Chapter IV: Part 4

The more we examine the mechanism of thought, the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious action of the mind enters largely into all its processes. Our definite ideas are stepping-stones; how we get from one to the other, we do not know: something carries us; we do not take the step. A creating and informing spirit which is with us, and not of us, is recognized everywhere in real and storied life. It is the Zeus that kindled the rage of Achilles; it is the muse of Homer; it is the Daimon of Socrates; it is the inspiration of the seer; it is the mocking devil that whispers to Margaret as she kneels at the altar; and the hobgoblin that cried, "Sell him, sell him!" in the ear of John Bunyan: it shaped the forms that filled the soul of Michael Angelo when he saw the figure of the great Lawgiver in the yet unhewn marble, and the dome of the world's yet unbuilt basilica against the black horizon; it comes to the least of us, as a voice that will be heard; it tells us what we must believe; it frames our sentences; it lends a sudden gleam of sense or eloquence to the dullest of us all, so that, like Katterfelto with his hair on end, we wonder at ourselves, or rather not at ourselves, but at this divine visitor, who chooses our brain as his dwelling-place, and invests our naked thought with the purple of the kings of speech or song.

After all, the mystery of unconscious mental action is exemplified, as I have said, in every act of mental association. What happens when one idea brings up another? Some internal movement, of which we are wholly unconscious and which we only know by its effect. What is this action, which in Dame Quickly agglutinates contiguous circumstances by their surfaces; in men of wit and fancy, connects remote ideas by partial resemblances; in men of imagination, by the vital identity which underlies phenomenal diversity; in the man of science, groups the objects of thought in sequences of maximum resemblance? Not one of them can answer. There is a Delphi and a Pythoness in every human breast. [At Delphi in ancient Greece was the oracle of Apollo: the Pythoness was his priestess.]

The poet sits down to his desk with an odd conceit in his brain; and presently his eyes fill with tears, his thought slides into the minor key, and his heart is full of sad and plaintive melodies. Or he goes to his work saying "To-night I would have tears," and before he rises from his table he has written a burlesque, such as he might think fit to send to one of the comic papers, if these were not so commonly cemeteries of hilarity interspersed with cenotaphs of wit and humour. These strange hysterics of the intelligence, which make us pass from weeping to laughter, and from laughter back again to weeping, must be familiar to every impressible nature; and all is as automatic, involuntary, as entirely self-evolved by a hidden organic process, as are the changing moods of the laughing and crying woman. The poet always recognizes a dictation from without, and we hardly think it a figure of speech when we talk of his inspiration.

The mental attitude of the poet while writing, if I may venture to define it, is that of the "nun, breathless with adoration." Mental stillness is the first condition of the listening state; and I think my friends the poets will recognize that the sense of effort, which is often felt, accompanies the mental spasm by which the mind is maintained in a state at once passive to the influx from without, and active in seizing only that which will serve its purpose.[3] It is not strange that remembered ideas should often take advantage of the crowd of thoughts and smuggle themselves in as original. Honest thinkers are always stealing unconsciously from each other. Our minds are full of waifs and estrays which we think our own. Innocent plagiarism turns up everywhere. Our best musical critic tells me that a few notes of the air of "Shoo Fly" are borrowed from a movement in one of the magnificent harmonies of Beethoven.

And so the orator--I do not mean the poor slave of a manuscript, who takes his thought chilled and stiffened from its mould, but the impassioned speaker who pours it forth as it flows coruscating from the furnace--the orator only becomes our master at the moment when he himself is surprised, captured, taken possession of, by a sudden rush of fresh inspiration. How well we know the flash of the eye, the thrill of the voice, which are the signature and symbol of nascent thought--thought just emerging into consciousness, in which condition, as is the case with the chemist's elements, it has a combining force at other times wholly unknown!

But we are all more or less improvisators. We all have a double, who is wiser and better than we are, and who puts thoughts into our heads and words into our mouths. Do we not all commune with our own hearts upon our beds? Do we not all divide ourselves and go to buffets on questions of right or wrong, of wisdom or folly? Who or what is it that resolves the stately parliament of the day, with all its forms and conventionalities and pretences, and the great Me presiding, into the committee of the whole, with Conscience in the chair, that holds its solemn session through the watches of the night?

