Chapter VIII: Part 8

So far our discussion has emphasized the anticipatory character of the conscious stimulus. Future consequences come into the present as _conditions_ for further behavior. These anticipations are based, indeed, upon previous happenings, but they enter into the present situation as conditions that must be taken into account. But to take them into account means that the conscious situation is essentially incomplete and in process of transformation or reconstruction. This peculiar incompleteness or contingency stands out prominently when the situation rises to the level of uncertainty and perplexity. To borrow the classical illustration of the child and the candle, the child is in a state of uncertainty because the neural activity of the moment comprises two incompatible systems of discharge, the one being a grasping and holding, the other a withdrawal and such further movements as may be induced by contact with fire. Hence the candle has the seductiveness of a prize, but at the same time carries the suggestion of burning the fingers. That is, the perceived object has a unique character of uncertainty, which inheres in it as a present positive quality. We are here confronted with genuine contingency, such as is encountered nowhere else. Other modes of behavior may be uncertain in the sense that the incoming stimulation finds no fixed line of discharge laid down for itself within the organism. In seeking to convert itself into response it may either sweep away the obstructions in its path or work itself out along lines of less resistance, in ways that no man can foretell. There may be moments of equilibrium, moments when it remains to be seen where the dam will break and the current rush through. Such uncertainty, however, is the uncertainty of the bystander who attempts to forecast what will happen next. It is not the uncertainty that figures as an integral part of conscious behavior.

This inherent uncertainty means that conscious behavior, as contrasted with the mechanical character of the reflexes, is essentially experimental. The uncertainty exists precisely because an effort is under way to clear up the uncertainty. The resort to eye or ear or to reflective thinking is suggested by the corresponding nascent responses and is an endeavor to secure something which is still to seek, but which, when found, will meet the requirements of the situation. Translating this process into terms of stimulus and response, we may say that the conscious stimulus of the moment induces the investigation or scrutiny which presently results in the arrival of a stimulus that is adequate to the situation. The stimulus, in other words, provides for its own successor; or we may say that the process as a whole is a self-directing, self-determining activity. Stimulus and response are not successive stages or moments, but rather simultaneous functions or phases of the total process. Within this process the given situation is the stimulus because it is that aspect or function which guides the subsequent course of the activity, while the bodily movements are the response because they already embody the activity that is to follow. The significant circumstance here is that stimulus and response resist the temporal separation that we find in a purely reflex act; stimulus and response are bound together as correlated functions in a unitary, self-directing process, so that these twain are one flesh.

Situations of uncertainty and expectancy, as exemplified by the familiar child-candle incident, are of interest, because they emphasize both the anticipatory character of experience and the peculiar reconstruction of the stimulus. These situations, however, differ merely in degree, not in kind, from other experiences; their merit is that in them the distinctive character of conscious life is writ large. To say that they are conscious situations is to say that they are so constituted that the possibilities of a subsequent moment are embodied in them as a positive quality. In them the present moment embodies a future that is contingent. And similarly the response has neither the predetermined organization of the reflex nor the aimless character of a response that issues in a set of random movements. It is, so to speak, of a generalized character, like the paleontological specimens that foreshadow in their structure the advent of both fish and reptile. This form of organization, however, while exemplified most strikingly in situations of uncertainty, pertains to all conscious behavior. In uttering a sentence, for example, we know in advance what we are going to say, yet the sentence shapes itself into definite form only as we proceed; or perhaps we get "stuck," and by hemming and hawing bear witness that a struggle for a certain kind of organization is going on. The same word in different contexts is a different word in each instance, by virtue of the coloring that it takes on from what is to follow after. And this is equally true of our most casual experiences. The auditory or visual object that we happen to notice and immediately afterwards ignore is apprehended with reference to the possibility of warranting further attention, or else it presents itself as an intruder that is to be excluded in order that we may go on with the concern of the moment. All experience is a kind of intelligence, a control of present behavior with reference to future adjustment. To be in experience at all is to have the future operate in the present.

This reference to the future may be in the nature of an end or goal that controls a series of activities or it may be of a momentary and casual kind. In any case the character of the stimulus changes with the progress of the act. The book on the table must become successively book-to-be-reached-for, book-to-be-picked-up, and book-to-be-opened, unless the process is to drop back to the type of reflex. This development of the stimulus gives genuine continuity, since every moment in the process comes as a fulfilment of its predecessor and as a transition-point to its successor. In a purely mechanical act response follows stimulus like the successive strokes of a clock. It is a touch-and-go affair; the stimulus presses the button and then subsides, while the neural organization does the rest. In conscious behavior, on the other hand, stimulus and response keep step with each other. A mere succession of stimuli would reduce conscious behavior to a series of explosive jerks, on the principle of the gasoline engine. To be conscious at all is to duplicate in principle the agility of the tight-rope performer, who continuously establishes new co-ordinations according to the exigencies of the moment and with constant reference to the controlling consideration of keeping right side up. The sensory stimulus provides continuously for its own rehabilitation or appropriate transformation, and in a similar way the neural organization is never a finished thing, but is in constant process of readjustment to meet the demands of an adaptation that still lies in the future.

