THE CONTEMPORARY LIBRARY OF PSYCHOLOGY

GENERAL EDITOR: F. AVELING, D.LIT. D.SC., PH.D.

THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE

THE CONTEMPORARY LIBRARY OF PSYCHOLOGY

Under the general editorship of Francis Aveling, D.Lit., D.Sc., Ph.D. University of London

CREATIVE MIND

By C. Spearman

PERSONALITY AND WILL

By Francis Aveling

THE MIND IN ACTION

By A. Campbell Garner

THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE

By Raymond H. Wheeler

(In Preparation)

THE SUBCONSCIOUS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND

By Bernard Hart

MIND AND BRAIN

By William Brown

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

By Cyril Burt

PRIMITIVE MENTALITY

By C. Eliot Smith

THE FRONTIERS OF PSYCHOLOGY

By William McDougall

THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE

A GENERAL VIEW OF GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

by

RAYMOND HOLDER WHEELER

PH.D.

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

New York

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Cambridge

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

COPYRIGHT, 1932, BY

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission of the publisher.

Kindle Edition: 2014-11-05

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To

MY WIFE

RUTH DUNLOP WHEELER

FOREWORD

by David Keirsery[1]

From the End Notes of David Keirsey’s very last book, Personology, Prometheus Nemesis Book Company; 2010.

In his book The Laws of Human Nature Raymond Wheeler provides a comprehensive and coherent view of the long forgotten idea of configurational fields. I know of no substitute for this book, its principles just as instructive and enlightening in the early 21st century as they were in the early 20th century.

It was on the so-called “mind-body” problem that Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Eric Berne foundered. Freud divided “mind” into three “mental organs,” Ego, Id, and Superego; Jung into Self, Persona, and Archetype; Berne into Exteropsyche, Archeopsyche, and Neopsyche. These “mental organs” made their mythical “presence” somehow intermingled with the physical organs, such as the brain, heart, lungs, and stomach. Once launched, each of these mythical organs acquired numerous functions, just as the heart pumps blood, the lungs inhale air, and the stomach ingests food.

For system-field investigators the “mind-body problem” never was a problem, since they regarded "mind” neither more nor less than the motor and sensory function of the nervous system. (See especially The Laws of Human Nature by Raymond Wheeler, the predominant American systemic field researcher). None of the gestalt psychologists—Gelb, Hornbostle, Hartmann, Katz, Koffka, Köhler, Lewin, Wertheimer, Wheeler—regarded the relationship between mind and body as a problem, since all of them used the word ‘mind’ as a verb instead of a noun. Thus we do mind but we do not have a mind. However, best that the word ‘mind’ be abandoned altogether and replaced with the word ‘nerves’, and, of course, with the prefix ‘neuro-’. So instead of saying ‘mental’ one ought to say ‘neural.’ The same might be said of the word ‘psych’ which is the Greek word for English ‘breath’. There are 56 words prefixed by ‘psych’ all but one of which can accept the substitution, these one being ‘psych-o-neurotic’. By replacing the prefix ‘psych’ with ‘neur’ the word becomes ‘neur-o-neurotic’, hence nonsense, and as such unusable. The other words that do not suffer from the abandonment of the word ‘psych’ are ‘neur-o-path’, ‘neur-o-pathologist’, and ‘neur-o-pathology’.

Unfortunately, organismic field theory, which appeared and flourished during the first third of the 20th century in Europe and America, was largely forgotten by all but a few social scientists in the last two thirds of the 20th century. At the beginning of the 21st century most behavioral scientists—anthropologists, ethologists, psychologists, sociologists—seem to be unaware of configurational fields, each in his or her own way negotiating the view of life that opposes it, namely mechanistic element theory.

Why did configurationism disappear in the 20th century when it had such a vigorous and incontrovertible start? The major reason was that when Hitler took over Germany in 1933, Germany being the birthplace of configurational field theory, all of the configurationist psychologists either left Germany or lost their academic posts there—Bühler, Gelb, Goldstein, Hornbostel, Koffka, Köhler, Lewin, Scheerer, Wertheimer. And of those who came to America—Bühler, Koffka, Köhler, Lewin—only one, Lewin, got a graduate post from whence to conduct configurational field research with the assistance of graduate students. Despite the efforts of American configurationists, Wheeler, Hartmann, Snygg, and Ogden, configurationism failed to take root in America, and its roots in Germany were ripped out by the Nazi horde. Another probable reason for the disappearance of the idea of configurational fields is the emergence of the computer late in the 20th century, thus giving the element mechanists (“reductionists”) another chance, seemingly plausible, to explain human action as mechanical. The structure and function of organisms may partially explain the structure and function of mechanisms, but the structure and function of mechanisms can never explain, even in part, the structure and function of organisms. After all, it’s a one-way street that cannot be reversed, however much the element mechanists would like it reversed. Sorry, the brain is no more a computer than a gnat is a machine.

Organisms emerge from organisms, already organized. The emergent organism is just as organized as the parent organism. Organization is always total, never partial; a state, not a process. Examine any organism of any size or age and note that it is organized. Organisms do not become organized; they are organized and are never otherwise.

Organisms are coherent and comprehensive systems that maintain their inherent polarization by two self-controlling processes: self-distribution and self-regulation. This is Nature’s First Law. Best not to violate it as many social scientists have done in speaking of "self-organizing systems.” Systems cannot be self-organizing simply because organization is not a process but a state.

Organisms always come from organisms, never from elsewhere. This is Virchow’s law, for it was he, who, early in the 19th century informed us that cells emerge from cells, and therefore not from the constituents that are left in the wake of cell disintegration. Organization is always given, never derived. [See especially The Way of the Cell by Franklin Harold. See also The Body Electric, by Howard Becker and Gary Selden, Cross Currents by Howard Becker, and Blueprint for Immortality by Harold Burr, the latter three for an account of the polarization of the cell and cellular structures.

It may be that those social scientists in the latter part of the 20th century who spoke of “self-organizing systems” did so because they confused order with organization. Thus mistaken, they may not have noted that there are degrees of order, but not of organization, that there can be more or less order, but not more or less organization. For instance, multi-cellular organisms are no more organized than uni-cellular organisms; oak trees no more organized than the acorns they emerge from. Certainly organisms increase in complexity as their cells divide; certainly developed organisms are more complex than unde-veloped organisms; certainly organization is an all-or-nothing state in which there are no degrees. Best to remember that, as structure, organization is a matter of kind, not of degree.

1. From the End Notes of David Keirsey’s very last book, Personology, Prometheus Nemesis Book Company; 2010. [Editor: David W. Deley]

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The Contemporary Library of Psychology has been planned to meet what is felt to be a need alike of the student and of the large and growing public who take a keen and intelligent interest in the subject. In common with all other sciences, Psychology is continually enlarging its boundaries by the discovery of fresh facts, the construction of hypotheses to explain them, and the verification of the hypotheses in experimental conditions. Unlike those of the other sciences, however, the claim of which to acceptance has long been established, its principal achievements are of comparatively recent origin. No doubt many of its problems are as old as philosophy itself; but their ancient solutions were of a highly speculative character, and it is only since the application of scientific method to the data of mental life that it has been possible for Psychology to take its place within the ranks of the empirical and experimental sciences.

Its scientific progress, however, has since then been astonishingly rapid; so rapid, indeed, that it has not failed to be accompanied by certain dangers incidental to speedy growth from infancy to adolescence. There have been the dangers, not always successfully avoided, of non-observation and of mal-observation, of hasty generalisation from insufficient data, of immature and faulty method, of imperfect experimental technique, and the like.

Even now, when all these have in large measure been overcome, and an incomparable method devised by which psychological data may be treated mathematically, there are still numbers of divergent schools each claiming to be the sole genuine representative of the science. This is in the main, if not entirely, due to the fact that workers have laboured more or less independently in separate and even isolated areas within the psychological domain. Some have specialised in the abnormalities of mind, and from their clinical observations have derived a general theory which they then extended to cover mentality as a whole. In this general theory the emphasis is upon the emotional character of mental life, and especially upon the dynamic nature of the Unconscious. Others, interested in animal and human behaviour rather than in the mental processes themselves, have found consciousness a superfluity for purposes of explanation, and have stressed a few native reaction-patterns as the basis upon which all behaviour is built up. Others, again, have occupied themselves with mental processes as these are actually observed to occur, and have devised experimental means for their investigation. And so on.

A consequence of this divergence of interest, especially when the several views to which it leads are expounded in text-books and manuals, and above all in summary expositions intended for more popular consumption, is that the reader is apt to form a one-sided and entirely misleading conception of Psychology. He may become an ardent psycho-analyst, a keen behaviourist, a formalist, a purist, or what not, as the case may be. But, while there is no doubt much truth in all these systems, which in point of fact considerably supplement one another, there is still in most of them a great deal that is of the nature of assumption and over-generalisation. The literature, moreover, of late years has grown to such an enormous extent that it is almost impossible for any one person to master it, and so to gain for himself a comprehensive and accurate perspective of contemporary Psychology in so far as this science is definitely and systematically established.

The plan of The Contemporary Library of Psychology has been drawn up with a view to presenting such a perspective in a popular way, but at the same time without any loss of scientific accuracy. Each volume to be included in it will deal with a special and definite topic which is capable of independent treatment as a single chapter of Psychology. Though this plan inevitably entails a certain amount of overlapping, since no one volume will take for granted what has been set forth in another, and certain principles are of necessity common to all, overlapping will be restricted to a minimum. The Series will, it is hoped, embrace all the major topics of the science, including those of Comparative, Ab-Normal and Applied Psychology. In this way each volume will be complete in itself; while the Library as a whole will cover the entire field of Psychology.

With this aim in view, it is confidently hoped that it will prove to be of real service both to the student and to the general reader.

F.A.

PREFACE

Tremendous upheavals are taking place to-day in many branches of science. Whereas the incidents immediately responsible for these changes were carefully controlled laboratory experiments, the significance of the empirical discoveries could not possibly have been understood without the construction of new, and in most respects, radical theories. The relativity movement in physics, the organismic movement in biology and the Gestalt movement in psychology represent advances in a new conception of Nature and a vast amount of startling experimental research which the new conception has promoted.

The revolution in science, however, is so broad in its implications that it cannot be regarded as progress in science alone. Rather, it illustrates an evolution in human thought that is certain to affect profoundly the culture and the destiny of the civilised world. Ethics and religion will not escape from it. Indeed, the same evolution is to be observed, in its less articulate form, in the world of practical affairs, where man’s attitudes toward man are changing.

Briefly stated, man is repudiating the old instruments with which he felt and reasoned; absolutism, materialistic and mechanistic assumptions, logical atomism, vitalism and spiritualism, and their numerous consequences that are now seen as self-contradictions. Even the fight against materialism has always been waged with a mechanistic logic, in the guise of vitalism. A new instrument is now emerging, long since recognised as a fact but hardly employed as a principle, a relative, organismic, descriptive unit, applicable as was the old mechanistic and absolute unit, to all branches of human inquiry.

An attempt has been made to direct the educated reader to the field of psychology as it appears when reinterpreted in terms of the new tool. Obviously such a task would be impossible without a historical approach. Moreover, since the new method of thought breaks down the conventional barriers between psychology and the other sciences, including ethics, the full significance of the present trend will have been missed if the presentation of the subject has avoided a relating of psychology to physics and biology on the one hand, and to sociology and ethics on the other. Of necessity, therefore, this book possesses a strong philosophical flavour, and for obvious reasons, a strict, scientific usage of terms has not always been followed.

It would be impossible to acknowledge credit for ideas and suggestions in all instances where credit is due; and, since this book is not written as a treatise or a text, references are conspicuous by their absence. The psychological reader will recognise at once the main sources from which the views, herein elaborated, were derived. They are the far-seeing contributions of intrepid pioneers, now in their prime, the first to break away from traditions centuries old—Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka. Following close behind them is a legion of investigators young and old, some nearer, some more remote in their views, but all blazers of new trails. Were this volume primarily a history of psychology, it would not omit the outstanding names of the past, or the venerable pioneers, now living, whose contributions are not, in any sense, to be appraised by their contrast with the views here presented. Theirs, like the work now being done, derive importance in the light of the conditions under which the work was accomplished. Their achievements will stand for all time as a monument to the progress of psychological thought.

There were many who aided, in indispensable ways, the preparation of the manuscript. Sections were frequently read and discussed with members of the psychological staff at Kansas University: Drs Harry R. De Silva, Beulah M. Morrison, Donald M. Purdy, Thomas D. Cutslorth, Marjory G. Cutsforth and S. Howard Bartley, and Messrs F. Theodore Perkins, Byron Sarvis and Robert Brigdon. Mrs Cutsforth and Mr Brigdon helped in typing the manuscript. Mr Perkins gave most generously of his time, reading and criticising the copy, and in reading proof. Upon Miss Doris Trower and Mrs Paul Malone rested the greater burden in typing the manuscript. To all of these friends the author wishes to express his gratitude.

To the Editor of this Series, Dr Francis Aveling, the author owes a debt of no small magnitude for his kind criticisms and for his original suggestion that the book be written.

To the T. Y. Crowell Company, New York, the author’s thanks are due for permission to quote from Readings in Psychology, 1930, his statement of eight organismic laws.

Whatever immaterial value shall attach itself to this book will mean more to one person than to any other. To her this book is dedicated.

R.H.W.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword — by David Keirsey

General Introduction

Preface

Chapter I

The Background of Contemporary Psychology

page    1

II

The Transition to Scientific Psychology

33

III

Biological Organisation

67

IV

The Development of Behaviour

96

V

The Laws of Perception

122

VI

The Laws of Learning

141

VII

The Laws of Emotion and Will

178

VIII

The Laws of Personality

199

Postscript — “Broken Part” vs. “Broken System-As-A-Whole” — by David W. Deley

Index

229

THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE

CHAPTER I

THE BACKGROUND OF CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY

§ I. THE PROBLEM. People are not only interested in each other because they want to be, they are obliged to be. The business man is not only interested in his partner for social and friendly reasons; success in business necessitates an interest in his personality and a knowledge of his habits. If an employer is to be successful economically, a humanitarian interest in the employees is of utmost importance, for only when a genuine concern for their welfare is shown will they work loyally, efficiently and contentedly. The worker is not merely an economic tool; he is a human being with human rights who insists upon a recognition of these rights. The physician who fails to reveal a human interest in his patients is mistrusted and avoided. The engineer who executes plans without regard for what people like gives way to the one who recognises that in the long run human values—the appreciation of the good and the beautiful—are not to be ignored even in the erection of bridges, the building of railroads and the construction of waterworks. The youth who shows a lack of interest in his associates is soon looked upon with critical regard, if not open contempt. In all walks of life, under whatever conditions, people demand an interest in each other, not for ulterior purposes, but as an end in itself.

§ 2. HUMAN NATURE. Herein lies the popularity as well as the practicability of psychology, for psychology is the science of human nature, a study of just those interests that people demand shall be mutually recognised.

Human beings are naturally aggressive in one way or another; they demand a chance to be active, to achieve, to gain position and power, to command the respect of their associates, to be recognised for something. If thwarted in this demand they will inevitably show a resistance that is both persistent and hostile. Human beings also demand security from danger, not only from danger that forebodes physical harm and therefore a disintegration of their physical being, but danger to the integrity of their egos. Not only their persons but their opinions must be respected. An attack upon a cherished idea, a sacred belief, is an attack upon the security of one’s mind. A person will fight for a principle as readily as for his neck. Paradoxical as it may sound, the reason why he will fight for an idea as vigorously as he will fight for his neck is the fact that the status quo of the mind and the status quo of the body are maintained in accordance with precisely the same set of laws. Of course ideas are more easily replaced than necks, so that if it came to a choice between the two, most people would prefer their necks; but there are many individuals who have chosen death by the sword or the gallows for the sake of an idea, not to mention those who have ignored the dangers of disease, adventure and deprivation for the sake of a scientific cause or a reputation for achieving the spectacular.

What is the secret of these powerful demands? Wherein lies the stupendous force of the human will? A single act of human mind results in the removal of a mountain, in the hurling of millions into war, in the construction of vast institutions that cover entire continents, in the wiping out of whole civilisations. Here, in the human brain is a physical system of energy, but one that must also be called mental, for it is a system that wills. It performs work; it innervates muscles that wield the hammer, the lever and the wheel; but, still as a physical system, it innervates these muscles in such a complicated fashon that the products mean sympathy, co-operation, vindictiveness, greed, altruism, purpose, ideals. It is a “machine” that sees, hears, feels, thinks and reasons. Indeed, the forces within it obey the laws of physics with such precision that by means of mathematical reasoning the wanderings of comets, the behaviour of gases, the properties of magnetic fields and the existence of substances yet unknown can be predicted. Again the paradox, if it is a paradox.

§ 3. MIND AND BRAIN. In the human brain there is a system of energy capable of running the gamut of the most variable, complex and unpredictable events known, to the most accurate and invariable. One never knows just what movement an infant will make next; but when that infant matures into a normal adult and acquires a knowledge of mathematics, the results of his most intricate types of reasoning can, under the right conditions, be predicted by other persons with as much, if not more, certainty and exactitude than any event can be predicted in the physical world. Planets do not revolve around the sun with a greater precision than the potentials of the human brain shift from one form to another in the inevitable reasoning that two and two are four.

It is of no use to posit a mind, alongside the brain, doing the thinking, when the brain must duplicate every detail and aspect of the reasoning process, for it must put these thoughts into words, gestures and actions with a fidelity that is absolute. If existing words do not suffice it must invent new ones, or at least control the muscles of the throat and hand in so precise and delicate a fashion that when the mind instructs it, for the first time, to write a new word never before written, it will carry through the performance without an instant’s hesitation. One might just as well admit that it is the brain that invents, that a system of energy of the kind that solar systems, electrical charges and atmospheric pressures are made of, feels, wills and reasons. Mind is the brain-in-action. It is organised energy that thinks.

§ 4. IDENTITY OF PHYSICAL AND MENTAL LAWS. There is only one way out. The same laws that govern physical energy govern thought, social intercourse and the possession of ideals. A so-called machine apprehends values, writes music and poetry, and believes in God. So-called mechanical and spiritual laws are the same. Is it better to read physics into mind and to regard the human being as a mechanical thing, or to read mind into the physical world and to consider Nature as non-mechanical? One has his choice, but it hardly matters, for whatever his decision he has forsaken the orthodox position both of the physicist and of the psychologist. He has repudiated the conventional, popular notion of mechanical versus mental events. In accepting the hypothesis that the laws of physics and psychology, in the last analysis, are the same, he has denied materialism as opposed to spiritualism and vice versa. He has declared that neither gravitational systems nor human beings are machines, that there are no machines in Nature. As will become evident, later on, he has taken what he considers of value in so-called mechanistic conceptions and whatever seems good in vitalistic conceptions. He has taken a position that is neither the one nor the other.

The consequences of this point of view are rather far reaching. They upset many of the supposedly demonstrated principles held by psychologists; they seem to oppose that common sense which insists upon a distinction of kind between mind and body. They change the orthodox conception of how man perceives objects, of how he develops mentally and learns. They radically alter the conventional notion of instinct. In short, they change the character of psychology from one end of the field to the other, and challenge the laws of attention and association upon which recent systems of psychology have been based. But the laws of human nature cannot be grasped in their fullest significance and in their relation to the world in which man lives until the apparent conflict between theory and common sense is resolved. Curiously, the very common sense that man has employed for centuries in an effort to save his soul from apparently being explained away by an erroneously mechanistic science delayed the progress of psychology and made man unintelligible to man. But so long as science was mechanistic, this common sense served a good end by preserving man’s belief in his own integrity. It will be the purpose of this chapter to help resolve this conflict between common sense and science by a brief excursion into history. This excursion will answer the questions:—Where did the common sense notion of mind and matter come from? What is wrong with it now?

§ 5. HISTORY AND NATURE OF DUALISM. Primitive man’s ideas were largely monistic. He believed in the existence of something in man of the order of a soul; and this soul was composed of material like that of objects observed around him. The soul was breath, air, fire or water. There were spirits, to be sure, but these also were copies of known objects. A view like this cannot as yet be considered materialistic, because there had not developed any definite notion of a spiritual or mind-entity with which an order of material objects could be contrasted. Materialism and spiritualism originated together and evolved hand in hand, the one depending upon and defining the other. The dichotomy of materialism and spiritualism is known as dualism. One aspect of this dualism was to have a profound effect upon the history of psychology by giving to it the perplexing mind-body or mind-matter problem, a problem whose beginnings take up back to the ancient Greeks.

§ 6. GREEK DUALISM. Dualism commenced in this way. The ancient Greeks asked themselves two important questions regarding the nature of man and the world in which he lived:—What are things made of? How do they work? All things, including man, are made of atoms (small particles, elements) they decided. Even the soul is composed of atoms that are particularly fine and smooth, and unusually active; but all atoms are ultimately of the same material of an unknown character. These atoms, it was thought, combined into systems in the innumerable ways necessary to account for a vastly complex universe. So far, so good. But this is only half of the story. Things may be composed of atoms, but what makes them combine in the innumerable ways necessary to account for all kinds of objects and events? And what makes them combine in uniform ways according to definite laws? What explains the constant changes going on from one combination to another? In other words, how do atoms function?

Empedocles sensed the limitation of the atomic principle. Atoms cannot entirely explain the soul, he said. The soul is something more than a combination or proportion of discrete entities; it is a thing in itself—just what it is and not something else. It is an entity in itself which transcends its effects that we see in the actions of human beings; and it is capable of migrating from one individual, at his death to another. Here the issue is a little more definite. A spiritual principle, different from an atomic principle, has been conceived. Shortly, the soul-principle was seized upon to answer the second of the two main questions that had been propounded:—How do things work? What explains the behaviour of things? From one standpoint, the standpoint of being, things are atoms; but from another standpoint, that of becoming, happening, change, behaviour, motion, things are expressions of order and intelligence. Motion is reason, the executing of a plan by a World Soul.

While the mind-body problem has not as yet been traced very far, the advances that have been made are more significant than they might seem at first thought. It is necessary, therefore, to pause a moment and take account of stock.

§ 7. STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION. In answering the question, What are things made of?, the Greeks reduced the universe to elemental structures, parts, contents, atoms. The problem was a structural one. A whole is reduced to its parts; the parts are then employed to explain the whole. The whole, in other words, is the sum of its parts. The aspect emphasised here is a static condition. In answering the question, however, How do things work?, the Greeks posited a mind which was synonymous with motion, change, order and uniformity of occurrence. This problem was a functional one. A whole is seen in the form of a dynamic process. The aspect emphasised here is activity. Early Greek thinkers were thus face to face with a problem that has confused philosophers and scientists ever since, the structure-function problem. What is the relation between structure and functions The Greeks attacked the problem of the nature of things from the structural point of view and the result was a world of atoms. They attacked it from the functional point of view and the result was mind. Are not such conclusions incongruous? On first thought, it would seem that mind and atoms are far too unlike to be descriptive of the same thing. But on closer inspection it turns out that structure and function are merely aspects of each other; the same thing is envisaged first from a static and then from a dynamic point of view. Structure is the form of an activity, a something moving, or a something that changes; function is the activity of the form, the moving or changing of the thing. Structure and function have opposite but mutually dependent meanings.

For an illustration, take the human body. In the last analysis it is a mass of motions, but these motions are organised into forms, some of them so stable that structural names are given them, such as stomach, brain, bones, and muscles. Stomach, brain, bones and muscles are structures of the body. Nevertheless, as structures they are relatively stable masses of action. Now note the differences in the terms that describe this action directly:—metabolism, digestion, secretion, absorption, integration, conduction. These are functions of the body and the terms are physiological in their meaning as opposed to structural and anatomical.

The Greeks were concerned both with the anatomy and with the physiology of the universe. They reduced the universe structurally to cells that they called atoms; they reduced it functionally to the activity of a universal mind shared by each person within it.

§ 8. MIND AND MATTER. Dualism had commenced. The function-member of a purely logical and neutral structure function parallelism, implying of necessity neither mind nor matter, had taken on a mentalistic connotation, while the structure-member was left without it. The first step had been taken in the procedure of giving to function a structural content, mind, to which atoms must eventually give way. Still, there was as yet no definite distinction between mind and matter, between the physical and the psychic. It remained for theology and ethics to force the issue; and this is the way it happened. The essential difference between soul and body must be the immortality of the one and the destructibility of the other. Since mind belonged both to the soul and to the body it was partly mortal and partly immortal. The body and that part of the mind belonging to it, namely sense experience and emotion, were base and impure, something that required cleansing. Reason abided in the higher part of the mind, the soul, and it alone could attain the highest good. Thus, gradually, through the philosophy of Plato and his followers the distinction between mind and matter was growing. The base, destructible, mortal, became the material. The noble, indestructible, immortal, became the immaterial.

§ 9. MODERN DUALISM. It remained for Descartes, in the seventeenth century, to crystallise the dualistic position in response to a pressing need. Indeed, this famous philosopher confronted a problem whose gravity can hardly be realised by the modern inquirer. Man had acquired a newborn faith in science and in the mechanistic principle which was clashing seriously with a theological philosophy centuries old. The old and the new must be harmonised somehow.

The Scholastics had attempted to stem the tide of dualism by a return to the philosophy of Aristotle, who held that the soul was to the body what form is to matter; but this philosophy was too abstract. And moreover, if form depends on matter for its existence, the soul must depend on the body for its existence. Too great a stretch of the imagination was required to understand the immortality of the soul on this basis. Accordingly, the appeal of Scholastic Philosophy became more and more limited in the face of advancing knowledge concerning the innumerable ways “matter” could undergo a change in form, thus indicating that form was after all quite temporary. But neither Scholastic Philosophy nor the principles of science could be changed radically enough to effect the necessary harmonisation. The only recourse was to find a larger, more comprehensive system of thinking into which both would fit.

This was the secret of Descartes’s greatness. He apprehended the larger whole in the light of the knowledge and thinking of his time. He put the finishing touches upon dualism to the end that matter and mind were defined as distinctly different substances, the one extended and occupying space, the other inextended and not occupying space; the one passive, the other active. Terms pertaining to mind described the soul; terms pertaining to objects outside the mind described matter. The world of reality was sharply divided into two realms, the material and spiritual, that were totally unlike and obeyed different laws.

§ 10. INFLUENCE IN SCIENCE. The influence of this doctrine in science was to last for centuries. Physics became the study of material things; psychology became the study of the soul. The method of one must of necessity be objective observation; the method of the other, introspection, or self-observation. The methods were by definition as different as the realms to which they were applied.

This philosophy of Descartes was simple and easy to understand and was therefore profound in its influence on the culture of the masses. Of course mind and matter are different in kind. Anyone can perceive that wood can be burned, that a stone can be crushed, that water can be boiled, that a ball can be thrown; but try to burn an idea of wood, crush a feeling of the stone, boil the sensation of thirst, throw the concept ball across the field! Obviously the two realms are distinctly different.

§ 11. OCCASIONALISM. All is simple sailing so far, but the rest is not so easy. If these two realms are distinctly different, how are they related? It is easy to understand how one billiard ball, hitting against another, can set the latter in motion, or how a spark can explode a charge of powder. The one, being a material thing, can affect the other. Physical force in the arm can transmit momentum to a ball; hence the ball can be thrown. But how can an idea, having no physical properties whatever, cause one’s arm to move? How can the intention to rise from one’s chair and open the door ever become effective in the physical movements of carrying out the act? Here was the weak spot in Descartes’s theory. By definition mind could not, of its own account, affect the body or vice versa. Accordingly, a third, omnipotent agent, capable of doing anything, must be posited to effect an interaction between mind and body. This agent was God. But this did not solve the problem. It is unsatisfactory theology to blame God for something that is logically unintelligible to human beings. The will does produce physical movements of the body. There is no question about it. A person can demonstrate that any time he wants to, merely by raising his hand. If it is necessary for God to intervene every time each one of several billion human beings will to move a single muscle, he must be kept incredibly busy. And animals, birds and insects are in the same predicament. Of course by definition it is easy for an Omnipotent Being to do anything, but for this very reason it makes the solution of the problem unsatisfactory to the intelligent human being.

Ever since Descartes’s time, therefore, philosophers have tried to bolster up the weak spot in his hypothesis. This problem was difficult because it was artificial, and there was little chance of realising, at the time, how artificial it was. The original nature of the problem had been distorted in the course of erecting systems of ethics and theology.

Notice what Descartes had done to structure and function. The structure of all reality had previously been reduced to atoms; they had been regarded as the substance of things; they were the content of the universe. The activities of things constituted mind. Atoms were the substance of mind; mind was the activity of atoms. There was no activity other than mind, no substance other than atoms. Descartes, however, attributed to mind a substance of its own that was not atomic. This deprived atoms of their activity, for mind had previously been regarded as the activity of atoms. It was necessary, therefore, to give atoms an activity of their own that was not mind; this activity was energy, now popularly defined as physical energy, something conceived as different from mind. Since atoms were no longer the substance of mind, they must be a substance unto themselves. This substance was matter, the stuff of which earth, trees, water and air are supposedly made. Since mind was no longer the activity of atoms it must have a substance or structure of its own, that is, its own unique content, a mind-substance. So, mind-substance became the stuff of which sensations, feelings, ideas and will are made. Through the influence of theology and ethics the original structure-function problem was made into two structure-function problems; out of one dualism, two dualisms were forged. Structure and function, alike, were duplicated on the side of matter and again on the side of mind. Philosophers were quick to see the superfluity of two dualisms and have been trying ever since to resolve them into one again. The artificiality of the problem which they faced lay in the unnecessary duplication. But artificiality brings troubles, and these will soon be evident.

§ 12. MONISM. Mind and matter, the philosophers then said, are not two substances, requiring the intervention of God in order to make an interaction possible. They are two aspects of the same thing, but the aspects are all that can be observed; the thing itself is unknown. For example, the physiological processes in the brain and the mental processes of the mind run hand in hand, in parallel fashion; they are two distinctly different views of the same process, just as concavity and convexity are different views of a curved line. In the latter case the line is known, but in the former the process, of which physical activity and mental activity are the two aspects, is not known. Mental processes do not act on the brain; they are the mental aspects of a process of which brain activity is a different aspect. It is not an act of will that causes the body to move; the cause of movement is a physiological process that parallels the act of will. To admit an act of will implies but does not describe the physiological cause of movement. This view, known as psycho-physical parallelism, owes its origin chiefly to Spinoza, and it was apparently so satisfactory that it has retained its popularity to the present day. It seems to solve the problem nicely. But on closer inspection it is nothing but Descartes’s out and out dualism over again.

Mental processes cause only the mental; physical processes cause only the physical. It is impossible to reason from the one to the other; by definition they are entirely unrelated. To posit the substance of which mind and matter are the two aspects does not assist in relating them, because the aspects are logically ultimate and final, just as Descartes’s substances were. It should be possible to reason from one aspect of a thing to another, and to understand how these aspects are related and dependent upon each other. In the case of the curved line this is easy, for the line can be seen; it is known. The line is the ultimate thing, relating concavity and convexity to each other. It is the thing that logically furnishes or creates the aspects of concavity and convexity. But in Spinoza’s theory of parallelism there is nothing equivalent to the line. There is only a question mark taking the place of a third agent, God. Therefore, by positing two ultimate aspects, Spinoza substituted aspects for substances and the double dualism remained as double as ever. Matter and mind were still distinct and opposite things, quite as different in kind as Descartes had made them, quite as much in two separate realms as before.

§ 13. IDEALISM. Efforts of subsequent philosophers to solve the difficulty by making mind the only real thing in the world, and matter more or less of an illusion (absolute idealism) were doomed to failure. The physical world is after all too tangible to be explained away. Efforts to make matter the only real thing and mind an illusion (absolute materialism) also failed because if there is anything of which a human being is certain it is that he sees, thinks and wills.

§ 14. COMMON SENSE. Thus it can be seen that the common sense notion of mind and matter, prevalent to-day, came from seventeenth century philosophy. That philosophy is responsible, however, in no way indicts philosophy of a crime. On the contrary, philosophy saved the day then. It is saving it now. Times change; and it is the responsibility of philosophy to anticipate the human needs of the future by supplying that future with an appropriate interpretation of man’s place in Nature. The thinking of the masses follows long years behind the thinking of intellectual leaders. Three hundred years ago, the man in the street had no definite idea at all of an ultimate distinction between two kinds of worlds, in fact, was governed in his own thinking by superstitions that hardly improved upon the beliefs of primitive man. At the same time a philosophy was being worked out by geniuses like Descartes that was to become the common sense of the masses, the substitute for superstition centuries later. The man in the street, to-day, is just as sure of a material and a spiritual world as his counterpart, centuries past, was sure of spirits and ghosts which were substantial copies of living persons. The two worlds are for him demonstrated facts, not theories. The belief is common sense, and it came from a philosophy known, three hundred years previously, only to a few selected intellectuals.

How common the belief that philosophy is a dry, impractical subject, fit only for the aberrated, academic freak who has nothing better to do but to theorise. How often one hears the claim that the philosopher knows a great deal about nothing. Little is it realised that philosophy is a religion, the religion of the trained mind that thinks abstractly instead of with concrete pictures. How seldom is it recognised that there is no influence in the world so powerful as philosophy, and that centuries in advance it determines the culture and policies of millions. The capitalist may insist that money runs the world, but in making such a claim, he fails to realise that his philosophy of life, a social heritage from the past, determines his attitude toward money and what he shall do with it. Money is a servant, not a master; economic laws are, at bottom, psychological laws. Business is essentially a materialistic institution, tempered, to be sure, by idealism and humanitarian interests; and that proves the point. Common sense is a naive, and in many respects an antedated philosophy, and this philosophy determines the properties and values even of business institutions.

§ 15. INSTINCT AND INSIGHT. There are others who claim that man is dominated not by his thinking but by his blind instincts. He is driven, it is thought, by the urge to survive and to dominate. But this view dates back also to a materialistic and mechanistic philosophy, a system of thinking which entirely neglects the fact that emotion and instinct are in themselves powerless without insight. If that insight is limited it only means that the influence of instinct is limited in proportion, and proves the thesis that, after all, the final appeal is to insight. It is the evolution of philosophical thought in one generation that furnishes this insight to future generations. If the philosophy turns out to be wrong the only alternative is to find a better one. To repudiate philosophy is for mankind to commit suicide.

§ 16. DUALISM IN PRESENT-DAY SCIENCE. A rather severe exercise in intellectual gymnastics has just been required in order to discover where the popular notion of mind and matter came from. But the effort has been worth while, albeit the argument has not yet been entirely convincing. Suppose, therefore, that philosophy be abandoned, momentarily, in favour of actual facts.

§ 17. PHYSICAL SCIENCE. Ask the physicists of to-day what they mean by matter. All kinds of answers will be forthcoming. The more naive among them will give the dualistic answer in face of the admission that they lack the faintest idea what matters is, as opposed to mind (assuming that such a thing exists). This is because, with the layman, they share the social heritage of a dualistic doctrine. The notion of matter was conceived in philosophy, not in science; and there is more ancient philosophy, to-day, in the physics that is being taught than most physicists would like to admit. Others will assert, more thoughtfully, that matter means only the structure or form of energy, and that it is merely a logical tool by which to relate one kind of energy with another. It is a common denominator, merely a conceptual thing, employed in an effort to make the facts of physics intelligible in something other than a mathematical sense. Mathematical symbols are essential when it comes to measuring and predicting; but, because they are quantitative symbols they do not describe the phenomena they symbolise. Others will say that the concept of energy is enough, and that matter is synonymous with energy, perhaps a cross section or longitudinal section of it. Still others will say that even the concept of energy is superfluous, and that the sole data of physics are measurements of time, space and wave-motion, expressible in terms of mathematics. Thus, from the standpoint of the physicist, the material world of the layman has evaporated into thin air; the search for matter has turned out, so far at least, to be a wild goose chase, no doubt because matter was a fictitious thing in the beginning.

All this is hard for the layman to understand, but only because he was brought up to regard anything solid or fluid or gaseous, anything palpable, as something material and made of matter. Unless the table is made of matter how could it possibly feel hard to the touch? The physicist replies:—“Simple enough. A wave-motion strikes the skin and induces other wave-motions in the nerves.” The differences between solids, liquids and gases are differences in compactness of wave-motions. Wave-motions of what? Of themselves. So it turns out that as far as the physicist is concerned the wave-motions might just as well be mind as matter. In fact, the word “mind” could be written wherever the word “energy” or the word “matter” used in a physics textbook and the science of physics would not in the slightest be altered. No mathematical formula would be changed—so far as we know—and not a single exact prediction of a “physical” event would be jeopardised. The scientifically predictable truths of physics, as physics, are exclusively mathematical and statistical. The rest of the science is conceptual, a supplementation by common sense and philosophy. The facts of physics constitute no proof of a material world as opposed to a mental one. Iron, sodium, electricity, yes; but matter, no; not in the conventional sense.

§ 18. MENTAL SCIENCE. Ask the psychologist what he means by mind. Again, the more naïve among them will give the dualistic answer. They, too, share the social heritage of a dualistic doctrine. Mind is the entity, consciousness. The notion of mind was likewise conceived in philosophy and not in science, and there is more ancient philosophy in psychology than most psychologists would like to admit. Others will assert that mind is only a logical tool by means of which to relate certain facts of self-observation, like the facts of sensation, with the facts of emotion and thinking. Still others will insist that the concept of mind is superfluous and that sensations, feelings, thoughts and ideals are no more evidence of mind than iron, wood and salt are evidence of matter. The former are evidence of something, to be sure, and so are the latter. Thoughts require a thinker, of course. Motion requires something moving; there is no doubt about it. Very likely, however, the physicist and the psychologist are nearly ready to agree that the thinker and the mover are one and the same; that is, they partake of the same order of reality, and in the individual human being are one and the same. What is that thing? For the present purpose, suppose it be called human nature.

