Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind

by James Mill

From the point of view of the logician, a serious difficulty attaches to our belief in the Memory of the Past; the psychologist can refer it to the incontinence of the mind, in moving freely away from the present in any direction, in accounting the step next to be entered upon in the absence of impediment, as secure as the one actually taken.

Let us consider the process first by reverting to the anticipation of the Future. That a state of things now begun will continue indefinitely is what the mind not only assumes but proceeds upon with a vehemence proportioned to its active endowments and dispositions, until admonished to the contrary by the experience of being checked. All instruction, or corroborating information, is dispensed with at the outset: the burden is always laid upon the denier. Of this tendency of the mind the examples are innumerable, and need only to be indicated. In the default of evidence, on one side, and against what ought to be considered evidence on the other side, we believe that, as we feel now, so we shall feel always. And our belief is not simply giving the benefit of any doubt there may 399 be to the opinion we incline to; it is a powerful impulse, counteracted only by a severe and protracted discipline. Also, we believe that our own feelings exactly measure and correspond to the feelings of every one else. Very few are ever brought within the limits of the actual truth on this point; the primitive tendency is not met by a sufficient force of the requisite education.

It is the belief in the future that offers the simplest and clearest example of the mind’s tendency to overleap the actual, to see no hard line between the present and the remote. The belief in nature’s continuance and uniformity has always been in excess. From the very same tendency springs whatever belief we have of our own continued existence and identity. We make light of the difference between the conceived future and the real present.

Much more subtlety attends the Belief in Memory: the meaning of which is, that, whereas certain ideas recalled by memory are, de facto, ideas, or mental elements of a kind that imagination might furnish, they yet carry with them the belief that they represent what was once actuality, like any sensation of the present moment.

Let us first apply to the case the overweening instinct now fully set forth. To the logician, the past, however recent, is divided by a deep gulf from the present: the idea and the actuality can never be interchanged. It is not so with the mind following its native disposition. I have a present sensation of thirst; in that present consciousness, I have the highest attainable assurance; my action upon it is unhesitating and complete. Let that sensation, however, pass away for one minute, and there remains only the idea which, as a mere idea, by virtue of its recency, may be at its maximum strength. The point now to be explained is, why I believe not merely that I have the idea, which as a fact of present consciousness I am entitled to believe to the utmost, but that the idea was lately a full actuality as much as is my present state of satisfied sensation. The explanation seems to be, that we really make no radical difference between a present and a proximate past; 400 the march of the mind is to and fro, into the past and the future, with the same tendency to act out both, as to act out the present, assuming always the absence of a positive check or break. Such is the inveterate persistence of the natural activity, that the belief in the thirst when present (shown by action in accordance therewith) has a continuing efficacy second only to the belief in a still present state. At the moment of actual thirst, I, in the absence of corrective influences, (and to some degree in spite of these), would be disposed to believe that I always was, and always would be thirsty. The satisfaction that has followed reduces that belief to a fraction of its former state; and my utmost licence of assumption would be, (in the absence of contradictory beliefs) that all my past has been one thirst. The fact is, that, in these moments, when I give full licence to the sway of the idea, by voluntarily remitting attention to my new experience, that idea may swell out into a pitch of mental occupation hardly distinguishable from the real presence; in which case, my past self and my present self are, as it were, one and indivisible; they are freely interchanged; the actual consciousness compounds and contains them both.

Going another step backward, let us consider the state prior to the thirst; say a consciousness of heat and muscular fatigue. What proof have I that these penultimate states were present in continuity of time and in immediate precedence to the thirst, and are not vagaries of imagination, nor drawn from a remote past, accidentally revived? There seems no other evidence than that already given regarding the proximate state. In surrendering our mind to the idea still remaining, and so imparting a momentary quasi-reality to the state, we have an experience possessing the characteristic features of present reality.

Another consideration has to be mentioned. The state of transition from reality to reality is a distinct and unmistakeable experience. The transition from a present sensation of thirst to a present sensation of satisfied thirst is a march of its own kind—unique and explicit. There are in it attendant 401 circumstances, not to be confounded with the transition from a present to a past across a break. The recent and proximate state of thirst has a mode of continuity, a setting in contact with the present, such as did not belong to the thirst of yesterday, and still less belongs to the idea of the narrated thirst of another person. No sensation ever comes to us alone, or without a group of collaterals; and the collaterals of the formerly actual, and of the ideal never an actual, are wholly different. (This point has been well illustrated in the text, [Chap. X.] on Memory). The peculiar link whereby a present actual passes out of actuality into proximate actuality, when it is barely deprived of existence in the real, is a fact that remains and attaches to everything that has been actual; and the unbroken sequence of these is our past life of actuality, clearly marked out from every aggregate of ideas indiscriminately culled and united in a whole of imagination. This last process has its own distinctive collaterals; it is accompanied by numerous shocks of agreement in difference, under the law of similarity; but we do not confound these or other accompaniments with the gliding movement of the mind over the chronological past. Thus to take the extreme instance. We can assume another person’s mental state (to a certain degree); and yet we do not fuse that with our own identity. There is a broad line of demarcation between each one’s experience that they term their actual, and the assumption of a second person’s experience, say of thirst, of fear, of curiosity. Our own past has continuity and fusion, in itself, and a peculiar set of circumstantial surroundings; in general, too, it is easy to remember. The other person’s experience is received through a machinery of objective signs, laboriously interpreted, and not realized with the collaterals of an experience of our own; it is shorn of all the beams of our own personality, whether in the present or in the recollected past.