It is this relationship of present response to the response of the next moment that constitutes the distinctive trait of conscious behavior. The relatively unorganized responses of the present moment, in becoming reflected in the experienced object, reveal their outcome or meaning before they have become overt, and thus provide the conditions of intelligent action. In other words, future consequences become transformed into a stimulus for further behavior. We are confronted here with a distinctive mode of operation, which must be properly recognized, if we are to give a consistent and intelligent account of conscious behavior. On the other hand, if we refuse to recognize the advent here of a new category, intelligence becomes an anomaly and mystery deepens into contradiction. Since intelligence or consciousness must be provided for somehow, we are forced back upon either interactionism or else epiphenomenalism, more or less disguised under a euphonious name, such as psycho-physical parallelism or the double-aspect theory. That is, the relation of stimulus and response is either reduced to plain cause and effect or else is rejected altogether and supplanted by a bare concomitance of the physical and mental series. In either case conscious behavior is reduced to the type of reflex action, the only issue between the two doctrines being the question whether or not it is necessary or permissible to interpolate mental links in the causal chain.

According to the doctrine of parallelism, conscious behavior is nothing more than a complicated form of reflex, which goes on without any interference on the part of mind or intelligence. Intelligence adds nothing to the situation except itself; it carries no implications or new significance with regard to conduct. The psychic correlate is permitted to tag along, but the explanations of response remain the same in kind as they were before they reached the level of consciousness. "Mere complexity should not becloud the issue. Every brain process, like every reflex activity, is presumably the result of physico-chemical processes. The assumption of a mysterious intuition or 'psychic force' adds nothing to the mechanistic explanation, even when the latter is most fragmentary. The interactionists go out of their way unnecessarily in assuming a special activity of consciousness to account for the dislocation of reactions from sensations. The nervous organization suffices to explain it. Distant-stimuli and central stimuli co-operate to bring about anticipatory reactions; foresight is but the conscious side of this process. The phenomenon is _both_ physical and mental."[39]

The passage just quoted is fairly typical. Since the mental is an aspect or concomitant of the physical it is clearly entitled to an occasional honorable mention, but the fact remains that the explanation of behavior is to be given wholly in terms of neural organization. The mental is quite literally an "also ran." To say that a physico-chemical process is also mental is of no particular significance as long as it is implied that the end or goal of the process plays no part in shaping the course of events. The mental simply gives dignity to the occasion, like the sedan chair with no bottom, in which the Irishman's admirers, according to James's story, ran him along to the place of banquet and which prompted the hero to remark: "Faith, if it wasn't for the honor of the thing, I might as well have come on foot."

It is this empty show of respect which the interactionists seek to avoid when they make the mental a distinct link in the causal sequence. The physical first causes the mental, and the mental in turn brings about a change in the physical. In this way a certain importance is indeed secured to mental facts, but it appears that, so far as purposive action is concerned, we are no better off than we were before. The mental is simply another kind of cause; it has as little option regarding its physical effect as the physical cause has with regard to its mental effect. Non-mechanical behavior is again ruled out, or else a vain attempt is made to secure a place for it through the introduction of an independent psychic agency.

It is true, indeed, that we are under no antecedent obligation to maintain the existence of an activity that is not entirely reducible to the type of everyday cause and effect. But neither does scientific zeal and incorruptibility require us to do violence to the facts in order to secure this uniformity of type. Not to speak at all of the difficulties inherent in this dualism, it seems undeniable that some facts persistently refuse to conform to the type of mechanism, unless they are previously clubbed into submission. Foresight and the sense of obligation, for example, must learn to regard themselves as nothing more than an interesting indication of the way in which the neural machinery is operating before they will fit into the scheme. And similarly the progress of an argument is no way controlled or directed by the end in view, or by considerations of logical coherence, but by the impact of causation. Ideas lose their power to guide conduct by prevision of the future, and truth and error consequently lose their significance, save perhaps as manifestations of cerebral operations. Since reasoning involves association, it must be reducible to bare association; the sequence of the process is just sequence and nothing more. A description of this kind is on a par with the celebrated opinion that violin music is just a case of scraping horse-hair on catgut. Everything that is distinctive in the facts is left out of account, and we are forced to the conclusion that no conclusion has any logical significance or value.