It is probably something of a shock, still, to reflect that the physicist has never observed matter and that the psychologist has never observed mind. The search for mind by the psychologist has also turned out to be a wild goose chase. Pains, pleasures, love, anger, fear, imagery, thinking, judgment; yes. Mind? Not in the conventional sense of the term. But there is no cause for worry. Nothing has been explained away. The problem was a fictitious one. Electrons, water, trees, houses, people, feelings, reasoning, are not denied; they are considered as real as they ever were. Only the two sharply contrasted categories into which these phenomena have been classified are repudiated.

§ 19. PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. There is another factual observation that may throw light upon the problem. Recall the argument that an idea must be different from a piece of wood because the former cannot be whittled. This type of reasoning neglects a most important fact. The wood burns, which, in terms of the argument, is a physical process. But the burning cannot be whittled. What can be done to it? It can be checked; so can an idea. It can be started; so can an idea. An idea has all of the properties of motion; it commences, goes on, and ends. It can be described; it can be measured, after a fashion, in space and in time. Why, then, is it not a physical process? It is, just as much as the burning of the wood. But what of it? “Physical” means nothing scientifically in either case. The burning process and the idea are functions, the one of wood, the other of nerve and muscle. Both are functions of a certain structure to which the word physical adds no meaning whatever, except under a dualistic doctrine.

Hold up your little finger and wiggle it. You can cut your finger, for the finger is structure. The movement cannot be cut, for the movement is function. Where is the movement? In the finger? Cut it open and see. No, the movement is not inside. The movement is not in the finger; nor is it outside of it; it is of the finger; it is something the finger does. Burning is not in the wood; it is something the wood does. Similarly, an idea is not in or outside of the brain. It is something the brain does. These ABC’s of dialectics are useful, in spite of the fact that they sound rather foolish; for they show how there are just as many phenomena of the so-called physical world that cannot be cut and burned as there are of the mental. These phenomena are processes, events. Science investigates events that have no claim to material versus mental substantiality.

But the story is not complete. Water, supposedly physical, can be boiled. But what is that? Hastening the activities of atoms. There is nothing unique about it as a physical process. A person can be stimulated and his thinking hastened too. A chemical compound can be broken down into its “elements”. So can a thought. Chemicals “interact”. So do ideas. Did you ever try to recall something and confuse two past experiences with each other? But, you say, thoughts cannot, theoretically, be reduced to electrons? Why not? Take salt. Reduce it to electrons and imagine yourself one of those electrons. You are inside the system and the form or pattern of the system that makes the substance salt is not visible to you. Where is the salt? It simply does not exist for you. In other words, scatter the electrons of salt, hypothetically, so that they cease to be in dynamic relation to each other, and salt no longer exists. Reduce an idea to the electrons of the brain and the same thing happens. Salt, a dynamic pattern of electrons, derives its property from the pattern. The properties of an idea are, similarly, properties of a pattern. To say that either one is a pattern of electrons is a matter of convenience that brands one neither as a materialist nor a spiritualist. One can be either or neither, just as he likes, provided he is willing to accept the logical consequences.

Finally that the chemist cannot take an idea as he can salt, and decompose it in a test-tube, is no argument for dualism. The type of wave-motion to which ideas can be reduced, supposedly, is the property of a living organism and cannot be taken out and put into a test-tube. Removing a piece of the brain in order to examine this wave-motion would result in failure because the wave is a function of the brain as a whole. It would be like taking sodium out of the salt and expecting, still, to have salt left. No part will suffice for the whole.

§ 20. INFLUENCE OF DUALISM ON PSYCHOLOGY: ASSOCIATION PSYCHOLOGY. The source of the popular distinction between mind and matter has now been traced, and the difficulties it must encounter have been examined. But the history of the problem and its influence on psychology have been traced only to Descartes. About this time a very important movement commenced in Great Britain, a movement generally known as Association Psychology. Not only was the mind-body dualism to make itself felt in this development but so was another philosophical issue, namely, empiricism versus rationalism. This issue dealt primarily with the origin of knowledge in the individual, but since the origin of knowledge and the beginnings of mind in the individual are aspects of the same problem, epistemology was bound to influence psychology. Its influence was far reaching. Empiricism held that the mind was a blank at birth and that knowledge came through having experiences. This meant, for psychology, that knowledge came through the senses; that is, it depended upon the stimulation of the sense organs by outside forces—the eye by light, the ear by sound, the organs of the skin by temperature and contact. Regarded as elements or units of mind, these experiences were called sense-impressions, or presentations. Thinking was a matter of reproducing these sensations in the form of images or ideas. Thus a person recalls a vacation trip by visualising the country through which he passed; he adds, mentally, six plus four, by visualising the numbers or by saying them to himself. In the latter case he is employing imagery of the sounds and movements of articulation, known as verbal imagery. Accordingly, there could be nothing in the mind that had not previously been sensed.

By assumption mental life is built up piecemeal. Each sense-impression enters the mind, so to speak, independently of any other. At the outset the impressions are not related and not organised. The beginnings of mental life are a chaos, a “big, booming, buzzing confusion” of unarticulated elements. How are law and order derived from chaos? How are unity and continuity obtained from a mass of discrete and separate mind-particles? This was an extremely serious problem. The solution seemed evident in the apparent observation that after two different sense impressions had been experienced together, especially several times, they became related and functioned together, subsequently, in the form of ideas. One item suggested the other; the two had become associated; a bond had formed between them. This was the essence of the famous law of association by contiguity, and became the basis of many subsidiary laws of association. Indeed, the same principle was applied not only to the association of ideas, but to the acquisition of muscular skill. Two movements, occurring together, often enough, were said to become associated together; learning was facilitated by associating pleasure with a particular idea or with a particular movement and was inhibited by displeasure in a similar manner. The dependence of learning upon rewards and punishments, success and failure, stressed to such an extent by modern pedagogy, is a doctrine that grew out of association psychology.

In short, this psychology promulgated the assumption that association brought order and unity out of chaos. It was basically an assumption that the whole is built from parts; the complex must be explained in terms of the simple; the higher in terms of the lower. It was a mental chemistry implying that mind grew by means of a uniting and synthesising of mental elements. It was an atomistic and mechanistic psychology.

§ 21. METAPHYSICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS. A metaphysical theory of mind and matter, and an epistemological issue, empiricism, forged association psychology and led to the working principle that mind must be explained by laws that do not and could not operate elsewhere in Nature. Dualism forced the psychologist to seek the dynamic aspect of mind in a unique kind of mental force, association, a bonding of elements together in some mysterious fashion after they had accidentally (in itself impossible) come into contact with one another, and after they had been juxtaposed several times. But forces do not act that way anywhere else in Nature; there is no possibility of deriving order from chaos. Indeed, there is no chaos; there is order in the beginning; and forces in Nature do not depend upon repetition for their effectiveness. Moreover, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

§ 22. BEHAVIOURISM. The assertion is often made that association psychology reached its climax with David Hartley, following the distinctive contributions of Locke, Berkeley and Hume; that it declined, gradually, in the psychologies of Brown, Hamilton and the Mills, and died with Bain, Spencer and Lewes. On the contrary, association psychology is still very much alive, especially in educational and behaviouristic circles in the United States, and in the conditioned reflex psychology of the Russian school. When it became evident to many psychologists that association was an inadequate principle, an adherence to dualism still made it necessary to seek the dynamic aspect of mental life in extra-“physical” forms of energy like the subconscious mind, conation, a psychic striving process, libido and hormé. Were this book primarily a history of psychology it would be possible to mention many outstanding and lasting contributions made by the Associationists, bur the present purpose is to trace the influence of the mind-body problem on psychological thought.

§ 23. ATTENTION PSYCHOLOGY. On the continent another important movement was developing, likewise under the influence of dualism and epistemology. Rationalism exerted as profound an influence upon the psychology of the Continent as empiricism exerted in Great Britain. Rationalism, with its emphasis upon the primacy of reasoning, insisted that the mind is not a blank at birth; it possesses innate ideas that, by implication, are at first subconscious. These ideas do not depend upon experience. Who, for example, ever saw an abstract triangle? Yet such a triangle can be thought. Who ever sensed time? Yet all persons have a concept of time. No one, however, was ever conscious of an abstract triangle before he saw a concrete one. Therefore, prior to the becoming aware of an abstract triangle, the idea of one must have been subconscious. In fact, it is impossible to experience any sense-impression consciously without first experiencing it subconsciously. How can you be aware of a pain until you have one to be aware of? You must have it first, of course; but what is its status before you are aware of it? Becoming aware of anything, according to the rationalistic doctrine, is to be explained as the transition of an idea from the subconscious to the conscious.

This doctrine of conscious levels passed through several stages. The subconscious was later defined as an “apperceptive mass” into which new sense impressions and ideas must be assimilated before they are apprehended. Becoming aware of anything was explained as an unconscious “apperceptive mass” acting upon the new impression. Finally, “apperceptive mass” became “margin of consciousness”, and what had previously been defined as consciousness became “focus”. Now the process of becoming aware of anything was explained as a margin acting upon the focus, a transition of a mental process from an unclear to a clear state. The name “attention” was given to this process. Attention psychology was thus born in the substitution of margin for the subconscious and focus for the conscious; but changing the terms did not change the Ionic of the system. Attending to anything is an act of mind whereby an idea is shifted from the subconscious, or the margin of consciousness, into the conscious, or the focus of consciousness, whichever one chooses. Thus apperception, or attention, was a process of ordering and unifying the vast details of mental life, and was to Continental psychology what association was to British psychology during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The outstanding names in the Continental movement were Descartes, Leibniz, Herbart and Wundt. The latter two borrowed much from association psychology before they completed their systems. In fact focus and margin were of British origin.

Attention, like association psychology, made its contributions. It is not to its discredit that it proved inadequate in the face of advancing knowledge; but it is necessary to understand why it proved to be inadequate. It was epistemology, not science. Grant, for the sake of the argument, that there exists a focus and margin of consciousness. How does one know anything about the margin? Obviously only by attending to it, that is, by bringing some part of it into the focus. But then it is no longer margin. To observe the margin one must change its status, which is another way of saying that the margin is unobservable and a fiction, just like an unconscious consciousness. Look at a picture on the wall. The attention psychologist would say the picture is clear while other objects about the room are unclear; they are in the margin of consciousness. The visual analogy, however, is misleading. There is a good reason why objects, out of visual focus, are not clear; physical and physiological optics afford the explanation. It is not a question of focus and margin of attention. A person can “fixate” the picture and attend to something he sees out of the corner of his eye, for example, a chair. Once more, suppose there is a background of consciousness and that whatever he is attending to stands out upon it. The background is just as clear as the object he attends to, in every other than a visual sense, for its very vagueness is clear; he is quite sure of the vagueness; the unclearness of the background is just as clear in terms of awareness as the clearness of the focus. Clearness is merely the simple fact of being aware of something, and a person is either aware of it or he is not. Awareness does not exhibit degrees; it is a constant, from a psychological standpoint. These facts are likely to be confused with the definiteness or vagueness with which one apprehends or understands a meaning. Here is to be found the real problem of clearness, a problem that is explained in terms of the degree of differentiation of mental processes. It is a question of amount and organization of detail, not a question of clearness of detail. Whether there is detail or not, there is clearness, that is, awareness. The problem of awareness as such is an epistemological one.

In the attention movement, once more the psychologist was obliged by his presuppositions to seek forces in mind that could not possibly obey any known laws of dynamics, because the laws of dynamics depend upon observation and measurement. By definition the subconscious and the margin are neither observable nor measurable. Why hypothecate a process like attention and thereby attempt to make man do something that would be utterly unintelligible as a process occurring anywhere else in Nature? At this juncture, perhaps, one hears the protest that mind is, after all, something unique and reveals processes that are quite different from anything else in the world. Granted, but what does that mean? Nothing. Water is unique; there is nothing else like it in the world. Light is unique; man is unique; any particular type of thing is unique or it would not be a particular type of thing. Uniqueness of phenomenological properties does not mean uniqueness of law.

§ 24. LACK OF PRINCIPLES. Psychology thus saw the arrival of the twentieth century with no satisfactory set of principles. Efforts to find these principles have been persistent, almost feverish, since then. With little or nothing to guide him it has been each man for himself, and each has contributed. Out of the wide divergence of standpoints and a general discussion of their relative merits it is becoming evident just what twentieth century psychology has been trying to accomplish. It is too early yet to prophesy exactly what the outcome of present movements will be; nevertheless, coming events cast their shadows before.

CHAPTER II

THE TRANSITION TO SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY

§ 1. DEAD-ENDS. The opening of the twentieth century witnessed the beginnings of many diverging movements in psychology, all intended to escape the limitations of existing systems and methods and to improve the status of the science. Two main trends can be distinguished, the one mechanistic and the other vitalistic. By the mechanistic view is meant the assumption that Nature functions like a machine; that wholes are assemblages of parts, and therefore that organization and unity do not transcend the aggregate; and that action is brought about through the influence of one part as such upon another part. By vitalism is meant the view that posits the existence of a special outside force acting upon an assemblage of mechanically arranged parts, a force that may be considered independent of the assemblage or capable of being separated from it. It may also be considered as one part of the assemblage capable of governing the other parts.

§ 2. MECHANISM IN PSYCHOLOGY. The mechanistic view was motivated by a desire to make the facts of psychology more precise and specific, and to avoid the evident necessity of speculation, a necessity which seemed almost inevitable if the larger, grosser problems of behaviour—the self, the will, personality—were to be investigated. The vitalistic trend was motivated by an unwillingness to forsake the personal, humanitarian aspects of the science. Investigators whose faith was restricted to a study of the simpler processes sought guidance for their purposes and methods in the physical sciences. Those who preferred not to limit their inquiries to the simpler processes hunted diligently for a set of principles peculiar to psychology in terms of which they might present an adequate picture of the dynamic human mind. Both groups drew from the association and attention psychology of the past; both struggled with the problems of epistemology and dualism.

§ 3. INTROSPECTIONISM AND BEHAVIOURISM. The first group split on the mind-body problem into the ranks of introspectionists and behaviourists; those who regarded psychology as the science of consciousness and those who endeavoured to rule consciousness entirely out of consideration. Although these smaller groups were on opposite sides of the wall that divided mind from body, their psychologies are logically very much alike. When the breach between them seemed to be widening, rather than closing, there were several attempts to combine the two points of view.

§ 4. INTROSPECTION: STRUCTURALISM. The combination of mechanistic and dualistic points of view had curious consequences. There was no possibility of envisaging mental life as a dynamic thing, purely in mentalistic terms; for to do so would be to forsake the mechanistic position and to concede the teleological. Accordingly, introspectionists were of necessity structuralists, in that their investigations were limited by a dissection type of analysis and by a description of its results. All that the psychologist could do was to introspect upon the simpler mental processes, reduce them to their smallest terms, and correlate these introspective data with data pertaining to the limited stimulus-conditions under which they were obtained. While relatively unfruitful of immediate practical results, the insistence of the structuralist upon exactness and control of method and upon training of observers was morally wholesome. Incidentally, the insistence upon training of observers unwittingly proved that observers can be over-trained and that introspection under these conditions is a learning process set up in the laboratory and directed by whatever the point of view under which the introspector was required to achieve his skill. In other words, the results from introspection are the direct products of the method and, as compared with experiences of everyday life, are in many instances artificialities. The systematic status of these results still remains to be determined. Titchener in the United States and Külpe in Germany stood out as leaders in this movement. Both gradually extended their interests to certain of the higher thought processes, and bent their efforts towards an introspective analysis of these processes into their constituent elements.

The data of introspection, obtained as they were by structural analysis, were like the results of anatomical dissection, dead, inert, unrelated bits of experience, unless interpreted. To interpret means to organise the data in terms of dynamic principles. But these investigators were fundamentally mechanists, although in some instances they intended not to be. Titchener and his followers for the most part begged the question of interpretation by relegating the problem to physiology, the “body-side” of the dualism. To some extent they relied upon the mechanistic laws of association.

§ 5. CONTENT AND ACT. Külpe and his followers attempted to solve the problem in another way. Mental life exhibited itself in a dual fashion, in the form of mental contents such as sensations and images, and in the form of mental acts or functions, sensationless dynamic units; but these dynamic units were either systematically treated as contents, just like sensations and images, or else the expedient of psychic determining forces was relied upon. Some even went so far as to insist upon a mysterious, unanalysable will-element or faculty of the ego, for which they claimed to have presented introspective evidence.

§ 6. REASSERTION OF DUALISM. The dilemma in which Descartes found himself, when he posited a material and a spiritual substance, now duplicated itself on the side of the mind. Mind must have its structure; it must have its function. Recall that instead of finding the functions of matter in its behaviour, that is, in its dynamic relations, which could be nothing else but mind as the early Greeks were clever enough to see, Descartes thought that mind, as something dynamic, must have its own structure in the form of a mental substance. Once committed to this view there is nothing to do but to duplicate the structure-function problem on the side of mind. Once the duplication process is begun, there is no place to stop. So Külpe and his followers, under the influence of their predecessors, did for mind what Descartes had done for reality. They created a dualism. Mind has its material aspects, sensations and images. But instead of discovering the functions of mind in the behaviour of these sensations and images, they thought that mental functions must have their own status as mental substances. So there results still another dualism on the side of the acts of mind. Mental contents are left behind; acts must exhibit their own structural and functional aspects. In all, therefore, there are mental contents, mental acts-as-contents, and mental acts, and so on ad infinitum.

§ 7. INTROSPECTION AND MECHANISM. It hardly seems possible that a psychology based upon introspection and defined as the science of consciousness could be mechanistic. But it turned out just as easy to be a mental mechanist as a physical one. There is nothing on the physical side of the dualism that compels one to be a mechanist. One chooses to be a mechanist by the assumptions underlying his thinking. A mechanist is one who does not see, in the data of science, evidence of any organising or directing principle, and accordingly interprets events as happening in a schemeless and undirected, purposeless way, yet determined by law. A curious paradox! To avoid the paradox, the mechanist may insist that he really does not mean that events are determined by law, but only that events occur with such regularity and precision, under observed and constant conditions, that he can make predictions. His laws are the laws of chance, which are really not laws at all. He will say that uniformities are statistical and have no meaning except a mathematical one.

§ 8. CRITICISM OF MECHANISM. An illogical position will give itself away sooner or later. The last assertion gives the mechanist away. Mathematical meanings are products of the human “mind”; they are laws of reasoning, of intelligence, conceived in accordance with a plan and executed with reference to an end. They belong to a teleological system of events, at least while being thought by a human being. Why then, should one turn right round and apply these meanings to a physical world with the assumption that now they belong to a mechanistic system?

The reason does not lie in the materialistic assumption that the physical world is made of matter. Mechanistic and materialistic thinking are not necessary bedfellows. The reason lies in the method selected in order to explain a given event, or a given object. This method is that of explaining the whole in terms of its parts, with the assumption that parts, for some mysterious reason or other, sum themselves together, or subtract from one another. It makes no difference whether that whole be defined as physical or mental, unconscious or conscious. The laws of association so popular in psychology are mechanistic laws, and as such are fictions. Applied to mind, they make mind as much of a machine as the physical world is supposed to be; or they are laws of chance, which is to deny that they are laws at all.

But this is only one part of the mechanistic story. The assumption that wholes are additively and subtractively obtained by a juggling of parts leads to elementarism, the belief that there are parts by their own nature indivisible, unanalysable, indestructible-in other words, elements. There is a fallacious logic lurking beneath the supposition of elements. An element is by definition a discrete, independent entity, capable of isolation from everything else; it is sui generis, self sufficient, self-defining. As everyone knows, no one thing exists out of relation to anything else. To admit this is to admit that an element does not have independent existence, that it derives its properties from those things upon which it depends, and is therefore neither discrete nor sui generis, neither an entity, nor an element.

And finally, the mechanistic position harbours the notion that cause and effect apply to the action of one discrete thing upon another, one part upon another part. It divides the universe into blocks; mind into a mosaic. The laws of “physical” dynamics could not account for such a monstrosity. Imagine several dominoes standing close together in a row. Tip an end-one over and the entire row falls down. It is only in popular language that one domino knocked the other down. Why did they all fall down instead of up? Why did some of them not fall up and some down? They are all parts of a gravitational system which must be taken into account in explaining their behaviour.

§ 9. EXAMINATION OF KÜLPE’S SYSTEM. With this somewhat lengthy digression it will now be possible to inspect the Külpean psychology a little more closely in order to ascertain its mechanistic character. Mind was analysed into elements, and among them were, to be sure, intents, purposes, Aufgaben, acts of will and resolutions of the ego. But these were elements, parts. To be efficacious they must act upon other parts in accordance with whatever strength they might possess as parts or elements just like dominoes standing in a row. And so, it was held, a purpose attracts ideas to it and thus selects the subsequent train of thought and fulfils itself in that way. Or, a purpose in mind pushes the subsequent train of ideas into line. These parts obtain their strength by means of association. The discovery of something in mental life of the same order as the gravitational system in the domino illustration, that really explains why purposes can be efficacious, was precluded by the structural and atomistic bias of the theory under which this psychology was formulated.

§ 10. VITALISM. There are many biological theories of life and even a larger number of psychological theories of mind, formulated within the logical framework of mechanistic thinking, that purpose to avoid these dilemmas. These are the vitalistic theories. They can never be made to work and therefore have never been satisfactory. There is good reason, for vitalism comes into being as a protest against mechanism when mechanism is interpreted as materialism. Consequently, it is naively supposed that substituting the terms life, vital force, or psychic energy for “material” energy, resolves the dilemma. But it repeats the dilemma of mechanistic thinking with a new set of terms. Life is regarded as an entity, something elemental, a part of the organism that somehow makes the rest of it go. An ego is posited in mental life as a part of mind, something elemental, which controls all the other parts one by one. “Machinism” over again and no possible way of explaining how the control is effected. There is a way out of the difficulty, which fits the so-called mental and physical worlds equally well; but we are getting ahead of our story.

§ 11. ATOMISM IN MODERN PSYCHOLOGY: BEHAVIOURISM. Typical psychologies of the structural movement have been considered and inspected critically. By far the greater number of efforts have been directed toward the formulation of functional systems. Indeed, the Külpean psychology ended in a vitalistic functionalism that turned out to be mechanistic as all true vitalisms must. The psychology that has stood out in sharp contrast to the types thus far considered, is behaviourism.

Behaviourism followed the dualistic doctrine even more naïvely than introspectionism, for the latter would refer to physiology when necessary, but the former almost boastfully declared its repudiation of mental life. It refused to work on the “mind-side” of the fence. All one needed to do was to “put in a stimulus” and to watch what “came out”! It was a stimulus-response psychology. The elements were reflexes. Just as sensory elements were supposed to combine into all other kinds of mental processes in introspection psychology, so reflexes were supposed, in behaviouristic theory, to combine and concatenate into instincts and habits. Again the appeal was to laws of association, now translated into laws of the conditioned reflex. Responses were built up and taken away by addition and subtraction. In the logical framework of its assumptions and working principles, behaviourism was structuralism over again on the side of muscular movement. The psychologies of Watson and Titchener were twins, the one on one side and the other on the other side of the dualistic barrier. The only excuse behaviourism had for claiming a title to be a functional system was its use of the term behaviour and its effort to predict. Its assumptions and working principles were atomistic. Just as, in association psychology, mental development was treated as a passive outcome of the chance order in which sense-impressions were aroused contiguously in time and in space, so the development of behaviour was construed in behaviouristic theory as a passive outcome of mechanical, conditioning processes. The new, both in mental life and in behaviour, was nothing but a rejuggling of numerous elements, a rehashing of the old. The elements were assumed to exist in the beginning. Unfortunately for behaviouristic theory, however, it has been demonstrated that parts are not primary and that reflexes will not integrate with each other to form the complicated movements required by the theory. (P. 108.)

§ 12. OTHER FORMS OF FUNCTIONALISM. Other varieties of so-called functionalism wandered less far into the pitfalls of the mechanistic position but, as was inevitable under a dualistic scheme, struggled with the vitalistic substitute for materialism in an atomistic framework of thinking. These systems, however, were much more wieldy, more comprehensive, and gave a much more satisfactory picture of human behaviour just as it is found. Perhaps one reason for this was the fact that they refused to ignore the larger and more human problems of psychology; another is the appeal that vitalism in any form makes to human sentiment because of its use of such terms as will, purpose and drive.

§ 13. “SELF” PSYCHOLOGY. Among these systems were, first, the “self” psychologies in which the source of mental processes was sought in an ego or self. This self was a substructure that cemented unrelated bits of experience together; it was one part of mind, the core, perchance, that acted upon all the other parts. Accordingly, every experience supposedly contained an element of self-awareness. In this general way the self was intended to explain the unity and continuity of mental life. The weakness of this type of psychology, like any vitalism, was its inability to account for the technique by which the self imposed its influence upon the rest of mental life. It had either to rely upon some mysterious psychic power, capable of doing anything required of it, or upon the machinery of apperception and association. Ward in England and Calkins in the United States wrote psychologies that have emphasised the self. In these psychologies is to be found a serious but abortive attempt to avoid the absurdities of building up a whole from its parts.

§ 14. HEDONIC AND HORMIC PSYCHOLOGIES. Other systems have stressed feeling (pleasure-pain) as the fountain of mental life. In these systems feeling is the dynamic aspect of mind, something of which all other mental processes partake; or it is an attendant of all other processes, giving to any complex state its dynamic character. Thus it explains continuity. Unity may be accounted for on the ground that all other mental processes are offsprings of feeling.

Quite similar to these systems are the conative psychologies that find in the basic aspect of mental life a striving, a tendency for all mental processes to pass beyond themselves into others. A given experience, by virtue of its inherent nature, demands its own completion. Conation is construed as one general aspect of mind, paralleled in any given process by two other aspects, feeling and cognition. In certain of the conation psychologies there is a perceptible approach to a position that is neither vitalistic nor mechanistic but contains some of the desirable features of both. The atomistic logic is implicitly denied in Stout’s acceptance of the law of relativity with regard to mental processes. Every mental state is what it is because of its relation to other mental states. Mental development, likewise, hinges upon the fact that modes of consciousness depend upon their psychological relations to other modes. Then, too, there is a recognition that the new in mental life emerges out of the old.

The essence of conscious behaviour, according to McDougall, is a striving toward a definite end; hence all behaviour is purposive or hormic. The simplest forms of behaviour reveal themselves as impulses or instincts which, as they run their course, involve intelligence. A certain amount of mental development comes about through a differentiation process from very crude beginnings all under the influence of some instinct that demands its own completion. On the other hand, the organism is equipped with habit mechanisms that can be woven together through a purposeful use and disuse of them by the organism itself. At this juncture McDougall attempts to avoid the conventional laws of association by relying upon a drainage theory of learning.

All the conative or hormic psychologies make, at least implicitly, a distinction between what is mechanical and what is not, a distinction that is disastrous to the system. Sooner or later the author finds, in one form of behaviour or another, evidence of a building up of a unified reaction by the piecemeal method; and the older concepts of association and apperceptive synthesis are relied upon to account for the products. This splitting of the organism against itself is an inevitable consequence of the dualistic position. The body functions as a machine, according to the mechanistic theory that is supposed to hold on the matter-side of the dualistic fence. Mind is obviously related to the body and must somehow be capable of functioning as the body functions, like a machine. Yet it is not a machine; it can take over the mechanical products of bodily activity and use them to suit its needs. To do this the mind must possess the mechanical working technique of the body as well as a teleological technique of its own of fulfilling purposes. Accordingly, the mechanical principles of association and apperception must be resorted to in the end; for these are mechanistic techniques analogous to those supposedly found in the physical world. They are the mental operations through which mental atoms are supposed to combine into larger complexes, akin to chemical union and synthesis. The hormic and conative principles, therefore, fail to meet the final test; although they are distinct steps in advance of other functional principles. They do recognise the demand for purpose in behaviour, and contain certain possibilities of a system that need not become self-inconsistent in order to bring the laws of behaviour into relation with the laws of Nature elsewhere. The difficulty arose in making the assumption that there is, strictly speaking, any such thing as a machine, and that atomistic logic will hold anywhere in Nature.

§ 15. PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY. Next, in its application of the principle of striving (another case of the hormic principle), Freudian psychology borrowed definitely from the “physical” laws of dynamics and did much to promulgate the conception that human behaviour, including mind, is the expression of an energy system. Its systematic possibilities, however, were clouded at the outset, first by its fantastic supposition of a subconscious mind, borrowed from attention psychology, and second, by its undue emphasis upon sex. Nevertheless, its frontal attack upon the problems of real human life, its subjugation of personality and the emotions to definite scientific inquiry by methods that yielded a surprising amount of prediction and control, place it among the best contributions of the century. Its systematic importance accrues to its emphasis upon a balance of striving tendencies. Personality is normal so long as one’s pains balance his pleasures. Desires are dynamic, conative impulses, demanding their own gratification. If gratification is not obtained in one way, it will inevitably be obtained in another, because desires are energy-potentials constantly seeking release. The human being will resolve its tension in some form of an equilibrium, either in the process of attaining a goal or by acquiring counter desires that compensate and therefore bring about a balance. While these principles were first applied to abnormal behaviour, psychologists were quick to see that similar principles obtained in normal behaviour.

§ 16. THE WAY OUT OF THE DEAD-END: Gestalt. Meanwhile, what may be characterised, without much question, as the outstanding psychological movement of the century had commenced, namely, Gestalt psychology led by Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka. Its claim to importance lies in the discovery that unlocked a new psychological world. It pulled aside the curtains of a new and larger whole into which the best of previous efforts can be seen to fit, and it has already gone far in painting a picture of that whole. Its contributions range all the way from a general conception of man’s place in Nature and his relations to the “outside world,” to precise and revolutionary disclosures in the specialised fields of learning, vision and touch.

The movement is still in its infancy; but it may be characterised, without premature judgment, as an expression within the field of psychology of a widespread change in point of view that has been taking place in all branches of human thought. This general change, to hazard an interpretation, may be characterised in many ways. First, it is a complete shift from atomistic logic and elementarism, even from its subtler form the synthetic approach. For synthesis presupposes chaos among pre-existing elements and that the elements exist out of relation to themselves and therefore out of relation to anything else. This position forever immunises the elements against being brought into relationship with each other. Second, it is a repudiation of dualism and its camouflaged forms—psycho-physical parallelism and all metaphysical, epistemological and ethical dichotomies. It finds artificial and self-contradictory all distinctions between the mechanical and the vital, the blind and the purposive, the determined and the free. It sees no conflict between the conditions under which so-called physical laws are found to operate, and the conditions under which the laws of “mind” are found to operate. It can discover no conflict between the laws of dynamics and the purposive execution of activities by conscious, human beings.

It finds in the physicist’s laws of dynamics the implication that energy systems are organic wholes, in principle, organisms; that the logical significance of life and will are found in the unity of meteorological, magnetic, temperature and gravitational fields; that these unitary fields, in virtue of their own nature, control all events that transpire within them, after the same fashion, in principle, whereby man voluntarily moves the parts of his body, speaks, and thinks. It discovers in the concept of potential a point of reference that frees the scientist from the dilemmas of atomism; for, unlike the atom, a potential is not self-defining; it presupposes a dynamic relation to other potentials, a system of differentials in which one potential exists only in relation to the others. It applies the logic of relativity to the descriptive unit.

Unlike previous notions of sui generis forces, which were atoms of energy, the organised field of force requires no reference to a push from behind or a pull from the front, no striving or driving or urging that presupposes a mind within the atom of energy or within the line of force to furnish the beginning, the direction, and the termination of a given event. All of the dynamic psychologies of the past have made these vitalistic assumptions.

The physicist has advanced far in the development of relativistic logic, the logic of unity; but approach him to-day with the organismic implications of his own thinking and he will retreat as if from some loathsome object, so ingrained in his mind is the supposition that the laws of dynamics are mechanistic laws. The thinking of the physicist, no less than of the psychologist, is saturated with philosophical tradition. That man should consider anything physical to behave as if it were mental is to admit blasphemy and to disgrace the science of physics; to believe that anything mental behaves as if it were physical is a sacrilege and marks the psychologist at once as a hopeless materialist, even brands him as an atheist. Both sides have false traditions concerning the dignity and high intellectual status of their science. The materialist and mechanist on the one hand, and the purposivist and vitalist on the other, are suffering from false intellectual pains. Not to be a mechanist is not to be a scientist, and not to be a vitalist is not to be a real human being. The consistent way to be a scientist and at the same time a human being is to be neither a mechanist nor a vitalist. While, therefore, the logic of the organismic position has long been implied in the way that the physicist has pictured the forces of Nature, face him with his own assumptions, and he is at once on the defensive. Nowadays a popular mode of defence is the seeking of refuge behind mathematics. Nature is not dynamic; for the purposes of sciences it is merely a table of probabilities. This position, of course, precludes the use of all descriptive terms; in fact it denies the validity of description in science, and of all concepts except those of number. This position, too, is taken in ignorance of the fact that mathematics itself rests upon an organismic logic.

§ 17. CONVERGENCE OF SCIENCES. It can hardly be claimed, therefore, that physics, even with its recent organismic implications, is responsible for the new movement. No one field, no one group of persons, is responsible. It has exhibited signs of life in various specialised fields, for it is a growth process, a matter of cultural development in human evolution. Philosophy has always flirted with the problem of unity, but always in the end as if it were something to be explained, always with an ultimate reliance upon atomistic principles; a proof that philosophy was fighting the imperfections of its own atomism without solving the problem. Sociology, biology and psychology began almost at the same time, independently, to experiment with the new idea, while its significance for epistemology was being felt by the philosopher. The experimenting is still in progress.

§ 18. HISTORY OF THE DESCRIPTIVE UNIT IN PSYCHOLOGY. So persistently are the layman and the scientist still thinking in terms of obsolete descriptive units, logical atoms, that the approach to the new psychology is fraught with the serious danger of reading the old into the new and missing the meaning of the new. In order to offset this difficulty, let us review, briefly, the history of atomistic logic.

§ 19. ATOMISM. Atomism was born in a premature attempt to account for complex events in Nature. It began in the thinking of primitive man and, in a similar form, is found in the thinking of children. Note how a young child observes a complex situation, say a complicated picture. It is a kitchen scene. Ask him to tell you about the picture and he enumerates discrete, isolated objects:—a chair, table, woman, dish, cat. Observing is a form of structural analysis; it takes things in relation and abstracts them from other things, leaving out the relations as far as explicit interpretation goes. Primitive man did the same thing. Upon looking out over the world about him he observed only discrete objects. Here was a tree, there a brook, somewhere else a mountain; there was rain and thunder; there were birds, animals, and other people. When it came to an explanation of these things he apprehended only one object at a time; each was a discrete, isolated entity, a whole, homogeneous in content, unanalysed and unanalysable. Since he thought in terms of object-entities, another discrete, isolated object must be the cause of any given thing. This object was another whole, another discrete entity, a spirit, phantom, ghost or God. By implication each object had its own independent origin; it was causally related to no other thing except its own ghost.

In so far as primitive man had a rational philosophy, therefore, his universe was a pluralism (monistic) and a chaos. Here, logically, developed the notion of a descriptive unit and this unit was a discrete, independent entity, unanalysable, homogeneous, and indivisible in structure. It was the forerunner of the logical atom, the elemental unit. Each unit, by implication, was an organic whole. But in the course of evolution, man failed to observe the laws of his own thinking, as will soon be evident.

By the time we reach early civilised man, there had developed the concept of a larger or more comprehensive unity, that of a complex whole. This type of whole is more difficult to grasp, and the logic involved in explaining it is very abstract. This is the crux of the issue to-day. Man committed the error of over-simplification. Since the elemental type of unity was easier to envisage (its organic character overlooked) and had been conceived first, it was only natural that the ancient Greeks should have attempted an explanation of the harder in terms of the easier, the complex in terms of the simple, the higher in terms of the lower. Remember that in the very nature of the observing process parts of complex situations are apprehended, first, as wholes. This has been true phylogenetically; it is true in the intellectual development of the child. Thus it happened that complex situations were reduced to, and explained by, atoms. We have been doing this ever since, first in one way and then in another.

§ 20. COMPLEX UNITY. But the Greeks were shrewd reasoners. They saw that atoms were of their own accord unrelated to each other when construed as discrete entities, and at the same time as the exclusive reality in the universe. They knew that atoms, alone, could not provide unity and organisation of complex wholes. But the atom was basic; it was the simplest existing thing, and simplicity is basic. Thus, upon an original conception of unity, that of structural homogeneity, another was built, namely, that of a derived unity. The latter was a unity to be derived from a plurality; an order to be obtained from chaos; things in relation to be obtained from things out of relation. It was an impossible problem, but its impossibility was a discovery of the twentieth century. That man should have tried for 2000 years to solve an impossible problem is not so surprising if there is anything at all in the process of evolution in human thought. What, then, were these futile efforts, keeping in mind that man has struggled with two conceptions of unity, the primary and the derived, a situation that presupposes in the beginning unity within a chaotic pluralism?