The distinction now drawn, (substantially what is exemplified at length in the chapter referred to,) is confirmed by what happens on occasions when memory and imagination are confounded. When a fact is long past, and all but forgotten, 402 the oblivion overtakes the evidentiary collaterals, the marks of continuity that link together what has been one actual state to what has been another actual state. I remember having had the idea or purpose to say or to do something on a certain occasion; but I do not remember whether I actually did or said the thing. The memory of the occasion is incomplete; the links are snapped that connect that idea with my remembered acting at the time referred to; it is not in its place in that authenticated series; and it is not associated with the collateral circumstances that always attend an actual transaction. On the other hand, as is well remarked in the chapter quoted, imagination may simulate remembered reality, when there is wanting the real memory that would people the occasion with authentic circumstances, and when the imagination has been excited and exercised so as to include in its compass the collaterals that go with an experience in the actual.—B.

[¹⁰⁸] The analysis of Belief presented in this chapter, brings out the conclusion that all cases of Belief are simply cases of indissoluble association: that there is no generic distinction, but only a difference in the strength of the association, between a case of belief and a case of mere imagination: that to believe a succession or coexistence between two facts is only to have the ideas of the two facts so strongly and closely associated, that we cannot help having the one idea when we have the other.

If this can be proved, it is the greatest of all the triumphs of the Association Psychology. To first appearance, no two things can be more distinct than thinking of two things together, and believing that they are joined together in the outward world. Nevertheless, that the latter state of mind is only an extreme case of the former, is, as we see, the deliberate doctrine of the author of the Analysis; and it has also in its favour the high psychological authority of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Mr. Bain, in the preceding [note], as well as in his systematic work, looks at the phenomenon from another side, and pronounces that what constitutes Belief is the power which an 403 idea has obtained over the Will. It is well known and understood that a mere idea may take such possession of the mind as to exercise an irresistible control over the active faculties, even independently of Volition, and sometimes in opposition to it. This, which Mr. Bain calls the power of a Fixed Idea, is exemplified in the cases of what is called fascination: the impulse which a person looking from a precipice sometimes feels to throw himself down it; and the cases of crimes said to have been committed by persons who abhor them, because that very horror has filled their minds with an intense and irrepressible idea of the act. Since an idea is sometimes able to overpower volition, it is no wonder that an idea should determine volition; as it does whenever we, under the influence of the idea of a pleasure or of a pain, will that which obtains for us the pleasure or averts the pain. In this voluntary action, our conduct is grounded upon a relation between means and an end; (that is, upon a constant conjunction of facts in the way of causation, ultimately resolvable into a case of resemblance and contiguity): in common and unanalytical language, upon certain laws of nature on which we rely. Our reliance is the consequence of an association formed in our minds between the supposed cause and its effect, resulting either from personal experience of their conjunction, from the teachings of other people, or from accidental appearances. Now, according to Mr. Bain, when this association between the means and the end, the end calling up the idea of the means, arrives at the point of giving to the idea thus called up a command over the Will, it constitutes Belief. We believe a thing, when we are ready to act on the faith of it; to face the practical consequences of taking it for granted: and therein lies the distinction between believing two facts to be conjoined, and merely thinking of them together. Thus far Mr. Bain: and with this I fully agree. But something is still wanting to the completeness of the analysis. The theory as stated, distinguishes two antecedents, by a difference not between themselves, but between their consequents. But when the consequents differ, the antecedents cannot be the same. An association 404 of ideas is or is not a Belief, according as it has or has not the power of leading us to voluntary action: this is undeniable: but when there is a difference in the effects there must be a difference in the cause: the association which leads to action must be, in some respect or other, different from that which stops at thought. The question, therefore, raised, and, as they think, resolved, by the author of the Analysis and by Mr. Spencer, still demands an answer. Does the difference between the two cases consist in this, that in the one case the association is dissoluble, in the other it is so much more closely riveted, by repetition, or by the intensity of the associated feelings, as to be no longer dissoluble? This is the question we are compelled to face.