In the end these difficulties, and in fact most of our philosophic ills, may be traced back to the prejudice that experience or knowing is a process in which the objects concerned do not participate and have no share. This assumption commits us at once to various corollaries and thus breeds a set of abstractions that pass themselves off as entities and add themselves to the world of our experience as demonstrable facts. In philosophy, as in the financial world, there is a constant temptation to do business on a basis of fictitious capitalization. Our abstract physico-chemical processes, with their correlates, such as passive, independent objects, souls, minds, or absolutes, do not represent actual working capital, but watered stock, and their inevitable tendency is to convert the legitimate business of philosophy into a campaign of exploitation, which is none the less exploitation because it is frequently done in the interests of what are supposed to be the spiritual values of man. A careful inventory of our assets brings to light no such entities as those which have been placed to our credit. We do not find body and object _and_ consciousness, but only body and object. We do not find objects that remain indifferent to the experiential process, but rather objects that exhibit a flexibility and mobility which defy all description. We do not find a self-sufficient environment or absolute _to_ which intelligence must needs adjust itself, but an environment that is at odds with itself and struggling in the throes of a reconstruction. The process of intelligence is something that goes on, not in our minds, but in things; it is not photographic, but creative. From the simplest perception to the most ideal aspiration or the wildest hallucination, our human experience is reality engaged in the guidance or control of behavior. Things undergo a change in becoming experienced, but the change consists in a doing, in the assumption of a certain task or duty. The experiential object hence varies with the response; the situation and the motor activity fit together like the sections of a broken bowl.

The bearing of this standpoint on the interpretation of psychology is readily apparent. If it be granted that consciousness is just a name for behavior that is guided by the results of acts not yet performed but reflected beforehand in the objects of experience, it follows that this behavior is the peculiar subject-matter of psychology. It is only by reference to behavior that a distinctive field can be marked off for psychological enterprise. When we say that the flame is hot, the stone hard, and the ice cold and slippery, we are describing objects and nothing more. These qualities are, indeed, anticipations of future possibilities, but this means simply that the objects are described in terms of their properties or capacities as stimuli of the organism. Such an account leaves out of consideration certain changes which things undergo when they exercise the function of controlling or directing changes in the adjustment of the body. A quality, such as "sharp" or "hot," is not mental or constituted by consciousness, but the function of the quality in giving direction to behavior through certain changes which it undergoes is consciousness. The changes that take place in things as a result of association, attention, or memory, are changes that have no significance, save with regard to their function as stimuli to new adjustments. Psychology, therefore, is properly a study of the conditions which determine the change or development of stimuli; more specifically it is a study of the conditions which govern such processes as those by which problems are solved, lessons are memorized, habits and attitudes are built up, and decisions are reached. To call such study "applied" psychology is to misunderstand the proper scope and purpose of the subject. Psychology frequently has occasion to draw extensively upon physics and physiology, but it has its own problem and its own method of procedure.

That this view of conscious behavior should involve an extensive reinterpretation of familiar facts is altogether natural and inevitable. If consciousness is a form of control, the question, for example, what is "in" consciousness and what is not must be interpreted with reference to this function of control. In a sense we perceive many things to which we are not paying attention, such as the light in the room or the familiar chairs and bookcases. These are perceived "marginally," as we say, in the sense that the presence of these objects affects the total adjustment of the moment in such a way that the experience _would_ become a clue to these objects if they were withdrawn. And similarly we may speak of marginal sensations of strain or movement, to indicate possible clues to certain bodily activities which are factors in the process. These marginal perceptions or images are not actual existences, but are symbols and nothing more. The significance of these symbols is that they point to certain conditions by which the experiences in question are determined. Thus the question whether a given experience involves certain "sensations" is just a question whether certain bodily or extra-bodily conditions are involved in the experience. If this reference to conditions is ignored and experience is explained in terms of sensory material that blends and fuses and otherwise disposes itself, the explanation is no longer science but sleight-of-hand. Psychology has no proper concern with such mythical constituents of consciousness; its business is with things as related to conduct, which is to say that psychology is a science of behavior.

II

According to the standpoint set forth in the preceding discussion, the key to a consistent and fruitful interpretation of consciousness and psychology lies in behavior. If we turn now to the psychology of introspection, which has been dominant so many years, we find a standpoint and mode of procedure which, on the surface at least, is of a radically different kind. It behooves us, therefore, to consider this standpoint in some detail in order to justify the attempt to reinterpret and "evaluate" it in the light of our own doctrine.

The point of departure for introspective psychology is to be found, so it seems, not in the facts of behavior, but in the distinction between focal and marginal experience. It is on this distinction that the introspective psychologist bases the attempt to give a psychological analysis and description of the contents of experience. To analyze and describe the facts of consciousness is to bring the marginal constituents of experience into the white light of attention. Analysis and description are possible just because experience is so largely a welter of elements that disguise their identity and character. In some way these unrecognized and unidentified elements are constituents of the total experience. To borrow the language of a writer quoted by James, "However deeply we may suppose the attention to be engaged by any thought, any considerable alteration of the surrounding phenomena would still be perceived; the most abstruse demonstration in this room would not prevent a listener, however absorbed, from noticing the sudden extinction of the lights."[40] Or, as James remarks: "It is just like the overtones in music. Different instruments give the 'same note,' namely, various upper harmonics of it which differ from one instrument to another. They are not separately heard by the ear; they blend with the fundamental note and suffuse it, and alter it."[41] Let the attention be directed to these overtones, however, and they at once detach themselves from their surroundings and step forth into the light of day. Even so the ticking of the clock may pass unnoticed in the sense that it is an undiscriminated element in the background of our consciousness; but if the ticking comes to a sudden stop, the feeling of a void in our consciousness proclaims the fact that something has gone out from it.