These futile attempts to account for derived unity have given us our vitalisms and mechanistic systems down through the ages. The necessity of carrying along two types of unity, the elemental and the complex, has resulted in no end of confusion, not only in current thought concerning current problems but in the interpretation of historical systems. Over this period of twenty centuries, whenever man has talked or written about a unity that was real to him he has defined it in the way primitive man defined it, as a homogeneous, simple thing. Thus he forced upon himself an artificial dualism of unities, for the unity that is real and primary must account for the unity that is secondary and artificial.

We see this confusion in all vitalistic systems. An organism, a complex of parts, functions as an organic whole. But this unity is not indigenous, logically, for the body is a machine, an assemblage. There must be something that gives it unity, apart from the machine itself, something that makes it run, a force separable from it, a life or spirit. Indeed, the universe itself, if made of atoms, must have a soul or mind that gives unity to the isolated parts. This is precisely the function of the ancient idea of a World Soul. Thus conceived, life or soul is an arch-entity, a simple, unanalysable, discrete thing, that can only be named and not described. It is a King ruling over his subjects, which are the parts, holding them together by no other instrument than his own fiat. These Kings have reigned in every branch of human thought.

§ 21. ARISTOTLE. In Aristotle’s psychology, for example, we have one of these Kings, the Soul of the mind, a unit without parts, indivisible and unchangeable; and then, we have the Body of the mind, divisible into parts, to be explained by its parts, a mental machine that can be described while the soul can only be named. Aristotle worked industriously to resolve this implicit dualism in his notion of form; but he failed completely, for the soul has many discrete forms which add and subtract. Space does not here permit an analysis of Aristotle in detail. Suffice it to say that to read a conception of organic unity into Aristotle’s thinking is grossly to falsify Aristotle, for he had no higher conception of unity than did primitive man beyond the realisation of a complex type of unity whose nature he utterly failed to comprehend. He confined his unity to his notion of form; and failing to realise what this could have meant, he left it behind, and proceeded with the usual atomism of his time.

§ 22. JAMES. It was the same in the case of William James. In the Thought, with a capital T, James postulates the vitalistic Soul of the mind, the agent of unity, and separates it neatly from the objects of the thought. There, in the realm of objects thought of, we have the atomistic pluralism of old, the Body of the mind, a mental machine composed of an infinite array of psychic atoms of all shapes and sizes—sensations, space-perceptions, time-perceptions, fiats, ideomotor actions, feelings of relation; a heterogeneous army, each item by definition discrete and unrelated to every other except through the fiat of a unifying Thought. Out there in the realm of objects thought of, association could be assumed to operate without implying original chaos in mental life. His was a most artistic dodging of the issue; a shutting up of the unity of mind in one box, a simple Thought, just as Aristotle shut up the unity of mind in the simple Soul; while a chaotic plurality ruled in the field of experience. A scheme cleverly executed; a battle bravely fought, for no man fought atomism harder than James, and no man ever landed in a purer atomism when he was done.

§ 23. TITCHENER. It was the same in the case of Titchener. Here we have a less explicit separation of unity and plurality from one another; but a none the less virile dualism. The unity of experience for Titchener was as safely encased against description, or any form of elucidation, as was that of primitive man; it was a unity that, like Aristotle’s Soul and James’s Thought, was named, and that is all. Nothing was done about it. This whole was Titchener’s so-called genetic unit, behind which he always sought refuge when his chaotic pluralism of described experience was challenged; or else he sought refuge in an implied organisation of the nervous system, rendering consciousness a meaningless epiphenomenon. The units of described experience were logical abstractions, we are told. Nevertheless these, not the genetic wholes with which experience commences, were the working tools of psychology. These, not the genetic units, were the real mind, the mind of psychological science. Here, in the mind of psychological science were the elements, the dimensions, or the phenomena (whatever they happen to be called, it makes no difference) that must be united by the artificial means of attention and association. Once more there was the secreting of unity within an isolated compartment. As a consequence of this procedure, coupled with an extremely narrow definition of psychology, we have an aggregate of alleged psychological fact as meaningless and artificial as any in the history of psychology. The dualism of logical and genetic units is the form taken, in Titchener’s system, by the dualism of simple and complex unity. This dualism cannot exist, even for the purpose of science. Thus, Titchener, like Aristotle and dames, ended in pure atomism and a chaotic pluralism. But in Titchener, as well as in his predecessors, we had valiant psychologists who made lasting systematic contributions, albeit these contributions were negative.

§ 24. PERSISTENCE of VITALISM. We have indicated the persistence of the vitalistic logic in man’s psychological efforts to handle the problem of derived unity. In every instance the experiences actually dealt with, described or explained were like the world of primitive man, a pluralistic chaos having no unity in its own right, but dependent, for its organisation, upon an external agency, a deus ex machina in the form of a capitalised Thought, a soul, a genetic unit, or the nervous system. It makes no difference; the systems are all alike in principle.

If space permitted it might be shown how the same errors are to be found in the psychologies of the conational or hormic type, where emphasis upon the atomic unit shifts more explicitly from structure to function. The descriptive unit becomes a living dynamo of force, a striving toward a self-imposed end. The direction of the striving is given within the homogeneous unit by its own fiat; which is another species of deus ex machina logically analogous to the spirit of primitive man. Or, the direction of the striving is determined by association. The problem of complex unity is solved in neither case.

§ 25. PERSISTENCE OF MECHANISM. Meanwhile we witness another line of development, and perhaps the most popular of all. The logic of this trend is exactly the same as that of vitalism and, in the end, a deus ex machina external to the process to be explained is appealed to. This is the mechanistic trend. It was not long before the assumption of fixed atoms or elements was discovered to be a faulty one. Elementarism did, truly enough, presuppose chaos. But what is the theorist to do, who, left with a derived and unexplained unity on his hands, refuses to admit into his system so tangible an entity as a unifying agent? Simple enough. The elements do it themselves. The complex whole is produced by a union, or seriation, or fusion, or blending of the logical atoms. The atoms are not fixed; they are capable of losing their identity in the course of blending. The derived whole, or complex unity, is a product of synthesis. This is the popular mechanistic view of to-day.

Here, at last, it seemed, was a conception that avoided the absurdities of vitalism. But which, after all, is more absurd, to obtain unity through the fiat of a deus ex machina, or to derive something from nothing? By definition a complex whole, obtained through synthesis, is derived from elements which in the beginning are unrelated and have no unity among themselves. Since the parts are originally out of dynamic relation to each other they are forever immune from each other’s influence. There is no way of getting them related except through dynamic relations and, if the relations already exist, which must be true if the parts are ever to be related in the future, it means that already they are parts of a unified whole; and in that case the notion of synthesis is redundant. In other words, the assumptions necessary in order to have synthesis make synthesis unnecessary. On the other hand, if the parts are construed as unrelated in the beginning, a mysterious agency somehow brings order out of chaos; plays the rôle of a deus ex machina bringing unity into a plurality. This mysterious agent is creative synthesis, a process that derives the properties of the whole from no source whatever, creates a unity out of whole cloth. This, logically, is a more absurd position than vitalism which frankly admits the existence of the agent.

Thus, in psychology, the concepts of association and attention have evolved about the central theme of synthesis, the faith that something can come from nothing, the one applying the faith empirically and the other applying it rationally. Both attention and association were agencies conceived for the purpose of deriving something that did not originally exist, namely, unity. To insist upon them now is simply to follow the old atomistic logic and to presuppose the impossible, namely, that elements out of dynamic relation to each other in the beginning can ever, by any intelligible means, be brought into relation. There is no instrument known to man that can perform such a miracle; if such an agency is assumed it must be a deus ex machina.

§ 26. DESCRIPTION AND EXPLANATION. The atomistic thinker of today hides behind the meaningless expression, “I am not trying to explain; I am only describing”; and goes merrily along, unwilling to inspect his assumptions, at the same time erecting one atomistic system after another. The scientist describes phenomena and infers relations; to treat of things in relation means to explain. Association and attention deals with relations, not with phenomena of direct experience. However sincere, therefore, our attempt may be to make no implications concerning association and attention, the acceptance and use of the concepts imply the need for a derivation of unity from chaos. Indeed, the laws of contiguity and repetition are intended to specify the conditions under which unity arises out of chaos; they are supposedly harmless tools indicating how bonds are formed between discrete and previously unrelated items of experience or units of behaviour; they are the supposed conditions of synthesis and other processes of complication by accretion and summation. That synthesis can be no more than a fictitious summative process is proved by the assumption of nothing but the unrelated parts in the beginning.

The mechanistic hypothesis, as compared with the vitalistic, has the disadvantage of offering no explanation of how a thought or a motor reaction obtains its direction, a difficulty added to the previously mentioned absurdity of the synthetic conception. To presuppose a mental set that gives direction to one’s thoughts, or a predisposition that gives direction to one’s movements, merely clouds the issue; for the mental set or the predisposition must in the same miraculous fashion have become associated, through repetition, with the thoughts and movements over which it supposedly exerts control. A vitalistic force could, logically, be endowed with a fiat to give direction and purpose to behaviour; but association cannot. No associationistic system provides for the original direction of the experiences that are to be associated together; nor does it account for the direction of thought after the associations have been formed. The items of experience originally have no meaning, no intent; they are accomplishing nothing, going nowhere. They are capricious, chaotic happenings; and once chaos, always chaos. Contiguity and repetition of response have no divine right to condition direction of response and, as such, have no efficacy whatever. Once a response has direction and once an idea has meaning, there are no bonds to be formed; there is nothing for contiguity and repetition to accomplish. As circumstances of behaviour, they are, like synthesis, redundant.

§ 27. NEW PRINCIPLE OF EXPLANATION. Thus the futility of any line of vitalistic and mechanistic reasoning has become apparent. The realisation of the futility marks another step in the evolution of science—all science—not alone psychology. There has arisen a new conception of the descriptive unit, a third phase in the history of scientific logic. The new descriptive unit is not the structurally homogeneous whole of primitive man, nor the complex and derived whole of vitalism and mechanistic logic, but the organic whole, recognised not as a problem but as a solution; not as a fact but as a principle; not something to be explained but something in terms of which to explain. This is the complex whole, not composed of parts but producing them; not made of parts but capable of differentiation. This descriptive unit is dynamic, not in a vitalistic sense but in an organismic sense, for dynamic properties are describable and measurable only in terms of differentials in energy potentials. Each whole is a field, differentiated into alignments of potentials, or structurisations of energy, known as phenomena. Each potential is a relative thing; it is definable, in fact exists, only in terms of the whole, that is, through the organic character of the whole.

The problem of agency, unsatisfactorily met by vitalism with its deus ex machina, and by mechanistic systems with their miraculous derivation of something from nothing, is solved. The conditioning factor is the field property of the total unit, a measurable quantity that is more than the properties of the parts within the field. The problem of the artificiality of analysis is solved, for the larger whole necessary to decrease the limitations of knowledge need only be discovered; it does not have to be manufactured. The problem of indestructibility of the unit is solved. Unity is a matter of form existing under organismic laws of dynamics. The problem of two unities is solved. Plurality differentiates in an organised fashion from an undifferentiated but dynamically balanced or unified field. This plurality is derived within a unity not by machinery but by the laws of dynamics. The problem of the direction of thought and of movement is solved; for they are construed as differentiations within a field of energy whose alignment of potentials gives direction to any activity within the field. The laws of energy are not mechanical; they are organismic laws.

It might be shown that such a basic law in physics as the second law of thermodynamics harbours the assumption that all measurable and observable phenomena in Nature are differentiations of a pre-existing organic system, whether we are thinking of a gravitational system or of a human being. The measurable and the observable lie on the side of loss, the resolution of differentials in potential toward a condition of homogeneity. The gains—the other side of the losses—are, in Nature, processes of growth and evolution which, as such, are not measurable, and they are observable only after they have occurred. In human experience the gains are the emergings of experiences which, the instant they are observed, must be jotted down on the other side of Nature’s loss and gain account.

It could be explained how the new physics, with its law of uncertainty, presupposes an organismic situation in Nature in which certainty is proportional to the knowledge of the organic whole within which a given event is occurring. The more isolated the part the less certain the prediction of its behaviour. It could be shown how relativity and the organismic logic are aspects of the same evolution in scientific thought; how the new descriptive unit places all events in Nature upon the same level functionally, and on different levels phenomenologically; how it places all the sciences on the same plane where principles are universal; how it denies all dualisms; how it limits causation or determinism in all science; how it harmonises purposive behaviour, ethics, and a theory of values, with physical science. Above all, the new descriptive unit forces science to inspect more carefully the atomistic mores that are still so prevalent. A few of these principles will be discussed in the following chapters. The others must remain for more detailed inspections elsewhere.

So complete a reversal in thinking of necessity causes confusion. That the new unit is a whole of whatever simplicity or complexity from the standpoint of its appearance is a principle easy to understand when read, but difficult to understand when followed through. It means that whether a given phenomenon is a chemical atom, a gravitational system, man or the universe, it is a unit of the same dynamic or functional complexity. As many principles are required to account for the simplest thing in Nature as for the most complex; but remember that relative complexity refers only to the structural or phenomenal aspect of the unit, the degree of its differentiation. In plan all units are equally simple or equally complex.

Each whole or unit has a form or configuration of its own, a phenomenological whole-character; and its unity accrues to organisation. Complexity, wholeness, unity, from a functional standpoint, are primary, not derived; organisation is a principle, not a problem. In the beginning as well as in the end there is order, not chaos. Unity is not something to be explained, but a source of explanation. And there is only one type of explanation; the complex explains the simple; the whole explains the part. Size and detail make no difference because they are relative. Variability of performance in no way changes the situation. Structural analysis does not simplify nor does it add explanations; it merely complicates the picture. Where details are useful for a more thorough understanding of an object or an event, analysis is justified; but if an explanation is to be sought in the products of analysis, the searcher is doomed to failure. The explanation can be found only outside, not within, the thing to be explained.

So completely is our thought saturated with atomism that every time we turn around we receive a shock. The resistance to the new logic is terrific. The mechanist holds it in contempt on the ground that it is mysticism and vitalism; the vitalist resents it because, to him, it is sheer machinism and materialism. Neither one understands it. The atomist, unable to rid himself of his atomistic shackles, can see nothing new in it; the mathematical scientist, temporarily a sceptic with regard to the descriptive and conceptual aspects of science, and unobservant of the organismic assumptions in mathematics, seeks refuge behind meaningless statistical laws. All of this is happening, while at the same time no one will admit that orthodox conceptions in science are satisfactory.

CHAPTER III

BIOLOGICAL ORGANISATION

§ 1. SCIENCE AND THE “SCIENCES”. If the examination of modern psychology in its relation to other sciences were complete, it would include the discussion of many problems. It would show that exactness versus inexactness is fundamentally the same in all science; that the question of determinism versus indeterminism now attracting the attention of the physicist is by no means confined to physics; that in the onward march toward specialisation of methods and interests, scientists have forgotten the wisdom of the ancient Greeks who saw Nature-as-a-whole and defined the study of it as physics; that the philosopher, bowed down through the ages with artificial theological quibbles, struggled unsuccessfully with dichotomies that the Greeks would not have tolerated.

Our discussion would make it clear that the tradition of looking to physics as the last source of appeal in scientific explanation is merely a social tradition, one of the numerous mores that so often dominate the scientific attitude. The physicist’s recent discovery that energy will not observe itself would appear, in principle, like the philosopher’s contention of long ago that mind cannot observe itself. Our discussion would explain how the phobia of being anthropomorphic does not pertain to functional problems, but only to phenomenological description. We would prove that terms like sensory process, feeling, emotion, thinking, will and self describe, without the inference of intermediate phenomena, specific forms of energy as truly as do terms like heat, light, electron and water; that science is relative, and that the dependence of one science upon another extends from physics to psychology as well as from psychology to physics; that one science is not basic to another from the standpoint of explanation, but only as an understanding of problems is furthered by a knowledge of concrete details and a more varied illustration of principles. This is because the laws that apply in one field are the same, in their logical form, as those that apply in another. Content is not the determiner of principle. Principle is the determiner of content.

§ 2. ENERGY UNITS. We would point out in detail why degrees of complexity accrue only to the phenomenological side of nature, not to the functional. This means that forms of energy vary in the complexity of their apparent content; that is to say, in the number of phenomena to which they can be reduced by known methods of analysis. Functionally, all systems of energy, no matter what their complexity of differentiation, are units; man is no more complex, in principle, than a chemical atom; his behaviour is as simple as that of a falling body. Functionally, the words complex and simple are interchangeable; phenomenologically they are not. Mental terms are phenomenological, not functional, in meaning; they describe the form or quality of energy systems in a certain stage of differentiation. Forms, or phenomenological properties, disappear under structural analysis; the analysis destroys them, or assumes that they have been left behind. It is in this sense that parts cannot explain the whole, and that chemistry does not explain physiology, nor physiology conscious behaviour.

Compare a gentle breeze with a cyclone. The former is phenomenologically simpler than the latter. Its form or configuration is simpler; but the laws that govern the first are no less numerous than the laws that govern the second; essentially the same things are happening in the one case as in the other, but under different sets of conditions. The wider difference between air currents and man’s behaviour is a again a matter of form, a phenomenological, not a functional, difference.

§ 3. ENERGY A NEUTRAL CONCEPT. And finally, we would discuss the difference between logical validity and statistical reliability; the organismic assumptions of mathematical reasoning; the applicability of the new descriptive unit to philosophy, ethics and religion.

We have said that the new descriptive unit is based on the laws of dynamics. These will be interpreted in their logical or conceptual form, not in their mathematical form. Moreover, we shall classify under the laws of dynamics certain principles that have not generally received expression in science; but these principles differentiate from the same set of assumptions that are implicit in the concepts of physics. As we shall employ the so-called physical term energy, nothing spiritualistic or materialistic, vitalistic or mechanistic is meant or implied by it. There is nothing about the terms energy and dynamic that requires a mechanistic definition; nor can the prudence of giving them such a meaning be defended on scientific grounds. Indeed, if we inspect the logic of science carefully enough, it becomes necessary to avoid their historical, mechanistic significance. The reasonableness of the modern substitute, the organismic position, must now speak for itself in the light of the history that we have presented. Meanwhile the reader should keep in mind that an equivalent history could be written for any one of the descriptive sciences.

§ 4. UNIVERSAL LAWS OF NATURE. The laws of dynamics describe, in universal terms, the behaviour of energy systems. The unity of these wholes is dynamic, a matter of organisation with heterogeneity of structure, not a matter of unity in the sense of non-reducibility and indivisibility of structure, as characterised the old concept of unity. Such a whole would, by definition, be homogeneous in structure. It would be an element such as the soul in Aristotle’s philosophy, or the monad of Leibniz, or the conventional reflex and mental elements as employed in physiology and psychology to-day.

What, then, are these universal laws of Nature which explain man in all the complexity of his purposive behaviour, as readily as they explain the simplest events in the so-called physical world, provided those events are apprehended in relation to a system of energy? What are these laws of dynamics that, even when applied to a gravitational system, give us a picture not inconsistent with a teleological interpretation when, in other circumstances, the phenomenological complexity of the system demands it?

For convenience we have selected eight laws, and present them, first, in relation to physical and biological problems. The remainder of the book will be an application of the same basic laws to the problems of human nature.

§ 5. LAW OF FIELD PROPERTIES. The first of these laws of dynamics, as we propose them, is the law of field properties.[1] This is the principle that any item of reality is in its own right an integrated whole that is more than the sum of its parts; it possesses properties not characteristic of its parts. From a phenomenological standpoint it has a form or configuration of its own which is its sine qua non, or distinguishing characteristic; from a functional standpoint it is a dynamic field, an organised system whose unique quality accrues to unity of organisation. Thus the properties of the whole are field properties. A property may be regarded, from various standpoints, as a mode of behaviour of the whole, a peculiar relationship sustained by the unit toward a larger unit, or a relationship sustained toward parts within the system. This law changes the conventional idea of integration. Strictly speaking, parts are not integrated; it is the whole as such that exhibits integration. One should speak of an integrated whole, not an integration of parts.

Considered as a unit, the earth, for example, possesses a density gradient from its surface to its interior that no part or section within the whole possesses. Under the proper conditions, however, any section or part possesses its own secondary gradient; but its basic properties are dependent upon a major gradient to which it is subordinate. Again, by virtue of its peculiar organisation, water possesses properties which neither hydrogen nor oxygen possesses. In other words, as one thinks from the part to the whole there emerge properties that, so far as the parts are concerned, were non-existent. An electrostatic field and an atmospheric field, likewise, possess attributes over and above the properties of electrons or areas to which the fields can arbitrarily be reduced. Strictly speaking, therefore, the fields are not composed of electrons or areas; the fields are these parts-in-relation; and the relations are as important as the parts. Indeed, to describe a field as made up of parts plus relations is an artificial procedure, for there is no dividing line separating parts and the relations between them. Thus parts, or ingredients, are always to some extent artifacts, and become false atoms unless they are defined as having membership character in a whole of some kind.

Water is not in reality composed of hydrogen and oxygen; nor is the human body composed of cells. A molecule is a field exhibiting a certain characteristic form, depending upon the organisation of energy within it. The human body, from the time of conception to the time of death, is likewise a field of energy, a whole, dynamically over and above, but including its cells and organs.

All such units require general descriptive terms pertaining to the character of their organisation. The more specific of these descriptive terms are pattern, symmetry, balance, equilibrium, form, structurisation, configuration, alignment of stresses, strains and potentials, gradients, lines and fields of force. A field, no matter to what extent it is differentiated, is the descriptive unit of science. The descriptive unit of the human body is of necessity the body itself, not its parts; for the body is not the sum of its several organs. It is a unit of organisation, an equilibrated, balanced field of metabolic forces to which the organs and cells are subordinate.

These metabolic fields of force are called physiological gradients. Even the single cells, with very little differentiation of structure, is a completely integrated field whose typical, basic gradient extends from the surface to the interior with its highest rate of living at the surface and lowest rate of living, generally speaking, in the centre. Cut a single-celled organism in two, and the surface-interior gradient is exposed along the cut surface; but the original gradient changes. The point of lowest rate of living shifts to the centre; and the exposed surface takes on surface character throughout. Then we have two organisms instead of one. The change was conditioned by the dynamic relationship existing between the organism and forces impinging upon it from its environment. Thus, the surface-interior gradient is not something wholly indigenous to the organism; it is conditioned by, and in that sense derived from, a larger whole. Of course the gradient is in part conditioned by the structural composition of the organism itself but only under the laws of a larger system of energy which includes the organism.

The more complex organisms possess axial or head-tail gradients. One, a gradient in the nervous tissue, extends from the head to the tail, in which the highest rate of metabolism is at the head end and the lowest rate at the tail end. Another, in the muscular tissue, extends in the opposite direction, its low point at the head and high point at the tail. These gradients control the development of organs within the body.

§ 6. THE LAW OF DERIVED PROPERTIES. The second Of these laws may be called the law of derived properties. Parts derive their properties from the whole. Lift a stone and its property of weight will be observed. Yet look within the stone and weight cannot be found, for weight is a relationship between the stone and the gravitational system of which the stone is a part. In other words, weight is a derived property. Similarly, a given electric charge is not an independent thing. Its potential is derived from an electrical field whose other parts have other potentials, all subordinate to the field-as-a-whole. The highness of one potential is relative to lowness elsewhere, and hence cannot be defined in terms of itself; in fact, it does not exist by itself. Highness exists only in terms of lowness and vice versa. Each is derived from the organisation of a field.

Turning to the living organism we find an analogous state of affairs. The function of a given organ is derived through dynamic relationship between that organ and the body-as-a-whole. Whether or not, for example, the thyroid will secrete into the blood stream, depends upon a chemical balance between that organ and the rest of the body. Whether oxidation of blood and digestion will take place depends also upon dynamic relations, chemical or mechanical, existing between the tissues of the lungs and digestive tract, on the one hand, and the organic environment in which they are located, on the other. The function of a given areas in the brain depends upon activity taking place throughout the nervous system; for the entire system is a balance of potentials, disequilibrated as a unit by any pattern of stimulation. The response that follows is a process of regaining balance. The law of derived properties, like all laws of dynamics, then, is universal.

§ 7. THE LAW OF DETERMINED ACTION. Third, the whole conditions the activities of its parts. This may be called the law of determined action. The laws that parts obey are the laws of the whole; the whole, as such, obeys its own laws. Logically speaking, the whole determines the behaviour of its parts. With respect to itself, it is self-determining. From a philosophical standpoint there is freedom in the whole part relationship as one thinks from the whole to its parts; there is determinism when one thinks from the parts to the whole. Since any part is also a whole and every whole also a part, any object or event in Nature is free or determined depending upon one’s point of reference. Parts that are relatively segregable and therefore relatively independent are, by definition, units in their own right and follow the laws of wholes; but parts are never absolutely independent, no matter how specialised, or how apparently remote from their fields. Causation, as a logical concept, obtains only between a whole and its parts, never from part to part. We have complete indeterminism when parts are considered out of relation to wholes, the indeterminism that is now puzzling the physicist with respect to the electron, simply because he is studying parts out of relation to the systems of which they are members.

Think of a gravitational system again. When bodies move within such a system, the system as a whole conditions the movement. The direction and velocity with which apples fall, whether in the United States or in China, are determined by the gravitational system as a unit. Consider also the living organism in the light of this law. Careful studies of growth in the embryo reveal that not only are the properties of the different organs derived from the organism as a dynamic field, but that the laws of dynamics explain where and when all the different organs shall appear and how far they will develop.

It is becoming evident that the laws of heredity are also the laws of dynamics; that any organ of the body can be changed either by altering the germ plasm and keeping the environment normal, or by keeping the germ plasm normal and altering the environment. If an embryo is taken early in its development before specialisation has advanced too far, and before the dynamic balance between parts has become so delicate that the organism is permanently destroyed by disturbance of a given part, curious results can be obtained by an interchange of tissue from one part to another. Tissue that, if left alone, would have grown into a head, develops into a tail when substituted for tissue at the tail-end. Conversely, tissue that would have grown into a tail develops into a head when substituted at the head-end. The development of the parts is determined, therefore, by the dynamic relation of that part to the whole, or in other words, by a physiological gradient.

If we inspect more minutely what is happening in the embryo, we find that the direction in which nerve fibres grow out, from their origin in cell bodies of the spinal cord to the extremities of the organism, is to be explained in accordance with exactly the same principles that govern activities in electrical fields. Matured nerve cells lie in chains. Each cell possesses receiving fibres, or dendrites, and discharging fibres, or axons. Whether these fibres shall receive or discharge is conditioned by the dynamics of the field into which they grow. This means that the nerve cells are polarised, in chains, by the physiological gradients that surround them. Nerve fibres that will discharge into the muscles grow out from the spinal cord and attach themselves to the bulky part of a muscle-segment where metabolism in the segment is greatest. Nerve fibres that shall eventually receive sensory impulses from the muscles extend out and attach themselves to the ends of the muscle-segment where the rate of metabolism is lowest. The detailed dynamics of these growth processes are very intricate and cannot be discussed here in detail, but the familiar laws of dynamics apply throughout.

Studies recently made of the brain show that the functioning of each part of the cortex reduces to a problem in field dynamics, not to the localisation of function assumed in orthodox neurology. Suffice it to make the generalisation, therefore, that even the rôle played by the individual cell—its function, the rate, direction, time and extent of its growth—depends upon surrounding field properties. These are all illustrations of the law that the whole conditions the activities of its parts.

§ 8. THE LAW OF INDIVIDUATION. We shall present, as a fourth law of dynamics, the principle that parts emerge from wholes through processes of differentiation or individuation. We may suppose that from a relatively homogeneous mass of cosmic energy there emerged, in the course of chemical evolution, more or less specialised and complicated systems of energy. These systems took on membership character in the whole, and derived their properties through dynamic relations sustained to the whole as they emerged. In the same general way, living organisms, built upon the same dynamic plan as inorganic systems, differentiated and emerged out of gravitational fields already existing. Their property of life was derived from the dynamics of the system in which they emerged. Life describes the dynamic aspect of a highly differentiated energy system, within a larger field of force. Differentiation, or individuation, means relative segregation of phenomenological units within larger wholes. The more highly differentiated systems exhibit greater phenomenological complexity than less differentiated systems. As phenomenological segregation increases dynamic dependence also increases.

The same law is revealed clearly in the development of the embryo. Specialised tissues and organs evolve through individuation from relatively undifferentiated fields of cells, and originally from undifferentiated protoplasm. In the beginning these parent cells have the possibility of growth into any kind of tissue. Thus the various organs of the body, the various conduction paths of the nervous system and the so-called nerve centres, both of the lower parts of the brain and of the cortex, all come into existence through individuation; they are local figures or patterns, emerging from a physiological ground or field. Much will be said of this law, shortly, when the movements of the embryo and the acquisition of skill in the adult are examined.

§ 9. LAW OF FIELD GENESIS. Fifth, wholes evolves as wholes. This is the law of field genesis. A given system of energy may undergo a growth or expansion process. This is an activity within a larger whole, conditioned by that whole. The structural modification of simpler atomic patterns into more complex ones may be considered an illustration of the law from physical science. In reality it is not an isolated pattern that has changed, but a field of force that has undergone differentiation.

The fact that chemical “elements” can be arranged according to the number of electrons found in the atom would make it appear as if, in order to derive one substance from another, the addition or subtraction of electrons would suffice. The “adding” and “subtracting” must be accomplished, however, in accordance with the laws of balance and symmetry of energy systems. To assume that going from one chemical “element” to another implies only an additive and subtractive process, as these are ordinarily construed, is to distort the picture by over-simplifying it. The formation of complex atoms involves not merely the simpler atoms themselves, but the fields in which the simpler atoms exist.

Let hydrogen and oxygen “combine” to form water. The formation of the new molecule, a variety of growth process, is a differentiation of an energy-field involving electrical, gravitational, thermal and mechanical stresses. To say that the event is merely the combining of two elements is again to commit an error of over-simplification. Similarly, common sense declares that one domino knocked another one down; but in reality the domino was pushed down no more than it was pushed up. The gravitational system in which the dominoes are behaving, which accounts for their behaviour, is ignored. Accordingly, in asserting that oxygen and hydrogen combine to form water the essentials of the process are overlooked; and as a consequence there is obtained a false conception of what is occurring. Specifically, this false notion is carried in the term synthesis; which is nothing but an unintelligible generation of wholes from parts.

The real problem is a change of form in the energy of a field, from relative homogeneity to relative heterogeneity of pattern. “Creative synthesis” turns out to be organic analysis, an individuation out of the whole through differentiation of form. What seems to be the derivation of a whole from parts is in reality the opposite. A larger unit of energy than synthesis presupposes is differentiating under its own laws. In this individuation process parts become more and more unlike.

We construe the formation of planets, of oceans and continents, the growth processes that characterise living organisms, and biological evolution in general, as expanding, differentiating wholes, not synthetic products of previously unrelated parts. The law of field genesis means that wholes are primary.

In the evolution of man there has occurred a change in the structurisation of the organism, commonly described as a dropping out of elements. There was a time, for example, when the skeleton was composed, anatomically, of more bones than are found in the human being. Likewise, organisms had more muscles and more teeth. They also possessed more hair; and the parts of the brain were more distinct than in the human being. We interpret this change from gross structurisation and relative dynamic independence of parts, to finer structurisation of the total field, with greater dynamic dependence, as a change toward heterogeneity. The skeleton of man, although less complex numerically in regard to number of bones, is more complex in its total structurisation, and capable of more complex performances. The same principle holds for the digestive, muscular and nervous systems.

The total picture of this evolutionary process, like the total picture of so-called chemical synthesis, is that of an energy pattern undergoing differentiation, in dynamic relation to its surroundings. During this differentiation, unity becomes phenomenologically more apparent with increased dynamic dependence of the structured parts.

The embryo, integrated when a single cell, furnishes us with an excellent picture of an expanding and differentiating dynamic unit. The unity of the organism, throughout its growth, accrues to the gradients of which we have already spoken. Growth, then, is a function of the organism-as-a whole; it is the progressive internal differentiation of a single protoplasmic individual; and this differentiation, in complex organisms, involves the separation of the living mass into subordinate semi-independent parts, the cells. Development should not be regarded as a multiplication and co-operation of cells, but rather as a differentiation of protoplasm. Thus the fifth law precludes any type of elementarism and synthesis. At the same time it contains the principle implicit in the physicist’s second law of thermo-dynamics.

§ 10. LAW OF LEAST ACTION. A sixth universal law of dynamics is one which may be called the law of least action. Stated in strict physical language it is the principle that objects generally move from one place to another over the shortest route in time, action being defined as energy multiplied by time. There are exceptions to this statement, notably in the field of optics, which need not concern us here, where movement is over the longest route in time. In either event complete organisation in a given system of energy is implied, whether we are dealing with maxima or minima.

Our interest in the law rests in this assumption of complete organisation, without which least and greatest have no significance. Let us envisage this organisation in the light of least action. Least action implies three points of reference, a starting place, direction of movement, and termination of movement. The starting place is the position at which a given amount of potential energy is, for some reason or other, released into kinetic. The possibility of motion is realised in motion itself. Direction of movement, in turn, implies that before an object commences to move it has some place to go to; and that place is the position at which the moving object would come to rest. But what starts the movement? What gives it direction? What brings it to a close? This entire situation is made intelligible only in terms of a disequilibrated balance or system of stresses. Think of the falling apple again. As the apple hangs on the tree it is balanced against “gravity” by an attachment. When the stem breaks that balance is disturbed and the apple falls. The apple was already hanging under stress toward the earth, or more specifically, toward the centre of the earth. Its fall possessed a definite direction toward a definite end. Had there been a tunnel through the earth, the apple would have fallen down the tunnel, and on beyond the centre of the earth; then, like a pendulum, it would have retraced its path over and over, shortening the excursion each time, until it has come to rest at the centre. Hence, the centre of the earth is the “goal” of the apple.

On closer inspection still more interesting features of this situation come to light. Stress toward the earth means that the apple on the tree is in dynamic relation to an entire system of energy, a gravitational system, of which it is a part. It means, further, that the stress has no significance in its own right. The stress at that point exists only in relation to the absence of stress at the centre of the earth. The apple falls from a position of relatively high stress in the direction of a point at which the stress will be resolved.

This is not all. The direction of resolution of stress is conditioned by the alignment of stresses between the apple and the centre of the earth. A gravitational system, as a functional unit, therefore, conditions the three outstanding aspects of the apple’s fall. The potential energy of the apple is given to it, in its position, by the system; the direction of the movement is given to it by the system; and the end of the movement is established by the system. Before movement is possible a dynamic whole provides the beginning, the direction and the end of the movement. The remote end is established before movement commences. A whole is conditioning the activities of its parts. Thus the different positions occupied by the apple along its path from the tree to the place where the ground prevents it from reaching the centre of the earth, are phases of a movement that is a unit from its beginning to its end. The movement is conditioned at once, in its totality, by the field properties of a system. One position along the line of motion will not account for the next. An attempt to explain the object’s progress in terms of steps would be to apply atomistic logic to a temporal sequence. Wholes, then, are temporal as well as spatial phenomena. The growth process, for example, is dynamically like the falling of an apple; it is a unit from beginning to end. In order to explain any phase of it, one must hunt for conditions external to growth; just as to explain the fall of the apple one must hunt for the conditions external to the apple and its complete line of motion.

The fact that before movement commences a remote end has been established demonstrates a correspondence between purposive behaviour in human beings and the behaviour of objects found elsewhere in Nature. Human behaviour is purposive; it is always executed with respect to some goal. But movement anywhere occurs with reference to a remote end. When a person extends his hand to raise a glass of water from the table the hand is directed by a neuromuscular system conditioning the activities of its parts in accordance with the same principles with which the earth, as a gravitational system, conditions the path of a falling apple.

The analogy can be carried farther. The apple is responding to a total situation, including the centre of the earth. Spatially and temporally the centre of the earth is ahead of the apple; it is the apple’s future. Strange as it may seem the apple is responding to its future. The whole, of which the apple is a part, surrounds the apple, both in space and time. Determinism holds only from the whole to its parts; the whole is both spatial and temporal; it contains future and past time, when a part is the point of reference; hence, the future, as much as the past, controls the present.

Growth is as much a response to the future as it is an evolution from the past. We, as individuals, are responding now to conditions that are, for us, our futures. This fact gives purpose and value to human life that are objective. Biological evolution is directional; it is progress towards a remote end; the race is responding to its future. Very little imagination is required, therefore, to understand how an acceptance of the laws of energy logically necessitates belief in the teleological character of man’s relation to that cosmic plan of which he is a member. The law of least action, which has long been regarded as one of the most inviolate and basic of all physical principles, harbours, indeed, a wealth of implications.

Returning to further illustrations from physics, air currents proceed from areas of high atmospheric pressure to areas of low pressure, over the shortest routes in time; electrical currents travel from points of highest potential toward the points of lowest potential within a given electrical field until the differential is resolved. Let gas escape into an empty container and it will diffuse throughout the container until the pressure is equal in all directions. Suppose a soap-bubble film to be stretched across the bowl of a pipe. Let a fine thread be dropped gently upon the soap film so that the thread forms an irregular figure upon the film. Pierce the film in the centre of the coiled thread. At once the thread will form a circle, and there will be no soap film within it. Between the circle and the edge of the bowl the film will remain intact. Why the circle? The thread changes its position until the surface tension between it and the film is equal in every direction. In all of these examples there was movement toward a condition of equilibrium when the balance of a given system of stresses was disturbed. In each case movement took place in the line of least action. Drops of water are shaped, therefore, in conforming to the character of the pressure that surrounds them. If the pressure is equal the drop will be spherical. Apples grow round not through some inherited predisposition, but in accordance with the laws of dynamics; our heads, eyes, fingers, trunks, are round, too, for the same reason; for the same reason, also, the embryo in a certain stage of its development is a sphere.