Persons who talk most do not always think most. I question whether persons who think most--that is, have most conscious thought pass through their minds--necessarily do most mental work. The tree that you are sticking in "will be growing when you are sleeping." So with every new idea that is planted in a real thinker's mind: it will be growing when he is least conscious of it. An idea in the brain is not a legend carved on a marble slab: it is an impression made on a living tissue, which is the seat of active nutritive processes. Shall the initials I carved in bark increase from year to year with the tree? and shall not my recorded thought develop into new forms and relations with my growing brain? Mr. Webster told one of our greatest scholars that he had to change the size of his hat every few years. His head grew larger as his intellect expanded. Illustrations of this same fact were shown me many years ago by Mr. Deville, the famous phrenologist, in London. But organic mental changes may take place in shorter spaces of time. A single night of sleep has often brought a sober second-thought, which was a surprise to the hasty conclusion of the day before. Lord Polkommet's description of the way he prepared himself for a judicial decision is in point, except for the alcoholic fertilizer he employed in planting his ideas: "Ye see, I first read a' the pleadings; and then, after letting them wamble in my wame wi' the toddy two or three days, I gie my ain interlocutor."

The problem of memory is closely connected with the question of the mechanical relation between thought and structure. How intimate is the alliance of memory with the material condition of the brain, is shown by the effect of age, of disease, of a blow, of intoxication. I have known an aged person repeat the same question five, six, or seven times during the same brief visit. Everybody knows the archbishop's flavour of apoplexy in the memory as in the other mental powers. I was once asked to see a woman who had just been injured in the street. On coming to herself, "Where am I? What has happened?" she asked. "Knocked down by a horse ma'am; stunned a little: that is all." A pause, "while one with moderate haste might count a hundred," and then again, "Where am I? What has happened?"--"Knocked down by a horse, ma'am; stunned a little: that is all." Another pause, and the same question again; and so on during the whole time I was by her. The same tendency to repeat a question indefinitely has been observed in returning members of those worshipping assemblies whose favourite hymn is "We Won't Go Home Till Morning."

Is memory, then, a material record? Is the brain, like the rocks of the Sinaitic Valley, written all over with inscriptions left by the long caravans of thought, as they have passed year after year through its mysterious recesses?

When we see a distant railway-train sliding by us in the same line, day after day, we infer the existence of a track which guides it. So, when some dear old friend begins that story we remember so well; switching off at the accustomed point of digression; coming to a dead stop at the puzzling question of chronology; off the track on the matter of its being first or second cousin of somebody's aunt; set on it again by the patient, listening wife, who knows it all as she knows her well-worn wedding-ring--how can we doubt that there is a track laid down for the story in some permanent disposition of the thinking-marrow?

I need not say that no microscope can find the tablet inscribed with the names of early loves, the stains left by tears of sorrow or contrition, the rent where the thunderbolt of passion has fallen, or any legible token that such experiences have formed a part of the life of the mortal, the vacant temple of whose thought it is exploring. It is only as an inference, aided by illustration which I will presently offer, that I suggest the possible existence, in the very substance of the brain-tissue, of those inscriptions which Shakespeare must have thought of when he wrote--

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain.

The objection to the existence of such a material record--that we renew our bodies many scores of times and yet retain our earliest recollections--is entirely met by the fact, that a scar of any kind holds it own nearly through life in spite of all these same changes, as we have not far to look to find instances.

It must be remembered that a billion of the starry brain-cells could be packed in a cubic inch, and that the convolutions contain one hundred and thirty-four cubic inches, according to the estimate already given. My illustration is derived from microscopic photography. I have a glass slide on which there is a minute photographic picture, which is exactly covered when the head of a small pin is laid upon it. In that little speck are clearly to be seen, by a proper magnifying power, the following objects: the Declaration of Independence, with easily recognized facsimile autographs of all the signers; the arms of all the original thirteen States; the Capitol at Washington; and very good portraits of all the Presidents of the United States, from Washington to Mr. James K. Polk. These objects are all distinguishable as a group with a power of fifty diameters: with a power of three hundred any one of them becomes a sizable picture. You may see, if you will, the majesty of Washington on his noble features, or the will of Jackson in those hard lines of the long face crowned with that bristling head of hair in a perpetual state of electrical divergence and centrifugal self-assertion. Remember that each of these faces is the record of a life.

Now recollect that there was an interval between the exposure of the negative in the camera and its development by pouring a wash over it, when all these pictured objects existed potentially, but absolutely invisible and incapable of recognition, in a speck of collodion-film, which a pin's head would cover; and then think what Alexandrian libraries, what Congressional document loads of positively intelligible characters--such as one look of the recording angel would bring out; many of which we can ourselves develop at will, or which come before our eyes unbidden, like "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin"--might be held in those convolutions of the brain which wrap the talent entrusted to us, too often as the folded napkin of the slothful servant hid the treasure his master had lent him.