The observation and description of the facts of consciousness, then, is based directly on the fact that experience, as the psychologist deals with it, possesses a focus and margin. Nature as conceived by the physical sciences presents no such distinction. The facts are what they are, and their character as focal or marginal, as clear or obscure, depends altogether upon their relation to an intelligence. Or we may say that if the facts of experience were always focal and never marginal, it would never occur to us to speak of consciousness as we do at present. As long as we confine ourselves to a given color, shape or temperature, as experienced focally, we are not dealing with consciousness, but with objects. An analysis of such facts that does not bring in the marginal is not an analysis of consciousness, but an analysis of physical reality. Even if we consider non-physical objects, such as mathematical or economic concepts, we find that our analysis is not psychological as long as the marginal is left out. The consideration of the margin, however, brings us into the presence of facts which are of a distinctive kind and which warrant a new science. Let the margin be eliminated and psychology disappears at the same time.

The psychological doctrine of focus and margin, then, is a matter of fundamental importance. On the interpretation of this doctrine depend our systems of psychology and of philosophy. What, then, is meant by focus and margin? If we turn to our psychologies, we seem to be confronted once more with something that everybody knows and nobody can define. But since we have to do with a distinction, the obligation to differentiate cannot be wholly ignored. Consciousness is sometimes likened to a visual field and sometimes to the waves of the sea. Like the visual field it has a foreground and a background, a near and a remote, a center and a margin or periphery. The contents of consciousness are vivid or clear in the center of this field and fade away into vagueness or obscureness in proportion to their approach to the periphery. Or, to take the other comparison, the focus may be represented by the crest of a wave and the margin by what we may call its base. This illustration has the advantage that it indicates the difference between higher and lower degrees of concentration. As concentration increases, the crest of the wave rises higher and its width decreases, while the reverse is true where the concentration of attention is less intense. All consciousness possesses the distinction of focus and margin in some degree; however much we may be absorbed in an object or topic, there is always an indirect mental vision that informs us of other facts, which for the time being are in the background of our consciousness.

For purposes of description a metaphor is at best a clumsy device. It has a tendency to substitute itself for the thing to be described and thus to conceal its limitations and inaccuracies. The present case is no exception. I am forced to think that the visual field in particular is a thoroughly vicious metaphor when employed to body forth the distinction of focus and margin. Whatever this distinction may in the end turn out to be, it is not such as this comparison would lead one to suppose. Objects seen in indirect vision appear obscure and blurred precisely because they are in the focus of consciousness. We get pretty much the same sort of obscureness or blur on a printed page when we look at it in indirect vision as we do when we look at it from a distance that is just too great to make out the words or characters. What the illustration shows is that things look different according as the circumstances under which we see them are different, but what bearing this has on marginal consciousness is not at all obvious to an unsophisticated intelligence.

When we speak of a focus and margin in consciousness, we are presumably dealing with conscious fact. Now this illustration of the visual field does not represent conscious fact. Ordinary perception carries with it no sense of obscureness at all, and when it does we have exactly the same kind of situation as when an object is too distant or in some other way inaccessible to satisfactory perception. That is, the object perceived is in the 'focus' and not in the margin. The obscureness of objects when seen with the margin of the retina has no more to do with the margin of consciousness than the obscureness caused by an attack of dizziness or by a morning fog.

It will be said, perhaps, that consciousness may be unclear even though there be no sense of unclearness, that there is such a thing as intrinsic clearness, quite apart from obstacles and problems. In other words, the same sensation is capable of realizing various degrees of clearness. It is not at all obvious, however, why the different experiences that are concerned in such a comparison should be called the same sensation. As long as we abstract from objective reference, each sensation is just what it is and there is no opportunity to make comparisons on the basis of clearness. A sensation as such--if we are bound to speak of sensations--can by no possibility be an obscure sensation, for the trait that we call obscureness or vagueness constitutes the intrinsic being of that sensation. If we permit ourselves to speak of clearness at all, we should rather say that it possesses a maximum of clearness, since it has managed to express or present its whole nature with not one trait or feature lacking. What more could be demanded, in the way of clearness, of any conscious fact than that it should body forth every detail that it possesses?