Examine, for the moment, the importance of this law in biology. We have already noted how, in general, physiological gradients determined the details of growth processes in the living organism. The most highly specialised of the senses develop in the head region where rates of metabolism are the highest. The direction in which nerve fibres grow out into the body from the spinal cord, the polarity of the nerve cell in chains, the direction of nerve impulses, the excitability of a given nerve centre, all illustrate the same law. A certain motion begins in a given place and progresses toward a given remote end, always under conditions that, in terms of dynamics, are fundamentally the same. Even a muscle, contracting, illustrates the law. Its energy, before excitation, is in balance with its surroundings; excitation disturbs that balance and the contraction takes place as a resolution of the potential. The growth process may be construed as the resolution of a tension. We speak of the growth potential whose realisation is the growth process itself, a release of potential energy into kinetic by the stimulating influence of environment.

§ 11. LAW OF MAXIMUM WORK. As a seventh law of dynamics we may choose the law of maximum energy or maximum work. When the balance of an energy system is disturbed, the energy of the entire system is affected, and all the available potentials are expended, that is, become kinetic, in the process of re-establishing the balance. Let a pair of scales be considered as a system of energy and let someone stand upon them without placing a sufficient number of balancing weights on the lever. The lever will rise until a certain maximum weight is hung from it. Then, as a system, the scales will become balanced completely against the stress applied to them. Or, if the dial type of recording device is used, the pointer will keep moving until a certain maximum value is reached. Suppose that salt is poured into a given amount of water. Under the existing conditions the salt will enter solution up to a certain maximum, and stop. When two chemicals interact all the energy of which both are composed is involved in the “exchange”; although some of it is lost in the form of heat.

In the biological realm a striking example of the law is found in the “all-or-none” principle with which a nerve fibre conducts. The impulse travelling over a fibre is always at a maximum, no matter by what form or strength of stimulus it is initiated. The same law seems to hold, also, for the contraction of a muscle fibre. Illustrations of the law in more complicated situations are “efforts” expended by the living organism in maintaining its integrity under disintegrating influences. All responses to stimuli constitute a class of such efforts, but vigorous, voluntary performances are particularly interesting examples; and the widespread organic changes that occur during emotional excitement are perhaps the most striking of all.

Other classes of adjustments, made by the organism in accordance with this same law, are the regenerative processes taking place after injuries to tissue, and the recuperative processes following fatigue. It is evident from this law that energy systems, as units, resist change or disintegration, a principle which we shall have occasion to employ in our treatment of emotion and “instinct”, and again in our discussion of habit. This law means, first, that when a system is disturbed it is disturbed throughout, not merely in one part; and second, that it resists disequilibration, using all of its available potential in regaining balance. Its behaviour follows a universal “all-or-none” law.

§ 12. LAW OF CONFIGURATION. Finally, as an eighth law, may be cited the principle of configuration. Basically this principle contains the idea that never does one discrete and isolated event affect another discrete and isolated event; for discrete and isolated things are fictions. The simplest conceivable event is a complex process of some sort, a dynamically integrated unit, affected by another system-as-a-whole. That other system is an organised whole of which the first is a part. If we wish to think of one system affecting another, such as two molecules interacting, their behaviour must be explained, ultimately, in terms of a larger system of which both molecules are members. In other words, the change that occurs in a given system is a response to a total set of conditions. This law will be interpreted as follows when applied to human behaviour:—Any reaction of the human being is a reaction of the organism-as-a-whole, and is a unified response to a total situation of some kind. If the response is directed specifically toward a detail of the total situation it is always made to that detail in relation to other details.

Further significance of the law can be understood only with reference to the conditions for least action. Any particular process in nature is the behaviour of a certain system of energy, structured in a certain way. A configuration is composed, then, of energy differentiated into alignments of stresses. Structurisation means that the whole possesses a form or Gestalt of its own. The form may remain constant while the parts vary, if the total balance of the parts remains the same. For example, a melody may be played in a high key or in a low one, with one quality of tone or with another. The auditory quality may vary; but the melody, the form of the total experience, remains constant. The sensory alignments—for they are alignments of energy—are a unified, balanced pattern. The melody is the configuration, the form of the total experience, which behaves or changes in an organismic fashion.

The systematic fashion with which energy patterns change, and objects move in space and time, is made intelligible by the conditions of least action. The descriptive unit, considered as a temporal thing, involves a high stress, a low stress, and a resolution of the differential. As a unit in time, the configuration includes the starting place, the direction, and the termination of a movement; as a unit in space, a configuration is a balanced system of structured energy, exhibiting a unique form or phenomenological aspect of its own.

Configurations are temporal as well as spatial units; they are structured in time as well as in space. The end of movement will not account for the beginning, nor the beginning for the end; tension will not explain the resolution toward the goal, nor will the goal account for the tension. The one implies the other; both must exist, or nothing.

The importance of this principle justifies repeating ourselves at this point. The first inch that an apple falls will not explain its fall through the second inch, or the second the third, or the third the fourth, and so on. Likewise, in the human being, growth between the ages of five and six will in no way explain the growth between the ages of six and seven. In accordance with the same principle, past experience does not account for present conduct. When the two are by definition placed in the same continuum the one has no causal efficacy with respect to the other. The logical absurdity of trying to explain one step in a continuous process by another is easily seen in simple situations like the following:—the sun will not rise to-morrow morning because it came up yesterday; a bird is not flying over yonder tree because, the moment before, it was flying over the river nearby. We can anticipate difficulty, on the part of the reader, when we apply this same reasoning to the problem of memory, for past experience will not account for memory. A given performance must be studied in relation to that dynamic whole which starts, directs and completes it; for the performance is inexplicable in terms of itself, or its parts. The performance is a unit, no matter how large or complex the thing performing, and no matter how long a time is consumed in the process.

There is another interesting phase of the law of configuration. Energy systems always “seek” a balance; they “seek” stability; and apparently under most if not all conditions in Nature, balance or stability is characterised by symmetry of pattern. Witness the spherical character of planets, the symmetrical character of their orbits, the symmetry of crystals, the bilateral symmetry of the human body, the great importance of symmetry in art, and probably the symmetry of molecules. Moreover, rhythm or periodicity, which is temporal symmetry, characterises all events in Nature. Witness again the periodicity of wave motions and the great importance of rhythm in human life.

§ 13. FAR-REACHING CONSEQUENCES. The consequences of our position are far-reaching. It can no longer be said that because man is more complex in form than a chemical compound he obeys different laws; for functionally the one is as complex as the other. It can no longer be said that because man is a conscious, thinking being, his behaviour is of a different order from that of a simply structured gravitational system. Because he remembers, it cannot be said that he behaves in accordance with a principle peculiar to consciousness. Because man exhibits insight, it cannot be said that his behaviour contains a factor without an analogue in electromagnetic fields. Because man wills it can no longer be said that he is free while a gravitational system is not. The organised energy of the latter moves the released apple just as truly as the human being moves his hand. Will, in principle, is organised energy. Man’s will differs from the energy of a gravitational system only in a phenomenological sense. From a functional standpoint energy, anywhere, may be construed as mind, but mind in an entirely new sense, in an organismic, not a vitalistic, spiritualistic or idealistic sense. Mind, thus defined, is not idea until structured as thought. It is structured into electricity, heat, light, sound and gravitational systems at the physicist’s level; water, iron, protein at the chemist’s; muscle, nerve, organisms at the biologist’s; ideas, feelings, will, self at the psychologist’s. This conception is merely a neutral dynamism, an objective functionalism which we have described logically, not an idealism until, phenomenologically, we reach the level of differentiation that we call experience. We have concerned ourselves with pre-idealistic or pre-psychological organisation, and have referred to experience merely in order to show the universality of the laws of dynamics. The dynamics of purposive, conscious, insightful, reflective behaviour are all contained in the dynamics of the atom; and vice versa, these dynamics are not mechanical.

Mind is determinism and, as such, is essentially the same everywhere; it is causation, and is instantaneous everywhere, an instantaneous change in dynamic relations. The gravitational system sets the apple in motion the instant the stem breaks; the human being, in the same way and by the same means, instantaneously moves his muscles and thinks. This conception of mind takes us back, in some respects, to the ancient Greeks. It is mind in a dynamic sense, not in the dualistic, mentalistic sense which subsequent usage gave it. We are looking at Nature, as the ancients did, as a whole, before analysis introduced false concepts.

§ 14. SUMMARY. This chapter has been devoted to the constructive task of presenting the dynamics of wholes, as they are found in Nature about us. Genetically, these wholes are pre-psychological types of organisation. Now that we commence a study of human nature we shall find that, dynamically, human nature is like any form of Nature.

We can now return to the first part of Chapter I. It is, after all, an energy system that thinks. To think is to follow the laws of dynamics. When simply structured systems of energy follow the laws of dynamics, an apple falls, a wind blows, an electric current travels, a gas diffuses, iron rusts. In the realm of biology, where systems are phenomenologically more complex, an organism grows, an organ forms, a nerve discharges, a muscle contracts, a gland secretes. At the psychological level, a still more complex level, but again only in a phenomenological sense, a human being wills, a self experiences, an individual moves a hand or a foot; he speaks, learns, portrays emotion, sees, hears, and feels. Ethically and philosophically, he responds to the future, with an effort to understand that future; he sets up goals and ideals. He posits a God; constructs the Universe-as-a-whole and evaluates his position in it. Value, as a relation, is man’s dynamic membership-character in the Cosmic Plan. Throughout the gamut of activity from the humble gravitational system to the Universe-as-a-whole, only one logic is applicable, one framework of thought in terms of which to envisage every detail. At present the unit of that framework, as we see it best, is organismic, relative and universal. Each unit has a property, a quality, a form, a value of its own, expressible mathematically, physically, chemically, biologically, psychologically or ethically, depending upon the type of larger whole of which it is apprehended as a member.

1 This and the following seven laws are quoted from Wheeler, Readings in Psychology; Crowell, New York, 1930. By permission.

CHAPTER IV

THE DEVELOPMENT OF BEHAVIOUR

§ 1. THE PROBLEM OF GROWTH. An immediate approach to the laws of human nature may be made through the problem of growth. Why does an organism grow? The answer to this question solves the basic problem for centuries inherent in the concepts of urge and instinct; it makes intelligible the evidently spontaneous character of behaviour, the searching, hunting, purposive, voluntary aspects; it reveals the secret of acquisitiveness and inventiveness; it removes the riddle of the new increments that are constantly emerging in the course of the learning process; it squares the idealistic side of human life with the facts of physiology, neurology and physics. It is the bridge over which the laws of dynamics are carried from the realm of the physicist to the realm of the psychologist, where they become the laws of human nature.

§ 2. GROWTH IN PHYSICAL WORLD. There is growth in the physical world. Systems of energy form and disintegrate. Chemical evolution is a slow growth process. Growth is occurring at a more rapid rate in biological evolution with a technique different in form but not in principle. In the growth of living organisms an evolution of startling speed is taking place with still a different technique, but again the same in principle. The enormous differences in speed between cosmic, biological and individual growth, trace down to the differentiation of energy systems into more and more heterogeneous and unstable configurations of energy. In the large it is a picture of cosmic life shifting phenomenologically from inorganic to organic forms.

Growth is a puzzle to the physicist who measures the life of an energy system by its dissipation of energy into that most unruly and chaotic form of all, namely, heat. If this is the total picture, the universe is running down. But what about growth? Is it achieved at the expense of more energy than is saved to the emerging compound and the growing organism? Is it the cosmic plan that organic and intelligent life evolve under the law of diminishing returns? Is Nature’s great experiment a failure? Is it to happen that growth, achieved at the expense of more energy than is saved, will result in intelligent systems of energy, capable of turning upon the heat lost in their production and converting it into useful forms? Does growth, after all, mean a winding up process that “saves”, as it goes along, more heat than is lost to organisation? Or do cosmic rays represent the gain in our immediate system that compensates for its losses? Such questions might sound foolish were it not true that sooner or later the growth process as a whole must be envisaged in terms of dynamics, and that the facts of cosmic and biological evolution must square, on the one hand, with physics and, on the other, with ethics. There is no getting around the point. If man’s behaviour reveals a forward reference, if it is hunting, searching, purposive in its character, as observation proves it to be, these characteristics have analogues in all other energy systems. Ethical man, with his philosophy of values, a developing, thinking being, operating according to one set of principles, could not survive or even articulate with a cosmos based upon an incompatible set of principles. Man must go to the cosmos, or the cosmos must come to man; the one process is the same as the other.

§ 3. COMPARISON OF GROWTH AND GRAVITATION. If a falling body in a gravitational system is an intelligible phenomenon, so is growth, because the two are functionally similar. The gravitational system furnishes the stress under which the apple hangs on the tree; it gives to the apple its possibility of motion. At the same time it gives to the apple the remote end of its fall, and the direction of its fall. The system contains the apple’s past and its future; and both, simultaneously, are conditions of the present, the momentary behaviour of the apple. The fall, as a given continuum, can be accounted for only by going outside that continuum to the system of conditions that sustain it. If man were the apple he would, let us suppose, be in dynamic relation to the centre of the earth, but without knowing it. He could not see into the future.

Growth is a movement. Like any movement, as a finite problem, it has its beginning in a potential. Let us call it in this case a growth potential. The potential is derived from a cosmic system operating in accordance with the laws of dynamics; that system is at the same time furnishing the line of growth and its remote end or goal. The growth process is the realisation of that potential in kinetic energy, or movement, when the balance of the system is disturbed, just as the falling of the apple is the realisation of gravitational stress. What, in growth, corresponds to the breaking of the apple’s stem? Stimulation of the living organism by its environment. What is the system? It is the world of energy in which we grow; the cosmos of life in which, as a race, we are evolving. Wherever there is movement, the suppositions of a potential and a remote end are not only legitimate but necessary; for otherwise movement is a meaningless occurrence having no beginning, no direction and no end.

Growth is something observed. We wish to make it intelligible. We do so by postulating the growth potential and by defining the growth process as the resolution of that potential toward a remote end. The remote end for the individual organism is natural death. The end for organic evolution is a problem in philosophy. The end that religion postulates as a personal entrance into immortality is neither refuted nor substantiated by known facts; for this sort of immortality and the identity of the immortal are not experimentally demonstrable. In general, however, organismic logic demands some sort of immortality consistent with man’s place in the cosmic plan, and an immortality which will harmonise with the laws underlying existence. But again man’s place in the cosmic plan, and an immortality consistent with it, are philosophical questions.

§ 4. RESPONSE TO FUTURE. According to the law of configuration, the beginning, the direction and the end of a given movement are aspects of the same descriptive unit. Each is significant only with reference to all the others. Growth, then, in terms of dynamics, is a fiction, something undeserving of a name, unless it be regarded as a response to the future. The realising of any potential is a response of one object or another to its future. It is in this sense that the behaviour of the apple contains the functional analogues of spontaneity, searching, hunting, purpose.

Potential is a guarantee of action. It is convenient to say that the potential demands its own resolution. It shares this demand with the whole of which it is a part, for the whole gives it the potential. It is therefore legitimate to say that the organism demands growth once the growth potential is established. It is already set up in the living organism. If the organism cannot grow it dies. Growth is a total life movement, an expanding, differentiating pattern of motion exhibiting itself, on the one hand, in an enlargement of structure, and on the other, in behaviour. But for growth to take place, a potential must be maintained and released by environment. This is accomplished in several ways, all reducible to one, namely, the activating influence of fields of force surrounding the organism—oxygen, heat, pressure, light. To these forces must be added the energy assimilated through food. So much for the growth that exhibits itself in the enlargement and differentiation of organic structure. This type of growth merges over gradually, with no break, into the other, the development of behaviour, which also must be sustained and released by environmental forces. The process is then called stimulation. The complex organism is so differentiated in structure that these sustaining and releasing forces act upon different systems of organs, oxygen through the lungs, other chemicals through the digestive system, and stimulation through the nervous system. But all this is the same in principle.

§ 5. PURPOSE. If, then, behaviour, in the large, is a product of a growth potential we can understand how it must be creative, inventive, and self-expressive. These, in fact, are its major characteristics. It is essentially emergent. Moreover, each act of behaviour demands completion in the attainment of a goal, subordinate to the remote ends of growth.

More immediately, behaviour derives its purposeful and seeking character, on the one hand, from neural tensions, and on the other hand, from those environmental situations to which the tensions are related. Anything that is external to the nervous system may be regarded as environmental; for it is the nervous system, primarily, with which are concerned the tensions that behaviour resolves. Part of this environment consists of organs within the body such as glands, the digestive tract and reproductive organs. These as well as external forces, furnish stimuli that induce nervous tensions. But this internal form of stimulation, so important in the behaviour of complex organisms, has been encountered, before, in principle. A gravitational system is continuously subject to internal disturbances that release potential into kinetic energy. The stem of the apple breaks and lets the apple fall. The breaking of the stem is analogous to intraorganic stimulation in the living organism. The breaking stem is something external to the apple and its line of motion toward the centre of the earth. Muscle contractions of the stomach wall that stimulate the nervous system are, similarly, external to the nervous system and to the behaviour of seeking food. Both the hunger response and the apple falling are movements toward remote ends, the one a food goal, the other, the centre of the earth. Theoretically each motion ceases in the same way, for the same reason; the apple when, on its way to the centre of the earth, an obstruction balances its own potential against it; the hunger response, when the food goal is reached and the stomach filled. Both motions cease when an unbalanced system of energy returns to a condition of equilibrium.

§ 6. EXAMPLES. Here is a scientist in his laboratory absorbed in the intricate processes of chemistry, creating a new theory and testing it one way and another; hunting, searching, calculating, and finally arriving at a great discovery. Months of arduous and painstaking endeavour were required; the problem beckoned with a call both persistent and irresistible; the labour was gratuitous; the goal was its own reward. But again, in principle, all this has been encountered before. From the bowels of the earth, under pressure, a stream of water comes to the surface as a spring. The nervous energy of the scientist boils into fruition, so to speak, under the pressure of a maturation potential. It is released in a behaviour called inventiveness. A fountain of water in the one case; in the other a fountain of knowledge. The spring continues to flow; a surface stream is formed. Tirelessly, irresistibly, persistently, winding, tumbling, falling, dammed up and overflowing some obstacle, on it goes, down, perhaps, hundreds of miles, requiring months of time, until a water-level is reached. Through the maze of contours offered by mountains and plains it goes, never stopping until the end. What is the source of this behaviour, of this persistence? It is a gravitational system giving direction, unerring, in the line of least action. A human being, alive, planning, thinking, under his own type of gravitational tension, in this case a maturation potential, guides his ideas, the muscles that speak his words and the hand that wields his pen, winding, tumbling, held by an obstacle of difficult logic only to overcome it, delayed by an intricacy of mechanical technique only to discover the solution, until the remote end, the discovery, the reaching of neural level, and resolution. Through the maze of contours offered by the limitations of his knowledge which his own system provided him, just as the gravitational system provides its own mountains and plains through which the stream must find its way, the chemist directed his stream of thought over an elaborate route, yet in the line of least action.

Why does the chemist’s behaviour seem voluntary while the stream seems to flow “involuntarily”? Only because, as men, we are behind our goals, moving toward them. When we think of the stream we see the whole situation, the source, the stream, the water-level; the picture is complete; the whole that is conditioning its parts is evident. But let man imagine himself the stream at any particular point, unmindful of the remote end that corresponds to the chemical discovery, and the whole that conditions its parts is now not evident. The stream is “searching”; its behaviour is “voluntary”; it is going on because it “wants” to; its “want” is the tension under which it flows; it is “voluntary” because the remote end is in the future.

It is not mind that gives to the chemist’s performance its voluntariness except in a phenomenological sense; will involves no new cosmic principle. Voluntariness must be defined dynamically in terms of ends not reached. Phenomenal mind exists apart from voluntariness in this sense. A movement of man is voluntary in virtue of being conditioned by a whole, whose field property may be described by the phenomenological term “will”. It is the act that is voluntary, not the will. So too the stream is “voluntary” in the sense of being conditioned by a gravitational system; the system itself is not. Voluntariness is a characteristic of the act, not of the actor. Common usage of terms has long recognised this fact. The will is free, not voluntary. If we consider the stream as an isolated thing, its force is equivalent to voluntary effort; the influence of the gravitational system upon it is equivalent to will. Man has will when considered a relatively segregated whole, operating under his own potential; the effort he expends, in moving, accrues to muscular contraction. The contraction corresponds to the stream. The reason why will is a term applicable only to man and animal as a mental phenomenon, lies in the difference of form into which the energy-system, man or animal, is structured, as compared with the form into which the earth, streams, mountains and plains are structured. Phenomenologically, man has a will and the earth has not. Dynamically, as potential, the will of man and the dynamics of a gravitational system are similar. Energy is the will of Nature, anywhere, in the sense that, whatever its manifestations or structurisations, the same laws and the same logic apply to it.

§ 7. OBJECTIONS MET. But, you say, do not inform us that man in his longings for truth, in his loves and idealisms, is no more than a gravitational system. Take care! It is easy to fall back into the dualistic and mechanistic trap. What is idealism? As a fact of experience it belongs to man. It differentiates man from systems of gravitation like the earth; it differentiates man from the beast. Phenomenologically then, to be idealistic is to be human, not to be an animal, nor to be inorganic. But, in terms of dynamics what is idealism? The setting up of remote ends for which to strive. Man does it himself relative to a cosmic plan. So too a simple gravitational system sets up ends that must be “striven for” in a dynamic sense. In accordance with its relation to the universe, the system furnishes its own centre toward which the apple hangs under stress; the system breaks the stem of the apple; the system supplies the fountain and the stream. Herein are the analogues of initiative and spontaneity. Any system, as a unified whole, establishes the ends of the activities that go on within it. That man in dynamic relation to his environment can set up goals, is, in terms of dynamics, nothing new in Nature. His consciousness of a goal is akin to the apple’s stress. Dynamically there is no inorganic versus organic; no man versus beast; no mind versus matter; no life versus inert bodies; no plan versus chaos; no teleology versus mechanism; no foresight versus blindness; no initiative versus passivity. Any whole—an atom, man, it makes no difference—contains all the principles pertaining to reality; it is in itself a universe. The cosmos may be likened to a fraction. Energy is the single denominator; phenomena of all forms are the numerator. The laws of dynamics belong to the former; the levels of complexity and degrees of purposiveness to the latter.

§ 8. SUMMARY. We have attempted to show, at some length, the consequences of the growth potential. They are the voluntary, hunting, inventive characteristics of man’s behaviour, characteristics that accrue to the demanding nature of unresolved tensions. Temporary searchings are expressions of a larger, more general potential “behind” them, a potential that is not only “behind” but “around” them in space and time; for it exists with reference to a point far in the future; it is the growth potential seen as part of a cosmic plan. Man spends his life searching, willing and resolving tensions. Out of the growth potential emerge, through differentiation, the broader aims of life; to live, to acquire knowledge, to contribute to posterity, and to believe in the future. The more detailed aspects of behaviour are further differentiations from the same whole, occurring, like the local windings and tumblings of the stream, in the presence of temporary obstacles in the course of daily life. The continuance of a performance always signifies a goal ahead. All events in Nature involve a forward reference.

We are now ready to examine the facts of development in a typical animal embryo. From these facts it will become evident that behaviour is an outcome of growth and is not to be explained by the usual, mechanistic hypotheses.

§ 9. EVIDENCE FROM NEUROLOGY: DEVELOPMENT OF MOTILITY IN THE EMBRYO. The nervous system of the embryo develops as an expanding, differentiating unit. At first it is a total, relatively homogeneous pattern of cells. Local and specialised nerve centres, or groups of cells, emerge and assume relative, not complete independence. Throughout the growth of the nervous system, field properties condition the activities of specialised parts. One would expect, therefore, to find illustrations of organismic principles in the development of the embryo’s motility; and this is precisely what we do find.

The first movements of the embryo, taking the salamander studied by Coghill[1] as an example, are those of the organism-as-a-whole. These are waves of contraction, called flexion, that pass down the body of the animal from the head region tailward, curling the animal into a semicircle or perhaps a complete circle. A little later a wave down one side of the body will not have been completed before a subsequent wave starts down the opposite side, curling the animal in the opposite direction. This results in an “S” shaped coil. When this movement takes place with the proper frequency it propels the animal in a primitive fashion through the water. When the forelegs develop, which precedes the growth of the hind legs, there is no separate nerve supply that permits local movement. The legs move only as the body moves; the movements are aspects of trunk movement. This is necessitated by the fact that nerve fibres to the trunk branch and carry impulses to the forelegs. The same situation holds also for the hind legs. Subsequently nerve centres that supply the legs differentiate sufficiently from the total nerve pattern to permit local reflexes when the legs are stimulated. Formerly it was thought that these local reflexes combined to form complicated activities like swimming and walking; but this is not the case. These local reflexes will not integrate. Coordinated movements must wait upon further development of the total nervous system of the animal. Rhythmic and properly timed movements of all four legs emerge together, already integrated, from the expanding and differentiating total nerve pattern. Thus the walking movements are not a product of reflexes nor of local random movements that combine as a consequence of practice or experience. Co-ordinated movements result from mautration. Reflexes are end products of differentiation, not units of integration.

Perhaps more striking yet is the manner in which separate movements of the leg develop. When the leg acquires relative independence of movement, it is the leg-as-a-whole that moves. Gradually, as the nerve supply maturates, movements of the fore part of the leg emerge, but this segment at first moves as a whole. Then movements of the “hand”, or foot-as-a-whole, differentiate from the forearm; and, finally, movements of the fingers or toes differentiate from hand-movements-as-a-whole. In each instance a part of the body, relatively segregable from the body as a whole, functions as a totality; and, in turn, part activities of that particular member emerge, integrated with pre-existing wholes as they emerge. Involved in all this differentiation is the organism-as-a-whole. The differentiation never leaves mass action behind.

The most interesting of all developments in the motility of the salamander occur in the anterior region of the body. Before the animal is able to walk with all four legs it can lift the anterior part of its body with its front legs, moving at once the head, neck, shoulders and legs. This it will do in response to a food object, say a fly, before movements of the head and jaws can be made. The animal lunges toward the fly before it can eat! Subsequently head and neck movements emerge from the total anterior body movements; jaw movements, in turn, emerge from head and neck movements. At this period in the animal’s growth, if a fly is brought near its head it will actually seize and crunch the fly in its jaws. But this is before swallowing movements can be made! No better illustration could be found of the principle that the organism’s growth is a unified process, taking place under its own potential with reference to a remote end and without experience on the part of the animal. The forward reference of the movements just described can be accounted for in no other way. The future, as well as the past, controls the present.

That the salamander should snatch a fly before it can eat is no more remarkable in principle than the simple fact that before an apple can fall the last part of the distance to the ground it must traverse the first part. The first part looks forward to the last in the same sense that catching a fly before eating it is possible looks forward to the later period of maturation when eating is possible. The maturation process is a continuum, just like the fall of the apple, conditioned by a whole external to it. The embryo’s movements are kinetic realisations of maturation. Their developmental phases correspond exactly, in terms of dynamics, to the temporal phases of the apple’s fall. Both the fall and the growth process are units in time as well as in space. In its growth, the salamander is merely obeying the laws of least action and configuration. The concept of instinct is superfluous.

The situation in the case of the salamander is harder to comprehend only because one cannot put his finger, so to speak, upon the remote end of the growth process so readily as he can put his finger upon the centre of the earth in the case of the falling apple. It is easy to see how the fall must be a continuum conditioned in its totality by an alignment of stresses. It is easy to see how one stage of the apple’s fall will not account for the next; although the one is necessary for the other. The one is necessary for the other because both are necessary, by definition, before there is anything to explain. Units, conditioned as wholes by larger wholes, are the only kinds of explicable phenomena. This is the law of determined action. Any other situation yields indeterminism. And nothing is a unit unless it is a complex whole, a differentiated field with respect to space and a continuum with respect to time.

Another way of regarding the forward look of the apple’s movement through the first foot of space, let us say, is to reflect that the movement (no obstacle interfering) through the last foot of space is guaranteed by the system before the first phase takes place. In the case of the salamander, lunging toward a fly before snatching is possible, and snatching before eating is possible, seem like intelligent anticipation. But the embryo need not know that at a later stage in its development it will swallow the fly and enjoy it, any more than the apple must know that at last it will rest upon the ground. The continuum of nervous and mental development is a species of movement continuum occurring in a cosmic system of energy surrounding the organism both in time and space. A cosmic plan guarantees the end of growth as the gravitational system guarantees the apple’s flight.

§ 10. FIRST MOVEMENTS OF THE INFANT. Studies of the human fœtus unmistakably bring out the same principles, demonstrable not only in the salamander but in the toadfish, rat and rabbit. Turning now to the newborn infant, studies by Irwin[2] point definitely to a continuance of the same growth precedure. The first co-ordinated movements are of the body as a whole. The apparently random waving of arms and legs and squirming of the body are not discrete, isolated reflexes occurring in chaotic fashion, but are mass actions variable in appearance because the infant’s skeleton and muscular structure are anatomically so complex. Each apparently separate movement is an aspect of a total body movement, only part of which is detected by the observer. The infant cries at first only as the whole body moves; and its first attempts voluntarily to control its hands and feet are made together with contraction of the whole body. It is true, however, that as embryos develop the trunk plays, overtly, a less dominant rôle. Likewise, in the infant’s later movements the rôle played by the trunk may at times be only that of assuming a general tenseness with no overt action, while the extremities are the parts exhibiting the greatest motility. Certain local movements emerge more discretely than others from the total pattern. Nevertheless, it is evident that parts of the body not actually moved still function in the total pattern. The importance of total body co-ordination even in adult performances can be demonstrated in all kinds of situations. Try, for instance, to aim a rifle with the body in an awkward position; try driving golf balls in an awkward stance.

§ 11. MATURATION. From all this it becomes obvious that the development of motor co-ordination is a function of maturation, not of practice or experience. This principle is of profound significance for the problem of learning in children and adults, and is rather damaging to the orthodox belief that “practice makes perfect”.

§ 12. ALL MOVEMENT DETERMINED BY END. A given muscular movement obtains its direction as does the falling body from a system of stresses, in this case from a system of neuromuscular tensions. Each movement is made with reference to a remote end. The remote end, in the case of complex movements, is not, as in the case of the gravitational system, a single point, but a situation more akin to the remote end of expansion of gas in a container, or the remote end of radiation phenomena. This situation, in the moving organism, involves what, for purposes of convenience only, may be designated as outer and inner aspects of the remote end. Consider a hungry person approaching the cupboard for something to eat. The neuromuscular system is under tension, in this case set up and released in large measure by intraorganic stimulation from the stomach wall. The person is nervous, irritable and tense. The remote end of his movements, so far as the organism as such is concerned, is within the organism itself; a relaxed, equilibrated state of the neuromuscular system. But the movements that end in relaxation are movements that bring the person to the cupboard and result in a filled stomach. The resolving process carries the organism to the external aspect of the goal-situation, the food-object. Thus, reaching the outer and inner aspects of the goal-situation are but two ways of describing the same process. Organic relaxation and arrival at the external object are coincident.

The direction of these movements is conditioned by a total situation involving arrangements of external stimuli toward which the organism is always in dynamic relation. We must think of the moving organism as an object moving in a larger dynamic whole, much as we think of the apple and its line of flight. There is, seemingly, a difference between an apple and the organism in that the apple does not propel itself toward the goal while the animal or human being does. This difference is only relative, however, and requires no new principles of explanation. The difference demands only a more complicated application of these principles.

The apple has mass, and does, in a sense, propel itself toward the ground, for as a mass, defined in terms of the whole, it makes a contribution to the whole. It possesses an increment of whole-character. To the extent that it is part-of-a-whole it is self-propelling in terms of the law of determined action. The living organism exhibits definite whole-properties, in its own right, that overtly figure in the process of reaching the goal. It directs its own movements toward the goal to that extent, and exercises the same government over its parts that the whole of which it is a part exercises over it. While the picture in the case of the organism is more complicated, phenomenologically, it is no more complicated in principle; the difference in the two situations is handled by repeated applications of the same set of laws as we go from phenomenologically more simple to more complex situations. At the same time that an organism, moving under stress in an environment, is being conditioned by a larger dynamic whole which furnishes at once the stress, the remote end, and direction of movement, so, in terms of the same set of laws, the organism gives direction, as a system itself, to the movements of its own parts.

§ 13. GOALS. In this complicated picture the contribution made by the organism results in alternative goals within the general goal-situation; that is, there are several points in the environment of which the organism is a part that may correspond to the single point in the centre of a gravitational system. The goal for the hunger response may, for example, be the cupboard, or the refrigerator, or a box of candy on a table in another room. The organism lives and moves, therefore, in an environment to which it is so adjusted that the larger whole amounts to a great number of related gravitational systems in one, each system being a particular alignment of stresses in the organism dynamically related to different stimulus-situations, and to each other.

§ 14. APPLICATION TO ETHICS. Were we to apply this line of reasoning to problems in ethics we would attempt to show, in detail, how intelligence figures in a human situation in a way similar to mass in a gravitational system. Suppose, for example, that a small object falls a given distance upon a glass plate. No damage will be done to the plate. But let a large object fall upon the plate from the same distance and the plate will be smashed. This is our cue to the rôle played by the part in the whole, although under the laws of the whole. The system, and the object in it, share “responsibility” for the broken plate. The larger object broke the plate because of its greater mass and therefore greater potential for performing work. Society and the individual share in the ethical responsibility for the deeds of man; society because it is the whole from which man derives his moral standards, and the individual, because he is the immediate agent of the deed, executed in terms of his judgement. His judgement corresponds to the mass of the falling body. The welfare of another individual, or of society as a whole, corresponds to the plate. Society itself corresponds to the gravitational field.

§ 15. DYNAMICS OF NEURO-MUSCULAR SYSTEMS. Returning to the main thread of discussion, there are certain neuro-muscular systems in the human organism, simple enough to permit a fairly clear conception of their dynamics. The optic system is one, as Koffka has so admirably pointed out. Here are two eyes each supplied with three pairs of muscles. These muscles all contract and relax as a unit as soon as the optic system is sufficiently mature. No practice is required.

Let it be assumed that the eyes of the infant are at rest, focussed upon a candle at A. The candle is moved to B. Both eyes follow the candle. But suppose that instead of starting at the point A we start at A′. The infant’s eyes would follow the candle quite as readily from A′ to B′. Notice, however, that the situation is quite different. In the first case muscles on the left side of each eye are relaxed, and contracted on the right; in the second case they are contracted on the right and relaxed on the left. In the two cases the light falls on different parts of the retina. Consequently, the neurological structures more actively concerned in the two movements are different in the two cases. In fact they are different for every position from which the eyes commence to move, for every different direction of movement, and for every different extent of movement. Indeed, it is impossible to conceive of any two movements just alike.

We are in a hopeless situation if we accept the experience theory. An infinite number of preformed pathways and bonds would have to be presupposed. If we try to account for these movements in terms of practice, or in terms of inherited reflex pathways where bonds are assumed between a stimulus and a given movement, one would never be able to make eye-movements; for each is different from every other with respect to its mode of stimulation through the retina, and its stimulation through tension and relaxation of the separate muscles. (The muscles themselves contain sense organs whose stimulation by muscular contraction or relaxation aids in the production of movement.) Obviously there must be an explanation that accounts for eye-movements on an entirely different basis, ruling out practice and the concept of reflex action.

§ 16. CONSTRUCTION OF RETINA. Note how the retina is constructed. The spot of clearest vision is in the centre, the fovea. There is a gradient of sensitivity that passes from the fovea to the margin of the retina. Whenever the brightest spot in the field of vision does not fall upon the spot of greatest sensitivity on the retina the optic system is disequilibrated. Tensions are set up in the eye-movement system. The equilibration is effected when the spot that is brightest in the visual field falls directly upon the fovea. The gradient of sensitivity across the retina and its dynamic relation to the optic system condition the simultaneous coordination of six pairs of muscles. If the eyes move so that the stimulus falls on another part, no closer to the fovea, there is no resolution of tension; if the eyes move so that the stimulus falls farther out on the retina there is an increase of tension. Only by moving the eyes so that the object falls upon the fovea is the tension resolved. Thus, eye-movements follow the law of least action just as the falling apple does. In the case just cited, and in all others, the law of least action and its corollaries permit of no explanatory concepts in psychology such as those of reflex action and the acquiring of motor co-ordinations by means of practice.

§ 17. EXPLANATION BY GROWTH-POTENTIAL. The explanation here offered is traced back to the growth-potential. The optic system is an expanding, differentiating whole, capable of functioning “perfectly” upon reaching a sufficient degree of differentiation. The differentiation is maturation. Reflect that the laws of movements in living organisms are the same as the laws of falling bodies. An apple need not try by experiment to reach the ground; its fall is not a selection of possibilities from a host of random performances, nor does it matter whether the apple is in the United States or in China. It has never fallen before; it does so perfectly the first time. From the standpoint of science there are no perfect or imperfect movements, not even in human conduct. In terms of dynamics Nature makes no errors and requires no practice. There are no wasted movements; there is no trial and error.