Three facts, so familiar that I need only allude to them, show how much more is recorded in the memory than we may ever take cognizance of. The first is the conviction of having been in the same precise circumstances once or many times before. Dr. Wigan says, never but once; but such is not my experience. The second is the panorama of their past lives, said, by people rescued from drowning, to have flashed before them. I had it once myself, accompanied by an ignoble ducking and scrambling self-rescue. The third is the revival of apparently obsolete impressions, of which many strange cases are related in nervous young women and in dying persons, and which the story of the dog Argus in the "Odyssey," and of the parrot so charmingly told by Campbell, would lead us to suppose not of rare occurrence in animals. It is possible, therefore, and I have tried to show that it is not improbable, that memory is a material record; that the brain is scarred and seamed with infinitesimal hieroglyphics, as the features are engraved with the traces of thought and passion. And, if this is so, must not the record, we ask, perish with the organ? Alas! how often do we see it perish _before_ the organ!--the mighty satirist tamed into oblivious imbecility; the great scholar wandering without sense of time or place among his alcoves, taking his books one by one from the shelves and fondly patting them; a child once more among his toys, but a child whose to-morrows come hungry, and not full-handed--come as birds of prey in the place of the sweet singers of morning. We must all become as little children if we live long enough; but how blank an existence the wrinkled infant must carry into the kingdom of heaven, if the Power that gave him memory does not repeat the miracle by restoring it!

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Burns tell us how he composed verses for a given tune: "My way is, I consider the poetic sentiment correspondent to my idea of the musical expression; then choose my theme; begin one stanza. When that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in Nature that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy, and workings of my bosom; humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed. When I feel my Muse beginning to jade I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper; swinging at intervals on the hind-legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my pen goes on."--"Letters to G. Thomson," No. XXXVII.

MEMORY

HENRY MAUDSLEY, M.D.

[Dr. Maudsley, of London, is an eminent physician and
psychologist. His works include "Body and Mind," "Body and
Will," "Responsibility in Mental Disease," "Pathology of the
Mind," all published by D. Appleton & Co., New York. From the
work last mentioned the following is part of the chapter on
Memory and Imagination.]

No mental development would be possible without memory, for if a man possessed it not he would be obliged to begin his conscious life afresh with each impression made upon him, and would be incapable of any education. We cannot perhaps better define memory than, following Locke, as the power which the mind has "to revive perceptions which it once had with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before;" in other words, as the power or process by which that which has been once known is, when _re_presented to the mind, known as a previous mental experience, that is, is _re_cognized. When people speak of ideas being laid up in the memory, they of course speak metaphorically; there is no such repository in which ideas are stored up, ready to be brought out when required for use; when an idea which we have once had is excited again, there is simply a reproduction of the same nervous current, with the conscious addition that it is a reproduction--it is the same idea _plus_ the consciousness that it is the same. The question then suggests itself, What is the physical condition of this consciousness? What is the modification of the anatomical substrata of fibres and cells, or of their physiological activity, which is the occasion of this _plus_ element in the reproduced idea? It may be supposed that the first activity did leave behind it, when it subsided, some after-effect, some modification of the nerve element, whereby the nerve circuit was disposed to fall again readily into the same action; such disposition appearing in consciousness as _re_cognition or memory. Memory is, in fact, the conscious phase of this physiological disposition when it becomes active or discharges its functions on the recurrence of the particular mental experience. To assist our conception of what may happen, let us suppose the individual nerve-elements to be endowed with their own consciousness, and let us assume them to be, as I have supposed, modified in a certain way by the first experience; it is hard to conceive that when they fall into the same action on another occasion they should not recognize or remember it; for the second action is a reproduction of the first, with the addition of what it contains from the after-effects of the first. As we have assumed the process to be conscious, this reproduction with its addition would be a memory or remembrance.

Psychology affords us not the least help in this matter, for in describing memory as a faculty of the mind or the conservative faculty it does no more than present us with a name in place of our explanation. But we do get nearer realities when we go down to the organic aptitude which, in consequence of an action, there is to the recurrence of a similar action on another occasion. And physiology presents us with many illustrations of such organized aptitudes. Take, for example, the education of our movements: a designed movement is performed at first slowly and clumsily, and it is only by giving great pains to it and frequently repeating it that we acquire the skill to perform it easily and quickly; the aptitude thereto being at last so completely organized in the proper nervous centres that it may be performed without consciousness on our part, quite automatically. Thus it appears that memory in this case becomes less conscious as it becomes more complete, until, when it has reached its greatest perfection and is performed with the most facility, it is entirely unconscious. After which, if we are psychologists who are content to rest in words and forbear to pursue the facts which they denote, we must cease to speak of it as memory: it has become custom, or habit, or automatism. But if we go beneath words to the property of the motor nerve-centres whereby they react in a definite way to impressions made upon them, organically register their experience, and so acquire by education their special faculties, we perceive that we have not to do in the higher nerve-centres with fundamentally different properties of nerve element, but with different functions which depend upon the same fundamental property. Substitute the highest nerve-centres for the motor nerve-centres, and the complex idea for the complex movement, and what has been said of the latter is strictly true of the former; the idea, like the movement, is accompanied with less consciousness the more completely it is organized, and when it has been completely organized it takes its part automatically in our mental operations, being performed, as a habitual movement is performed, automatically. The physiological condition of memory is, then, the organic process by which nerve-experiences in the different centres are registered; and to recollect is to revive these experiences in the highest centres, the functions of which are attended with consciousness--to stimulate, by external or internal causes, their residua, aptitudes, dispositions, or whatever else we may choose to call them, into functional activity. Stimulated from without, they constitute recognition, that is, cognition with memory of former cognition; stimulated from within, they constitute recollection.