If sensations or states of consciousness possess degrees of clearness, it seems to follow that we may scrutinize them for the purpose of discovering characteristics that were present though scarcely perceived, in much the same way that the polishing of old furniture brings out the grain in the wood. But such a parallel, I submit, is plain nonsense. The supposition that consciousness is something that in due time and with good fortune may attain consciousness is too absurd for discussion, even though it is a supposition that plays a considerable role in present-day psychology.

The purpose of the discussion, up to this point, has not been to deny the validity of the distinction between focus and margin, but to insist upon the necessity of reconsidering the meaning of this distinction, if we are to attain to a workable definition of consciousness and a fruitful or even intelligible conception of the problem of psychology. I have endeavored to show, in the first place, that the doctrine of focus and margin involves the _raison d'etre_ of psychology. Apart from this doctrine we have no task or problem that psychology can claim as its distinctive possession. The analysis of what is in the focus of consciousness is adequately provided for in the other sciences; it is only with the introduction of what is called the margin that an enterprise of a different kind becomes necessary. But, secondly, this distinction of focus and margin cannot be drawn on the basis of the experienced contrast between clearness and obscureness. The very fact that anything is experienced as obscure means that it is an object of attention, or, in other words, that it is in the focus of consciousness and not in the margin. The comparison of focus and margin with direct and indirect vision is misleading, because it suggests that experiences are marginal in proportion as they are felt as obscure. And, thirdly, if we undertake to distinguish between focus and margin on the basis of a difference in clearness or vividness of which no note is taken at the time, we encounter the difficulty that experience or consciousness, taken abstractly, does not admit of such variations in degree, and so this criterion likewise goes by the board.

The situation is indeed peculiar. That there is a realm of psychological fact is universally conceded. As a consequence of this conviction a great body of fact and of doctrine has been built up. It would be folly to deny either the distinctiveness or the significance of this achievement. And yet James's description of psychology as "a string of raw facts; a little gossip and wrangle about opinions; a little classification and generalization on the mere descriptive level; a strong prejudice that we _have_ states of mind and that our brain conditions them,"[42] is not wholly untrue even today. It is even possible for a present-day critic to outdo James and maintain that the legitimacy of psychology as a separate inquiry is a matter of faith rather than of sight. The 'raw facts' of which James speaks resolve themselves into physical and physiological material on the one hand and metaphysical dogmas on the other; the gossip and wrangle are largely over fictitious problems; the classifications and generalizations as a rule involve trespassing on other fields; the prejudice that we have states of mind has less standing-ground today than it had twenty years ago. In other words, there is still plausible ground for James's pessimistic comment: "This is no science, it is only the hope of a science." A situation such as this carries with it the insistent suggestion that the trouble lies, not primarily in the nature of the subject-matter, but in our conception of the problem. "The matter of a science," as James says, "is with us." And if the distinction of focus and margin constitutes the starting-point and justification for a science of psychology, a better understanding of this distinction will mean a more adequate appreciation of the problem with which psychology has to deal.

As a starting-point for a reconsideration of focus and margin, we may take those experiences in which the distinction of clearness and obscureness is presented as an experienced fact. Let us then turn once more to the familiar illustration of the visual field. "When we look at a printed page, there is always some one portion of it, perhaps a word, which we see more clearly than we do the rest; and out beyond the margin of the page we are still conscious of objects which we see only in a very imperfect way."[43] That is, we appreciate the distinction between what lies in the center of our visual field and what is more remote, just because in this experiment we are trying to see what lies beyond the center without turning our eyes in that direction. We set ourselves the task of seeing what is on the page, and at the same time we interpose an artificial obstacle. Hence the sense of effort, and the contrast between what is clear and what is obscure. The present experience is obscure, not inherently, but only with reference to a certain problem or question. It is inadequate as an anticipation of further experience. The contrast between clear and obscure is created by our attempt to overcome the difficulty, and is therefore absent from ordinary, unobstructed visual perception.

The situation described in the following familiar quotation from James is an illustration of the same thing: "Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the longed-for term."[44]

'I met this man on the train, and later at the reception; but what is his name?' The struggle rends our consciousness in twain. The occasions of our meeting, his appearance, his conversation, are solid fact, yet all suffused with the pervasive, evanscent "wraith" that tantalizes us with glimpses which half reveal and half conceal the name we seek to grasp.