§ 18. RAT AND GUINEA PIG. Consider the difference between a newly-born guinea pig and a newly-born rat. The former can walk quite readily at birth; the latter is relatively helpless. The difference is one of maturity, not practice. The rat that must “learn” how to walk is merely demonstrating maturation in an environment of objects as his co-ordinations improve; while the guinea pig matures in the uterus. In both cases maturation is a function of stimulation, not of exercise. What seems to be exercise in the rat, and consequently an explanation of learning, is only the growth potential released into kinetic energy by environmental instead of uterine stimuli. Learning depends on practice in the same way that the falling apple depends on movement. The two are the same. To attempt an explanation of the one by the other is only to set up a fictitious problem whose solution is as impossible as the problem is fictitious.

§ 19. DIFFERENTIATION AND MATURATION. There have been infants who, artificially prevented from walking until long after the natural period of “trying”, walk perfectly well in the first attempt. (Perfectly must always be used in a practical, not a scientific sense.) Birds reared in high nests fly successfully the first time they try. Experiments on frog and salamander embryos by Carmichael[3] show that these creatures may be anæsthetised and prevented from making swimming movements over a period of days, while unmolested embryos are passing through the first awkward stages of swimming. When the drug is removed, the anæsthetised animals swim quite as well as the normal who have had several days of “practice”. The awkwardness of the latter in the interim consists of those grosser, less differentiated movements that any living organism makes in early stages of maturation. Differentiation and maturation go hand in hand.

Professor Bird,[4] experimenting upon chicks, discovered that pecking movements improve without practice within the limits of time the chicks can live without food. While practised chicks performed better than the unpractised, there was no evidence that faster progress in the latter was caused by experience. They had food, were stronger, maturated faster, and had the advantage of light; while the unpractised chicks were kept in the dark. Other experiments show that, without practice, forcibly-fed chicks will improve in pecking with age, until the limit of about two weeks is reached, when they no longer will peck at all. They will then die in the presence of food. Here we have evidence that maturation will take place only within limits in the absence of stimulation (Padilla).

1 Cƒ. Coghill; Anatomy and the Problem of Behaviour; New York, 1929.

2 Cƒ. Irwin; The Amount and Nature of Activities of Newborn Infants, etc.; Gen. Psy. Monog.; 1930; Vol. 8; 1-92.

3 Cƒ. Carmichael; Development of Behaviour in Vertebrates Experimentally Removed from the Influence of External Stimulation; Psy. Rev.; Vol 33; 1926; 51-58; Vol. 35; 1928; 253-260.

4 Cƒ. Bird; The Effect of Maturation upon the Pecking Instinct of Chicks; Ped. Sem., Vol. 33; 1926, 212-234.

CHAPTER V

THE LAWS OF PERCEPTION

§ 1. THE BEGINNINGS OF MENTAL LIFE IN THE INDIVIDUAL. In terms of the old descriptive unit, the beginnings of mental life, like the beginnings of behaviour, were a hodgepodge of inarticulate, unrelated elements. This time the elements were sense impressions and ideas. Since the dawn of psychology the main systematic problem has been to account for unity and order in mental life under the assumption that there was this chaos in the beginning. The mechanist movement took the form, first of faculty psychology and then of associationism. The vitalistic trend revealed itself in attention psychology. Each ended, finally, in a compromise that accepted the evils of both, a compromise that renders orthodox, present-day psychology systematically as hopelessly far from the truth as psychology was in the beginning. The compromise made attention and association, alike, agents of synthesis.

Accordingly, we were brought up to believe that the mind at birth consisted of so many distinct types of sensation:—visual, auditory, kinæsthetic, tactual, olfactory, gustatory. Somehow these discrete bits of experience appearing in consciousness one by one without unity and without order, fused and became unified wholes. But how? Logically, instruments of organisation, external to these processes, were required in order that such a mental machine could be a going concern. These instruments were association and attention, the two factors of mental life subject to law.

How did these factors supposedly bring order out of chaos? First, there was the primary law of association, viz., that when two experiences once occurred together a bond formed between them and, as a consequence, the one experience thereafter tended to suggest the other. There were many subsidiary or secondary laws:—the laws of similarity, contrast, cause and effect; then later, the laws of exercise or use and disuse (frequency), vividness, intensity, effect (bonding of an experience with pleasure or unpleasure), emotional congruity and intellectual congruity (special cases of the law of similarity). When psychology turned away from introspectionism it carried these laws with it and named them the laws of the conditioned reflex. These laws were also carried from sense experience to imagination and recall, over a logical bridge long since known as the physiological trace. Traces left in the nervous system by original sense impressions followed the laws of sensory organisation. The theory of traces committed the atomistic error over again with reference to temporal continuity. The mechanisms and laws of association, attention and memory-traces are as fictitious as the chaos which they were intended to remedy.

§ 2. DYNAMICS OF BEHAVIOUR AND PERCEPTION. Experiments in infant and child behaviour now reveal the fact that not only bodily movements, but the development of perceptual experience, follow the laws of dynamics. The infant for example, recognises whole situations first, such as his mother’s face. He can distinguish the face long before parts of the face are known to him, before there are eyes, ears, nose, hair, teeth, and even before there is perception of colour or a recognisable difference in brightness between one face and another. The face as a perceptual whole has properties of its own, such as friendliness and harshness, that cannot be referred to the parts. Similarly, the infant recognises the total effect of the handling he receives from different persons. The touch of each person is different although the difference is not traceable to particular pressures or movements. The total-feels differ as wholes.

§ 3. PERCEPTUAL WHOLES. That perceptual wholes are primary can be tested in still another way. After the child is old enough to recognise pictures of faces and even the actual existence, in faces, of eyes, nose, ears and other features, he cannot recognise an eye or a nose separate from the face. It is no longer an eye, but an aeroplane; no longer an ear but a coil of rope or a bird’s nest; no longer a nose but a tent or a mountain; no longer a mouth but a stairway. In each case the segregated parts take on whole properties; and it is two or more years later before these segregated objects can be identified by the child as parts of the whole from which they were taken.

§ 4. SYNÆSTHESIA. Evidence that the whole-character of perceptions is primary and that the specific sensory processes to which they can be reduced are secondary, is found in the phenomenon of synæsthesia. It has long been supposed, erroneously, that synæsthesia was a product of association. Consider a case of coloured hearing as an illustration. For a certain individual, piano tones are yellow, flute tones are blue, and clarinet tones are red. Another, who does not see colours when he hears tones, naturally thinks that the synæsthesic individual hears tones as he does; but this is an entirely wrong impression. For the synæsthesic individual, the visual and auditory aspects of his tonal experiences are not differentiated; the one cannot be abstracted from the other. Without the visual processes the listener is deaf to the tone.

Functionally, non-synæsthesic individuals perceive tones just as synæsthesic persons do. The perceptions are only phenomenologically different. Note how tones are ordinarily described. They are round, smooth, rough, harsh, soft, mellow, stringy, full, thin, high, low. A tone might as well be red as mellow, green as soft, white as rough. In fact, all persons are functionally as synæsthesic as the one who sees colours when he hears tones, for the perfectly good reason that a tone “sensation” is not after all a sensation. It is an extremely complex auditory configuration, a unit in its own right, having the meaning of a tone, but no more auditory in its sensory quality than the words employed to describe it would indicate. We hear with the brain as a whole; which means that if we must describe a tonal experience in terms of sensations, we feel, see, touch, and smell tones quite as much as we hear them. It will be of no avail to argue that such aspects of a tonal experience as require these “borrowed” terms to describe them are really auditory after all, but the trouble lies in our language; for we have the intelligence to invent words when we need them without mixing meanings in such an unseemly fashion. It will avail no one to assert that these experiences to which red, green, round, smooth, rough and mellow refer are associational luxuries tied to a tone quality; for, upon abstracting these experiences, there is no quality left. The colours are actually essential aspects of hearing.

This is not the whole story. Just as it was long supposed, erroneously, that there was a particular discrete quality of sensation that corresponded with a given physical type of stimulation, a view known as the constancy hypothesis, so it was thought that the human being perceived discrete kinds of spaces—visual space, auditory space, tactual space. Again, recent experiments prove the contrary. Cutsforth[1] has shown that there is no tactual space except in meaning. Tactual experiences are inseparable from visual and, without a visual background, do not form spatial wholes. Let a blindfolded observer explore an object, easily recognisable through vision. If he recognises the object at all it will be through visual imagination; but the chances are against any recognition of the object. Touch processes will not, alone, organise into space forms, even with practice. The adventitiously blind must rely, over the years, upon visual imagination for the space field within which to locate and perceive form, direction and extent. Gelb and Goldstein[2] found that a patient suffering from lesions of the so-called visual area of the brain was able to say that something happened when he was touched; but he could not tell where he had been stimulated. Aviators who have had experience of blind flying report that, even with instruments, it is very difficult to keep oriented with respect to earth; and that without instruments it is impossible. The equilibratory sense is not sufficient to inform them when their plane is right side up or upside down in the absence of a visual reference point, the horizon. Even with instruments that inform the pilot when he is upside down it is difficult to know in which direction upside down is.

§ 5. PRIMITIVE PATHIC STATE OF PERCEPTION. Available illustrations that disprove the orthodox conception of perceptual experience are legion. There is only one choice to make. The original consciousness of the infant is not a “big, booming, buzzing confusion.” Confusion means a mass of unrelated, discrete entities. On the contrary, the ordinal consciousness is a relatively homogeneous, undifferentiated field, potentially visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactual, olfactory, all in one.[3] Out of this relatively homogeneous total field there emerge forms that are figured upon a ground, just as local movements emerge through an individuation process from a total pattern of mass action. As they emerge, these forms are qualitatively distinguishable from one another, not because they are unanalysable, pure, simple qualities, but because as complex wholes, their whole-properties differ from one another. Qualities are subordinate field properties which, like secondary gradients in physiology, derive their characteristics from the whole from which they emerge. This emergence of quality is induced by stimulation of sense organs, and is, again, an expression of the growth potential. The individual’s consciousness, then, is another case of an expanding, differentiating, dynamic whole.

§ 6. EXAMPLE. Consider how a person identifies the pitch of a tone. There is good reason why he designates a certain tone as high and another as low. Audition, as such, will not constitute a field of its own; pitch emerges from a ground of visual experience. Before pitch can be discriminated a tonal range of pitches must be heard and apprehended as a whole, and a single particular pitch must be apprehended in its place along the range. The range is not built up by adding pitches together through association; the individual pitches differentiate from the range. Range has extent; and there is no auditory extent, as such. Thus a pitch is actually seen in a range as well as heard. It matters not that a person sees a piano keyboard or some other visual object with which he is said to associate the high and low pitched tones. This object merely conditions the particular manner in which a necessary visual ground differentiates into specific points along an extended range.

The same visual ground is the field property from which sounds derive, for seeing persons, their localisation in space. Much has been said about the importance of binaural hearing, phase differences, intensity differences, and the like, as if they, as discrete factors, accounted for sound localisation. True it is that phase and intensity are certain essential modes of stimulation; but only if the erroneous constancy hypothesis were true would this mean that the product, a tone shifting in space, was experientially an auditory process shifting in an auditory field. The tone shifts in a visual field.

§ 7. THE LAWS OF PERCEPTION: LAW I. Perception, like movement, is always organised, and follows the laws of dynamics that were presented in the preceding chapter. First, the term perception is applicable to any conscious experience no matter what the degree of phenomenological complexity or simplicity. As to the atom, versus the universe, all known explanatory laws apply to the simplest sensory experience as well as to the most complex emotion or thought process. The plan of the entire “mind” is contained in the simple process of seeing or hearing. Any mental process that “stands up” under observation is a whole, possessing a field property, and is phenomenologically complex. It has properties over and above those that are ascribable to its analysed parts. The outstanding field property of any perceptual experience is its meaning. Look at a square. Squareness is a property of the perceived figure as a whole. It is not contained in the four lines or in any given section of space within its boundaries. It is logically equivalent to a gravitational or a physiological gradient. Consider a melody. A melody is the whole-property of a certain sequence of tones. No sequence shorter than the whole is the melody; yet the melody is a distinct experience, perceptible without an explicit recognition of the individual notes. A printed word is an excellent illustration of a perceptual whole. In fact children learn to read best by perceiving words as wholes first, before letters are distinguishable.

The following is a splendid example of this principle; the incident actually occurred in a certain kindergarten. The teacher was in the habit of dismissing the children one by one after they had recognised their name, among others, when written on the board. It was Fred’s turn. The teacher wrote Freddie on the board, along with Johnnie, Walter, and Charlie. Fred insisted that his name was not there. The teacher insisted that it was. Finally Fred was excused from the room. He told his mother, on returning home, that he was “dumb”, for the teacher had said so; he did not know his name. His mother investigated, and discovered that he knew his name, even his full name, Frederick, and could write either Fred or Frederick. The next afternoon the performance in the kindergarten was repeated, but Fred’s mother was in the room. She asked the teacher to write Fred or Frederick, not Freddie, whereupon Fred recognised his name at once. Freddie, as a word, was different from either Fred or Frederick; it was perceived as were the other two words, as wholes. Fred could not see that “Freddie” contained the word Fred, for he had not reached the analytical stage of seeing words within words.

§ 8. LAW II. Second, parts derive their properties from wholes. Returning to the illustrations given under law one, all of the lines of the square derive their position and direction from the figure-as-a-whole. Their peculiar brightness is derived from a range of brightnesses just as the pitch of a tone is derived from a tonal range. The position of the square is derived from a total space-field; its “thereness” is derived from a differentiated field of space that, at the same time, has other “therenesses”. The individual tones of a melody derive their position and appropriateness from the melody as a whole; their pitch is selected relatively to their position in the melody; the proper emphasis and duration of each note are also derived from the nature of the melody as a whole. Again, the individual letters of the word, Fred, are selected with reference to the sound of the word as a whole, and their position depends upon the whole-property of the word.

§ 9. LAW III. Third, the whole conditions the activities of its parts. In drawing a square, the movements of making each line are conditioned by the total perceptual-motor pattern of the square as a single unit. That each side means the side of a square and not the side of something else is determined by the figure-as-a-whole.

Beautiful illustrations of this law are found in reversible illusions. In figure 2, x may be seen either as the upper or under surface of a stair, depending upon how the stair-as-a-whole is seen.

In reading proof it is so difficult not to see each letter in the light of the whole word that, often, errors are missed. Expose a word like f ther for only a tenth of a second and frequently the letter “a” will be seen when it is not there. Let several digits be exposed briefly with one of them upside down and all will be perceived right side up. Expose an incomplete pattern and it will be seen completed, for the part that is wrong will take on the proper membership character in the whole.

§ 10. LAW IV. Fourth, parts emerge from wholes through a process of individuation. This law has already been illustrated in the development of the child’s perception of a face and its parts. At first the infant sees a face as a whole, unable to pick out its different parts, yet able to distinguish one face from another. The parts then emerge from the face but are not recognisable away from it. Finally, the parts acquire sufficient properties in their own right, that is, sufficient individuality, to be recognisable as parts of a face, when not drawn with the face. Experiments with brief exposures of complex figures and arrangements of digits show that the observer sees, first, a mass of black standing out on a white ground. This is before any parts within the field can be identified, in fact, before any part takes on position. Then the parts emerge with their properties of position and identity, or form.

§ 11. LAW V. Fifth, wholes evolve as wholes. This law is evident from the first illustrations given in the preceding paragraph. No matter how differentiated the perceptual pattern, at each stage in its growth it is an organised whole. Each newly-discovered fact is not added from an outside source associated with the pattern; the new increment comes from the whole itself, related to it as it appears.

This law is best illustrated, perhaps, in the early perceptual life of the child. The child’s experience grows, not by an accumulation or accretion process, but by an expansion that involves differentiation. This is proved by the child’s use of words. A little girl was out walking with her mother one day when they stopped for a moment on the bridge over a mill-race. The mother permitted her daughter to throw sticks and stones into the water, and informed her that what she saw was a mill-race. The next day they were on a train going to the beach. They passed over a bridge, a hundred feet above a large river. The child looked down and said:—“Mother, there’s a mill-race.” And when they arrived at the beach the daughter danced up and down with glee, shouting:—“Mother, there’s a great, big mill-race!” Children often call a muff or a skunk a kitten after learning that their pet is a kitten. The author’s daughter learned the word baby before she was a year old and called herself baby when looking into a mirror; called bold paper and real dolls, babies; people whom she met on the street were babies, and even a statue in the nearby park was given the same name. Here there is shown the unified and undifferentiated, not confused, character of the child’s early perceptual processes.

When the child discovers how to analyse, his perceptual life still retains its character of unity. Now, however, experiences are differentiated; and perceptual wholeness expresses itself phenomenologically in terms of concepts, or abstract ideas. The mill-race, river and ocean are still alike in some way; but their similarities have emerged in a sufficiently explicit fashion to be verbalised and used purposively. These three objects are alike in being bodies of water, or in having waves. A muff, a cat and a skunk are alike in having fur. By this time the child is able deliberately to employ the whole-character of his general perceptual experience, in the form of concepts, principles and generalisations. Then he is reasoning.

§ 12. LAW VI. Sixth, the law of least action. That perception obeys the law of least action may be noted in the dominance of symmetry and balance in works of art, in conventional symbols such as the alphabet, dollar-sign, percent sign and asterisk. An irregular figure, briefly exposed, is seen as having more symmetry and balance than it actually possesses. Balanced, symmetrical designs are easier to perceive than irregular ones. Let a slightly irregular figure drawn in white upon a black background be fixated for several seconds. In the negative after-image that may be seen immediately afterwards, by focussing the eyes upon a neutral ground, the figure takes on perfect symmetry; the “error” in the design is corrected. The figure completes itself toward a more stable pattern, an occurrence quite analogous, in its dynamics, to the falling apple in the gravitational system.

§ 13. LAW VII. Seventh, the law of maximum energy. A test of the law of maximum energy, in the field of perception, lies in the determination whether perceptual processes undergo attenuation in the course of time. It is true that once a certain figure has been seen, as for example a face, a brief exposure of only part of the face may be given and the complete face will be seen. The perception is, in conventional language, filled in by imagination. But the face is not a face until it is filled in. Here, as far as perception goes, the imaginative factor cannot be separated from the sensory. There is, after all, no attenuation, no simplification, but rather a perception that retains its organisation when stimulation is, with respect to previous stimulations, incomplete. The same principle is seen clearly in imaginative recalls of past events. One visualises the mountain scenery he enjoyed during his summer vacation. The perceptual pattern is partly reconstructed, phenomenologically, in the absence of many of the original stimuli, but not all of them. The configuration is similar, however, to the original. Again there is no attenuation, no dropping out of details with respect to a given stimulus situation. Cut down the stimuli and the experience is cut down phenomenologically. Each experience is maximum with respect to existing conditions.

There is no more a simplification or dropping out of processes in mental life, in the course of attaining ends, than there is involved less energy each time a ball is dropped to the floor.

This law may be illustrated in another way. A given figure must be perceived as a whole or not at all. To perceive part of it only is to perceive another figure of a different character. The clearest case, perhaps, is found in apprehending meanings. The number one, for instance, does not mean a fraction of 1 although the fraction may be as high as .99999999. Similarly, 1 does not mean anything more than 1, no matter how slight the difference may be.

§ 14 LAW VIII. Eighth, the law of configuration. Imagine two narrow slits an inch long, cut vertically in cardboard, an inch apart. Let an apparatus be imagined behind the screen that will expose a light first through one of the slits and then the other, with any desired length of exposure, interval of time between the two exposures, and intensity of illumination. If these three factors are properly controlled, light may be exposed first through one slit and then through the other. Neither exposure will be seen. Instead, a flash of light will be noticed, moving from one of the slits to the other. This is the familiar moving picture illusion. It was investigated by Wertheimer in 1912. The result of his experiment was a revolutionising of modern psychology; for he showed the necessity of adopting the organismic point of view in place of the atomistic one.

Note that between the two slits there was no stimulation of the retina, yet movement between them was seen. There are conditions under which the movement is poor; conditions under which two stationary slits of light will be seen at the same time, and conditions under which two successive exposures will be seen, all depending upon the time, space and intensity relations of the stimulating conditions.

An interesting aspect of this simple experience is the fact that, under the conditions for good apparent movement, nothing is seen until the second exposure is made. The whole-character of the perceptual process is not only demonstrated again; but the circumstances under which the whole-character exists are brought out. Movement is a field property of the perception and is conditioned by a total set of factors which must be complete before the perception develops. In other words, the perception is an organised response to a total situation; it is a temporal as well as a spatial unit. Until the conditions for completing the movement are set up, the movement does not commence. One of the conditions for the completion of the movement is the exposure of light through the second slit. How familiar a ring this account has, for the falling apple requires a remote end, the centre of the earth, before it can fall. Physiologically, a perception is reduced to wave motion in the brain, but the differentials in potential must be set up before the movement will occur; and these are set up by the two stimulations in their relation to the dynamics of the total brain.

Now let the light exposed through the first slit be a weak one and the light through the second, a stronger one. Nothing will happen until the second light is exposed; then movement will be seen going in the opposite direction from the order in which the slits were exposed—from the second slit back to the first. This illusion is only momentary, for the movement switches back again. But the law of least action has been demonstrated under the conditions that existed at the moment of stimulation. Movement occurred from the higher to the lower potential, from the stronger to the weaker places of initial stimulation.

§ 15. PERCEPTION VERSUS ATTENTION. How much more scientific and satisfactory these laws are than the older vitalistic laws of perception that presupposed attention as the organising agent. In orthodox language, squareness, seen when four straight lines are appropriately drawn, depends upon an act of attention; reversible illusions are caused by shifts in attention. Attention is the state that prepares one for the perception of a given object at any time. If one does not hear his name called, it is because his attention was absorbed. When one looks at a five-spot on a die the organisation of the dots is a result of attention. Attention has covered a multitude of psychological sins; it has been a most convenient psychological deity capable of anything. Now, attention psychologists are shielding themselves behind the argument that, after all, by attention is meant not an agent, but a name for a set of conditions that control perception. Accordingly, attention is a state of preparedness accounting for the selective factor in perception. It is a brain condition; it is intensity of stimulus, movement of stimulus, the number of stimuli, anything that helps to condition a perception. Since when have we required a single term to connote a variety of conditions, among themselves possessing no unity or interrelations? In these circumstances the conditions must speak for themselves. To insist upon an attention factor is merely to admit the old belief in the necessity for an external organising agent, a belief that conventional psychology has paradoxically repudiated in its reduction of attention into unrelated conditions of perception, while retaining the concept of attention.

Selection, in perception, is traceable to the conditions under which perception occurs. These conditions act directly on perception, not through an intermediary process. Intensity of stimulus, movement of stimulus, number of stimuli, arrangement of stimuli, all condition observation, not of attention. Attention is superfluous and a fiction. The laws of human behaviour, then, as far as its perceptual aspects are concerned, are the laws of dynamics, not supposed laws of an attention that limits one’s powers of observation at one time, helps them at another, steps in and guided a perception first in this direction and then in that. The so-called range and fluctuations of attention are no more and no less than the range and fluctuations of perception.

Logically, if the laws of perception were reduced to laws of attention, one would be forced, for consistency, to posit attention as the cause of mental development. Mind in the beginning was attention. If attention is a condition of perception it must come first. Attention with nothing to attend to! How incongruous! No more incongruous, however, than any mechanistic or vitalistic conception. And finally, if one attempts to identify attention with organisation he is making two things out of one, the absurdity of which is demonstrated by the following statements:—The perception was attentioned; the perception was an attentioned response. These assertions are meaningless and ridiculous; yet, if “organised” is substituted for “attention” the assertions are meaningful. This fact alone proves that attention is not organisation; it refers to an alleged mental process by itself, a fictitious intermediary between organisation and perception.

1 Cƒ. Cutsforth; An Analysis of the Relation Between Tactual and Visual Perception; Lawrence; 1930.

2 Cƒ. Gelb and Goldstein; Über den Einfluss des vollständigen Verlustes des optischen Vorstellungsvermögens auf das taktile Erkennen; Zsch. f Psych.; Vol. 83; 1919, 1-93.

3 Cƒ. Cattell; The Subjective Character of Cognition; Brit. J. of Psy. Monograph Supplement, No. 14, 1918.

CHAPTER VI

THE LAWS OF LEARNING

§ 1. THE PROBLEM OF INSTINCT VERSUS LEARNING. There is no activity of man from birth to death that does not depend upon a growth potential; nor is there an activity that does not depend upon environment, for the growth potential exists only with reference to environment. Thus, basing behaviour upon the laws of dynamics does away with a fruitless and misleading distinction between acquired and inherited behaviour. If one must make the distinction, one should consider that problem-solving in mathematics is quite as instinctive as walking or loving, and one must admit that the latter are acquired to the same extent as learning fractions. These forms of behaviour differ in the same way that a cyclone differs from a gentle breeze, namely, in the circumstances under which stresses are set up that demand resolution.

Moreover, it makes no difference whether the performance in question reveals itself upon the day of birth or when the individual is physically mature. Take the so-called sucking instinct in infants. The neural mechanisms between the mouth and the brain have no efficacy in their own right. If the infant’s mouth and digestive tract, together with the direct anatomical routes from these organs to the brain, were dissected intact, there would be no sucking. “Instinct” is not a mechanical performance depending upon a certain set of preformed, inherited pathways in the nervous system. It is a performance of a total organism, all parts of which are involved in the performance. To be sure, the total organism can be reduced, within limits, and a given performance will in some fashion be carried out; but in such circumstances there is always a loss somewhere, in some respect.

The sucking, too, is acquired, in the same sense that any activity is acquired, through growth and environmental stimulation. There is a period in the life of the embryo prior to which the sucking activity does not appear; and whether it shall appear or not depends upon the dynamic environment in which the nerve and muscle tissue develop. From our discussion in Chapter IV it can be seen that the sucking response emerges from undifferentiated mass action under the control of a total neural pattern. So-called acquired performances, learned after birth, emerge in the same way. Organic and uterine environment control the development of the lips, tongue, throat and their immediate nerve connections quite as much as education controls the development of mathematical reasoning. The growth processes that end in the latter require a different kind of stimulation; that is all.

Compare a newly hatched pheasant with a robin. The one is able to see, run, scratch and pick up its own food while the other is at first blind and helpless. In a few weeks; however, the robin can execute similar movements. How does it happen that movements, essentially alike in character, come about through the operation of different and incompatible principles? Yet this is the assumption involved in the distinction between instinct and learning. Is not the similarity of the two sets of movements sufficient proof that instinct and learning are one and the same?

Grant for the sake of the argument that the two are not the same. The instinct to walk, then, is laid down in toto, in the pheasant, by inheritance. This presupposes a particular set of pathways in the nervous system capable of being used for a particular set of movements. A pheasant starts to walk. It travels in a straight line for a short distance and suddenly turns to the right because there is a tree in the way. Did the instinct to walk inform the bird how to turn to the right when there was a tree in the way? Suppose the obstacle was a mound of earth instead of a tree. Did the instinct provide for this alternative? There is a wide rut in the ground that must be jumped. Did this same instinct furnish the pheasant, also, with the equipment for jumping? A sudden noise is heard, and the pheasant halts in his tracks. Does the instinct—the same set of pathways—provide also the device by means of which to halt when a noise is heard? Does it also furnish the means of turning around and running for a hiding place, or of returning to the mother when she calls? The instinct to walk does marvellous things, that one little set of pathways! It furnishes the pheasant with complete movements of walking, turning to the right, left, back, forward again, up, down, around, across, not only in all directions but at all speeds and in unnumbered emergencies. What could be a better admission that any mode of behaviour for which an explanation is sought in instinct is assumed to exist in toto before it actually does exist? Everything that the theory intended to explain is taken for granted and used as the explanation.

§ 2. “INSTINCTIVE” TENDENCIES. The advocate of the instinct hypothesis will not find comfort in the protest that instinct is merely a tendency toward action. What does tendency mean? It means that a certain act has already commenced; and, as we have seen, an act does not commence until its remote end has been established. To imply a tendency, then, assumes the conditions for the completed performance.

How about the so-called blindness of instinct? Why will a hen brood on corncobs or stones, or the lamb follow the wolf, or two males of the species fight for the possession of a female until one of them is dead? Are not questions pertaining to intelligence just as relevant? Why do human beings do stupid things? Is it any worse for a lamb to follow a wolf than for a human being to follow a medical quack? We call the latter performance human ignorance. Why, at the lamb’s level of performance, should there not be a lack of lamb judgment? We speak of too much credulity or too much will to believe in the case of the human being. Is it preferable, in the case of the lamb, to say, “too much instinct”; or would it be more reasonable, since the lamb must perceive the wolf in relation to something in order to follow it at all, that the lamb’s insight, too, was meagre? Like the human being it wanted something in its own way, and the tension toward the foal was unguided by circumstances that come with growth.

§ 3. “INSTINCT” AND EVOLUTION. The problem of “instinct” can best be understood in the light of evolution. There came a time in the development of animal life when eggs would hatch only if kept warm by the mother bird. Just at the time when such eggs happened to be laid, how was it that the bird showed the necessary behaviour of brooding? How did it happen that the bird developed higher body temperatures during the brooding period, thus imparting the heat necessary for the growth of the embryos within the eggs? Certainly the bird did not reason:—“Well now, here are some eggs that, unlike eggs laid heretofore, will not hatch unless I keep them warm.” Nor did it scurry around and become overheated just before it sat on the nest each time. On the other hand, there was certainly no mysterious set of pathways like so many pipes connected with the egg-laying apparatus, blowing steam into the bird’s muscles, so to speak, keeping it on the nest whether or no. If the instinct did it, why have the bird? And if the bird was just one instinct plus another, an aggregation of mechanical devices, what unified them? There is only one answer. The bird is not a bundle of instincts; there are no instincts; nor is the bird a mysterious deus ex machina informing a strand of nerves to function at a certain time. The bird, from brain to ovaries, is a unified, dynamic system.

In the course of evolution there developed, as one unified whole, an egg-forming apparatus that produced a certain type of egg, a nervous system dynamically so adjusted to the condition of the egg-sac that it conditioned the laying of the egg at a certain time. The same nervous system, during the brooding period, changed the metabolism of the bird in such a way that its temperature increased. The same nervous system was so structured in relation to the egg-laying device, the feathers, the bill, in fact all the necessary organs, that the eggs became a goal for the response of brooding. The same system that, as a whole, produced eggs incapable of hatching without incubation, also produced the insight necessary not only for the brooding response, but for nest building and the care of the young. We have, in the so-called instinctive responses of the bird, the evolution of a self-running, balanced, dynamic system; just as a gravitational system is a balanced and self-running thing, giving organisation and direction to motions within it. Anyone who thinks the bird is a bundle of instincts makes the same mistake of thinking that the earth is merely an aggregation of stones, water, dirt and atmosphere.

Thus a bird, equipped with wings, has the nervous system that makes possible their intelligent use; equipped with a bill, it has a nervous system accompanying it so structured that the bill becomes a tool to be used intelligently in food-getting, nest-building and self-protection. Equipped with an odoriferous gland, the skunk knows when and where to use it. Equipped with powerful muscles, sharp teeth and claws, the lion’s carnivorous habits are a matter of lion intelligence. With a digestive tract constructed to permit the digestion of certain food, and a body whose maintenance requires such food, an animal possesses the necessary sense organs for detecting it, together with the appropriate insight, and desires, for the behaviour of hunting and securing it. Likewise, giving birth to certain types of young, the animal has the nervous system enabling it to care for the young intelligently with respect to the demands of the situation. Every detail of the total system, whether anatomically or functionally considered, evolves with reference to every other. But the system, unified as it is, permits only a limited number of responses and a limited insight. This insight is proportional to the degree of maturation in the race and in the individual.

The differences in the stereotyped character of responses in the different animals, as for example in the insects versus mammals, may be explained by the dynamics of the nerve structures that have been formed in the course of evolution. In any case the unity of the nervous system can be demonstrated physically as easily as the unity of a gravitational system can be demonstrated. In any case we see in the higher organism the development, under a growth potential, of a complex, organised, total behaviour pattern that expands and differentiates through the influence, first, of uterine and intraorganic stimulation and, second, through the addition of environmental stimulation. The species came into existence, in the course of time, through the differentiation of an evolution potential.

§ 4. THE PROBLEM OF LEARNING. We return to the pheasant and the robin. Witness the awkward performance of the robin when, still a fledgeling, it is placed upon the ground. It sinks backward upon its tail as it attempts to walk; it topples on its side or lunges forward upon its breast. Then it is up and trying again. What could look more like trial and error, for the movements are certainly not successful? Herein is precisely the place where the fallacy of the trial and error conception of learning resides. The movements were unsuccessful with respect to what? Obviously the standard of perfect walking. But what has this standard to do with the robin falling against its breast? Nothing. The robin has no more idea of the goal of perfect walking than an infant has of the calculus. The conditions for perfect walking are not the conditions for falling over. The concept of trial and error no more explains walking than the fact that four is the double of two explains two. One cannot account for an event in terms of conditions that apply not to that event but to another.

§ 5. UNIFORMITY OF NATURE, INORGANIC AND ORGANIC. If there is unity and order in Nature there can be only one standard for a given set of conditions. The law of least action sets that standard. If action occurs over the shortest route in time, then organisation is always complete with respect to the existing conditions. Even if action occurred over the longest route in time, as may be assumed in certain physical situations, maximum organisation is implied. Thus we see the fallacy of the double standard. From the standpoint of science there is no trial and error in Nature, no random performance and no waste of whatever kind. It follows that one stage of learning is not the correct point of reference for another; and a superior performance is not the correct point of reference for an inferior one. The correct points of reference are the universal laws of dynamics, the system of energy with which we are dealing, and the actual factors that disturb that system in its present state. This rules out any reference to trial and error or random, unco-ordinated activity. It rules out any reference to a performance as stupid or intelligent except with respect to comparative levels of growth. It means that one level of stupidity in an intelligent act will not account for another; since both levels obey the same laws under differing sets of conditions.

§ 6. FAllACIES ABOUT “LEARNING”. We have not begun to enumerate the fallacies in the orthodox conception of learning. It is an error to assume that we learn by experience unless we mean that the learning involves experience, or better, that learning and experience are synonymous. Then the expression is redundant. Suppose for the sake of the argument that experience does account for learning. There is a first step in the learning process of an infant, and a first step in the learning process everywhere along the line of mental development, when the organism confronts situations which it has never confronted before. How can learning commence prior to a time when there has been no experience at all; and how can a new phase of learning commence prior to a time when there has been no experience in this particular situation? A principle that will not account for the first step in learning will not account for the second, the hundredth or the millionth. Thus the statement that we learn only with experience means that we are using two words to designate the same process, learning and experience.

Out of the false logic lurking in the experience theory of learning come many other fallacious assumptions, including the popular belief that practice, as such, makes perfect; that the way to learn is to drill; that the nervous system develops by exercise just as a muscle is alleged to do. On the contrary, an attempt to explain learning in terms of exercise, or by the use and disuse of nerve pathways, is utterly wrong. Drop a ball a million times and it will not fall more easily the last time than the first. The apple need not seek its way to the ground several times, nor even once, before making the “perfect” performance. An air current, never having gone from a certain place to another, has no difficulty in finding its way. An electric current will travel just as well through a switch the first time as it will the thousandth. Repetition makes no difference to the switch nor to the current. The current is conditioned upon the difference in potential between the ends of the wires.

In a similar fashion a nerve cell, sufficiently maturated to permit conduction, need not, through repeated exercise, be practiced in the art of carrying its impulses. Whether a given nerve cell will conduct depends upon its dynamic relation to the surrounding field—its position in a field of potentials—not upon the number of times it has been used. Similarly, the synapses, or junctures between nerve cells, which are like switches, will carry a current as readily the first time as the millionth.

§ 7. LEARNING IS DOING. Learning is doing. It is not explained by doing. The facts that account for learning are external to it, and repetition of response is not external. Thus, not repetition of response, but the facts that explain repetition, explain learning. The acquisition of intellectual or muscular skill involves persistence in a given task; and this requires repetition of stimulus-situations, just as a growth process requires time. In fact, learning is a growth process; but repetition of performance will not explain it anymore than time will explain growth.

One child has studied his lesson several times. Another has studied it only once. The first knows it much better; but the additional study is not the cause of the greater knowledge when studying and increasing knowledge are one and the same process. Hence, by definition, progress presupposes stages of development; it is not explained by them. The dependence of one stage upon its predecessor is definitional, not dynamic; since progress is by definition a unit from beginning to end.

Let an analogy be considered in this connection. Think of half a circle. You cannot think of half before you think of whole, for the half presupposes the whole; but once you have the idea of whole you can think of either half or of both. Furthermore, thinking of one half implies the existence of the other in the same descriptive unit. Thus, definitionally, one half depends upon the other; you cannot have one without implying the other. It is the same with all unity. You cannot think of a single part without implying all the others, but no one part will explain any other.

§ 8. LEARNING IS A “WHOLE”. Merely transpose this logic from a spatial to a temporal unit. One phase or step in a temporal continuum will not account for the next. Learning is by definition a continuum, a certain temporal unit. The instant you say “learning” you imply all of the steps that the process involves from its beginning to its end. True it is that one would not have progressed through the second step until after he had gone through the first; but again the dependence is definitional, not causal, just as one would not have half of a circle until he had implied the other half. Thus it follows that, in order to explain learning, one must go (1) to growth potentials considered external to behaviour, and (2) to environment.

The problem, repetition of response, may be approached from another angle. Suppose the increment of progress between the first and second repetitions of an unlearned task be considered subtracted from the repetitions. Subtract also the increment between the second and the third repetitions, the third and the fourth, and so on. These increments represent all there is to the learning process, as such; and the repetitions—the doing of the same thing over and over again remain. Without these increments the performance would not have changed from the beginning. This argument, alone, proves that the essence of learning is not the repeating of an activity; it is doing something in a new way each time a stimulus-situation is met. Learning, therefore, is precisely what repetition is not; it is exactly the opposite of the conventional notion of habit.