It must be borne in mind, as Dr. Darwin remarked many years ago, that in dealing with memory we have to do not with laws of light, but with laws of life, and that the misleading notion of images or ideas of objects being stored up in the mind has been derived from our experience of the action of light upon the retina. If we would understand the laws of organization in the highest nerve-centres, we shall certainly do well to study organic processes generally; it would be not less absurd to attempt to understand the higher processes without giving attention to the lower, than it would be to attempt to build a house without taking pains to lay its foundations securely. It is a plain matter of observation that other organic elements besides nervous elements perpetuate impressions made upon them, which they may accordingly in a certain sense be said to remember; the virus of smallpox, for example, makes an impression upon all the elements of the body, which they never lose, although it becomes fainter with the lapse of time; in some unknown way it modifies their constitution so that ever afterwards their susceptibilities are changed. The scar which is left after the healing of a wound in a child's finger keeps the same relative proportion to the finger through life, growing as it grows; for the elements of the new tissue not only renew themselves particle by particle, and thus perpetuate it, but they extend it in relation with the growth of the surrounding parts. We need not brave the fire of psychological scorn by calling this retention of impressions _memory_, or care greatly what it is called, so long as due heed is given to the fact; but we may be permitted to perceive in it the same physiological process which, in the cortical [outer] layers of the cerebral [brain's] hemispheres, is the condition of memory, and of habit in thought. Moreover, it may be fairly demanded of the psychologists that they be consistent, and that they no longer use the word memory to denote those mental processes which have been so completely organized that they take place without consciousness; if it be wrong, as they profess, to assume or imply an unconscious memory, it must be still more wrong to assume or imply an unconscious consciousness, as they sometimes do.

In any case, the foregoing considerations cannot fail to show how misleading it is to look upon perceptions as mere pictures of nature, and upon the mind as a vast canvas on which they are cunningly painted; the real process is one of organization, and it is rightly conceivable only by the aid of ideas derived from the observation of organic development--namely, the fundamental ideas of Assimilation of the like and Differentiation of the unlike. Nowhere is it more necessary than in the study of memory to apprehend clearly that what we call mind is the function of a mental organization; for thereby we get rid at once of many empty discussions which have been carried on without definite result; as, for example, whether memory is a knowledge of the past, or a knowledge of the present with a belief of the past, and the like. Moreover, this conception of a mental organization is indispensable to the explanation of the manifold varieties of partial or general loss of memory which are produced by injury, disease and decay of brain; for memory is good or bad according to bodily states, is impaired in various ways by disease, decays with the decay of structure in old age, and is extinguished with the extinction of life in the brain.

From of old two kinds of memory have been distinguished, according as the object remembered occurs to the mind spontaneously, or is voluntarily sought for; the former being known as _memory_ proper, the latter as _recollection_. It is certain that we do recognize this difference, which common language attests, between that which is revived without any effort, and that which we endeavour to recover by an effort; and that men differ much, by virtue of natural capacities, both in memory and in power of recollection. No doubt much of the difference in both cases is due to the degree of attention which is given to the subject when it is first presented to the mind, but this will not account satisfactorily for all the difference which is observed; some persons being able to repeat with great ease a row of figures, a number of dates, or several lines of poetry, after reading them over once, while others fail to do so with equal success after reading them over many times. Extraordinary instances have been recorded of this exactness of memory for details reaching back to the earliest periods of life. I have seen an imbecile in the Earlswood Asylum for idiots who can repeat accurately a page or more of any book which he has read years before, even though it was a book which he did not understand in the least; and I once saw an epileptic youth, morally imbecile, who would, shutting his eyes, repeat a leading article in a newspaper word for word, after reading it once. This kind of memory, in which the person seems to read a photographic copy of former impressions with his mind's eye, is not indeed commonly associated with great intellectual power; for what reason I know not, unless it be that the mind to which it belongs is prevented by the very excellence of its power of apprehending and recalling separate facts from rising to that discernment of their higher relations which is involved in reasoning and judgment, and so stays in a function which should be the foundation of its further development; or that, being by some natural defect prevented from rising to the higher sphere of comprehension of relations, it applies all its energies to the apprehension of details. Certainly one runs some risk, by overloading the memory of a child with details, of arresting the development of the mental powers: stereotyping details on the brain, we prevent that further development of it which consists in rising from concrete perception to conception of relations. However, it must be allowed that there have been a few remarkable instances of extraordinary men who have combined a wonderful memory for details with the possession of the highest intellectual powers.

