please, apprehension, presentation, cognition or knowledge, but there we have to leave the matter. On this account we make use of the fact that an awareness, say of a variety of black marks on this page, is caused in a certain peculiar way, namely through impressions on a part of the brain (the retina) and various complicated connected goings on in other parts of the brain. To say that the mental (neural) event so caused is aware of the black marks is to say that it is caused by them, and here ‘aware of’ = ‘caused by’. The two statements are merely alternative formulations.
In extending this account to more complicated situations where we know or, less ambiguously, refer to things which are past or future we have to make use of the fact that impressions are commonly signs, have effects which depend not on themselves alone but upon the other impressions which have co-operated with them in the past.
A sign[*] is something which has once been a member of a context or configuration that worked in the mind as a whole. When it reappears its effects are as though the rest of the context were present. In analysing complex events of referring we have to break them up artificially into the simpler sign-situations out of which they arise; not forgetting meanwhile how interdependent the parts of any interpretation of a complex sign are.
The detail of this procedure is most easily studied in connection with the use of words. We shall deal with it therefore in Chapter XVI, where the reading of a poem is discussed. Here only the general principle matters that to know anything is to be influenced by it, directly when we sense it, indirectly when the effects of past conjunctions of impressions come into play. More will be added later, in connection with the process of reading, about the receptive, the knowledge aspect of mental events. The other two aspects need less explanation. They are also more generally important for the understanding of poetic, musical and other experiences. For a theory of knowledge is needed only at one point, the point at which we wish to decide whether a poem, for example, is true, or reveals reality, and if so in what sense; admittedly a very important question. Whereas a theory of feeling, of emotion, of attitudes and desires, of the affective-volitional aspect of mental activity, is required at all points of our analysis.
CHAPTER XII
Pleasure
The poor benefit of a bewitching minute.—The Revenger’s Tragedy.