Often, in explaining learning conventionally, an analogy is drawn between the nervous system and a muscle. The nervous system improves with use, it is argued, just as a muscle does. But the analogy is misleading, first, because a muscle does not improve because of use. A muscle contraction is a product of numerous conditions; and among them are a stimulus and the metabolic relations of the muscle to its blood supply. The same situation that incites a muscle contraction stimulates heart action, raises blood pressure and produces faster rates of metabolism. These processes result in a growth or “hardening” of the muscle. The cause of the “hardening” is not the contraction itself, but is external to the muscle. A growth potential is realised in kinetic energy when that potential is set up by stimulation—an entirely different story, based upon an entirely different logic, from the claim that organs improve by use.

§ 9. EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMAL LEARNING. Very striking in this connection are experiments on learning in animals with the use of operative technique. Lashley[1] showed that a monkey could learn to open a latch-box with the right hand when its left hand and arm were paralysed by an operation on the right cerebral hemisphere. The nerve paths and synapses which, in terms of the exercise theory, require use if the left hand and arm are ever to be employed in opening the box had been destroyed. The problem learned, the monkey’s right hand and arm were then paralysed by an operation on the left cerebral hemisphere. Meanwhile the left side of the body had recovered. Before the right side recovered the monkey was given the latch-box. He opened it successfully with the unpractised hand and arm. It is evident that the monkey, not a set of pathways, had learned to open the box. The nervous system as a whole was involved in the manipulations and in gaining the insight necessary to execute the task.

Finally, the exercise theory rests upon the notion of gradation of neural resistances at the synapses, or junctures between nerve cells. This resistance, it is said, decreases with the repeated passage of currents through the synapse. Again the interpretation violates the laws of dynamics. Moreover, experimentally, it is demonstrable that a nerve fibre will conduct with maximum strength or not at all. If, then, the intensity of a nerve current is cut down by resistance at the synapse, the decrement is made up again by a maximum discharge of the next neuron in the chain. Every way we turn we find complete evidence against the theory that habits are formed by repeating them. (Cƒ. pp. 107; 120.)

§ 10. WHY IS PRACTICE NECESSARY? If all this is true why must the virtuoso spend hours, daily, with his violin, or suffer the loss of those finer and more nicely balanced touches that mark him as a genius? Why must a person continue to speak or read a foreign language, or else decline in his facility? Once more we face a familiar principle in dynamics. As long as there are differentials of potential in an energy system, energy in the regions of the highest potential will, if unstable, “leak” into surrounding regions of lowest potential, unless the differentials are kept up by disturbances from outside. A learned performance is represented in the nervous system by differentials of potential in the form of structurisations of nerve tissue. Where the energy is grossly structured into relatively coarse and stable patterns, the change toward homogeneity of form will be slow in the absence of stimulation. We find such structurisations in the gross aspects of maturation, the growth of major cellular interconnections in the nervous system, and an increased cellular formation in the muscles. But within these gross patterns there are finer and less stable structurisations, representing the latest stages of differentiation in the maturation process. These are the first to suffer with lack of stimulation; the grosser developments are the last to suffer, and the latter represent the cruder, more mass-like performances characteristic of the earlier stages in learning. The finer co-ordinations also suffer most under fatigue, and in disease, emotional excitement or other disturbing situations.

The virtuoso reverts, practically speaking, to older and grosser performances in the absence of the stimulation to which practice subjects him. The foreigner, under fatigue and excitement, “reverts” to his mother tongue; the senescent individual reverts to childhood; the maladjusted person flees from the cruel world of adult reality and regresses to childhood ways; the delirious person, removed from external stimulation, reverts to youth and recites verbatim poetry and drama which he is unable to recall voluntarily because normal waking life is, in its totality, a much more highly differentiated behaviour pattern than the one involving materials learned in childhood.

The reversion or the regression is conditioned by the absence of stimulus-patterns. The golfer, for example, who has not played for several months, perhaps years, has removed himself from the stimulus-patterns that keep the energy of his nervous system differentiated and organised with respect to the goals of golf. The gross aspects of movements made on the golf course do not suffer, meanwhile, for they are made in response to other situations in life. Were the player to remove himself long enough from all environment, the gross aspects of these movements would also suffer; he would finally become unable to walk. Gross and constant arrangements of stimulus-patterns having to do with gross spatial and temporal relationships between objects and events in our environment sustain the gross organisation of our behaviour patterns, and also the cruder aspects of perceiving and thinking. As we shift from one task to another we still confront these stimulus arrangements. But the finer arrangements to which the finer aspects of perception and co-ordination are adjustments, differ from one situation to another, and as fast as we remove ourselves from these aspects, the alignments of potential in the nervous system corresponding to them disappear.

§ 11. APPLICATION To MORALS. Until he understands thoroughly the details of such a theory of habit formation as we have just presented, the moralist will find little comfort or satisfaction in trying to explain addiction to tobacco, liquor and drugs. But here again, repetition of the act is involved only by definition; it explains nothing. The reason why these habits are hard to break is the fact that the circumstances required for breaking them have not been satisfied. Narcotics alter the composition of tissues in the body. In the sense in which we have used repetition of stimulation, repetition does count. With each application the tissues of the throat, and other parts of the body, become more and more dehydrated, producing a tickling and thirst which, in advanced stages, becomes pain. During the application and shortly after, the narcotic anæsthetises the tissues, and, if strong enough, depresses the nervous system. In any case there is temporary relief from the tickling or the pain, and an intoxicated feeling that, in the right circumstances, is pleasurable. The habit commences as a voluntary act, generally for social reasons. Shortly the social motive gives way to the demand for relief from dehydrated conditions in the tissues; the narcotic, taken to obtain relief, increases the dehydrated condition; thus the entire process becomes a vicious circle. In no case, however, is the habit to be explained by the tunnelling of grooves through the nervous system. Efforts to break the habit must always be motivated in proportion to the demand for relief from pain.

§ 12. ESSENTIALS OF LEARNING. So far, then, what are the essential conditions of learning? First, the learner, whether an animal or a human being, must be maturating and, in the long run, confronting a learning situation that furnishes external stimulation. Second, the learner must be interested; he must have the will to learn. In other words, he must be under tension toward some goal. The ultimate source of this tension is the growth potential; the immediate source is environmental and intraorganic stimulation. The importance of the will to learn and of intraorganic stimulation has already been alluded to (pp. 103; 145), and will become evident, again, in the following chapter. Meanwhile, two vital problems of learning remain to be considered here, insight and motivation.

§ 13. INSIGHT IN RELATION TO LEARNING. So atomistically minded are most of us that, after all is said and done, we wonder why learning does not follow the great and fundamental law of association. We forget that by looking at learning piece-meal we fail to observe its essentials. We observe a growing embryo and see cell piling upon cell. Why then is growth not a multiplication of cells? It is, but only from the standpoint of dead anatomy. Dynamically the cells are the structurisations of an energy system; as cells they are parts without relation and without unity. Regarded as structurisations of a dynamic pattern they become, not explanations, but results. A true description of growth rests, not upon the cell, but upon the process by means of which the cell is formed. To think of growth in terms of cells is to put the cart before the horse. Likewise, when we think of learning in terms of discrete experiences, said to be associated together, we are putting the cart before the horse. The experiences are like the cells; they are the evidences, not the causes of development.

§ 14. BANKRUPTCY OF ASSOCIATIONISM. Nevertheless, suppose we apply the association theory seriously to the learning process. A child finds a bee crawling on the windowsill and seizes it with his hand. The obvious happens. In order to account for this event the association theory regards the perception of the bee as a complex of sensations. Each of these sensations must be associated by so many separate acts of mind with innumerable elements in the movement of withdrawing the hand. Which aspects of the bee produced the contractions of the flexor muscles and which the contractions of the extensors? Both types of muscular response are physically required for the withdrawal. But this is only a small part of the difficulty. The multitudinous details of the bee—head, body, wings, feet, colour, size, shape—and the multitudinous separate contractions and relaxations of muscles must become bonded in the right way to the feeling of pain. The bee must be associated with the movement; the pain with the movement; and the pain with the bee. Nor is this all. The bee is on the windowsill. The hand was withdrawn from the windowsill. If bees are hereafter to be avoided when seen on windowsills, the windowsill must be associated with the multitudinous aspects of the bee and again with the movement and still again with the pain. And the bee is crawling, so the crawling motion must also be associated with the bee, with the movement of withdrawal, the pain and the windowsill. For every conceivable aspect of the situation bee travelling at a certain speed, a certain sized bee, a certain coloured bee and so on ad infinitum,—bonds must be multiplied and remultiplied. What a marvellous piece-meal performance; millions of different mental acts, each a separate thing, coming together! Did they all decide to do it of their own accord just in the right way at the right time? Did a miracle-performing agent like attention do it? Suppose the miracle was thus wrought. It was all for nothing, for in terms of the theory nothing is learned until after the associations are formed and after the bonds are established by use. We never learn except by experience.

Tomorrow the poor child is in the garden picking flowers. There is a bee in the flower. But there are no established bonds between the bee and the flower; the bonds were formed between a bee and a windowsill. There is no knowledge as yet that a bee in a flower will sting; a certain pathway in the nervous system must be used first, the pathway that connects flower with a stinging bee; so the child must be stung by the bee-in-the-flower. Then he must be stung again in every new situation before he knows that a bee in that situation may sting him. The appeal to common elements between old and new situations will not save the theory; for the common element has not yet been associated with the elements of the situation that are not common, and this can never be accomplished until the process of bonding has been achieved, through experience, in each new situation. A bee, therefore, may be ever so familiar, but the familiarity, not yet connected by association with a new situation, is worthless.

Stupid, you say. This is not what association means. Obviously, having been stung once the child associates his past experiences with the new situation before he is stung again. But now you have abandoned your theory. The child is in a new situation and is performing an act never before executed; no bond has been formed by use; no pathway opened by repetition. You are granting insight to the child. Put the theory to a further test. Suppose the child was stung originally on the left hand and suppose his left eye had been closed and he saw the bee with the right eye. A certain set of bonds, presumably, have been formed. Now the next day the child approaches a bee with the right hand and the right eye is closed. Here is a different set of pathways, with unformed bonds. What will the child do?

No, the child did not learn by forming associations and by exercising his synapses. When he first saw the bee on the windowsill and was stung, the experience then and there was no piece-meal affair, but a single, unified performance involving the whole neuromuscular system. This system obeyed in its own way the laws of dynamics. In having the experience the child was learning, neither before nor after; when he saw the bee the next time he avoided it for the same reason that he had the original experience. The situation then demanded a new, but at the same time, an organised response, developed there on the spot; the bee was perceived in relation to the total situation. The child did not repeat being stung for the same reason that an apple does not repeat its fall. A particular alignment of stresses repeats its activity but once. Thereafter there is a new alignment of potentials. The original experience was a phase in growth process, a phase in the differentiation of an energy pattern.

We said that the child avoids bees after being stung for the same reason that he can understand what the bee is doing at the time of the initial stinging. It becomes obvious, therefore, on analysis, that the instant one admits prediction in behaviour he forsakes the laws of association. Since learning is always a matter of making predictions implicitly, the notion of association is throughout fictitious.

§ 15. INSIGHT VERSUS ASSOCIATIONISM. Thus the concept of insight supplants the concept of association. There is nothing mysterious about insight. It can be demonstrated in animals as far down in the evolutionary scale as the goldfish. F. T. Perkins[2] trained numbers of these animals to choose their food from the dimmest of three illuminated compartments, a bright, a medium and a dim. Then he shifted the brightness of the lights up the scale of intensity until what was the brightest before was now the dimmest. How did the fish behave? The correct compartment is now the one which they had all learned not to select, for they were punished whenever they went to it. They went immediately to the dimmest of the three compartments, the very light, which in the previous situation, they had learned to avoid. What better proof could there be of insight; the perceiving of one detail of a situation in its relation to the total situation. What better proof of the fact that the same light had one property in one combination and another property in the other. The properties of the parts are derived from the whole of which they are members; and this holds for perceiving in the goldfish as well as for perceiving in human beings.

We know that all perceiving is in this way relational; and, unless the relations are such as can be grasped by the learner at a given level of maturation, learning will not commence. Learning is a growth of insight, and to be effective, this growth must be stimulated at a rate commensurate with the learner’s normal rate of maturation. If repetition of stimulation comes too frequently, the task becomes insensible to the learner, a situation that is induced, also, by stimulating the organism with tasks whose difficulties mount faster than the learner is maturating. This conception of learning construes it as a process of making discoveries; it is a stream of inventions on the part of the learner, no different in principle from the creative work of the artist, the scientist and the organiser of business.

§ 16. THE PROBLEM OF MOTIVATION. Conventional psychology has been responsible for a veritably atrocious use of rewards and punishments in an effort to control the learning process, on the theory that a particular performance is facilitated or stamped in by pleasure and inhibited or stamped out by annoyance. This aspect of the association theory, like all other aspects of it, is false in spirit and in fact. First, before an experience will be pleasant or unpleasant in a learning situation the experience must be judged right or wrong, helpful or harmful, with respect to some goal. If, then, insight is not basic to the satisfaction or the annoyance, there is no satisfaction or annoyance. Moreover, the learning is accomplished when the judgements of right and wrong are made, not when the experiences are pleasurable or annoying; the latter are by-products, not causes of the learning. Motivation through the arousal of pleasure or unpleasure is efficacious, therefore, only when it makes a given organised response more vigorous. It increases tension; and under increased tension the organism’s responses are faster and at the same time more intricately organised, but pleasure and unpleasure accomplish nothing in their own right. The greater vigour of response, characterised phenomenologically by feeling, is induced by the stimulating situation that produces the feeling. If the situation is not sensible to the learner, and the response is not insightful, no amount of feeling will result in learning. The motive must be logically relevant to the goal.

Second, the philosophical assumption behind the conventional idea of rewards and punishments is fallacious. Man’s goals are not pleasure and unpleasure. In the course of performing some act he discovers pleasure and unpleasure, and abstracts from the performance these affective aspects only to assign them as the cause of the performance; just as in learning he discovers the acquisition of experience, abstracts the experience from the learning, and assigns to experience a causal efficacy. Man’s goals are situations and things, not feelings. What he wants is an opportunity to resolve his growth potential; he wants action, since his potentials are constantly being set up and released, and his activities must always have remote ends.

Third, ulterior rewards and punishments do not supply these ends. To use them as ends misapplies the laws of dynamics. If an engineer wishes to direct a stream of water to a certain place he locates that place at a given level in the same gravitational system that includes the water. Then the water will reach the goal under the power of the system. He does not locate still another place to one side of the original, for he would then divert the water from the spot he has already provided. Likewise, in human behaviour, there is only one legitimate remote end for a given performance, and that remote end must be its own reward or its own punishment.

Bribes, grades, grade-points, stars, social standing and gifts on the one hand, and whippings, scarings and deprivations on the other, are very likely to detract from the desired goal, the goal of a perfected act, the goal of achievement or skill. They deprive the learner of truth, knowledge and sportsmanship for their own sake; they sterilise idealism. These motives have become vicious influences in our day, taking out of mental development, both in our school systems and in our homes, its romance, adventure and culture, the aspects of life’s intangible worth, the most precious of its values. Intemperately misapplied, they deaden the personality, sterilise intelligence, weaken curiosity, stunt inventiveness, curtail initiative, and create all manner of artificialities such as egotism, conceit, social prestige, desire for power and authority, humiliation, inferiority complexes, and maladjustments of many kinds. They sap life of its deeper meaning, make people superficial, materialistic and utilitarian; they make automatons of our children just as automatons are made out of circus animals, whose insight is reduced to artificial situations in which every detail of performance is under the rigid control of a trainer who allows them no initiative or spontaneity of their own; for to express themselves naturally would mean to spoil the display and endanger the life of the trainer. The spirit of rewards and punishments is the spirit of authority, dominance and rule, the spirit that crushes and overpowers. Learning must be its own reward or there is no learning, only a shrunken mind, distorted intellectually and morally. Nature does not operate on the principle of ulterior gains. To motivate is to give a task meaning and value in its own right.

§ 17. THE PROBLEM OF MEMORY. If this psychology of learning is revolutionary, the psychology of memory will seem even more so, for here atomism makes its last and strongest appeal. Even now the reader will insist that since one never recalls an experience that he has not had, original experience explains recall. Here again definitional dependence is confused with explanation. Dynamic and definitional dependence are different so long as there are external points of reference, a whole that surrounds a part.

It has always been held that the congenitally blind, for instance, have no concept of colour because they have never seen colour; whereas the reason why they have no concept of colour is the same as the reason why they cannot see. The visual response cannot be made, since the optic system is lacking the necessary differentiation and organisation of structure. If the blind man could see he could recall visually; for recalling visually is a special case of seeing. The observation in its own right has no power to condition recall. On the other hand, by definition, recall presupposes observation, just as one half of a circle presupposes the other. There is nothing to account for at all until both the observation and the recall are admitted into the same descriptive unit.

§ 18. MEMORY “TRACES”. Meanwhile, psychology has posited in its customary atomistic fashion a memory trace in the brain to account for the recalls of “past experience”. Let us grant the trace and see what happens. A trace, left by an original impression, guarantees recall and a recognition of the recall as that of a previous experience. An independent thing, this trace does the recalling, and by definition, the recognising, for it supplies the necessary information to the recaller that the experience in question had been in consciousness before. There is nothing left for the recaller to do! A function of the organism-as-a-whole has been relegated to a trace, and the recalls are the acts of so many separate minds, residing in the traces which are by assumption independent and unrelated.

The atomist is likely to protest at this bald statement of his position. The trace theory never meant this, he says. By trace is meant only that an original experience makes a difference to the future of the organism; that with experience the nervous system undergoes a relatively permanent change. Such a change, however, construed organismically as maturation, does not represent an experience, for experience takes place only with reference to a particular stimulus-pattern. The neural processes corresponding to the particular aspects of an experience exist only as experience is taking place, and when the experience is over the neural pattern disappears. Maturation or growth of the nervous system is no more a trace than one’s body of twenty years ago exists now in the form of a trace. This means that maturation conditions the general aspects of experience, the degree of its differentiation; the stimulus-pattern conditions its temporary form.

What, you are now asking, does explain recall? The same organisation of potentials in the nervous system and the same stimulus-pattern that accounted for the original observation, except that (1) maturation has taken place meanwhile, and (2) there is only a partial duplication of the original stimulus-pattern. To illustrate this, you climb a mountain on your vacation. When you return you are able to recall the scenery. You are doing nothing more than to see the scenery with part of the stimulus-pattern missing, the scenery itself. When you were actually looking at the mountain, you were responding to many more stimuli than the mountain itself. There were your companions, your camping equipment, and your conversations with each other, even with yourself. You return home, bringing these stimuli with you, including language. Circumstances, then, construct a stimulus-pattern partly duplicating the original; the response partly duplicates the original, and we designate it as recall. If the repeated stimulus-pattern were as complete as the original, the perception would have been equally as complete. You would then be re-observing the mountain, for, by assumption, it would be in front of you again. Errors in the recall are to be explained in terms of maturation on the one hand, and removal from stimulus-patterns on the other.

§ 19. MEANINGS. But why, you ask, does one refer the recall to a particular place and time if there are no traces? One might just as well ask, Why the recognition of the original object? Why did it have meaning? How does any original experience have meaning? The first meanings in life obviously do not depend upon traces, for there are none; if first meanings, no matter how vague, do not require traces, neither do meanings that are apprehended later on, no matter how old we are. Each perception and each recall (for recall is incomplete perception) involves an interpretative factor, a discovery, an invention. It is the perceiving of some detail in its relation to a total situation. It is an emergent phenomenon.

An apple does not derive its fall from a preceding fall. No experience derives its meaning from a previous experience. Each experience derives its meaning from a total system of potentials existing in the present. Phenomenologically the performance of the apple is called motion, a fall to the ground. In case of memory the phenomenological property is a feeling of familiarity, the form assumed by the kinetic energy in question.

§ 20. TIME-PERSPECTIVE. The judgement of two lines, the one as shorter than the other, is by definition incomplete until the two lines have been perceived in relation. Similarly, in recall, the experience is incomplete until two phases of it are apprehended in terms of a larger time-frame. The first phase is the reference to past time; the second is the reference to present time. Before the past reference, involved in recall, can be understood without recourse to traces, the nature of this time-frame must be inspected. This time-frame is a whole which, with reference to itself, is undifferentiated time, neither past, present nor future. It is the temporal field-property of a ground of experience. The temporal parts of the field have the relationships of past, present and future within the total time-frame, and that total time-frame may be now.

Let Figure 3 represent a given field of experience which, with reference to everything else, is called now. The field is spatial and temporal. Suppose it to be the perception of a landscape and the observer is watching an object, x, move from A to B. X is perceived in its space-time relations to the field as a whole. But the time properties of the perception, x, are changing as x is seen leaving A and approaching B. A is past time with respect to x and B is future, for x was at A and will be at B, and x is the moving present. All of this is apprehended within the time-frame that we have just defined as now. Compare this discussion with p. 85 and the logic of the two accounts will be found identical. We were speaking then of a gravitational field; we are now speaking of a field of experience. The apprehension of the distance x to B and the position B, which are the future with respect to x, is as necessary in apprehending the time properties of x, as are the apprehension of the distance A to x and the position A. But A–B is a dimension; it represents a field, not a moment.

One might also apprehend x in its time relations to S and T, or any system of points within the field. The apprehension of any object within a field of experience, then, involves a past reference and a future reference—the actual existence of past and future time in the field that we call now. The field, with respect to any point therein, involves the principle of time, and differentiates into the past, present and future with a given part becoming the point of reference. In other words, the past, present and future actually exist now because the now is a field extended in time with reference to its parts, just as it is extended in space with reference to its parts. A space-whole surrounds its parts spatially; a time-whole surrounds its parts temporally.

§ 21. SPACE-WHOLE AND TIME-WHOLE. There is an up and a down, a right and a left with reference to a center, when a differentiated field of experience is examined from the standpoint of space; but from the standpoint of the undifferentiated whole there is no up nor down, no right nor left; it is merely expanse. Similarly, when the differentiated field is regarded from the standpoint of time there is past and future, with respect to a centre, the present; but if the time field is considered from the standpoint of the whole alone, there is merely time.

No mystery, therefore, clouds a memorial reference to the past. A recall is like x in the figure. It is an experience apprehended with reference to an existing time-frame, now, that, with respect to the recall as the point of reference, contains the past, the present, and the future. We have run into our old organismic law once more—that the part derives its properties from the whole. That whole is the now. The now, obviously, is not the present except when apprehended as a part of a larger time-frame. As a field, or whole, in relation to its own parts, it is merely time, which is neither past, present nor future.

There is no transcending of the present and a digging back into past time that is gone when we recall; there is no awakening of a trace. X, the recall, is an experience related to a total “now”-situation, differentiated into past, present and future time. Any particular experience within the field emerges with its past or future or present time-reference in this now. The same processes that can be experienced as a recall, with a past reference, can be experienced as an anticipation of the future. One may visualise a mountain scene and realise it as a recall, or as an anticipation of seeing the mountain again, with no explicit reference to the past. This often happens when one is on his way to visit old scenes.

§ 22. SUMMARY OF THE LAWS OF LEARNING: LAW I. The laws of learning are the laws of dynamics. In order to illustrate them specifically, consider the accompanying set of digits. The law of field properties states that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Column A contains a plan; this plan is the whole to which we shall refer. Apprehending the plan permits one to learn the column in a single “repetition”. Column B contains as many digits as column A but the logical plan is missing. The whole is a less significant one and a longer time is required to learn it; for its unity is confined to time and space relationships only, which are less stable than logical relationships.

A

B

4

...

7

5

...

1

7

...

18

10

...

33

14

...

4

19

...

9

25

...

5

32

...

26

40

...

17

49

...

45

The same law may be illustrated in golf. One can never learn golf by first acquiring the proper wrist movements, then, separately, the elbow, shoulder, waist, knee and ankle movements. Co-ordinations of the body are not acquired in this way. The stance, body balance, and organised system of tensions and strains is more than the sum of so many separate movements. Attempts to put separate movements together by “association” ruins one’s golf, as every careful observer knows. Movements must be of the body-as-a-whole; these are awkward and undifferentiated at first, but not random.

§ 23. LAW II. Parts derive their properties from the whole of which they are members. In column A there is the number 10. It is only with reference to the whole that this number has the property of being fourth in line from the top, in fact, only in virtue of the plan that it is in the column at all. 10’s property of being three more than the preceding number and four less than the succeeding number is also derived from the plan. In golf, twisting one’s wrists means nothing in its own right. Wrist movements belong to elbow and shoulder movements in exactly the same sense that 10 belongs to 7 and 14 in column A. If the wrist movement does not derive its properties of extent, force and direction from the total movement-pattern it has nothing to do with the golf-process at all. The purpose of the wrist movement is to give snap to the swing and position to the club-head. Try to put snap into the swing by twisting the wrists without making an organised body movement and the result is disastrous; there is neither snap nor swing. Try it by keeping the entire body stiff as a board, or by becoming absolutely limp all over!

§ 24. LAW III. The whole governs the activities of its parts. In learning the digits of columns A and B, one must first know that they are in a column or series; each number must be learned in its position in the series. In golf, if the proper balance of the whole body is not acquired first, the delicate movements that are to follow cannot be executed. The stance or total pattern of movement (varying with the purpose of the shot) determines how each muscle shall be contracted.

§ 25. LAW IV. Skill along any line comes about through the individuation of specialised movements from mass action. It matters not how long the process takes. It may take place in a few seconds, as in case of column A, or it may require years, as in golf. A total behaviour pattern, under a growth potential, is undergoing differentiation through external stimulation. The potential exhibits itself in the will or the desire to learn.

§ 26. LAW V. Wholes evolve as wholes in the learning process. In the case of the columns, it is always a column with a good or a poor plan of organisation that is being learned. Golf is always a total pattern of movements involving the whole body. At every step the whole is there; the organisation is present; but it is changing toward greater differentiation. At no time is there a building up of a whole from its parts, or the addition of a new movement to a mass of old ones, or a new experience to an apperceptive mass.

What seems to the uninitiated as an addition is an entirely new total pattern of movement, or a new field of experience, albeit it has, in either case, a feeling of familiarity about it.

§ 27. LAW VI. Learning follows the law of least action. In order to learn at all one must be under tension; there is no learning where there is no will to learn. Once the tension is set up the goal is set up also; and the behaviour is already organised with respect to that goal, for the tension and the goal presuppose organisation. From a practical standpoint, so-called perfect versus random co-ordinations are differentiated versus undifferentiated movements, that have emerged in the course of stimulation and maturation. Every thought and movement has direction from the outset. Only the conditions for least action will account for this direction.

§ 28. LAW VII. Learning follows the law of maximum work. Movements once acquired are not forgotten so long as stimulation continues, for the organised potentials of the nervous system will, other things being equal, preserve their status quo except as, of their own accord, so to speak, they iron themselves out in the absence of stimulation. Movements persist, then, for the same reason that “work” is required to move a stone. A system of energy, once formed, resists a disturbance of its balance; it insists upon making its own changes.

§ 29. LAW VIII. Learning is a configurational response. It is a unit in space and in time. Not only does it involve responding to a detail of a situation in relation to a total situation, but one phase of progress will not account for the next. From the standpoint of the learner, progress is an evolution of insight, a continuous process of invention.

1 Cƒ. Lashley; Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence; Chicago, 1929.

2 Cƒ. Perkins and Wheeler; Configurational Learning in the Goldfish; Comp. Psy. Monog., Vol. 7; 1930; No. 31.

CHAPTER VII

THE LAWS OF EMOTION AND WILL

§ 1. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FEELING. For several hundred years, and especially since the time of Immanuel Karat, it has been a tradition to limit the major aspects of mental life to three:—the intellectual or cognitive, volitional or conative, and emotional or affective. Psychologists, meanwhile, have asserted that all cognitive processes, such as perceiving and thinking, were composed of elements largely concerned with the distance-senses of sight and hearing. The conative processes, including willing, choosing, determining and assenting, were chiefly composed, it was thought, of conative elements, the sensations of movement and strain. The affective processes were supposedly composed of systemic or organic sensations induced by stimulation from the internal organs. Feelings and volitions were said to lack entirely any feature of knowledge; only cognitive processes informed us about things.

§ 2. ARTIFICIALITY OF DISTINCTION. Because of such traditions as these our psychology of feeling has become more and more artificial and atomistic throughout the history of the science. In order to straighten out the tangle, one must attack the problem genetically and infer the character of conscious behaviour in the infant. The evidence, as we have seen (p. 127), points to the undifferentiated status of mental activity in its beginnings. There is at that time no feeling versus cognition, versus volition. Primitive experiences are at once perceptions, wants and feelings; they are equally cognitive, volitional and affective. From an undifferentiated ground there emerge patterns or figures of experience, all differentiating with respect to space, time and quality.

When stimulus-situations, external to the organism, dominate the formation of the perceptual field, figures emerge of definite size, location and form; but if the stimulus-situation is within the organism, the perceptual field does not undergo so definite a spatial structurisation. For example, one is able to perceive a chair of distinct outline, form, size and position; but strains, pains, pressures, organic experiences, tastes and smells, are less differentiated in all their spatial characteristics. The so-called feelings of pleasure and unpleasure, and the emotional experiences of joy, fear, love and anger have, in most cases, only a diffuse body reference with undifferentiated spatial features. Similarly, experiences that are called desires, wishes, determinations, hopes and beliefs, all having a certain body reference, exhibit spatial characteristics that are extremely vague. When a person desires something, he can, if he will introspect carefully enough, discover a ground of muscular strain upon which an ideational anticipation of the desired goal is figured. In exerting voluntary effort, this body reference may become quite definite for the reason that muscles are always involved, whether the effort is “physical” or “mental.”

Experiences dominated by body reference are no more and no less cognitive than the auditory or visual in whose terms we apprehend events at a distance. The latter involve knowledge about external things; the former involve knowledge about internal conditions, which are quite as much things as external objects are, except that they are less definite in their space relations and qualitative differentiation. Conversely, visual and auditory perceptions are not to be contrasted with feelings, because the meaningfulness of these perceptions does not accrue alone to visual and auditory factors. Perceiving a chair involves a body reference; it is by no means exclusively visual. One may feel incipient movements of sitting down, or he may feel the delicate changes in muscular tonus about the face or in the chest, or diffuse organic changes in the region of the diaphragm, all having to do with the appreciation of the object as beautiful or rare. There are also the strains of fixation and of eye movement, and verbal processes such as “chair”, “ordinary”, “pretty”, “cheap”. At any rate, the process that we call perceiving the chair is, in all circumstances, a response of the total organism; and without the bodily processes, the chair would not perceptually be a chair. Thus the perception involves feeling and volition.

§ 3. OREXIS INVOLVES PERCEPTION. Conversely, feelings and volition involve processes that are ordinarily regarded as perceptual. In looking at a painting, the feeling of pleasure is after all inseparable from the perception of the painting. It is an aspect of the total, unified experience. More than that, if one were to abstract the pleasure, as the introspectionist can do if he likes, he will find that its body reference involves visual processes, even if he is adventitiously blind. The visual processes make possible the localisation and even the apprehension of the pleasure; for the pleasure will not apprehend itself. It must be part of a larger unit; and there are no experiences pertaining to the larger unit that are not reducible to sensory processes of some kind. There is no differentiated psychic element or quality reuniting the other differentiated experiences into a whole. Rather, the undifferentiated, or unanalysed experience possesses the phenomenal property of a certain meaning, pleasure, which is, as such, non-sensory. The pleasure does not do the uniting; the unity is the experience apprehended in its totality, before that totality is destroyed by analysis. In other words, the feeling is a cognition; it must be perceived, like any object; and the perceived feeling involves the same types of processes as a perceived object such as a chair does, only of a less differentiated character. If one wishes, therefore, he may regard feelings as undifferentiated intellectual processes, and perceptions or ideas as differentiated feelings. Only confusion will result from the atomistic interpretation that perceptions involve a feeling aspect and feelings involve a perceptual aspect; for the experience is not feeling plus perception in either case. It is all one; and it is much better to base the classification upon the degree of differentiation that the experience exhibits.

§ 4. BORDER-LINE CASES. If we accept such a classification, there is a border-line of experiences which may be called either the one or the other. They are the events of mental life commonly known as intuitions, “hunches” and guesses. In these cases to say that one “feels that such and such a thing is so” is quite as legitimate as to say that he “thinks it is so”. Here, by definition, feeling and undifferentiated ideas are synonymous. To illustrate:—When a learner first approaches a problem, such as was given on p. 173, were he to look for a hidden scheme in the arrangement of the numbers, his first prolonged glance at the column as a whole will very likely end in a vague notion of the plan; he obtains this idea from the general arrangement of the figures which are seen to progress in a more or less orderly fashion; he senses the fact that the progression occurs through addition. These experiences are sudden, inarticulate and undifferentiated, but extremely meaningful. Later, upon a more detailed inspection of the column, the undifferentiated plan takes specific form. The numbers added each time are perceived in their relationships. Similarly, one may be engaged in a game of bridge, and just before selecting a card to play, he feels, in an inarticulate fashion, that a particular card is the best one to lay down. In fact this is the history of all specific ideas; they appear first in an undifferentiated form. How often has one been in an argument with a friend and felt that the assertion he just heard was wrong but could not tell exactly why? Somehow it did not “fit”.

It may be shown, likewise, how volition must be as cognitive as it is conative; for every voluntary act is a goal-activity, involving not only the apprehension of a goal, immediate or remote, vague or definite, but a self-consciousness, with a body reference, differentiated to one degree or another.

§ 5. FEELING. As we proceed, therefore, to our discussion of feeling, it must be with the same assumptions with which any psychological problem is attacked. The process in question is an abstraction. It is not a particular kind of behaviour, because all behaviour partakes of the process under consideration. All forms of behaviour exhibit their undifferentiated aspects. Every performance is cognitive, feelingful and in some respect conative. Discussing any one of these properties, apart from the total experience, is fraught with danger and is likely to be misleading. In any event feelings in themselves are cognitive. That they are also volitional is demonstrated not only by individual experience but by history; for the majority of historic theories of the will have based the will upon feeling or emotion. The fact, however, that those experiences we call feelings are dominated by a body reference makes it legitimate to consider them in that light. They have more of a personal or “subjective” reference than perceptions having to do with environment.

Feelings, then, are undifferentiated, but cognitive, experiences, dominated by a reference to the body of the experiencing person. Like all other experiences they are responses to total situations, and involve, in an undifferentiated way, the apprehension of relations. Through feeling, a definite relationship is perceived between the experiencing person and some aspect of his environment. It is a highly evaluative experience, having to do with situations that hinder or help, build or destroy; that are good or bad, right or wrong, true or false. Thus, feelings deal with conflicts and the release from conflicts; always with tensions and the manner in which circumstances permit their resolution. It matters not whether the goal-activity is a search for food, body comfort, a mate, a safe place in which to be stationed temporarily or permanently; whether it is the search for the solution of a mechanical puzzle or of a problem in science or philosophy, or whether it is perfection of some activity like golf or piano playing. In any case feelings evaluate the organism’s relation to some goal and to subsidiary ends which, in turn, are means to the major goals.

Behaviour is always an organised process of resolving these tensions. The human energy system, therefore, is always being disequilibrated and is always in process of returning to equilibrium. It may be said, for the sake of convenience, that there are, roughly, three classes of feeling. First, there are disagreeable feelings and emotions which are the phenomenological properties of the system in its totality, returning to a balance in the face of resistance; or better, they represent expenditure of energy in the process of resisting interference. Second, there are pleasurable feelings and emotions which are the phenomenological properties of the system, gaining its balance upon the removal of resistance. They represent the final approach to a given state of balance. The third class consists of feelings in the form of undifferentiated ideas, the phenomenological properties of the system in the first phases of confronting resistance. They involve the vague recognition of a problem. More specifically, they represent the first organisation of a behaviour pattern with respect to a new situation.

§ 6. THE DYNAMICS OF FEELING AND EMOTION. All three classes of feeling are to be explained in terms of dynamics. Consider the movement of a body from an initial position to its remote end. In the initial position its energy is exclusively potential. The nearer it approaches to the remote end the less its potential energy and the more its kinetic. In proportion to its kinetic energy it is capable of performing work, or resisting a force in its path. Let a steel ball the size of an apple strike a person on the head after it has fallen only a centimetre. It will deliver a smart tap but will do little if any damage. Let it strike one’s head after a fall of a thousand metres. The result need not be described.

§ 7. FEELINGS AND GOALS. Let a human being be engaged in some goal-activity. He may return home in a hurry for lunch and find that it is unprepared. He becomes irritable. He may be seeking the love of a certain young woman and discover a rival. Forthwith he finds himself in a jealous rage. Let the goal of being alive be threatened by accident, danger, disease, injury, or by the assault of a murderer, and immediately one defends himself through vigorous flight or combat. Let any situation stand in the way of protecting, feeding or educating one’s children and it is met with the utmost resistance. The feeling and emotional reaction is a resistance that the human energy system, as a whole, offers to the thwarting situation. The resistance is proportional to the nearness of the goal, and to the amount of potential or degree of tension under which a person starts toward it. If he is extremely hungry, delay makes him all the more angry; or if a caller rings the bell just as he is being seated at the table, the more keenly he resents the interference. The lover, forsaken on the eve of his wedding, suffers more intensely than if his acquaintance with the hoped-for bride had been only casual. The death of an infant brings intense distress to the parents, a grief proportional to the delight with which the birth is anticipated; but let death select a youth brought successfully to the achievement of young manhood or young womanhood, and grief is the more paralysing, reconciliation all the harder.