If we now proceed to examine closely the nature of recollection, it will be found that the difference between it and simple memory is not fundamentally so great as appears on the surface. When we voluntarily try hard to remember something which has been forgotten, and succeed in the end, the actual revival is done unconsciously and, as it were, spontaneously; for it is plain that if we were conscious of what we want we should not need to recollect it, inasmuch as it would already be in possession; and it is furthermore plain that a definite act of volition recalling it must imply a consciousness of it, inasmuch as it is impossible to will what we are not conscious of. Arbitrary recollection by an act of will is therefore nonsense. What we really do when we try to recollect is to apply attention to words or ideas which have, in our past experience, accidental or essential relations to, or associations with, the forgotten word or idea, voluntarily to keep these ideas active by making them consciousness and to trust to their power of awakening into activity that which it is desired to recall; indeed, it is notorious that the best way of succeeding is, having held the related ideas energetically in attention for a time, to allow the thoughts to pass to other things, when the lost idea will, after a longer or shorter time--sometimes indeed after days--recur to the mind. The actual process of reproduction is therefore one of simple or spontaneous memory; we prepare the way for it by stimulating into action the related ideas, but we positively interfere with its success if, by continuing to keep them in attention, we do not permit them to do their work spontaneously; the reason of this being that we thereby hinder the propagation of their activity to other nerve-circuits. We shall understand this the better if we realize that consciousness is the _result_ of a certain activity of idea, not driven to it, but drawn by it, and get rid of the metaphysical notion that it is some mysterious power which we direct voluntarily to the idea in order to make it active.

It will not be amiss, before passing from this subject, to take note of and to ponder that certainty which, in trying to recollect something, we have of our possession of what we are thus striving to gain consciously, though we are not conscious what it is. We have the clearest conviction that, although we have forgotten it, we still have it and may recover it. How comes it to pass that we are so sure of the existence of that of which we are not conscious? In the first place, it would appear to supply an argument in support of the theory that something has been left behind in the nerve-circuit ministering to the forgotten idea, in other words, retained by it, which differentiates it from other nerve-circuits, disposes it to a repetition of its former activity, and produces the conviction of a latent possession, even when it is not active, or at any rate not active enough to awaken consciousness. In the second place, it must be remembered that the forgotten idea had associations with other ideas, which are really part of its meaning; it may well be, therefore, that when these are active and occupy the attention, while it remains inactive and below the horizon of consciousness, there is a tendency or sort of effort to reopen the former paths of association, in order to their completeness--to make the circuit, so to speak; and that it is the consciousness of this tendency or effort which gives rise to the certainty which we have of something forgotten. Certain it is, that when a stimulus excites one of two movements which have taken place together or in succession on former occasions, there is a tendency, when the stimulus is powerful or continued, to the reproduction of the associated movement; there is a diffusion of the stimulus along the accustomed path to the associated motor centres, and a union of movements is the result. A piece of poetry which has been thoroughly learnt may be repeated mechanically, as a tune may be whistled, when the proper verbal movements have been once started; indeed, the repetition in such case is most successful when consciousness is not too much occupied with it; for it frequently happens, if we think about the words which we are repeating, we become uncertain and forget, and are obliged, in order to succeed, to begin again and allow the succession of movements to go on automatically. We impede the operation of the spontaneous memory, upon which we really depend, when, by maintaining the activity of a word in consciousness as attention, we hinder the propagation thereof to the associated nerve-circuits.

When a person who is conscious of an idea is striving to revive a related idea which he has forgotten, he presents an example of memory in the making; for he is striving to revive the yet incomplete organic union between them, which was the result of the original apprehension of their relations, and which, when complete, will cause the one idea to recall the other instantly and without the least effort, just as a single sensation of an object at once revives the cluster of sensations which are combined in the perception of it. The process of intellectual development consists in the mental organization of related ideas, as internal representatives of external relations in nature, and in making this organization so complete that a number of associated ideas shall act like a single idea, being combined into a complex product and recalled instantly and without conscious effort, just as a complex movement is. Then the memory is so complete that we must cease to call it memory, because it is unconscious. In fact, spontaneous recollection is at an end when involuntary memory begins, and involuntary memory merges gradually into a reproduction of former mental experiences which is as completely automatic as the habitual movements of our daily life. And well it may be; for the same organic property of nerve element--indeed, I might say, the same fundamental property of organization--is at the bottom of both.