To account for such experiences simply in terms of half-submerged "sensations" and "images" is to do violence to all the requirements for clear thinking. If we rule out explanations of this kind, we are evidently forced to the conclusion that these experiences are obscure, not in themselves or in the abstract, but with reference to the function of putting us in possession of the name to which they are inadequate clues. It is the subsequent, satisfactory experience of the name which furnishes our standard for clearness; in other words, the implications of obscureness are of a functional, and not of a static or structural, kind. The marginal character of an experience is simply a reference to its function as a clue or cue to some further experience, i.e., a reference to its character as a changing stimulus. Or we may say that the distinction between focus and margin is just another aspect of the distinction between the conditions for further activity and the incompleteness which leads to further adjustment. The transfer of the future into the present gives us a fact, here and now, and in this respect the experience is entirely focal in character, and as such it is subject-matter for the various sciences. Whatever the nature of the experience, it is just what it is, and not something else. With respect to the further experience, however, which it conditions or for which it prepares the way, the present experience is entirely marginal, i.e., in its character as a changing stimulus it is subject-matter for psychology. The distinction of focus and margin, then, is based ultimately upon the function of experience in the control of behavior. The given situation is a present fact and is in functional change; or, in terms of our present discussion, it has both a focus and a margin. As present fact it is a reality which requires recognition in the form of adjustment; as in functional change it provides opportunity for bringing the adjustment to fruition. That is, the experience both sets a task or makes a demand and it points the way. The distinction is a distinction of function, not of static existence, and it is this distinction which is represented by the contrast of focus and margin.

If we compare this interpretation of focus and margin with that of traditional psychology, we find that the latter construes the relation of the present to the future experience wholly in static terms, the functional relation being left out of account. The later experience is read back into its predecessor in the form of dim or marginal images, which need but show themselves more completely to make the two identical. If these sensations were intended only as symbols of a functional relationship, it would perhaps be scarcely worth while to enter a protest against them. But when the functional relationship is quite overlooked, the explanation that is given becomes exceedingly dubious. The ticking of the clock, for example, that is present, though unnoticed, the overtones of the note that suffuse the whole without diverting attention to their individual qualities,--in what precise way are facts of this kind concerned in the description of the experience which they modify? A study of the clock or of the overtones can hardly pass as an analysis of consciousness; it is too obviously an affair of physics. Such a study becomes merely an excuse for repeating the analyses of physics and reading them off in terms of sensations and images. Moreover, the transfer of all this material to consciousness looks suspiciously like a transaction in mental chemistry. Where, then, is psychology to gain a foothold? What is the meaning of these uncanny sensations and images, which nobody experiences, unless it be their character as symbols of adjustment? They have no legitimate status, and psychology, by consequence, has no legitimate problem, except in so far as they represent those possible acts of adaptation which are the sole and proper concern of psychology.

It remains to point out briefly the bearing of these results on what is called "the method of introspection." We are sometimes assured that introspection has discarded the belief in a separate mental stuff or subject-matter, but there is ground for the suspicion that such protestations are made in the same spirit that we affirm our belief in the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule, with no thought of being taken seriously. At all events, without a literal "looking within" it seems to become exceedingly difficult to differentiate introspection from ordinary observation as practised in the other sciences. The reason for this difficulty is that there is nothing left in introspection by which it can be differentiated. The term introspection properly designates, not a method but a problem; the problem, namely, of interpreting given facts with reference to their function in the control of behavior. If psychology is to justify its claim to the status of a science, it is in duty bound to secure for itself both an objective criterion for the adjudication of disputes which otherwise are of necessity interminable, and a subject-matter that is not simply a heritage of metaphysical prejudice, but a realm of fact that is attested by everyday observation and experience.

III

Within recent years the doctrine that psychology is a science of behavior has acquired a certain prominence. It is presupposed, of course, that the behavior with which psychology is concerned is of a distinctive sort; but the differentia is unfortunately the very thing that the "behaviorist" has hitherto left out of account. In his revolt against introspectionism, which has been accustomed to give to its subject-matter a subjectivistic and "psychic" interpretation, he goes to the other extreme and relies on behavior pure and simple. Being without a serviceable differentia, he is unable to mark off the field of psychology from contiguous territory. The selection of certain problems within the general range of behavior, with no recognition of any distinctive trait to guide and justify the selection, is hardly enough to warrant a new science. Even an arbitrary principle of selection is better than none, and it would, therefore, be quite as reasonable to subdivide the field of botany in the interests of a new science, and group together for separate botanical study those flowers which have enabled poets to give symbolic expression to the beauty of women.

That the principle of selection is, in the end, the ability to modify behavior through the anticipation of possible consequences, appears from the fact that the category of stimulus and response is otherwise found to be unworkable. It is true that in the simpler forms of behavior stimulus and response may be correlated without practical difficulty. But when we deal with what has been called "delayed overt response," the matter becomes more complicated and the theoretical difficulty becomes more prominent. The behaviorist would not seriously undertake to record everything that happens between stimulus and response. He proceeds selectively, taking the relation of stimulus and response as his clue. He is properly interested in the movements which result from the application of the stimulus only in so far as they constitute response. Otherwise his study is not a study of behavior, but a study of movements. But when does a movement constitute a response? Do we label as stimulus the spoken word which results in overt action a week later, or the visual perception which sets a complicated and long-drawn-out problem, for no other reason than that it appears somewhere as an antecedent in the causal chain of events? If so, there is no obvious reason why the event which occurred just before or immediately after the _soi-disant_ stimulus should not be regarded as the true stimulus. Unless a satisfactory reason is forthcoming, it would seem better to substitute cause and effect for stimulus and response and to drop the term behavior from our vocabulary. Psychology then becomes a study of certain causal relationships, but is still without a principle for the selection of those causal events which are supposed to constitute its peculiar subject-matter.