The same law of proportionate action and reaction holds for the pleasurable emotions, when the goal is reached. The gratification of desires brings pleasure in proportion to the intensity of the desire. A football crowd, held in suspense by a series of plays that have worked to the disadvantage of their team, grows mad with excitement and joy when sudden progress is made or a touchdown achieved. One is listening to a witty story, waiting, with anticipation, for the point to be sprung. The meaning suddenly grasped, with a release from the strain, there comes a spontaneous burst of enjoyment and laughter. A joke is funny in proportion to the tension which its preliminary steps set up, and in proportion to the quickness and comprehensiveness with which the point is perceived.

§ 8. FEELING AND PHYSICAL LAWS. Feeling and emotion may also be envisaged in terms of the laws of maximum work and least action. Of course in principle these laws apply to emotional activities no more than to all others; for all the basic laws of dynamics apply to all forms of behaviour. An energy system, as we have implied in the preceding discussion, offers resistance to any disturbance, and the effect of any disturbance is that of threatening the organisation or integrity of the system. Potential energy in the human system, therefore, untapped in ordinary circumstances, becomes available when the organisation of the organism’s forces is in jeopardy. This “reserve” energy is not expended in response to a need, but under the universal principle of action and reaction. The situations that disturb the system most are those that supply the greatest amount of stimulation; and the response is proportionately vigorous.

The picture is not complete, however, until the structurisation of an organic system, like a human being, is contrasted with that of a less structurised system like a magnetic field or a gravitational system. Where there is more specialisation of structure within a system of a given mass there is more energy available for performing work—in fact, more “free” energy involved at all times in the maintenance of unity within the system. This fact may be stated in a different way. The more the system is specialised in structure the less the force from outside required to threaten its unity. An injury requiring little force to apply will completely destroy the living organism, or permanently cripple it. Moreover, the energy expended by a system, in resisting disintegration, adds that much to the depletion of the system; and without the growth potential the depletion would be permanent. A scratch becomes infected and blood poisoning sets in. The organism must supply the energy for the growth of the infection and at the same time the energy that resists that growth. If we think of the infection as foreign energy and the defence reaction as the energy of the system itself, action and reaction are equal.

Thus we see an energy system performing work in the maintenance of unity, suffering depletion in proportion, and acquiring energy from its environment to make up the loss (some of it, not all). This situation is supposed to distinguish between the organic and inorganic, but the difference is not one of principle; it is, once more, merely a phenomenological difference. The organism and its environment are, in the end, one system. Within proportionate limits, any part of an energy system, having its own unity, will recover a loss through a process equivalent to growth by “acquiring” energy from its surroundings. This is likewise the principle involved in oxidation—in fact, in any chemical “interaction”; again because the subsidiary and the larger wholes are, in the end, one unified system. The molecular constitution of iron, for example, is a subsidiary whole. As it gives up energy to its surroundings, it will, to some degree, acquire energy in turn. The form of the whole, however, changes; and there is some permanent loss with respect to the subsidiary system in question. In biological growth the same is true. Eventually the organism dies, just as, eventually, the pattern of energy, iron, through a rusting process, changes form, becomes something else, and eventually is dissipated.

§ 9. CAVEAT. In this entire connection it is necessary to repeat a warning. It is atomistic and illogical to regard growth and chemical union as syntheses. Every time we admit growth into a system, a larger whole is presupposed in which growth is a process of differentiation. Rather than to fall into the error of atomism it is preferable to regard the amount of energy available for growth as relative; in which case it is legitimate to presuppose a whole as extensive as the problem demands. Then the question arises:—With respect to what is this larger whole relative? The answer is:—Still another; for there is no largest, no absolute whole, only that Unknown Realm to which all knowledge and thought, all known existences, are relative. Since the unknown must be relative, also, to the known, there is no inconsistency yet appreciable in the relativity conception.

The loss of energy to which we have just referred is an empirical fact; but all empirical facts are relative to a finite system as a point of reference. The energy is not lost with respect to the larger whole. Since it is the second law of thermo-dynamics that deals with losses of energy from given systems, and since the law does not cover the system to which the energy is lost, the law is not universal; it is only part of the picture, and the reverse side of the canvas is the Unknown. There is nothing final, then, about the law, except with respect to a given part of a system.

§ 10. PHYSIOLOGICAL PHENOMENA. It now remains for us to describe the releasing of the “free energy” available in the living organism in the process of maintaining unity. Suppose that a terrier is chasing a rat. The stimulus-pattern that, to the rat, means the equivalent of “enemy after me”, has set up high potentials in the nervous system that resolve themselves, through nerve conduction, into the rat’s muscles. The first perception of danger is the form of the preliminary discharge, regarded in its totality. The same stimulus-pattern, however, has set up potentials in the sympathetic nervous system which, in turn, induces an increased discharge of adrenin into the blood stream. The result of this secretion and the innervating effects of the sympathetic nervous system are profound. Energy stored in the liver as animal starch is released into the blood stream in the form of glycogen, an animal sugar. The energy of the glycogen, passing through the musculature, is converted into motion; that is, the muscles contract more vigorously. Processes of digestion stop through the inhibition of peristalsis and of secretions from the digestive glands, thus making available the energy otherwise expended in that direction. The arteries around the digestive and other internal organs contract and those in the brain and muscles dilate, thus redistributing blood where it happens to be needed most. Blood pressure increases; heart action and breathing are faster, thus supplying the muscles and nervous system with blood that is fresh with energy and carrying away more rapidly the waste products of increased metabolism. The kidneys increase their activity also. The composition of the blood is changed in such a way that clotting is more rapid. The organism perspires, reducing the temperature of the body and balancing the over-production of heat that increased action produces. The total picture is that of a system-as-a-whole conditioning the activities of its parts, in a most complicated fashion, to the end of maintaining integrity. Integrity in this case means life. All the resources of the organism, in this case the rat, are directed to that end. And the nearer the dog to the rat, the faster and more vigorously both the physiological and voluntary reactions take place. Indeed, they are one unit, obeying one set of laws. The rat will fight to the utmost to escape. This is the law of maximum work, which holds quite as well at the physiological as at the voluntary level.

§ 11. PHYSIOLOGICAL PHENOMENA AND FEELING. The widespread organic changes that the human being reports during exciting emotion as a sinking feeling in the stomach or about the diaphragm, a hollow feeling in the chest, dry mouth, cold chill and boiling of blood—these are in part the phenomenological aspects of this widespread change of pattern in the total energy system when under intense stimulation. These changes occur when any intensive goal-activity is thwarted. They are part of the picture of resistance, and occur in all emotional reactions that are vigorous, such as fear, anger, rage, jealousy, grief, desperation, extreme determination and even hysterical joy. To protect oneself against danger, to struggle determinedly for the solution of a perplexing mathematical problem, and to exert oneself to the utmost in physical competition with a sack of sugar, are examples of the same fundamental type of process. The whole system is thrown into action in accordance with the same set of laws. The type of goal makes no difference; the reaching of any goal is necessary for the maintenance of integrity.

§ 12. MENTAL AND PHYSICAL “INTEGRITY”. There is no difference in principle between “mental” and “physical” integrity. They are not mutually exclusive; the one always involves the other. The demand for life is both, and is one rather than the other only as we shift our reference point from one phenomenological level to the other. In reality the levels do not exist. To illustrate:—a person, raised as a strict fundamentalist in religion, believing that to question the Virgin Birth is a heresy to be paid for by eternal damnation, suffers untold “physical” torture when the literal truth of his belief seems doubtful to him. His whole body is affected. His digestion is upset; he is fatigued with the bodily waste products of anxiety; he may, if he fails to justify his more liberal ideas, develop hyperthyroidism, functional heart trouble, diabetes; his system may become depleted and disintegrated to the extent that he lacks the strength to overcome an infection or to sustain a needed operation. He may become weakened nervously, become depressed, develop hysteria, or dementia præcox. In desperate search for relief he may become an alcoholic or a drug addict; he may develop anti-social traits and become a thief. He may commit suicide. At any rate, he suffers as a total individual, physically and mentally; and the least that will happen is the development of an unbalanced, overemotional personality. Whatever does occur, the efforts are those of a most elaborate and highly specialised system, physiologically and psychologically involving nicely balanced parts, to preserve its integrity under the laws of dynamics. If there is no escape from the lack of balance, the system will of its own accord disintegrate. If the heart is the weakest aspect in the system, it will give out with the consequence of death; if the weakest part of the total system pertains to its mental aspect, insanity is the consequence. In any case the death process is self-initiated, with reference to environmental forces. Suicide is only one variety, a variety conditioned by the dynamic relation of the victim to the pattern of humanity around him; while death by disease is a variety of disintegration conditioned by other aspects of environment. In either case the human organism resists the outcome until the limits of energy, available for the purpose, are exhausted. That death by disease is involuntary and death by suicide is voluntary will not distinguish the two except with respect to social values. Again the principles are the same.

§ 13. THE ORGANISM AS A “WHOLE”. If we look at the human organism-as-a-whole from a physiological standpoint, we find a system that shifts its energies to any occasion in the course of retaining organisation. This fact is observable not only in emotional situations but in every type of situation, and at the physiological level where no reference to mental activity is pertinent. A person living at sea level has a certain blood pressure that is generally lower than if he resided at higher altitudes. His acid-base balance is different, in fact, his whole physiology exhibits a different functional pattern. Similarly, a person living in a cold climate differs in this pattern from the person living in the tropics. If he changes from one of these abodes to another, his whole physiology must undergo a change, popularly known as acclimatisation; and until this change takes place health difficulties are almost certain to arise. Furthermore, the unity of the organism rests upon a balanced system of glands whose secretions are normal or abnormal in accordance with the chemical stress among the glands themselves and between their secretions and the chemical composition of the blood.

§ 14. THE ORGANISM AS MENTAL. If we look at the same human being from the mental standpoint, we find a unified whole that, in accordance with the same laws, changes to any occasion, within the limits of its energies, in the course of maintaining internal harmony. We have shown in a general way that feelings and emotions obey the laws of dynamics; and that particularly useful, in understanding these phenomena, are the laws of least action and maximum work, together with the corollary that, in its goal-activity, a body offers resistance to an obstacle in proportion to the nearness of the goal.

§ 15. THE PROBLEM OF THE WILL. The problem of the will has arisen several times in the course of our discussion. It follows from the position we have taken that human needs are, as desires, no more than as forces, the demands of an energy system to retain its status quo against interference, and to resist a change that is not as much self-controlled as it is induced. The system will obey none but its own injunctions; albeit it must have an excuse.

Nor does the fact that human beings will voluntarily search for the things they need presuppose a principle not found in the behaviour of inorganic systems. The searching is to be explained in terms of dynamics. In human beings the process is more varied, complicated and obvious. In terms of dynamics, searching for food and “absorbing” it is no different from “attracting energy” from a given position. The fact of locomotion in the one case and the lack of it in another does not alter the principle; nor does an application of dynamics deny the human will. The mechanist, in attempting to explain human behaviour, logically destroyed it in carrying it over to dynamics; the organismist carries the laws of dynamics over to human behaviour without making his conceptions vitalistic. Vitalism was a mechanistic dynamism, and mechanistic thought was a materialistic dynamism.

We have said that the human energy system, with its highly specialised structures, possesses quantities of energy so instable as to be available for expenditure in the maintenance of unity, and that maintenance of unity takes the form of resolving tensions toward remote ends. Movement of the living organism from one place to another is merely an aspect of the resolving process going on within the organism; just as the falling body resolves its potential by going from a higher to a lower level with respect to the centre of the earth. The difference between the two, expressed crudely, is the greater obviousness of several “gravitational” dimensions in the total system of which the organism is a part, so that the organism has several goals rather than one. Thus he may go first in one direction and then in another. The falling apple does the same thing in principle, too, as a matter of fact; for at the same time that it is “attracted” toward the centre of the earth, it is “attracted” by surrounding objects. Actually it, like the human being, has a multitude of goals, but one of them dominates the others. Again the difference accrues to phenomenological discreteness of goals and of resolutions of potential. It is a difference in the degree to which the system in question is differentiated.

§ 16. LAW IN RELATION TO WILL. As regards the specific organismic laws in their relation to the will problem, we can only hint at their general applicability. The third law is particularly relevant, namely, that the whole conditions the activities of its parts, for is not the will the organism-as-a-whole conditioning the activities of its parts? No system of psychology has made intelligible, in the past, just how a person by his own intent can move a hand or recollect a thought. In short, volition was a mystery, so much of a mystery that the mechanist ruled out the will as a degenerate psychological concept. The vitalist made of it a deus ex machina. The organismic position raises will to the level of dignity that field properties of energy systems enjoy in physics and physiology; it becomes one of the most important concepts in the new psychology without implying vitalism or mechanism.

§ 17. DETERMINISM VERSUS FREEDOM. Not only this, but it straightens out the tangle of determinism versus freedom. The only type of causation that is intelligible is the genus which comes under the law that determinism obtains only between the whole and its parts. The human will is a phenomenological species of this genus. In other words, the will is the phenomenological aspect of that configuration of potentials in the organism-as-a-whole by which each thought and act is directed. Effort, as a phenomenon, falls conveniently under the law of maximum work. Choice is a matter of growth in a problem situation. By the time, therefore, that each principle of dynamics is applied in detail to the problem of will, it becomes as intelligible and necessary a psychological concept as perception or learning.

§ 18. THE SELF. The same logic can be applied to the problem of the self and to an entire epistemological psychology on the phenomenological level of self-consciousness. If a gravitational system can condition the fall of an apple and a human organism can contract a muscle, a self as subject can know an object by the same general means. There is, most certainly, a dynamics of the self, where epistemological terms describe dynamic relations obtaining between energy patterns of a very high order of differentiation.

CHAPTER VIII

THE LAWS OF PERSONALITY

§ 1. THE PROBLEM OF PERSONALITY. When an individual emigrates from one social group to another where customs and points of view are different, a realignment of his personality pattern is necessary, or conflict arises between him and the new group; just as changing from one climate to another demands a physiological adjustment, or “conflicts” result between the organism’s metabolism and the new environment. Analogous types of adjustment, at whatever phenomenological level we choose, are occurring constantly in daily life, because environmental influences of all kinds, social and physical, are in constant flux.

Just as the body, within limits, develops immunity to germs, or replies with other forms of defence to physical forces that disturb its balance, so the personality develops defence mechanisms against the disturbing situations which it meets in its social environment. In either case the technique is dynamically the same; the disturbance induces a tension which demands resolution. In the case of the personality these tensions take the form of so-called complexes named for the types of situations in which they arise. Among them are compensations, rationalisations, sublimations and regressions. The resolution is a purposeful effort to obtain relief from strain. Social situations thwart the goal-activities of the individual and the defence reactions are the showing of resistance. Showing resistance is at the same time an effort to surmount or circumnavigate the obstruction. The methods employed are varied in proportion to the instability and complexity of the human energy system.

When one bumps his head against an open door, the tension set up not only involves pain and a sudden vigorous effort to change the direction of one’s movements, but it also involves the emotional resentment of having a goal activity thwarted and an insight into the cause of the thwarting. The cause was one’s own carelessness. To admit blame is to question one’s own integrity or perfection; and this, in turn, is an obstacle to the goal of self-respect. The sudden flush of anger is the form taken by the inevitable resistance to this obstacle. Proportionately as kinetic energy is reduced, the potential rises and the demand for resolution increases. Proportionately, also, the resulting resolution is vigorous and quick and it occurs in the line of least action. Any energy, under potential, changes its course when the most direct route to the goal is blocked. The human being is no exception. The goal of self-esteem temporarily blocked, his energies organise at once toward the goal that is most immediately available. This is the door, hence the anger is vented on the door; it must suffer the blame and be punished by slamming it shut. Or, some member of the family becomes the goal and is condemned for leaving the door open. In any case, the potential is released and the status quo of the system, the personality, is preserved; the ego has retained, for the instant, its self-esteem. Accordingly, if a person makes a poor drive in golf, something must be wrong with the club, or his partner spoke too soon. If a carpenter pounds his finger he damns the hammer; if a student fails in an examination, it was because the instructor could not teach.

§ 2. EXAMPLE OF RATIONALISING. The turns that such rationalisations take are often very far-fetched and elaborate. A mother, distressed by the thought that her boy is no longer a baby and dependent upon her, develops over-anxiety for his welfare. He asks permission to go swimming; which she denies him on the ground that he might catch cold or drown, although she knows that it is a very warm day and that the swimming hole is only four feet deep. Under protest she finally consents but, during his absence, pictures one catastrophe after another befalling him, sees him carried home shivering with chills and heated with fever, or his foot crippled and bleeding with a wound from broken glass. The motive of this over-anxiety is not the hope that something will happen to her boy; for in case of a genuine accident no one’s regret would be more sincere than hers. Rather, the phantasy gives her an opportunity to live over, in her imagination, the feeling that, after all, her son is still dependent upon her. Here, in her dream, she can bestow unstintingly the mother love and tenderness that her relations to him demand.

§ 3. RATIONALISATION A CONSCIOUS PROCESS. It is a false popular belief, for which Freudian psychology is responsible, that rationalisations are unconscious processes. The person who is rationalising is not supposed to know what he is doing. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Rationalisations—indeed, all the so-called defence reactions—are bluffs. They are ways of avoiding reality, resolutions of tensions toward imagined rather than real goals. But unless one knows what and why he is rationalising there is no motive for the process. In reality, a person never rationalises without knowing it. Perhaps he does not call the process by that name; but he suffers the momentary twinge of conscience, or the fleeting realisation that he is pretending; and he recognises the insincerity of the performance. This is proved by the irritability, embarrassment, even violent anger and resentment, that are invariably shown when the bluff is called. Pushed into the corner, the challenged victim will fight rather than admit the truth; for to admit the truth, now, is worse than to admit it in the beginning. This is why too direct an approach to the deceit intensifies it and causes the rationaliser to cultivate an exterior of sham that is all the harder to break down. Indeed, the individual then struggles more vigorously to convince himself that he is not two-faced. Thus, if relations between the individual and the social group prevent him from succeeding in his original game, he will withdraw farther and farther away from the goal of sincerity. He may eventually lose insight into the genuine motives of his own conduct, beyond the realisation that something is wrong. When he no longer appreciates his insincerity he is lost and insane.

A person, cowardly at heart, develops an exterior pose, calculated to intimidate his associates. In an inarticulate way he certainly knows the reasons for his conduct. His attitudes are deliberately planned; and, although he may not know the physiological reason for his behaviour, he is quite aware of the ingenuineness of his performance. He will not bluff where it is evident that he cannot deceive; instead, he runs, and the pain of the defeat is intense. He will bluff harder next time, and so the vicious circle goes on.

Another person is possessed of a cruelty impulse which he cannot express without being censured and held in contempt. But the impulse is a tension that must be resolved in a roundabout way. Thus, outwardly, he reveals a great aversion for surgeons and makes everyone aware of his apparent prejudice. Or, he openly revolts against so-called vivisectional research and even becomes an ardent campaigner against it. Perhaps he becomes a leader in a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. He devotes an energy to this work in proportion to his delight in thinking of animals in distress. Indeed, this is the motive for his external crust. His interests, displayed in a manner now acceptable to society, give him the coveted opportunities to think about, and see, the “cruelty” which his own sadistic impulse demands. He has “sublimated” his desires.

§ 4. HYPOCRISY IN RATIONALISATION. The hypocrisy of his behaviour, however, can easily be detected in an overinterest in his pursuits, and in the great care he always takes to assure others how he would never be caught treating an animal cruelly. On the other hand, he would be the first man to lash his horse behind the stable on slight provocation; just as the mother, described a few paragraphs back, would be the first to express unqualified sympathy for her son should he be in actual distress. Let any one call the person’s bluff who doubts the principle that a clear-cut awareness of the cruelty impulse is maintaining the sublimation. A person unpossessed of the impulse would not take the accusation seriously; but the man who deserves the accusation would flare up at once or burst forth with an alibi as voluble as it was insincere.

§ 5. INTROVERSION. These defence mechanisms are common to the human nature-pattern. All normal individuals portray them in a temperate manner, children as well as adults. Introversion is one of the common varieties, a reaction that often takes the form of day-dreaming. Professor J. J. B. Morgan[1] relates the story of a young lad of sensitive disposition who was sharply rebuked by his teacher for being stupid. Thereafter his interest in school, not any too strong to begin with, subsided appreciably. He would spend hours in the classroom, absorbed in phantasy.

On one occasion he was persuaded to tell an older friend what occupied him when oblivious of the schoolroom situation. Here is a typical daydream. His home town was being attacked by Indians. He was in the front ranks of the defenders and his comrades were falling all around him. In a last moment of desperation he charged the marauding band singlehanded, slew right and left, and finally, just as he fell wounded, routed the few of the enemy who remained. Just then reinforcements came from the village. Quickly sensing the situation, they lifted him upon their shoulders and carried him to the village square in a blaze of glory. There the populace gathered around him and shouted their gratitude and acclaim. Among them was the teacher, who fell at his feet in abject mortification, begging his forgiveness for the rebuke and the torture she had caused him.[2]

Wherever the social environment arouses tensions, and at the same time offers no opportunity for an overt resolution, relief is sought in imagination. There we obtain our revenge, assassinate our enemies, become the heroes we should like to be; but there, also, ambition is cultivated, plans are laid, and many problems solved that render life more worth while.

Daydreams are the safety valves of the personality. Particularly is this true in the case of those persons who, normal in all other respects, are afflicted with some physical condition that marks them off from society. Lameness, obesity, extreme height, blindness, deafness, stuttering, a facial disfigurement or an ugly feature, all demand their compensations; they are occasions for numerous rebuffs on the part of society that are utterly inacceptable to a person otherwise sound in mind and body. No normal person enjoys being an object of curiosity, of condescension or of pity, nor does he enjoy being avoided.

§ 6. SOCIAL CAUSES OF INTROVERSION. Society is always cruel to the person who, by choice or otherwise, does not conform to the physical and mental characteristics of the group. A certain girl is blackballed from a sorority because she is too fat. The blind are forever being reminded of their predicament by a well-intending society that is constantly underestimating them. From childhood up, if the blindness was of early origin, they are discouraged from being independent, even in small things. But what is worse, they are not permitted to feel that intellectually they are capable. Society fails to realise that they demand treatment on the same level as their normal, seeing associates. “May I help you across the street”?, a well-meaning pedestrian asks, when he sees a blind man hesitating at the curb to make sure that the street is clear. “Let me take you down town”, is the offer a solicitous friend imposes upon his blind room-mate. One good lady, after inviting a blind man to dinner, laid a metal tray at his place in order to keep the tablecloth from being soiled.

These sympathetic offers of attention on the one hand, and on the other a disposition to avoid or underestimate the blind, produce a serious conflict between them and society, which in the end results in the distortion of a personality that would otherwise have remained normal. The pedestrian could just as well have said, “I am going your way, too”, and could have satisfied his desire to be of aid, accomplished the service, and gone on, as if the blind person had been a seeing friend. The student companion could have said, “May I go with you”?, instead of using the word “take”, which so obviously tells the story of pity and condescension. He, too, could have treated his blind friend just as he would treat any other. The stupid hostess little realised that her cultured guest, though blind, would have been less likely to soil the tablecloth than a seeing person.

Thus, society is constantly increasing tensions in the blind; and, to resolve them, the blind develop a very elaborate and oftentimes violent phantasy life in which they assassinate the seeing public and preserve their self-respect. Such dreams are harmless, indeed potent safeguards, both from the standpoint of the blind and of the seeing.

The stutterer, too, suffers in the same way from a public that does not understand. His trouble usually begins, also, in childhood. Disturbed at the outset because he cannot meet the demands of parents urging him to speak correctly, distressed because his childhood companions laugh at him and mimic him, lonesome because people shun him, he is disheartened at the outlook on life; and the social environment ceases to be the abode of goals. Introversion and an extremely rich life of daydreams are the consequences. The blind child, or the stutterer, having less than extraordinary fortitude, or without the good fortune of associates with more than usual insight, will never reach maturity unstunted in intelligence and undistorted in personality. Between the victim and society the breach is constantly widening; the vicious circle expands. Not treated with understanding, the afflicted person becomes sensitive, perhaps moody and sullen. Then he is pitied or shunned the more; he retreats the more; then he is regarded as helpless, and the misunderstanding soon mounts to proportions unrealised by both sides. The victim develops suspicion and hostility; intentions are mutually misunderstood. What hope is there for the victim?

§ 7. A CASE OF PERSONALITY MALADJUSTMENT. The author once knew a young man who, at the age of four, moved to a community where his associates were uncongenial. He was far more cultured than they, in fact, had little in common with them. The first day he made their acquaintance trouble began. In a rough and tumble, bullying fashion they commenced the difficult initiation. He was not accustomed to roughness; he did not understand it. He had been taught that it was wrong to fight. In the eyes of the gang he at once became a coward. Hazing was therefore all the more fun for them. One day they seized him, lifted him to the ridge-pole of a low shack and rolled him down the roof, from which he fell, badly shaken, to the ground. Another time they stripped him of his clothes; then, keeping a safe distance, they dared him to retrieve his possessions.

Meanwhile, the boy’s mother, with a motive not for an instant to be questioned, fought his battles for him by soothing him and teaching him to feel superior to the gang. He tried avoiding them, but it was no use. In the school yard he was the object of jeers and petty tricks; in the classroom he was the object of whatever torment the gang could inflict when the teacher was not looking; and to show brilliance in his recitations was only to invite more trouble after hours.

Not long after this the family moved to a different locality. As far as the boy was concerned, however, the damage had been done. Already a sensitive disposition had become hostile; he was suspicious of all strangers of his age; and, if he found a companion of whom he was not afraid, his awkwardness in making contact sent the companion at once into an attitude of distant coldness and reserve. Because it was hard to make friends in the new community, his associates branded him at once as queer.

When their attitudes became more hostile his suspicion and embarrassment increased. The breach was undergoing the inevitable expansion. Meanwhile, as anyone would do in the circumstances, he developed a life of phantasy. There, in a world of his own, he was accepted; there he avenged his tormenters; there he learned how to avoid the battles of real life. He was brilliant. Hours were devoted to the solving of mathematical puzzles, many of them of his own invention.

The withdrawal was not only intellectual but emotional. Ultimately he began to show no interest in other people save his parents, particularly his mother. He lost all social insight. He became unable to recognise a friendly group when he was in one. He suspected everyone of talking about him, criticising him, standing in his way of success.

Various efforts had been made by his parents and by friendly teachers to prevent the splitting of his personality by contact with a world of reality. For a time it seemed as if they would be successful. Finally, as a last resort, he was sent to college, a long way from home, in the hope that, by his own resources, he might discover the means of making friends and of adjusting himself. But the vicious circle still persisted. Mutual suspicion increased between him and his social environment. He lacked a sense of humour and regarded practical jokes as malicious insults. A few pranks, harmless in themselves, fanned his suspicion into open hostility. The boy showed hatred and fear in his facial expression and gestures; his associates developed a concern for their safety. The climax came when, one day, they quarrelled and the boy, according to his housemates, “threatened to shoot them”. According to the boy’s own story, he said that if they continued to spread derogatory stories about him over the campus, “they ought to be shot”.

He was then placed under observation in the student hospital and would stand for hours in the door of his room, watching the stairway. When asked why he remained there he replied:—They are going to get me”. Questioned as to who was “going to get him”, he answered:—“The police”. It was too late now to expect a reconciliation. There was nothing to do but send for the mother and advise that the boy be placed in a sanitarium, where the necessary psychotherapeutic measures might be adopted.

§ 8. INCIPIENT DEMENTIA PRÆCOX. In this case we see the history of incipient dementia præcox. It is the picture of a human energy system struggling to maintain its organisation during the course of maturation. The mother, by her treatment of him, should have set up potentials in the child that demanded resolution toward the gang in real rather than imaginary form. She probably could have achieved this end if she herself had been sufficiently aggressive and, in popular phraseology, had imparted to him the fighting spirit. Instead, she killed that spirit with her pity and sympathy. He should have been made to fight his own battles; to suffer defeat if necessary, but at any rate to fight the gang. They would have developed respect for him then, if nothing else; and to have won their respect would have been a victory, ending in tolerance on the part of the gang and in confidence on the part of the boy.[3]

Normality of personality demands that traits of character be derived from the same, not different wholes. As it was, the boy derived hostility, and nothing else, from the group outside the home; he acquired gentleness and sympathy, with nothing else, inside the home. The segregation of stimulus-patterns into society, on the one hand, and home, on the other, resulted in a splitting of the boy’s personality. Its unity was sustained with very little but the self as the point of reference.

“Human nature decays in isolation.” The boy was shutting himself off from environment, anæsthetising himself, and as a result, was losing social insight, initiative and purpose. He was depriving himself of a personality because human traits depend upon dynamic relations with a sure sounding human nature-pattern. As the seclusion went on the human aspects of his nature disappeared. If he should continue in this direction, in the end he would lose all contact with his environment, refuse to recognise people, show no interest in them, decline even to talk, eat, keep himself clean or care for his bodily needs. In other words, without stimuli from outside, the potentials necessary for a personality were losing their differential. They were changing to a state of homogeneity which means, in the end, inaction and death.

§ 9. THE LAWS OF PERSONALITY: LAW I. Nothing can exist except as a part in dynamic relation to a whole. Personality is no exception to this law. The laws of personality, then, are the universal laws of dynamics. The first of these, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, directs us at once to society, the whole of which personalities may be regarded as parts, or members. Society, from this standpoint, is a field of personalities, or better, a field of human nature which we may call a human nature-pattern. There is no developed human nature except in human society. This law holds for all life. There is no developed dog nature in the absence of dog society, no developed bird nature in the absence of bird society. This society is necessary for the complete structurisation of behaviour patterns. We may think, of course, of the canary, for years isolated in a cage, but contrast the limited behaviour-pattern of such a bird with one in its native haunts, and remember, also, that the canary spent a very important period of its life—its infancy—in a bird society.

Human nature is primarily a group, not an individual, phenomenon. That the group reveals properties of behaviour not exhibited by individuals in isolation is easily proved. There are cases on record of abandoned children who managed to survive, until found, in an animal society. Such children are more like animals than human beings; they develop the habits of animals and acquire no language. Folkways, mores, customs, public opinion, morality, language, number, are uniquely group phenomena, the field properties of the human nature-pattern. Abandoned children acquire none of these social responses. Indeed, a thousand individuals reared in total ignorance of each other would exhibit no strictly human modes of behaviour. It is doubtful if such hypothetical creatures would develop mentally at all; there would be no problems to face, no tensions to resolve, no differentiation of the behaviour pattern. If they could see, what they saw would mean nothing to them; if they could hear, what they heard would have no significance; if they could feel, there would be nothing gained. To posit such hypothetical creatures would at the same time mean to presuppose no growth potential; because by definition the social environment with respect to which the human growth potential exists, is lacking.

When we apply the same law to personality, with the individual as the point of reference instead of the group, we find much that conflicts with orthodox conceptions. From this standpoint personality is not the sum total of so many traits of character, not an integration of habits. Rather, it is a field property of the individual’s total behaviour.

§ 10. LAW II. Parts derive their properties from wholes. The individual personality, then, is derived from the group; just as the weight of an object is derived from a gravitational system. We have already seen how this law operated in a case of dementia præcox. The growing child acquires a human nature just as an electric charge acquires potential, through its dynamic relation with different degrees of potential elsewhere. All aspects of the human behaviour pattern must be derived in this way—the intellectual life, emotional life, beliefs, any mode of behaviour one might mention. Even the more specialised activities of seeing, hearing, and feeling must derive their meaning from the activities of the social group.

The infant’s personality is undifferentiated at the outset.[4] Immediately it begins to take on the field properties of the human nature around it. Rough, quick, jerky, awkward handling of the infant, and noise or confusion around him, will soon induce irritability and nervousness. If the facial expressions and voices of parents and older children are harsh, depressed, or in any way intemperate, the beginnings of a hyper-irritable personality are all the more exaggerated. On the other hand, gentle, confortable handling, orderliness and quiet, and happy, inviting attitudes, produce an orderly, temperate personality. The pattern of human nature is reflected, also, in the management of the infant’s feeding and sleeping habits, and in his exposure to sudden changes in stimulation. It is reflected, later on, in the number of activities in which the infant is permitted to indulge. When a child, the manner in which he is forced to learn the laws of possession, and the types of companions he is permitted to play with, are of vital importance.

If authority is too arbitrary and persistent, initiative may be crushed and the child made so dependent upon aggressiveness in others that, later, he must always play the rôle of servant. If parents attempt no discipline whatever, the child may become so dependent upon the docility and submission of others that in later life he must always play the rôle of master. What is this but the imposition of the surrounding human nature-pattern upon the individual. The part certainly derives its properties from the whole. There is nothing except a normal, undifferentiated growth potential to be obtained from heredity.

The derivation of a personality from the social group is complicated by parents and teachers, perhaps older brothers and sisters, who project their ambitions upon the children under their care. A certain mother always wanted to teach but was never able to fulfil her ambition. When her daughter reached college age the mother insisted that she should attend college and prepare herself for teaching. Since it had been the mother’s ambition, it seemed to her that she could wish nothing better for the daughter. But it left the daughter out of the picture. The daughter wanted to marry. Instead, she submitted to her mother, made a failure of school teaching, lost her opportunity to marry, and was forced to remain at home, “broken in spirit and unable to organise herself for any kind of valuable activity.”

§ 11. LAW III. The whole governs the activities of its parts. Persons are restricted in their freedom by the mores and laws of the group. To conform means liberty. Success is always achieved through one’s dynamic relation to the group. By definition, the individual is, from his standpoint, a separate being; he is a differentiation from the human nature-pattern that surrounds him; he exists, he behaves, but in terms of the group; the group behaves in terms of him, but in accordance with its own laws, not his. If, in the estimation of the group, the individual is important, the group makes him an unusually good source of imitation and suggestion. He may be a genius because of his ability to govern and organise, or to make articulate the vague religious and philosophical strivings and ideas of the group, or to lead in campaigns of aggression or defence, or to invent devices which greatly improve the living conditions of the group. In any case the group sustains leadership and genius. The outstanding qualities of the leader exist only in relation to the mediocrity, needs, and potentials of the group. Individuality thus becomes potent and real through its membership character in society.

The whole functions always through its parts. This is as true of society as it is of gravitational systems. The mass of the falling body in the one case and the individual in the other are necessary points of reference; but mass means nothing as an isolated thing; neither does the individual. Witness the way a person dresses, the language he uses, his religious and moral ideas, his political beliefs, the way he educates his children, his etiquette, in fact every aspect of his behaviour one might choose to mention.

§ 12. LAW IV. Parts emerge from wholes by a process of individuation. Differences in personalities are conditioned by the variations in the social pattern that influence single persons. The attitudes of parents and other members of the family are not exactly the same toward any two children. The position of one person with respect to the whole, as compared with another person, is an environmental source of individual differences. Similarly, no two points in a gravitational system have exactly the same dynamic relation to the whole. The properties and behaviour of each particle will be different in terms of the whole.

Society supplies the general features of the human nature-pattern, and out of this pattern the new personality crystallises. The development of personalities in people is exactly the same process, dynamically, as was seen in the physiological development of the embryo where its various parts, through individuation, acquired local structures and functions.

§ 13. LAW V. Wholes evolve as wholes. In the course of evolution society did not emerge as an organised human nature-pattern by an additive process. The group was an evolutionary unit. In fact, biological evolution has depended in large measure upon the existence of societies. Life in groups aided in the struggle against natural enemies and unfavourable climatic conditions; it decreased the chance of infant mortality, and aided in the selection of useful biological variations. Without group life there would have been no language and no thinking.

In the same way, the personality of the individual develops as a differentiating, expanding whole. It is at first general and undifferentiated. The structurisation of the total, balanced personality, is the so-called appearance of particular traits. General activity versus sluggishness differentiates into stubbornness, aggressiveness and brilliance, versus docility, passiveness and lack of alertness. As differentiation goes on, personality becomes phenomenologically more variable and complex, still retaining the general features that appeared first. The more refined traits, on the one hand, and the more objectionable, on the other, do not emerge until the individual is passing through the adolescent period and has come in contact with larger social groups than were found in the family and on the playground. Many and striking have been the alterations of personality effected by these later changes in social environment.

§ 14. LAW VI. Personality follows the law of least action. With the individual as the point of reference, this fact was well illustrated in the case of dementia præcox. Tensions not only demand resolution, but in the most direct way. They presuppose organisation and balance within a system of potentials. Thus a personality-tension implies a goal, and vice versa. Because the boy’s goal at home supplied a more immediate relief from strain than goals in his environment, there was no effort to seek relief outside. It was the home that prohibited him from having other goals. There were no “low pressure areas” in his social environment while the “lowest” was in the home. The boy’s energy became organised, as all energy does, with respect to the points of lowest stress in the system. All other modes of behaviour were precluded by the absence of goals.

The boy’s self-seclusion was itself a goal activity. His mother could not assist him in resolving all his tensions; society helped him in no way. Since the same total situation that arouses tension supplies the goal, society was conditioning the boy’s internal goals. A normal boy would actually fight if attacked, for his anger would demand resolution in that direction; he would have plotted revenge and would have executed the plot overtly. The boy fulfilled all this in daydreams. The low points of stress were within when they could not be outside.