Thus much concerning the nature and function of memory. Upon its basis rests the possibility of mental development, in which there are, as we have already seen, the organic registration of the _simple_ ideas of the senses; the assimilation of the like in ideas which takes place in the production or evolution of _general_ ideas; the assimilation, of the properties common to two or more general ideas into an _abstract_ idea; the special organization or differentiation, or discrimination, of unlike ideas; the organic combination of the ideas derived from the different senses into one _complex_ idea, with the further manifold combinations of complex ideas into what Hartley called _duplex_ ideas. In fact, no limit is assignable to the complexity of combinations which may go to the formation of a compound idea. Take, for example, the idea of the universe. But how comes it to pass that a new imaginative creation of the mind, to which nothing in nature answers, is effected? By the same process fundamentally as that by which our general and abstract ideas are formed. For when we consider the matter, it appears that there are no actual outside existences answering to our most abstract ideas, which are, therefore, so far new creations of the mind; in their formation there is a blending or coalescence of the like relations in two concrete ideas--the development of a _concept_, there is, as it were, an extraction of the essential out of the particular, a sublimation of the concrete; and, by the creation of a new world in which these essential ideas supersede the concrete ideas, the power of the mind is most largely extended. Now, although there are no concrete objects in nature answering to these abstract ideas, yet these are none the less, when rightly formed, valid and real subjective existences expressing or signifying the essential relations of things, as the flower which crowns development expresses the essential nature of the plant. Thus it is that we rise from the idea of a particular man to the general idea of man, and from that to the abstract idea of virtue as a quality of man; so that for the future we can make use of the abstract idea in all our reasoning, without being compelled to make continual reference to the concrete. Herein, be it remembered again, we have a process corresponding with that which ministers to the production of our motor intuitions; the acquired faculty of certain co-ordinate movements by means of which complicated acts are automatically performed, and we are able to do, almost in the twinkling of an eye, what would cost hours of labour were we compelled on each occasion to go deliberately through the process of special adaptation, is the equivalent, on the motor side, of the general idea by which so much time and labour are saved in reasoning: in both cases there is an internal development in accordance with fundamental laws, and the organized result is, as every new phase of development is, a new creation. Creation is not by fits and starts, but it is continuous in nature.

COMMON SENSE

WILLIAM BOYD CARPENTER, M.D.

[Dr. Carpenter was one of the leading men of science in the
generation which has recently passed away. He was a physician
and psychologist of mark, and withal a geographer of
erudition and extensive travel. His famous work, "Principles
of Mental Physiology," is published by D. Appleton & Co., New
York. Its eleventh chapter, minus a few paragraphs, is here
presented.]

There are two principal forms of common sense which it is desirable clearly to distinguish. The first is what the philosopher means by common sense, when he attributes to it the formation of those original convictions or ultimate beliefs, which cannot be resolved into simpler elements, and which are accepted by every normally constituted human being as direct cognitions of his own mental states. It might, indeed, be maintained that this necessary acceptance of propositions which only need to be intelligibly stated to command unhesitating and universal assent, cannot rightly be termed an act of judgment. But just as sense-perceptions, which are intuitive in the lower animals, have been acquired in man by a process of self-education in the earliest stages, in which acts of judgment are continually called for, so may we regard the autocratic deliverances of the universal common sense of mankind as really having, in the first instance, the characters of true judgments, each expressing the general resultant of uniform experience,--which may be partly of the individual, and partly that of the race embodied in the constitution of each member of it.

The second or popular acceptance of the term common sense, on the other hand, is that of an attribute which judges of things whose self-evidence is not equally apparent to every individual, but presents itself to different individuals in very different degrees, according in part to the original constitution of each, and in part to the range of his experience and degree in which he has profited by it. This is the form of common sense by which we are mainly guided in the ordinary affairs of life: but inasmuch as we no longer find its deliverances in uniform accordance, but encounter continual divergences of judgment as to what things are self-evident,--some being so to A whilst they are not so to B, and others being self-evident to B which are not so to A,--it cannot be trusted as an autocratic or infallible authority. And yet, as Dr. Reid truly says, "disputes very often terminate in an appeal to common sense;" this being especially the case, when to doubt its judgment would be ridiculous.

If the view here taken be correct, these two forms--which may be designated respectively as elementary and as ordinary common sense--have fundamentally the same basis; and we may further connect with them as having a similar genesis, those special forms of common sense, which are the attributes of such as have applied themselves in a scientific spirit to any particular course of inquiry,--things coming to be perfectly self-evident to men of such special culture, which ordinary men, or men whose special culture has lain in a different direction, do not apprehend as such.

The judgment of common sense as to any self-evident truth, may be defined as the immediate or instinctive response that is given (in psychological language) by the automatic action of the mind, or (in physiological language) by the reflex-action of the brain to any question which can be answered by such a direct appeal. The nature and value of that response will depend upon the acquired condition of the mind, or of the brain, at the time it is given; that condition being the general resultant of the whole psychical activity of the individual. The particular form of that activity is determined, as we have seen, in the first place, by his original constitution; secondly, by the influences which have been early brought to bear upon it from without; and thirdly, by his own power of self-direction. And it may be said that while the elementary form of common sense depends mainly upon the first of these factors, its ordinary form chiefly arises out of the first and second, and its special forms almost exclusively out of the third;--the response being given, in each case, by a nervous mechanism, in the organization of which the generalized results of the past experiences of consciousness (whether of the race or of the individual) have become embodied.