Even if we manage to become reconciled to this situation, however, our troubles are not yet at an end. There still remains the difficulty in certain cases of showing that the event which is selected as stimulus or cause bears any significant relationship to the event which figures in our scheme as the response. The stimulus is supposed to have a causal connection with the response, but how are we to know that this is the fact? How are we to know that the engineer who solves a problem for me at my request might not have done so anyway? No behaviorist can possibly show that the air waves set in motion by my vocalization were an indispensable stimulus. We doubtless believe that the spoken word was in fact the spark which lit the fuse and finally exploded the mine, but this belief involves a complication of causes which it is wholly beyond our power to control or to verify.

It is true, of course, that we are able, as a matter of fact, to correlate stimulus and response. I know that it was the spoken word which caused the commission to be executed, for the expert reminds me of the fact and presents a bill. But neither of us makes any pretense that his belief is derived from a scrutiny of the causal sequence. Memory furnishes us with a shortcut to the result. While our present acts are doubtless connected with the past through causation, we do not regard them as simply the effects of antecedent causes. They are rather responses to present stimuli. The expert presents his bill, being moved thereto by a stimulus which may be indicated by saying that it is the spoken-word-constituting-a-commission-now-completed-and-entitling-me- to-compensation. That is, the stimulus cannot be pushed back and anchored at a fixed point in the past, but is a present factor at the moment of response and is operative by virtue of its anticipation of future events.

If, then, psychology is to be regarded as a study of behavior, it is plainly necessary to reinterpret the category of behavior. For example, a purely mechanical response to a light-stimulus may properly be viewed as response to the ether-vibration or wave-length upon which it follows in temporal sequence. But if this stimulation results in what is commonly called consciousness, a different kind of response ensues. The light-stimulus becomes a cause or occasion for the act of looking. But why look, unless it be to secure a new stimulus for further response? We stop to look, precisely because the first stimulus does not run smoothly off the reel. The response will not go forward, but is halted and expends itself in the effort to secure a further stimulus. This is the moment of attention, in which the stimulus undergoes a process of transformation, concomitantly with the process of reorganization in the motor responses, and in the direction of ends or results that are foreshadowed in it. This change in the stimulus takes place under certain specifiable conditions, and the study of these conditions is a study of such processes as perceiving, attending, remembering, and deliberating, which are distinctively psychological in their nature. Processes of this kind, if taken as changes in stimuli, find an objective criterion in the adaptive behavior for the sake of which they occur, and they provide psychology with a distinctive task and subject-matter.

As against the introspectionist, then, the behaviorist is justified in his contention that psychological procedure must be objective and experimental in character. The danger to which he has exposed himself is the failure to differentiate his problem from that of physiology and physics. It is only by a proper recognition of both the objective and the distinctive character of conscious behavior that psychology can free itself of the reproach which is heaped upon it by members of its own household and take the place that rightfully belongs to it in the community of the sciences.

IV

According to the preceding exposition, the current psychological doctrine of focus and margin is an attempt to reduce the changes in the stimulus to terms of static entities denominated sensations and images. By abstracting from change we convert the new stimulus that is already on the way into inert sensory material, which lends itself to purely analytic treatment. In this way the suggested hardness of the rock becomes a "centrally aroused sensation" of a stubbed toe, the heat of the candle becomes an image of a burn, etc. As was said before, the sensations are not existences, but representatives or symbols of our nascent activities; they are the static equivalents of this foreshadowing or reference to the future. The explanation of experience that we find in James and Bergson approximates this view so closely in one respect and departs from it so widely in another as to warrant a brief discussion.

A prominent characteristic of the doctrine advocated by James and Bergson is the emphasis given to the foreshadowings or anticipations of the future. Experiences of conflict, such as the struggle to recall a name, take on their peculiar coloring, so these writers contend, from their relationship to a beyond, to something which is yet to be. If we are to understand experience as it really is, we must guard against the besetting temptation to translate everything into spatial equivalents. This forward reference is usually read off as a distinction and contrast between simultaneously existing components. Some constituent is first set apart as the nucleus or focus and is then enveloped with an elusive, intangible wraith of meaning, which is called the margin. We have been taught to think of the focus as made up of sensory material of some sort and silhouetted against a background lit up by the fitful, inconsequential heat-lightning of meaning. But this is a perversion of the facts. When we are engaged in a problem it is precisely these unformed meanings that are of interest and importance. They are in the focus of consciousness, in so far as we can speak of a focus at all. They absorb our attention and direct our energies. They inform us of a margin, not by refusing to compete for our attention with more important or more interesting facts, but by bodying forth the _unfinished_ character of the situation. Hence this beckoning, this tingling with the sense of closeness, this sinking back when our efforts meet with defeat. Focus and margin, in short, have to do with movement, with transition, and not with a static field. These situations are felt as inherently unstable and in process of reconstruction. There is a peculiar sense of activity, of "something doing," of a future knocking on the door of the present. What is thus on its way to the present we can designate only in terms of the object as it is after it has arrived. To call it marginal is to immerse the object in this temporal flux, which embodies perfectly the characteristics of Bergsonian duration.