The larger situation, the relationship involving the group as a point of reference, must also be envisaged in terms of least action. When an individual does not conform to the folkways of his group, tensions develop in the group that are expressed as suspicion and fear. In primitive society the group not only showed fear of the variant, or nonconformer, but even worshipped him. In civilised society, to relieve tensions of various kinds between groups and individuals, the group segregates the variant if he is subnormal or criminal; and if he is a genius it vociferously hails him as a leader or shuts him up in prison as the case may be.

One group responds to another in terms of race prejudice, cautious co-operation, tariff laws and armed force. Primitive, simple reactions are means of arriving at primitive, simple goals; elaborate behaviour on the part of educated and civilised man, requiring a long time for consummation, is the most direct way to reach an intricate goal. Thus, in half-civilised society a murderer is unceremoniously hunted down and killed; while in a highly civilised group he is arrested, given trial, a chance to appeal, another trial, a reprieve, and perhaps a pardon. It all depends upon the complexity of the goal-situation and the configuration in which the goal functions. Similarly, the higher the level of intelligence and culture the more complex the goal-activities. This means that civilised man has a greater variety of tensions, more worries, more troubles than primitive man; conversely, he has more satisfactions and enjoyments, upon being released from strain. The critical, intelligent person undergoes more conflict than the feeble-minded or the ignorant.

§ 15. LAW VII. Personality follows the law of maximum work. The personality will fight for its status quo. Not to preserve it means disintegration. Preservation also means keeping the parts intact. Hence the resistance to a change in any idea that does not evolve through the growth potential. Ideas will not change unless they can change themselves, or rather, be changed by the person himself in the course of gaining insight. Forcing ideas on other people leads only to hostility and antagonism. Thus we have, both in individuals and in groups, the acceptance of an idea that, just previously had been vigorously rejected, even with the shedding of blood. The difficulty with which one surrenders his estimation of himself, his theories, his beliefs and his peculiarities of conduct, lies in the circumstance that each derives its existence from the total behaviour pattern. Before a part can be altered, the character of the whole must undergo a change. Insight is that change in the character of the whole that comes through growth. Thus, development and growth are required if one is to change a personality trait, overcome a complex, give up a belief, or alter a habit. Progress must come with insight.

The case of dementia præcox exemplified the law of maximum work when, as a whole, the boy’s personality disintegrated. Phenomenologically, the law is illustrated in his suspicion of everybody. Suspicion was anticipation both of the tension and of the factor that caused it; it was resisting the disturbance of his total behaviour pattern, a disturbance that society was constantly inducing. But what a price to pay for the preservation of unity; ultimately, insanity, the form of unity that emerges in relation to an unbalanced environment!

Social groups, races, nations, may follow the same path. If, through attitudes of hostility or superiority, they isolate themselves from surrounding groups, they can no more live indefinitely than can a personality. They will disintegrate sociologically, psychologically, and biologically. It is as easy for a nation to live the false life of extreme introversion as for an individual, and the same inevitable death will ensue. Races, like individuals, develop defence mechanisms. Moreover, it is as easy for surrounding nations to kill the soul of a race by making intolerable its intercourse with environment as for society to kill the soul of an individual. There is a social as well as an individual dementia præcox. Imperialism and religious proselytising have demonstrated this repeatedly. When a superior or powerful race forces education and religion upon an inferior or weaker race, the same situation results. Thus we see the importance of mutual tolerance and non-interference in international affairs.

The Golden Rule is a law of dynamics. It expresses the “physical” law of action and reaction in the field of moral relations. If the rule is misapplied, only conflict results. To the extent that one nation will not accept a universal human code, or will accept it only qualifiedly, the whole world of civilisation suffers. In the individual, worry and suspicion deprive him of normal growth. In national affairs the same is true. Moreover, international tension is expensive in the energies of people; for these energies must be consumed in the maintenance of large navies and standing armies. For what purpose? Only to continue the strain between nations. This mutual inducing of strain permits no proper national relaxation; and, like individuals whose tensions are not resolved, nations will, in time, suffer the consequent disintegration. Like individuals, they will become insane and perhaps kill for the sake of killing. At any rate they will kill when the dispute could have been settled by arbitration. In order to solve international relations, a larger, balanced whole must emerge, in which the nations can pursue their activities in harmony. The whole must be a sincere, not a camouflaged, League of Nations. Obedience to the law of the whole is liberty, for nations as well as for persons. Civilised humanity constitutes a whole, the violation of whose laws brings only destruction.

§ 16. LAW VIII. Personality follows the law of configuration. The development of any particular characteristic, say the defence reaction of boldness, is not a response to a limited social environment, for example the amused glances of other people, when one is small of stature. Rather, it is a response to a given situation in its relation to all other aspects of social life. If the same society that cast the glances also showed a respect for the individual and accepted him, there would be no development of defence mechanisms. The personality could then maintain its balance in dynamic relation to an equal distribution of social stimuli. This means that personality is an organic unit responding to all the personality aspects of the human nature-pattern external to it. If the contact is one-sided, the personality will be distorted; the more varied the sources of stimulation, the more differentiated, the more rounded and stable, will be the personality.

The social group is a field of balanced potentials in the form of personalities. It responds as a unit to outside groups. It reacts to any disturbing situation in its relation to all other influences that are at the same time affecting it. This principle is of extreme importance in understanding the behaviour of nations, as for example in assigning responsibility for wars, tariff and migration laws, in evaluating the culture of nations, and in estimating, equitably, the attitudes of races placed under the supervision of more powerful groups.

§ 17. CONCLUSION. The human being will not rest content with schisms, dualisms, paradoxes, inconsistencies, the begging of questions, any type of intellectual hypocrisy, rationalisation, superficiality, or the avoidance of issues. Here honesty with oneself will prevail; conflict is intolerable, for it is lack of balance; there must be a harmony in thought that is complete, and the harmony must reach to the very depths of human inquiry; there must be unqualified unity. In obtaining this unity, science must satisfy, not antagonise, or through its implications, discourage, the faith of humanity in idealism; religion must satisfy, not resist, the demands of the most rigorous logic. If this is not accomplishable, neither science nor idealism nor religion is true, for the truth demands unqualified self-consistence within man’s widest grasp of reality.

§ 18. PROGRESS IN THOUGHT. The progress now taking place in human thought is just this achievement of unity. It has emerged, largely in the twentieth century, in the conception of a more comprehensive framework in which to apprehend scientific and philosophical problems. In our physics, biology, psychology, philosophy and religion the same change is taking place. It is an abandonment of absolutism, a tearing down of intellectual and emotional fences between departments of science, between science and philosophy, between science and religion, between religions, between all of these things and life itself. Prejudices and suspicions have reigned between departments of science; the physicist has looked down upon the psychologist; the psychologist has feared the physicist; science and religion have acted like enemies in spite of assurances that they were friends; science has disdained philosophy and philosophy has looked condescendingly upon science; religious groups have quarrelled among themselves. Atomistic thinking has been responsible for it all; it has created an age of specialisation and specialisation has nourished atomistic thinking. Now, in theory, we are transcending these dilemmas with a new tool of thought, the relative, organic unit, whose unity is functional and whose plurality is phenomenological. In practice we are adopting every possible means of overcoming the evils of specialisation.

Tireless, prudent and far-seeing must be the leaders of thought in every field of like, for the new tool of thought has its dangers. Mankind proverbially invents tools before it knows well how to use them. Man invented gunpowder and forthwith slaughtered his fellows; he invented the radio and has little control of vicious propaganda, religious proselytising, pernicious adverstising, “medical”, political, and other forms of hoodwinking that the radio affords.

Materialistic and mechanistic science, to the layman, is the absolute truth regarding the world in which he lives. This gone, and doubt already established as to the nature of the invisible world, he is left with no substantial philosophy. Floundering, he will, without the best of leadership, enter upon a period of scepticism, fanaticism, mysticism and Epicureanism. History is in danger of repeating itself; for the new enlightment is slow in permeating the minds of the masses, and the abandonment of the old precedes the acceptance of the new. We must avoid a period of intellectual and emotional anarchy. Among scientists, the physicist and the psychologist especially owe the duty to mankind of stabilising and organising the layman’s thinking. Philosophy and religion were never more sorely needed.

Danger lies in the ranks of the scientists who cry:—“Experiment, don’t think”, for this is the cry of intellectual suicide; it is the scientist’s way of saying:—“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow ye die”. Danger lies in the ranks of the clergy who say:—“Believe, don’t think”, and in the ranks of teachers whose methods imply, “This is authority, the truth will not stand alone”. Danger lies in the casting all but statistical meaning in science to the wind. The scientist who says, “Let the other fellow worry about the world of reality, I will do nothing with it”, is intellectually lazy, cowardly, or bigoted. To this extent he is a traitor to the society that supports him. Danger lies in man’s optimism and complacency, the insistence that he needs no guidance. Danger lies in the weakened authority of the family, church and State. Knowledge of the true, the good and the beautiful must assume the authority of institutional law.

§ 19. EIRENICON: MUTUAL KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING. The scientist must know his philosophy and the philosopher his science; the clergyman and the teacher must know both. One scientist must know the general principles under which all the others are working. A huge task is before us. The child revolts at subject matter divorced from life; critical-minded man is revolting against a physics, a biology, a psychology abstracted from life and artificial. To couch the subject matter of physical science purely in terms of probabilities, as many scientists are now advocating, will devitalise science still further and deprive it of the value to human culture which humanism demands of it; at the same time its mathematical significance must be preserved. This is no simple task. To delete psychology of its descriptive content and resort, alone, to statistical precedures that ignore reality will kill psychology and make of it a useless instrument in giving to the social sciences their necessary foundation.

In order to find the ultimate truth in all human thought we must begin with unanalysed and unrationalised experience. The new method of thought that posits, “Begin with the whole and always refer everything back to it”, is the only way to deal with fields where analysis and intricate reasoning are ultimately required. There is one framework from which science, philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and religion emerge, each having membership character, each differentiating under the same laws, which are, at once, the laws of human nature and the laws of the Universe.

This does not mean the repudiation of old truths. Science has declared that we must measure; this is true; experience always involves a quantitative judgement. Art has demonstrated that we must appreciate to live. Religion has affirmed that we must believe to live. Philosophy has proved that we must know to live.

As for psychology, subjectivism claimed that we must describe experience; this is the true message of introspection. Behaviourism said we must act overtly to be a psychological subject; and this is true. Freudian psychology said we must study the human being as a system forever compensating in order to maintain its balance; and this is true. Self psychology said that we must refer all activity to a common factor; and this is true. Purposive psychology said that man was not a machine; and this is true. Conation psychology said that a psychological event was a dynamic process going on to an end; and this is true. Functional psychology regarded mind as a “stream”; and even this is true. But none discovered the descriptive unit that fully satisfies the demands of all the others; none invented the unit that fulfils its own purpose—the organic unit—which links the sciences together and explains the mind in terms of physics or—what amounts to the same thing—the Universe in terms of mind.

1. Cƒ. Morgan; The Psychology of the Unadjusted School Child; New York; 1924.

2. This imaginative story is highly indicative of the SP Artisan personality type. SP Artisans crave action, and base their self-esteem on their physical performance. SP Artisans tend to do poorly in school, because schools are designed by SJ Guardians for SJ Guardians. SP Artisans need to be active. Sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher lecture is endlessly tedious to the Artisan:

“With their concrete intelligence, Artisans are not in the least interested in the clerical, humanities, and science curricula that abound in modern American schools, and this often gets them into trouble, because they refuse to do their assignments. Ordinary school work is, after all, mere preparation for something the Artisans figure they’re never going to do anyway. Artisans do not wish to prepare — for anything — and they are careful to make this clear to their would-be instructors.

Certainly Artisans are active, but only in their stubborn insistence upon getting to do something interesting, something that allows them to test their mettle. They’ll work in a tool-centered curriculum.

In spite of poor schooling many Crafters manage to develop their tactical skills on their own. Gifted with their hands and eyes, Crafters make wonderful tradespeople, carpenters, mechanics, plumbers, furniture makers, weavers, jewelry smiths, and so on. They are the very best pilots of all manner of vehicles, trucks, trains, planes, boats, and they also make incomparable surgeons, artists, athletes, musicians — and warriors.”

—David Keirsey, Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence (1998)[paraphrased]

Blaming the teacher for the SP Artisan’s lack of enthusiasm in school is outright wrong and indicative of “Broken Clock = Broken Part” thinking. This is a case where there are no broken parts. The fault lies in the design of the system-as-a-whole. — David W. Deley

3. dementia præcox, now known as schizophrenia, is well known now to be a biological disorder, not caused by anything the parents did or did not say or do. Blaming the mother here is completely unjustified. Schizophrenia is not the result of improper upbringing or other stressful circumstances. If anything, being the parent of a schizophrenic child is very challenging. — David W. Deley

4. The author appears to be advocating the "Blank Slate" hypothesis, an epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that all of their knowledge comes from experience and perception. This theory has since been discounted. See for example Steven Pinker The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, (in which he argues against the idea of a blank slate), and David Keirsey Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence, the seminal work on Temperament Theory:

Temperament Theory: Lost and Found

That people are highly formed at birth, with fundamentally different temperaments or predispositions to act in certain ways, is a very old idea. It was first proposed in outline by Hippocrates around 370 B.C., and the Roman physician Galen fleshed it out around 190 A.D. The idea continued in the mainstream of thought in medicine, philosophy, and literature up through the 19th century. On the other hand, the idea that people are born without predispositions and are therefore largely malleable appears to be an early 20th century notion. Ivan Pavlov saw behavior as nothing more than mechanical responses to environmental stimulation. John Watson, the first American behaviorist, claimed he could shape a child into any form he wanted by conditioning it, provided that the child is put in his charge while yet an infant.

What, we might ask, is "temperament" and what relation does it have to character and personality? There are two sides to personality, one of which is temperament and the other character. Temperament is a configuration of inclinations, while character is a configuration of habits. Character is disposition, temperament pre-disposition. Thus, for example, foxes are predisposed — born — to raid hen houses, beavers to dam up streams, dolphins to affiliate in close-knit schools, and owls to hunt alone in the dark. Each kind of creature, unless arrested in its maturation by an unfavorable environment, develops the habit appropriate to its temperament: stealing chickens, building dams, nurturing companions, or hunting at night.

Put another way, our brain is a sort of computer which has temperament for its hardware and character for its software. The hardware is the physical base from which character emerges, placing an identifiable fingerprint on each individual's attitudes and actions. This underlying consistency can be observed from a very early age — some features earlier than others — long before individual experience or social context (one's particular software) has had time or occasion to imprint the person. Thus temperament is the inborn form of human nature; character, the emergent form, which develops through the interaction of temperament and environment.

I want to emphasize that temperament, character, and personality are configured, which means that, not only are we predisposed to develop certain attitudes and not others, certain actions and not others, but that these actions and attitudes are unified — they hang together. Thus, the SPs base their self-image on graceful action, bold spirit, and adaptability to circumstance, these three traits evolving together of necessity. Furthermore, these three traits, developing together as if out of a single seed, preclude the emergence of a self-image based on, say, empathy, benevolence, and authenticity, which are characteristics of the NFs. In the same way, the SJs base their self-image on reliability, service, and respectability, these three traits emerging together as a unified structure of personality. And again, the unfolding of these three traits together weighs against developing a self-image based on ingenuity, autonomy, and willpower, which is characteristic of the NTs.

This notion of four distinct temperaments, inborn and unified, calls into question two major points of view in 20th century behavioral science. The first can be called the theory of hierarchical motivation. Abraham Maslow, a leading proponent of this theory, held that we are all motivated by a number of needs which displace each other as we satisfy them. We ascend, he said, from physical needs (food, clothing, shelter) to safety needs (security, protection, assurance), then on to social needs (love, friendship, belonging), and next to the need for self-esteem (valuing self, self-worth, pride). And a few of us — not really very many, he suggested — are able to arrive finally at what he called the "self-actualizing" phase of development, no longer motivated by the primary physical needs, nor by needs for safety, belonging, and self-esteem. Maslow seemed to believe that the fully-realized, enlightened, self-actualized personality is everyone's highest goal in life, and implied that those people who don't make it nevertheless have a latent need for self-actualization, which will break forth as a full-blown motive once they satisfy their more primary needs.

It certainly makes sense to say that in normal development many of us arrange our lives so that we satisfy our need for sustenance, for safety, for social ties, and that we then turn our interest to achieving self-esteem. But beyond this point temperament theory counsels us to part company with Maslow and other hierarchists. For if people are fundamentally different, born with different needs and inclinations, then they might not all share the desire to take Maslow's last step into self-actualization. Perhaps not even most of them. Of course all must have self-esteem. Maslow was right in this. But as it turns out, most people base their self-esteem on something else entirely. Only those of one particular temperament, Myers's NFs, are concerned with becoming self-actualized — finding their true selves — and value themselves more in the degree they achieve this aim.

Thus it is not that self-actualization is a step beyond self-esteem; rather, it is but one path to self-esteem. There are other paths. Freud, for instance, was right when he said that physical pleasure is the way. But not for everybody, as he supposed, and not as an end in itself, but as a means to self-esteem. Those of the SP temperament prize themselves more when they live sensually and hedonically. Harry Sullivan was also right. The security of social status is important — for some at least, and in the service of self-esteem. Those of the SJ temperament hold themselves in higher regard when they attain a reputation as pillars of society. Likewise, Alfred Adler was right in that the quest for powers motivates us — some of us — and those of the NT temperament look upon themselves with pride as their technological powers increase. It is unfortunate that Maslow, himself an NF, saw the aims of the other three personalities as merely arrested attempts to gain self-actualization.

The other point of view challenged by the four temperaments theory says that not only do all of us have the same goals, but we also go through the same stages of growth and development. Reading the leading writers on maturation, we are counseled that all mature persons have certain attitudes and certain habits, and that all must take the same developmental steps to get there. Such a position was taken, sometimes explicitly and always implicitly, by investigators such as Gesell, Ilg, Ames, Erikson, Piaget, Sheehy, and Levinson, to name some of the more prominent contributors.

But this way of defining maturity will not do. A mature NF is strikingly different from a mature SP. Likewise, a mature NT is astonishingly different from a mature SJ. Just as the fox matures differently from the beaver, so does the dolphin mature differently from the owl. Just as the Lion wanted Courage to get on with life, so Dorothy wanted Security, the Tin Woodman wanted a Heart, and the Scarecrow wanted Brains. To use the same criteria of maturity for all kinds of creatures is to miss the entire point of this enquiry. Imagine a mother fox schooling a young beaver in the art of sneaking into a chicken yard and making off with a fat hen, and picture also the little beaver's astonished paralysis upon receiving such guidance. This, of course, is unimaginable, but as parents many of us encourage our offspring to emulate us, to be chips off the old block, to follow in our footsteps. The Pygmalion Project ascends to its greatest heights and generates its greatest intensity in pointing the young toward our own conception of maturity. None of the temperament are above wanting to validate their own ways, and so set about, unconsciously and involuntarily to be sure, to sculpt their young into the image of themselves.

Temperament will out in maturation as in all other domains of life, and so, again, we are asked to think of temperament as inborn, innate, inherent, and of character as exactly configured, as precisely patterned, as definitively systemic. SP or SJ, NF or NT, our traits of personality entail each other and are bound together by a common origin and a common destiny. And it is not until these traits have developed that we can be said to have acquired our mature personality, to have become a full-blown specimen of what we were meant to be, just as the tiny acorn becomes the mighty oak tree.

—David Keirsey, Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence (1998)[paraphrased]

David W. Deley [editor]

POSTSCRIPT

by David W. Deley

The Broken Clock

“Broken Part” vs. “Broken System-As-A-Whole”

When a tragedy happens, we may fall victim to the limitations of our own philosophy.

The “Broken Part” Philosophy

Imagine we have a clock with internal gears and springs and other mechanical parts. The clock works fine for awhile, then one day the clock malfunctions—the clock does something unexpected, and we are surprised by the unexpected results. We want to fix the clock, so we take the clock apart and look for a broken part. Our intention is to find the broken part, remove the broken part, and replace the broken part with a new part. Once the broken part is replaced we except the clock to function properly again.

The “Broken System-as-a-whole” Philosophy

Now imagine we have the same broken clock, we take it apart and carefully examine all the internal parts, and determine that there are no defective parts inside. Every part is found to be in good condition. There is no single broken part—the problem is with the design of the system-as-a-whole. Even though all the parts are working as expected, the system-as-a-whole still failed.

It's possible for a system with no defective parts to still fail. Just because we get an unfavorable result does not mean there must be a broken part.

Systems Which Include People

This is especially true of systems which include people. Take for example the field of airplane transportation. When an airplane takes off the hope is that it will land at it’s destination airport without incident. It’s amazing how often this is actually the case. However, once in awhile the end result turns out to be not as we had hoped—instead of the airplane ending up back on the ground safely in one piece, something unexpected happens: the airplane “crashes.”

Inevitably the first reaction is to “look for the broken part”. First the pilots are scrutinized—could this disaster have been averted if the pilots had done something different? If the answer is YES, then the pilots are blamed—they are identified as “The Broken Part” which needs fixing or replacing.

However, this does nothing to focus attention on the system-as-a-whole. Pilots are only one part of a much bigger system, because inevitably it was our system-as-a-whole that failed us, not just one part. No one wanted the airplane to crash; everyone wanted and expected the airplane to end up at it’s destination airport safely in one piece. However, this wasn’t the end result. It’s quite possible that none of the parts involved in this system-as-a-whole were defective, and it was the system-as-a-whole itself that failed us.

Each part, each person involved, may have performed as best as anyone could hope for. People make decisions based on limited knowledge, to the best of their ability, in real time, with no crystal ball to consult that would accurately predict what the future will be based on a decision they make now. It is only after the end result is known that we can look back in hindsight with a God-like view of what happened. And it is our philosophy that determines where we look and what we look for.

The problem isn’t that people fail to follow our ideal model of how the system should work, the problem is our ideal model fails to model how the real world actually works.

An excellent introduction to this new philosophy is the book:

- Ten Questions About Human Error: A New View of Human Factors and System Safety (Human Factors in Transportation) by Sidney Dekker (CRC Press 2004)

This is more a book on philosophy than it is about aircraft accident investigations, though it uses transportation accident investigations as a framework. The basic result is people don’t want disasters to happen, and yet they still happen. The old philosophy was to “find the broken part” i.e. someone or something to blame, and replace him/her/it. Underlying this old philosophy is the unspoken assumption that the design of the system itself is safe, therefore unwanted outcomes are caused by defective parts.

The new philosophy is the system itself is not entirely safe. It’s possible to “drift into failure,” where no one wants a disaster to happen, no one is to blame, yet we still occasionally have an unfavorable outcome, because the system itself is not 100% safe. (After all, the system incorrectly predicted a favorable outcome, so the system must be defective.)

—David W. Deley

October 2014

INDEX

ACCLIMATISATION, 194

Act, 36 ff.

Action, least, 82 f., 103, 110, 118, 134, 176, 187, 194, 218 f.

Affective processes, 178 ff.

Analysis, 63; organic, 80

Animal learning, 153 ff.

Apparent movement, 137 f.

Apperception, 43

Apperceptive mass, 29

Aristotle, 11, 55 f., 70

Association, 5, 27, 60, 125, 162 ff.; bankruptcy of, 159 ff.; laws of, 38ff., 58f.

Association psychology, 24 ff., 42, 122 f.

Atomism, 41 ff., 51 ff., 166 ff., 189

Atomistic psychology, 27

Atoms, 7, 9, 14; logical, 52, 59; psychic, 56

Attention, 5, 60, 122 f., 138 f.

Attention psychology, 28 ff., 47

Attenuation, 135 f.

Aufgaben, 40

Awareness, 30 ff.

BAIN, 27

Behaviour patterns, field genesis of, 145 ff.

Behaviourism, 27 f., 34; atomism in, 41

Berkeley, 27

Bird, 120

Blind, congenital, 167; introversion in, 206; perception in, 126 f.

Body reference, 179 ff.

Bond, 26, 27, 118, 123, 161

Brain, 79, 125; and mind, 3 f.; as system that wills, 3; lesion in, 127

Brooding behaviour, genesis of, 145 ff.

Brown, 27

CALKINS, 43

Carmichael, 120

Cattell, 127

Causation, 64, 76, 93

Cells, nerve, 77

Chance, laws of, 38

Chaos, 26 ff., 48 ff., 53 ff., 59

Chicks, experiment on, 120 f.

Child, perception in, 124 ff.

Clearness, 30 ff.

Coghill, 107 ff.

Cognitive processes, 178 ff.

Common sense, origin of, 17

Complex vs. simple, problem of, 65, 68 ff.

Complexes, 199 ff.

Conative processes, 178 ff.

Conative psychology, 44 f.

Concepts, 134

Conditioned reflex, 27, 123

Configuration, 69 f., 89 ff., 99, 110, 135 f., 177, 197, 223 f.; temporal, 91 f., 99

Constancy hypothesis, 126 f., 129

Content, 36 ff.

Cortex, 78

Cosmic energy, 78

Cosmic plan, 95, 111

Cutsforth, 126

DAYDREAM, 204 ff.

Defence mechanism, 199

Definitional dependence vs. causation, 152 f., 167

Dementia præcox, 210 ff.; and maximum work, 221

Derived properties, 74 f., 131f., 174 f., 213 f.

Descartes, 10 ff., 24, 29, 36 f.

Determined action, 75 f., 111 114, 131 ff., 175, 196, 215 f.

Determinism, 75 f, 85 f.

Determinism vs. freedom, vs, indeterminism, 67

Differentiation, 78 f., 100, 108, 120 f., 133 f., 142 f., 175, 198

Direction, problem of, 61, 63, 83ff.

Disequilibration, 89 f.; in perception, 128 f.

Disintegration, resistance to, 186 ff.

Double standard, fallacy of, 148 f.

drug habits, 157 f.

Dualism, 6 ff., 24 ff., 36 ff., 48 ff.; Greek, 7; in present day science, 19; modern, 10 ff.

Dynamic relations, 59 f., 95

Dynamics, physical, 39; laws of, 48 ff., 69 ff., 106, 161

EFFORT 88 f.

Ego, integrity of, 2, 40

Elementarism, 58 f., 82

Elements, 23, 25 f, 39 ff., 59 f, 79 f., 122 f., 159 f.

Embryo, 76, 82; motility in, 107 ff.

Emotion, 89; dynamics of, 185 f.; laws of, 178 ff.; physiological phenomena of, 190 ff.

Empedocles, 7

Empiricism, 25

End, remote, 87 f., 98 f., 105, 109 f., 113 f., 137 f.

Energy, concept of, 69 ff.; free, 187; physical, 14, 20; potential, 47; reserve, 187; units of, 68 f.

Environment, function of, 110, 119 ff., 141 f, 152 f., 193; social 213 f.

Epistemology, 25

Equilibrium, 47, 102, 184

Ethics, dynamics and, 115 f.

Evolution, 78 f., 86, 96, 145; chemical, 96

Exercise theory, 150, 153

Experience, and maturation, 168; and stimulus-pattern, 168 f.; growth of, 133 ff.; primitive, 178; theory of learning, 149 f.

Explanation, 59 ff.

Eye-movements, 116 ff.

FAMILIARITY, feeling of, 170 f. Fatigue, 89

Feeling, 183 ff.; and perception, 179 ff.; and physical phenomena, 191; and undifferentiated idea, 182; dynamics of, 185; psychology of, 178 ff.

Field genesis, 79 f., 133 f., 175, 217 f.

Field of force, 49 ff.

Field property, 71 ff., 84, 107 f., 128 ff., 173, 197, 212; temporal, 170 f.

Figure, 179; and goals, 185 f.; and physical law, 187

Form, 9, 63 ff., 68 ff., 90 ff., 104, 106, 133

Freudian psychology, 46, 201

Function and structure, 8 ff., 14

Functionalism, 41, 43

Future, response to, 99

GELB, 127

Gestalt, 47 ff., 90 ff.

Goal, 83 ff., 91, 98 f., 107, 113 f., 115, 158, 164, 175, 179, 196, 200 f., 206 f.; activity, 184, 191; and personality, 218 f.; own reward, 165; thwarting of, 200

Golden Rule, a law of dynamics, 222

Goldfish, 162 ff.

Goldstein, 127

Gradient, 72; physiological, 73; sensitivity, 118 f.

Gravitational system, 5, 39 f., 71, 76, 101 f., 105, 115, 165, 171

Greeks, the, 8, 9, 36, 53 ff., 67

Ground, 129, 179

Group, mores, 215 ff.; and the individual, 216 ff.; as evolutionary unit, 217

Groups, social and maximum work, 221 f.

Growth, and gravitation, 98 f.; as movement, 98 f.; laws of, 77 f., 82, 96 ff., 159; meaning of, 97 f.

HABIT, 153

Hamilton, 27

Hartley, 27

Hearing, 125 ff.

Hedonic psychology, 43 ff.

Herbart, 29

Heredity, 76

Hormic psychology, 43 ff.

Hume, 27

IDEALISM, 16, 18, 105 f.

Illusion, reversible, 132

Imagery, 28

Immortality, 99

Individuation, 77 ff., 132 f., 175, 217 f.

Infant, 3; movement of, 111 ff.; eye-movement of, 116 ff.; perception in, 124 ff.; personality in, 214 f.

Inheritance, 143

Insight, 18, 147, 158, 161, 163 f., 177, 220; in relation to learning, 158 ff., vs. associationism, 162 ff.

Instinct, 5, 18, 42, 89, 142 ff.

Integration, 71

Integrity, mental and physical, 192 f.

Intelligence, sterilisation of, 166 ff.

Introspection, 34, 35, 37 ff.

Introversion, 204 ff.; social causes of, 206 f.

Intuition, 182

Irwin, 111

JAMES, 55 f.

KANT, 178, 185

Kinetic energy, 83 f., 119 ff., 200

Koffka, 47, 116

Köhler, 47

Külpe, 35 ff., 40 f.

LASHLEY, 153

Law, mechanical and spiritual, 4; mental and physical, 4 ff.

Law of, action and reaction, 186; all or none, 88; configuration, 89 ff., 99, 110, 136 f., 177, 223; derived properties, 74 f., 131 f., 174 f., 213 f.; determined action, 75 f., 111, 131 f., 215; field genesis, 79, 133 f., 175, 217 f.; field properties, 71 ff., 129 f., 173, 212; individuation, 78 f., 132 f., 175, 217; least action, 82 f., 103, 110 114, 118, 134, 176, 187, 194, 218 f. maximum work, 88 f., 135, 175, 187, 191, 194, 197, 220 f.; ther- thermodynamics, 63, 82, 189; uncertainty, 64

Laws, of Nature, 70 ff.; statistical, 66

Learning, essentials of, 158 ff.; fallacies about, 148 ff.; laws of, 141 ff.; nature of, 163 ff.; problem of, 147 ff.; summary, 173 ff.; vs. instinct, 141 ff.; whole-character of, 152 ff.

Leibniz, 29, 70

Lewes, 27

Life, dynamics of, 78 f.

Locke, 27

MCDOUGALL, 45

Machine, 4, 5, 33, 45 ff.

Man, primitive, 6, 52 f.

Margin and focus, 29

Mass, function of, 114 f.

Mass action, 109 f., 128, 142 ff., 175

Materialism, 5, 16, 40

Matter, 6, 20

Maturation, 110 f., 112 ff., 120 f., 155 ff., 163 f., 168, 175; in personality, 210 f.; vs. exercise, 119 ff.

Maturation potential, 102 ff.

Maxima, 83

Meaning, 31, 130, 169 f.; and perception, 181 f.

Mechanism, 33, 37 f., 40, 54; criticism of, 38 ff.; persistence of, 58 ff.

Melody, 130 ff.

Memory, 92, 166 ff.; theory of, 168f.

Mental law, and physical, 4 ff.

Mills, 27

Mind, 10, 12, 21 ff.; 37 f., 40, 93, 104, 228

Mind and, body, 7, 8, 45; brain, 3 f.; matter, 6, 10, 12; subconscious, 28 f., 47

Minima, 83

Monism, 14

Monkey, 153 f.

Morals, 157 f.

Morgan, 204

Motivation, 158, 164 ff.

Movements, co-ordinated, 108; determined by end, 113; emergence of, 109 f., 112 f.; loss of 155 ff.; pattern, 174

NATURE, uniformity of, 148 f.

Nature, human, 2 f., 21; a group phenomenon, 212 ff.; decay of, 211 f.; uniformity of, 148 f.

Nature-pattern, human, 211 f.

Nerve impulse, dynamics of, 150 f.

Nervous system, function of, 107

Neurology, 107

Neuromuscular system, dynamics of, 116 f.

OCCASIONALISM, 12

Optic system, 110 ff.

Orexis, and perception, 180 ff.

Organic unit, importance of, 228

Organisation, 31, 140, 175; in personality, no f.

Organism as a whole, 193 ff.; as mental, 194; physiology of, 193 ff.

Organismic position, 50

PADILLA, 121

Parallelism, structure-function, 10; psycho-physical, 15 ff.

Parts, 72 ff.; conditioned by wholes, 104

Past reference, explanation of, 172 f.

Pattern, completion, 132; dynamic, 24, 90 f., 131 f.

Pattern, stimulus, partial duplication of and memory, 168 ff.

Perception, and attention, 138 ff.; conditions of, 139 f.; laws of, 122, 129 ff.; pathic states of, 127 ff.

Perkins, 162

Personality, 47; balanced in relation to group, 223; derived character of, 215 f.; and law of differentiation, 218; laws of, 199 ff., 212 ff.; maladjustment, 208 ff.

Pheasant, 142 ff.

Phenomenological properties, 31

Physical law, and mental, 4 ff.; and psychical, 22 ff.

Physics, 67

Plato, 10

Pleasure, 164 ff.

Pluralism, 52.

Potential, 74 f., 162 f.; energy, 83 f., 100, 200; growth, 101 ff., 106, 118 ff., 152 f., 221

Potentials, of brain, 4; concept of, 48 ff.

Practice, function of, 154 ff.

Psychoanalytic theory, 46 f.

Psychology and physics, 68

Punishment, 164 ff.

Purpose, 101 ff.

QUALITIES 128 f., 179

RAT and guinea pig, 119 ff.

Rationalising, 201; a conscious process, 201 f.; hypocrisy in, 203 ff.

Rationalism, 25, 28 ff. Reasoning, 134

Recall, problem of, 169 f.

Reflexes, 42, 70, 108, 111, 117

Relations, logical, 173; space, 173

Relativity, 49

Repetition, 27, 62, 150 ff.

Responsibility, 116

Retina, 117 ff.

Rewards, 164 f.; ulterior, 165 f.

Robin, 142 f.

SALAMANDER. 107 ff.

Scholastics, 11

Science, 23, 50; convergence of, 50 f.

Science, mental, 21; physical, 19

Self, 197; psychology, 43

Sensation, 122, 125, 178

Sense impressions, 25

Sense organs, 25

Social environments, and individual, 213 f.

Soul, 6, 7, 12; world, 8, 55

Sound localisation, 129

Space whole, 171 f.; lack of, 176

Spencer, 27

Spinoza, 15, 16

Spiritualism, 5

Stimulation, intraorganic, 158; external, 158

Stout, 49

Stress, 83 f., 98, 105

Structural analysis, 35, 65, 69f.

Structuralism, and introspection, 34

Structure, and function, 8 ff., 14

Structurisation, 90

Stutterer, introversion in, 206

Subconscious mind, 47

Subjective reference, 183 f.

Sublimated desires, 203

Sucking movements, 141 ff.

Suicide, 193

Symmetry, 92, 134

Synsthesia, 124 ff.

Synapse, 150, 154; resistance at, 154

Synthesis, 45, 80, 122, 189; creative, 59 f., 80 f.; evils of, 48, 59

TENDENCIES, instinctive, 144 f.

Tension, 87 ff., 101 ff., 104, 106, 175, 205, 219; and nearness to goal, 186

Thought, 55 ff.; progress, in modern, 224 ff.

Time frame, 170 f.

Time perspective, 170 f.

Time whole, 171 f.

Tichener, 35 ff., 56

Tones, perception of, 125 f.

Touch, 126 ff.

Trace, 123, 167 f.

Trial and error, 119, 148 f.

UNIT descriptive, history of, 51 ff., 151; genetic, 56 ff.; time and space, 177

Units, 36

Unity, 26 ff.; complex, 53; logic of, 49 ff.; primacy of, 69; problem of, 51; temporal, problem, of, 85 f.

Unpleasure, 164 ff.

Use theory, 153 f.

VITALISM, 33, 40, 43, 54, 195; persistence of, 57, 59

Volition, 178 ff.

Voluntary, definition of, 104

WALKING, movements, 120, 142 f., 148 ff.

Ward, 43

Watson, 42

Wave-motion, 20, 24

Wertheimer, 47, 137

Whole, 8; complex, 53 f., 62; perceptual, 124 f.; spatial, 126 ff.

Wholes, 72 ff., 79 ff., 85 ff., 103; organic, 49 ff., 62 ff., 89 f.; primacy of, 81; properties, 114, 124; subsidiary, 188

Will, 93 f., 104; acts of, 40; dynamics of, 195; force of, 3; law in relation to, 196; laws of, 178 ff.; problem of, i95 f.; to learn, 158, 175, Work, maximum, 88 f., 135 f., 176, 187, 191, 194, 197, 220 f.

Wundt, 29