The parallel between the cerebral action which furnishes the mechanism of thought now under consideration, and the action of the sensori-motor apparatus which furnishes the mechanism of sense and motion, is extremely close. We have seen that there are certain sense-perceptions, which, although not absolutely intuitive, very early come to possess--in every normally constituted human being--the immediateness and perfection of those corresponding perceptions which are intuitive in the lower animals; and that with these are associated certain respondent motions, which, though acquired by practice in the first instance, ultimately come to be performed as by a second nature. Certain of these motions, such as walking erect, are universally acquired; and thus obviously come to be the expressions of the original endowments of the mechanism, trained by an experience very similar in the uniformity of its character to that which educates the elementary form of common sense. For it must be clear to any one who compares the erect progression of a child who has just learned to walk, with that of a dancing dog or even of a chimpanzee, that while experience makes its acquirement possible in each case, only an organism which is at the same time structurally adapted for erect progression and possessed of a special co-ordinating faculty, can turn such experience to full account. The balancing the body in the erect position at starting, the maintenance of that balance by a new adjustment of the centre of gravity as the base of support is shifted from side to side and from behind forwards, and the alternate lifting and advance of the legs, involve the harmonious co-operation of almost all the muscles in the body. Although this co-operation is brought about in the first instance by the purposive direction of our efforts towards a given end, under the guidance of our visual and muscular sensations, yet when we have once learned to walk erect, we find ourselves able to maintain our balance without any exertion of which we are conscious; all that is necessary for the performance of this movement being that a certain stimulus (volitional, or some other) shall call the mechanism into activity.--But further, we have seen that special powers of sense-perception can be acquired by the habitual direction of the attention to particular classes of objects; and that special movements come to be the secondarily automatic expression of them. How nearly related these are to the preceding, we may assure ourselves by attending to the process by which an adult learns to walk on a narrow base, such as a rope or the edge of a plank. For the co-ordinating action has here to be gone through afresh under altered and more special conditions, so as to give a greater development to the balancing power; yet when this has been fully acquired, it is exerted automatically with such an immediateness and perfection, that a Blondin can cross Niagara on his rope with no more danger of falling into the torrent beneath, than any ordinary man would experience if walking without side-rails along the broad platform of the suspension bridge which spans it. Now since in those cases in which man acquires powers that are original or intuitive in the lower animals, there is the strongest reason for believing that a mechanism forms itself in him which is equivalent to that congenitally possessed by them, we seem fully justified in the belief that in those more special forms of activity which are the result of prolonged training, the sensori-motor apparatus grows to the mode in which it is habitually exercised, so as to become fit for the immediate execution of the mandate it receives: it being often found to act not only without intelligent direction, but without any consciousness of exertion, in immediate response to some particular kind of stimulus,--just as an automaton that executes one motion when a certain spring is touched, will execute a very different one when set going in some other way.

There is strong analogical ground, then, for the belief that the higher part of the nervous mechanism which is concerned in psychical action, will follow the same law; embodying the generalized result of its experiences, so as to become able to evolve, by a direct response, a result of which the attainment originally required the intervention of the conscious mind at several intermediate stages of the process. What there is strong ground for believing in regard to the perceptional consciousness, may fairly be extended to the ideational, which is so intimately connected to it, the unconscious co-ordinating action, which in the former case brings the whole experience to bear upon the question, whilst the decisions of the latter are based upon a limited, and therefore one-sided, view of it,--the defect of judgment being due either to an original want of the co-ordinating power, or to disuse of the exercise of it through the limitation of the attention to special fields of study. It may often be noticed that children display a power of bringing common sense to bear upon the ordinary affairs of life, which seems much beyond that of their elders; and yet a very sensible child will often grow into a much less sensible man. Now the reason of this seems to be, that the child perceives the application of self-evident considerations to the case at issue, without being embarrassed by a number of other considerations (perhaps of a trivial or conventional nature) which distract the attention and unduly influence the judgment of the adult. And the deliverances of a child's common sense thus often resemble those of the old court fools, or jesters, whose function seems to have been to speak out home truths which timid courtiers would not venture to utter. Moreover, as has been well remarked, "it is quite possible for minds of limited power to manage a small range of experience much better than a large, to get confused (as it were) with resources on too great a scale, and therefore to show far more common sense within the comparatively limited field of childish experience, than in the greater world of society or public life. This is probably the explanation of a thing often seen,--how very sagacious people instinctively shrink from a field which their tact tells them is too large for them to manage, and keep to one where they are really supreme."