But this is only a first step. If we turn now to those experiences from which this inner diremption of fact and meaning is absent, we find a process that is essentially the same in kind. They likewise constitute a temporal flow, even though there be no sense of duration or of change as such. The different moments of these experiences are not mechanically juxtaposed, but blend together in much the same way as when the process is experienced as a process. In principle we have the same transition, the same becoming, the same growth from less to more, the same activity of continuous reconstruction. Conscious life, we find, is a continuous adjustment; each of its moments is a "transitive state." The more evenly flowing experiences are likewise endowed with a focus and margin, not in the form of static elements, but as a dynamic relationship of what is with what is to be.

Such an interpretation of experience, moreover, opens the way for a proper valuation of the psychologist's procedure. The concept of sensation is methodology pure and simple. Granted that focus and margin are such as was indicated a moment ago, how are they to be described, unless we resort to some _Hilfsbegriff_ such as sensations? James's description of the effort to recall a forgotten name is not description at all in a scientific sense, since the "wraith of the name" that we are trying to recover is of too unearthly a fabric to be weighed and measured by accepted scientific standards. It makes us "tingle," it lets us "sink back," but such portrayal is literature rather than science. Our first step must be to resolve our material into components. These components we identify with genuine elements if we can, with pious fictions if we must; but until this is done there can be no exact description. There can be no precision in our statement of the facts and no formulation of the laws that govern their changes.

This view undeniably has a certain plausibility. As long as the results are attained which the psychologist sets out to reach, we need not be hypersensitive on the score of methods. In the field of natural science, at all events, this Jesuitical principle is not incompatible with respectability. If it be true, however, that sensation is but a tool or artifact, a means to an end, what is the end that is to be attained by this device? It is at this point that we come to the parting of the ways. According to the view previously elaborated, the anticipations of the future have to do with the results of our possible acts, and sensations are simply symbols for the various elements in our complex motor responses. In the case of Bergson and James, however, the clue that is furnished by response is discarded. The reference to the future, being dissociated from behavior, is taken as evidence of an abstract or metaphysical duration, so that experience is somehow other than it seems; and sensation is regarded as the translation of duration into the language of space. Associationism is justified in its belief that reality is different from its appearance in our experience, but is criticized for attempting to interpret the real in terms of space rather than time. In both cases the lead of the subject-matter is abandoned in favor of an explanation that is derived from a fourth-dimensional plane of existence.

The suspicion that these two positions have a deep-seated affinity is strengthened if we call to mind that the concept of sensation was originated, not in the interests of methodology, but as the expression of a historic preconception that mistook fiction for fact. The fundamental error back of it was the preposterous notion that consciousness consists of subconscious or unconscious constituents, which by their mechanical or chemical combinations make our experience what it is. The question which it raises and which has afflicted us even to the present day is not primarily the question of fact, but the question of intelligibility, as the controversy over mindstuff abundantly attests. Whether we regard experience as made up of sensory material, however, or as constituted in a Bergsonian fashion, is a matter of detail; the primary question is whether a distinction between consciousness as it appears and as it "really" is has any meaning. In so far as this distinction is maintained, we are beating the thin air of mythology, despite our reinterpretations and justifications. True conversion does not consist in a renaming of old gods, but demands a humble and a contrite heart. To call sensation an artifact, a methodological device, without a surrender of the metaphysical assumption that lies back of Associationism is not to correct the evil, but is more likely to be treated as an indulgence for sins that are yet to be committed.

This fundamental identity is presumably the reason for certain other similarities, which would perhaps not be readily anticipated. Both doctrines undertake to tell us what is going on behind the scenes, what consciousness or experience "really" is. The descriptions present an astonishing difference of vocabulary, but if we take care not to be misled by superficial differences, we find an equally astonishing agreement as to content. From the one side consciousness is explained as a juxtaposition of elements; from the other as an interpenetration of elements so complete that the parts can be neither isolated nor distinguished from the whole. On the one hand we find a multiplicity without unity, on the other a unity without multiplicity. In the one account the temporal unit is a sensation devoid of internal temporal diversity; in the other duration as such is a unity in which past, present, and future blend into an undifferentiated whole. The one position gathers its facts by a mystifying process called introspection; the other obtains its results from a mystical faculty of intuition. The difference in language remains, but both accounts lead us away into a twilight region where words substitute themselves for facts.