437 Belief on evidence is therefore always a case of the generalizing process; of the assumption that what we have not directly experienced resembles, or will resemble, our experience. And, properly understood, this assumption is true; for the whole course of nature consists of a concurrence of causes, producing their effects in a uniform manner; but the uniformity which exists is often not that which our first impressions lead us to expect. Mr. Bain has well pointed out, that the generalizing propensity, in a mind not disciplined by thought, nor as yet warned by its own failures, far outruns the evidence, or rather, precedes any conscious consideration of evidence; and that what the consideration of evidence has to do when it comes, is not so much to make us generalize, as to limit our spontaneous impulse of generalization, and restrain within just bounds our readiness to believe that the unknown will resemble the known. When Mr. Bain occasionally speaks of this propensity as if it were instinctive, I understand him to mean, that by an original law of our nature, the mere suggestion of an idea, so long as the idea keeps possession of the mind, suffices to give it a command over our active energies. It is to this primitive mental state that the author’s theory of Belief most nearly applies. In a mind which is as yet untutored, either by the teachings of others or by its own mistakes, an idea so strongly excited as for the time to keep out all ideas by which it would itself be excluded, possesses that power over the voluntary activities which is Mr. Bain’s criterion of Belief; and any association that compels the person to have the idea of a certain consequence as following his act, generates, or becomes, a real expectation of that consequence. But these expectations often turning out to have been ill grounded, the unduly prompt suggestion comes to be associated, by repetition, with the shock of disappointed expectation; and the idea of the desired consequent is now raised together with the idea not of its realization, but of its frustration: thus neutralizing the effect of the first association on the belief and on the active impulses. It is in this stage that the mind learns the habit of looking out for, and weighing, evidence. It presently discovers 438 that the expectations which are least often disappointed are those which correspond to the greatest and most varied amount of antecedent experience. It gradually comes to associate the feeling of disappointed expectation with all those promptings to expect, which, being the result of accidental associations, have no, or but little, previous experience conformable to them: and by degrees the expectation only arises when memory represents a considerable amount of such previous experience; and is strong in proportion to the quantity of the experience. At a still later period, as disappointment nevertheless not unfrequently happens notwithstanding a considerable amount of past experience on the side of the expectation, the mind is put upon making distinctions in the kind of past experiences, and finding out what qualities, besides mere frequency, experience must have, in order not to be followed by disappointment. In other words, it considers the conditions of right inference from experience; and by degrees arrives at principles or rules, more or less accurate, for inductive reasoning. This is substantially the doctrine of the author of the Analysis. It must be conceded to him, that an association, sufficiently strong to exclude all ideas that would exclude itself, produces a kind of mechanical belief; and that the processes by which this belief is corrected, or reduced to rational bounds, all consist in the growth of a counter-association, tending to raise the idea of a disappointment of the first expectation: and as the one or the other prevails in the particular case, the belief, or expectation, exists or does not exist, exactly as if the belief were the same thing with the association. It must also be admitted that the process by which the belief is overcome, takes effect by weakening the association; which can only be effected by raising up another association that conflicts with it. There are two ways in which this counter-association may be generated. One is, by counter-evidence; by contrary experience in the specific case, which, by associating the circumstances of the case with a contrary belief, destroys their association with the original belief. But there is also another mode of weakening, or altogether 439 destroying, the belief, without adducing contrary experience: namely, by merely recognising the insufficiency of the existing experience; by reflecting on other instances in which the same amount and kind of experience have existed, but were not followed by the expected result. In the one mode as in the other, the process of dissolving a belief is identical with that of dissolving an association; and to this extent—and it is a very large extent—the author’s theory of Belief must be received as true.
I cannot, however, go beyond this, and maintain with the author that Belief is identical with a strong association; on account of the reason already stated, viz. that in many cases—indeed in almost all cases in which the evidence has been such as required to be investigated and weighed—a final belief is arrived at without any such clinging together of ideas as the author supposes to constitute it; and we remain able to represent to ourselves in imagination, often with perfect facility, both the conflicting suppositions, of which we nevertheless believe one and reject the other.—Ed.
APPENDIX.
(From “An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy.”)
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF THE BELIEF IN AN EXTERNAL WORLD.
WE have seen Sir. W. Hamilton at work on the question of the reality of Matter, by the introspective method, and, as it seems, with little result. Let us now approach the same subject by the psychological. I proceed, therefore, to state the case of those who hold that the belief in an external world is not intuitive, but an acquired product.
This theory postulates the following psychological truths, all of which are proved by experience, and are not contested, though their force is seldom adequately felt, by Sir W. Hamilton and the other thinkers of the introspective school.
It postulates, first, that the human mind is capable of Expectation. In other words, that after having had actual sensations, we are capable of forming the conception of Possible sensations; sensations which we are not feeling at the present moment, but which we might feel, and should feel if certain conditions were present, the nature of which conditions we have, in many cases, learnt by experience.
It postulates, secondly, the laws of the Association of Ideas. So far as we are here concerned, these laws are the following: 1st. Similar phænomena tend to be thought of together. 2nd. Phænomena which have either been experienced or conceived 441 in close contiguity to one another, tend to be thought of together. The contiguity is of two kinds; simultaneity, and immediate succession. Facts which have been experienced or thought of simultaneously, recall the thought of one another. Of facts which have been experienced or thought of in immediate succession, the antecedent, or the thought of it, recalls the thought of the consequent, but not conversely. 3rd. Associations produced by contiguity become more certain and rapid by repetition. When two phænomena have been very often experienced in conjunction, and have not, in any single instance, occurred separately either in experience or in thought, there is produced between them what has been called Inseparable, or less correctly, Indissoluble Association: by which is not meant that the association must inevitably last to the end of life—that no subsequent experience or process of thought can possibly avail to dissolve it; but only that as long as no such experience or process of thought has taken place, the association is irresistible; it is impossible for us to think the one thing disjoined from the other. 4th. When an association has acquired this character of inseparability—when the bond between the two ideas has been thus firmly riveted, not only does the idea called up by association become, in our consciousness, inseparable from the idea which suggested it, but the facts or phænomena answering to those ideas come at last to seem inseparable in existence: things which we are unable to conceive apart, appear incapable of existing apart; and the belief we have in their coexistence, though really a product of experience, seems intuitive. Innumerable examples might be given of this law. One of the most familiar, as well as the most striking, is that of our acquired perceptions of sight. Even those who, with Mr. Bailey, consider the perception of distance by the eye as not acquired, but intuitive, admit that there are many perceptions of sight which, though instantaneous and unhesitating, are not intuitive. What we see is a very minute fragment of what we think we see. We see artificially that one thing is hard, another soft. We see artificially that one thing is hot, another cold. We see artificially that 442 what we see is a book, or a stone, each of these being not merely an inference, but a heap of inferences, from the signs which we see, to things not visible. We see, and cannot help seeing, what we have learnt to infer, even when we know that the inference is erroneous, and that the apparent perception is deceptive. We cannot help seeing the moon larger when near the horizon, though we know that she is of precisely her usual size. We cannot help seeing a mountain as nearer to us and of less height, when we see it through a more than ordinarily transparent atmosphere.