Now, in so far as our conscious mental activity is under the direction of our will, we can improve this form of common sense, as to both its range and the trustworthiness of its judgments, by appropriate training. Such training, as regards the purely intellectual aspect of common sense, will consist in the determinate culture of the habit of honestly seeking for truth,--dismissing prejudice, setting aside self-interest, searching out all that can be urged on each side of the question at issue, endeavouring to assign to every fact and argument its real value, and then weighing the two aggregates against each other with judicial impartiality. For in proportion to the steadiness with which this course is volitionally pursued, must be its effectiveness in shaping the mechanism whose automatic action constitutes the unconscious thinking, of which the results express themselves in our common-sense judgments.

The ordinary common sense of mankind, disciplined and enlarged by an appropriate culture, becomes one of the most valuable instruments of scientific inquiry; affording in many instances the best and sometimes the only basis for a rational conclusion. A typical case, in which no special knowledge is required, is afforded by the flint implements of the Abbeville and Amiens gravel beds. No logical proof can be adduced that the peculiar shapes of these flints were given to them by human hands; but no unprejudiced person who has examined them now doubts it.

The evidence of design to which, after an examination of one or two such specimens, we should only be justified in attaching a probable value, derives an irresistible cogency from accumulation. On the other hand, the improbability that these flints acquired their peculiar shape by accident, becomes to our minds greater and greater as more and more such specimens are found; until at last this hypothesis, although it cannot be directly disproved, is felt to be almost inconceivable, except by minds previously possessed by the dominant idea of the modern origin of man. And thus what was in the first instance a matter of discussion, has now become one of those self-evident propositions, which claim the unhesitating assent of all whose opinion on the subject is entitled to the least weight.

We proceed upwards, however, from such questions as the common sense of mankind generally is competent to decide, to those in which special knowledge is required to give value to the judgment; and here we must distinguish between those departments of inquiry in which scientific conclusions are arrived at by a process of strict reasoning, and those in which they partake of the nature of common sense judgments.

Of the former class we have a typical example in mathematics, and in those exact sciences which make use of mathematics as their instrument of proof; but even in these, it is common sense which affords not only the basis, but the materials of the fabric. For while the axioms of geometry are self-evident truths which not only do not require proof, but are not capable of being proved in all their universality, every step of a demonstration is an assertion of which our acceptance depends on our incapability of conceiving either the contrary or anything else than the thing asserted. And thus the certain assurance of the proof felt by every person capable of understanding a mathematical demonstration, depends upon the conclusive self-evidence of each step of it. But we not unfrequently meet with individuals, not deficient in ordinary common sense, who cannot be brought to see this self-evidence; whilst, on the other hand, the advanced mathematician, when adventuring into new paths of inquiry, is able to take a great deal for granted as self-evident, which at an earlier stage of his researches would not have so presented itself to his mind. The deliverances of this acquired intuition can in most cases be readily justified by the reasoning process which they have anticipated. But the genius of a mathematician--that is, his special aptitude developed by special culture--will occasionally enable him to divine a truth, of which, though he may be able to prove it experientially, neither he nor any other can at the time furnish a logical demonstration. In this divining power we have clear evidence of the existence of a capacity which cannot be accounted for by the mere co-ordination of antecedent experiences, whether of the individual or of the race; and yet, as already shown, such co-ordination has furnished the stimulus to its development.

Of those departments of science, on the other hand, in which our conclusions rest (like those of ordinary common sense) not on any one set of experiences, but upon our unconscious co-ordination of the whole aggregate of our experiences,--not on the conclusiveness of any one train of reasoning, but on the convergence of all our lines of thought towards one centre,--geology may be taken as a typical example. For this inquiry brings (as it were) into one focus, the light afforded by a great variety of studies,--physical and chemical, geographical and biological; and throws it on the pages of that great stone book in which the past history of our globe is recorded. And its real progress dates from the time when that common sense method of interpretation came to be generally adopted, which consists in seeking the explanation of past changes in the forces at present in operation, instead of invoking (as the older geologists were wont to do) the aid of extraordinary and mysterious agencies.

Of the adequacy of common sense to arrive at a decisive judgment under the guidance of the convergence just indicated, we have a good example in the following occurrence:--A man having had his pocket picked of a purse, and the suspected thief having been taken with a purse upon him, the loser was asked if he could swear to it as his property. This he could not do; but as he was able to name not only the precise sum which the purse contained, but also the pieces of money of which that sum consisted, the jury unhesitatingly assigned to him the ownership of the purse and its contents. A mathematician could have calculated, from the number of coins, what were the chances against the correctness of a mere guess; but no such calculation could have added to the assurance afforded by common sense, that the man who could tell not only the number of coins in the purse, but the value of each one of them, must have been its possessor.